Crime Stories of the Century
The awful acts of the past 100 years forced America to look at itself in the mirror
We are at once disgusted and fascinated by crime. First, we avert our eyes. Then we reach for the newspapers with their grisly headlines and stare for hours at our televisions as the accused villains go on trial. Every decade, it seems, produces a "crime of the century." As E. L. Doctorow noted in Ragtime, headline writers way back in 1906 had already anointed the murder of renowned architect Stanford White the "Crime of the Century," even though there were still 94 more years to go.
We cling to each detail of these dramas. The tantalizing tidbits--the color of the sultry murder victim's nightgown, whether it was a foggy night or cruelly hot--make the unimaginable imaginable. "We want anything that would take us out of the boredom of everyday life," says Colin Wilson, a bestselling British crime writer.
But even more, we want to know how the unspeakable acts were committed, to convince ourselves that we're immune from the same wretched fate--or perhaps to reassure ourselves that we're incapable of such heinous behavior. Ann Rule is a popular true-crime writer who worked alongside Ted Bundy at Seattle's Crisis Clinic before he went on his infamous killing spree. "Some people will put their heads in the sand," Rule says, "while others want to look evil right in the eye, as if the more they know, the safer they will be."
It is the unknowable face of evil, perhaps, that so compels. A deranged stalker--charismatic, deceptively attractive--kills a string of young women, all with long, dark hair. A workaday laborer targets young boys, burying their bodies one next to the other under his house. Why?
As time goes by. Criminal acts tell us much about the times in which they were committed, the mores of the day illuminated by their violation. "If you look back at the trials of the centuries," says historian Roger Lane, author of Murder in America, "all of them are telling us something specifically about our society at that point in time." Gary LaFree, a University of New Mexico criminology professor, attributes a crime surge in the first three decades of the 20th century to unemployment and labor unrest, Prohibition, and a questioning of middle-class values during the 1920s. But after World War II, crime dropped. The family structure was stable--TV's Ozzie and Harriet were the model in the 1950s. The U.S. economy was strong. So was respect for the law. "We had just won a war with important ethical and moral overtones," says LaFree. "There was trust in the government and political system."
For a time, the violation of that trust captured the criminal imagination. Then society's pillars began to crumble. Divorces increased; families unraveled. Race riots and protests against the war in Vietnam broke out across the nation. Crime stayed high during the 1970s and 1980s, but demographic changes and widespread prosperity reduced crime in the 1990s to the lowest level since World War II.
And in the new millennium? "Oklahoma City, I'm afraid, is the future," says Lane. "At the end of this American century and the beginning of the next, all the world's grievances center on Uncle Sam." Sadly, there will be many more "crimes of the century."
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