“Countdown to DEATH”, “MURDERED by my boyfriend”, “Falling for a KILLER” … the language of true crime lost its potential to shock long ago, yet we continue to be drawn in. High-profile cases, solved or unsolved, seem to provide a bottomless well of fresh evidence and further mystery. What drives so many of us to consume true crime is a need to understand the extremes of humanity from the safe distance of the page or headphone. But for those who write in this genre, a “safe distance” can be hard to find.
Michelle McNamara is the most recent, and most tragic example. In 2013 McNamara, a journalist and writer, took up the case of the Golden State Killer, a term she coined to bring together a series of murders committed over a wide area of California during the 1970s and 80s. She opened up a trail of cold cases, made links police had missed at the time and often felt herself close to uncovering who the prolific serial killer might have been.
Her book, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, is a beautifully written tribute to the passion and determination with which she approached her subject, but it was published posthumously. By 2016 McNamara was torn between finishing the book and solving the case. She felt she couldn’t do one without the other and had amassed a vast body of research. She was joined in her obsession by other enthusiastic amateurs, whose collective efforts helped keep them all engaged in what must have felt an overwhelming and endless task.
McNamara was found dead on the morning of 21 April 2016, her death ruled an accidental overdose, brought about by a dependence on opioids. The book was finished by crime writer Paul Haynes, investigative journalist Bill Jensen and McNamara’s widower, Patton Oswalt, and published in February 2018.
Two months later, former police officer Joseph James DeAngelo was arrested and confessed to being the Golden State Killer. In August 2020 he was sentenced to life without parole for 13 counts each of murder and kidnapping – which, between the statute of limitations and plea bargaining, represented a mere fraction of the crimes he had committed. McNamara’s investigation was credited with raising awareness, but not generating evidence that resulted in DeAngelo’s arrest. In the end, it was modern DNA technology that linked the historical crimes to his family and eventually to him.
Striking a balance between giving your all to an investigation and maintaining a healthy distance from traumatic subject matter is something true crime writers ignore at their peril. This delicate line has been trod from the very first instance of modern true crime reportage: In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. First serialised in the New Yorker in 1965 and published in book form the following year, it established its author as not only the father of the genre, but also its first casualty.
In the spirit of “New Journalism” Capote immersed himself in the tragic mass murder of a well-to-do farming family in the rural Kansas town of Holcomb. The story consumed him. He shadowed the investigation from police hunt through high-profile trial all the way to the executions six years later of the convicted murderers. His relationship with Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, the drifters who planned and carried out the killings, was the subject of much speculation at the time and since.
In his bid to understand what drove them to such extreme acts, Capote befriended Hickock and Smith through the bars of their cells. With Smith especially he seemed to build a particular rapport. Yet as the years dragged by, the harrowing case took its toll and he eventually found himself longing for the execution date, to complete the project, free himself from the claustrophobic confines of Holcomb and the tyranny of the book’s ever-retreating deadline.
Capote would say afterwards of the town: “If I had realised what the future held, I would have driven straight on. Like a bat out of hell.” He would live for another 18 years, but never finished another major book.
How does a true crime author give voice to a victim without embellishing the facts with conjecture – or put another way: making things up? It was an accusation levelled at Capote by fellow writer Jack Olsen, who said of In Cold Blood: “I recognised it as a work of art, but I know fakery when I see it. Capote completely fabricated quotes and whole scenes.”
Arguably, readers want a full account that paints the case vividly and engages their emotions. Are they happy to trade the facts for that buzz? Because what is left when you take the “true” out of “true crime”?
“Techniques in fiction and true crime overlap,” says David Collins, who published The Hunt for the Silver Killer in May. “You’re getting inside the characters’ heads, engaging with their feelings, finding the jeopardy and becoming emotionally connected.” Collins’ book documents his investigation into the suspicions of two coroner’s officers who spotted subtle links between a series of murder-suicides across the north-west of England during the late 1990s and early 2000s.
His findings make compulsive reading, suggesting that a serial killer who murdered at least six elderly people is still at large. But he admits that spinning such stories can be murky: “There’s real emotion at play and it’s an ethical minefield – because there’s always the temptation to ascribe thoughts and feelings to a victim based purely on speculation.”
Yet that dilemma is not an issue for every true crime author. Some of the best and most evocative books in this genre are by writers who already have a strong personal connection to a case. Is writing about personal traumatic events cathartic, or does it compound the trauma?
Maggie Nelson wrote The Red Parts in 2005, 36 years after her aunt’s murder. Jane Mixer had been a Michigan law student in 1969, 23 years old and engaged to be married when she was brutally killed. For the best part of 30 years her death was ascribed to multiple murderer John Norman Collins, until DNA tests in 2002 revealed a link to local man and former nurse Gary Earl Leiterman. It’s a fascinating case that spans two eras in detection: old fashioned shoe leather and fast, “failsafe” 21st-century DNA.
The Red Parts is an astonishing read. Much more than a book about the case and its surprising conclusion, it’s an intimate account of Nelson’s family and how they lived in the shadow of her aunt’s murder. The 2005 trial that reopened the case also reopened the family’s wounds and exposed what Nelson described as their “faulty grief” both for Jane and the future they all lost. Did unpacking such personal material help the grieving process, or not?
“I felt horrible after I finished it,” she told the Guardian in 2017. “But the irony is that my catharsis was in writing down that there is no catharsis. The stories we tell ourselves don’t heal us, but I also think if I hadn’t written it, I wouldn’t have processed the experience.”
Alligator Candy is David Kushner’s 2016 memoir charting the 1973 abduction and murder of his 11-year-old brother, which became headline news when Kushner himself was just four. Like Nelson, Kushner is driven by a need to capture what it means for a family to experience such a terrible, transformative experience, alongside an account of the case as it was handled by law enforcement and the local community at the time.
Speaking in advance of his podcast launch in 2021, he said, “it was difficult for me to tell the story, but I hope by doing so, it facilitates other people telling their own.” Perhaps this is where a writer with a personal connection has the advantage over a reporter. They write their way out of the trauma, while an observer must write their way in.
Penny Farmer was 17 when her 25-year-old brother Chris and his girlfriend Peta were murdered while traveling in Guatemala. Her book Dead in the Water (published in 2018) is a thorough and highly personal account of what her family believe happened in 1978, the dark years that followed and the extraordinary story of how she used social media to track down the killer almost 40 years later.
For Farmer the process of recording her family’s story on the page was absolutely the right thing to do. “My primary aim in writing the book was for it to stand as a lasting memorial to a very dear brother. I felt it was my family’s story to tell,” she told Deborah Kalb in 2019. “It seemed natural I should write it. As a family we felt very protective of Chris’s memory and I wanted to take rightful ownership of it. The book is like bringing him home.”
While the popularity of true crime as a literary genre shows no signs of waning, the same traps Truman Capote fell into nearly 60 years ago lie in wait for the unsuspecting writer today. Falling prey to obsession, becoming too close to the people involved, embellishing the facts and being driven to distraction by pressure to deliver a full account and meet a deadline.
Perhaps readers should be aware of those traps too.
The last word belongs to Michelle McNamara. About writing I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, she said: “I love reading true crime, but I’ve always been aware of the fact that, as a reader, I am actively choosing to be a consumer of someone else’s tragedy. So like any responsible consumer, I try to be careful in the choices I make. I read only the best: writers who are dogged, insightful, and humane.”
• The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels by Janice Hallett is published on 19 January by Viper. To help the Guardian and Observer, order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
