I’ve read a ton of True Crime books in my lifetime. I’ll usually linger in that section while perusing the library shelves, pausing my kids’ anxious search for the next great Star Wars-themed cook book. I’ll grab something about a serial killer I’ve never heard of, or maybe a book with a modern spin on a notorious perpetrator. Sometimes the case is an older one, unsolved at the time of publication but by the time I read it, the internet confirms they’ve finally nabbed the guy. That was what happened with Michelle McNamara’s book, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, about the Golden State Killer, which was a satisfying ending to a disturbing read.
But other times the mystery just lingers. Maybe there are forces at work intentionally muddying the investigations for unknown reasons, or maybe the crime is just too common and uninteresting to warrant media attention. There’s no resolution, no outcry, no justice for the victims or peace for their families. They deserve better than that.
Conspiracy Writing
If you’re a true crime enthusiast, you’ve undoubtedly read the erstwhile crème de la crème of the genre—Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi. You may not know that a twenty-year investigation by journalist Tom O’Neill concluded that Charles Manson was a federally protected government asset, and that Bugliosi concocted the entire Helter Skelter theory out of whole cloth, much to the disgust of cops who were working that and several other related Manson Family cases at the time.
Especially frustrated were two Manson parole officers who repeatedly fumed watching him skate on multiple parole violations year after year.
“Believe me, I read every Manson book that I possibly could read. And then I read [Chaos, by Tom O’Neill], and threw them all away.”
— Quentin Tarantino, The Joe Rogan Podcast
I was skeptical, but around the same time I grabbed Bugliosi’s 2007 book, Reclaiming History, at a thrift store. It’s about the JFK assassination, and after reading about twenty pages of Bugliosi praising the Warren Commission finding, I began skimming. A half hour later, I’d determined the book was next to worthless and put all 1648 pages to use in the only manner I could devise: as bedding in our chicken coop.
If you want an actual book about the Kennedy assassination, I recommend Best Evidence by David Lifton. Good luck finding it new though, because it contains the (you know) best evidence of the Kennedy conspiracy. By contrast, you can easily find Bugliosi’s thickly-bound JFK whitewash new in every format, wherever books are sold. Those two facts are telling about who runs the show when it comes to large scale investigations of prominent cases.
True & False Zodiacs
One of the more recent true crime stories I read was Gary Stewart’s book The Most Dangerous Animal of All, detailing the hunt for the Zodiac Killer—the serial killer credited with the murder of five people in Northern California from 1968-1969 but famous due to the taunting, coded letters he sent to police and newspapers during the initial investigations, complete with ciphers that mystified code-breakers for years.
I was pretty convinced that Stewart’s own estranged birth father, Earl Van Best Jr., was indeed the Zodiac. It checked multiple circumstantial evidence boxes and provided a baseline for the psychology of how a young man could have become a deranged, sadistic killer. It even answered the question of how he became a code writing expert—Van Best and his father used to communicate with complex ciphers for fun.
After closing Stewart’s book (which was published in 2014 and the subject of a 2021 documentary), I pulled out my phone to see how his conclusion fared after a decade of scrutiny. Not well. It turns out that not only did Stewart have plenty of detractors for his theory, but I learned that there were—and as of this writing still are—no less than six additional individuals purported as the true Zodiac Killer1.
That was a sad recognition. How many cops, family members, journalists, amateur sleuths, and writers have poured countless hours into solving the Zodiac mystery, only to have it doused with a cold bucket of “Yeah, but…” as soon as the matter seemed resolved?
It almost makes you want to dismiss the whole thing—indeed, any decades-old cold case—as pointless. Why should we continue pursuing definitive answers about crimes that took place sixty years ago, or thirty, or ten? Especially when the best evidence points to suspects who are already dead.
For that matter, why continue beating the drum on other crimes that happened decades ago? Why investigate rapes, sexual assaults, or missing persons that occurred long ago? Wouldn’t it be better for everyone to just move on, bury the past, and focus on more immediate concerns? Every homicide detective in the country has a stack of cases on their desk. Some are higher priorities than others, and more can get added to the stack at any moment.
The Murderer Next Door
Murder is a big deal, but it’s also not that important for most of us in our daily lives. For instance, do you know how many murders the police in your county are working on? These matter way more than most of the stuff filling our social media feeds, yet most of us will never hear about them. Society tends to ignore horrific crimes occurring all around us in favor of things happening a world away.
