Before you click "read more" to access the entirety of this post, check out this MySpace page [pdf], and answer these questions:
1. Is there anything interesting or noteworthy?
2. Is there anything that stands out, making this an unusual page?
3. Is there anything troubling or disturbing?
As I type this, my wife lounges on the couch behind me, soaking up another Ann Rule true crime tome. Rule's books are popular in part because she draws upon her experience as a police investigator to ask the right questions, to consider evidence and motives, and to use the right terminology. (As a writer, she's competent, which is rare in the genre.)
The Ann Rules of the world have one more piece to add to their narrative puzzle: the tell-tale MySpace page. The example you just saw belonged to the prime suspect in a shocking Seattle quadruple homicide. For a storyteller like Rule, the clues are all there: the struggle with alcoholism, the crying, the Freudian fear of becoming like his father. But my hunch is that if you knew nothing about its creator, you'd shrug and say it was just another profile.
True crime writers, unlike investigators, have the benefit of hindsight. I think with enough of a bias (say, knowing your subject murdered a bunch of people) you could filter just about anybody's life to make them look like a multiple murder waiting to happen.
ReplyDeleteIt would be an interesting experiment, though, to get a bunch of data on several different people who are not murderers, get a true crime writer like Ann Rule, give her the data and tell her it belongs to people who are murderers, and see what she comes up with.
Or, conversely, to hand her four random pages pluw this one to see if she could pick the killer. I'd expect even professional "profilers" wouldn't do much better than chance.
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