I admit when I sat down to write this, I didn’t know the murder rate in my state either, so I started digging. There are way more homicides in my neck of the woods than I realized, and it’s probably the same where you live.
The publicly available data for my borough of around 115,000 people is pretty scarce, but for the state of Alaska (population around 740,000) there are currently 716 acknowledged cold cases of which 102 are declared murders; the rest are missing persons, unidentified remains, and suspicious deaths going back decades.
If you want to check the status in your state, there are databases, podcasts, and cold case blogs galore. True Crime is one of the most popular media genres around, partially because people want justice, but also because some freaks love gore. Mostly though, it’s because we love a good mystery. And the more interesting the mystery, the more fascinated we are by it.
Because Justice Matters
When I moved to Anchorage in 1996, I noticed posters all over the University of Alaska, Anchorage campus. They were blowups of a smiling teenager with the caption Who Killed Bonnie? underneath. In September of 1994, Bonnie Craig (a schoolmate of my wife) was abducted in South Anchorage, raped, and beaten to death before being dumped facedown and submerged in McHugh Creek about an hour away.
Like everyone else on campus, I lamented the tragedy but didn’t think much about it. Getting a degree in Justice from that university, and even working at its Justice Center research arm, didn’t cause me or my fellow students to ever discuss her or her case. No university professor ever mentioned it that I can recall.
It was a cold case, a dead end that laid dormant under a stack of homicide investigations in a city with plenty of others in need of attention. It wasn’t until 2006 that a robbery inmate in a New Hampshire, Kenneth Dior, was linked via DNA to semen samples taken from Bonnie’s body in 1994—technology that didn’t exist at the time of her death.
Dior was convicted of Bonnie’s murder in 2011, and I had no idea about that, either. I honestly hadn’t even thought about the case until today, so I looked it up. I’m grateful for the technology that solved her murder, and appreciative of the investigators who toiled over it while so many fellow Alaskans never even thought about it. It makes me wonder how many unsolved crimes linger in my hometown that we’re clueless about. Maybe the cases just aren’t intriguing enough.
“People read and listen to true crime because it restores order from chaos…That’s the answer to give when someone asks you why you like hearing about real-life murders. It’s the comfort of watching everything be put in its place after an episode of outright, sickening bedlam…Everything is perfect (a sleepy town, high school sweethearts, a loving marriage), then everything goes wrong (a love triangle, a missing woman, a body in the woods) then everything goes right again (the killer is caught and convicted, and society is back to where it should be)…There is a foreign element in an otherwise perfect environment, and it must be removed.”
— Billy Jensen, Chase Darkness With Me
There was a time in America when, if someone went missing or died in your neighborhood, everyone would know it. Nowadays we’re more likely to miss it entirely in favor of whatever is trending on Facebook or X unless it’s a truly unique murder, with intrigue and stakes higher than just a random guy getting shot in a bad part of town.
But every case matters. Every victim deserves justice—those raped by elite pedophiles at the highest levels of power, to the fentanyl-addicted kid stabbed in a homeless camp, and everyone in between. Their lives matter because they matter to Jesus. And if it matters to Jesus, it matters to us.
But if we never hear about them, how can we address them? How can we contribute and assist law enforcement, or amateur investigators, or the victims’ families?
Perhaps the first thing we can do is get back in touch with our community, with in-person gatherings, sharing meals and games and life. Another would be to check in with local media from time to time, which, admittedly, I rarely do anymore.
Instead of scrolling social media for twenty hours a week, let’s gather and share stories, and dreams, and first-hand news. A dead body discovered in the woods, or a sexual assault down the road might shock us more if we hear about it from a friend as opposed to an easily dismissed JPEG we can scroll past, if the algorithms even allow it to pop up on our feed in the first place.
For too long we’ve filtered our news to gel with sought harmony, and preferenced away the ugly truth occurring around us. And while nobody should steep in darkness all of the time, ignorance of it is tacit to tolerance of it. Serial murders and massacres sell books and feed headlines, while everyday evil enjoys obscurity.
God’s people have a lot to offer in exposing and combating that, if we’re willing to face atrocity in our communities head on. The crimes that make True Crime podcasts the hottest ones around, are often happening all around us.
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- Additional suspects are Arthur Leigh Allen, Gary Francis Poste, Ross Sullivan, Lawrence Kane, Richard Gaikowski, and Giuseppe Bevilacqua. As the YouTube channel The Infographics Show recently stated, “Is this the face of the Zodiac Killer? Only time and official verification from someone not looking to cash in will tell.” ↩︎