Sex, Power and True Crime

Justice for Shanquella

Sex, Power and True Crime

We were all shocked, but not shocked at the same time.  We’ve known this kind of thing has been happening for centuries.  Girl raped, girl blamed.  Nothing seems to protect her.  Women from lower classes of society, from parts of society without easy access to police prioritization, had their pain dismissed.  The young men involved just called it sex, or “training.”

Such attitudes had long roots.  In the early days of serial killers, the new interstate highway system allowed easy and fast access from one area of the country to another. It provided a pathway for people to act on homicidal thoughts with reasonable ideas of escape. And they were right – at least for a decade or two.  A young woman from a lower, or even middle-class family who disappeared was dismissed as a runaway and deemed not worthy of investigation. 

My husband and I used to play a game we called “The Forensic Files.”  We would lounge around and narrate our environment like it was an episode of that show.  In ominous tones, we’d observe that our dog wanted a treat on this fine, sunny day in Charlotte, North Carolina.  A car pulled into a parking space in front of our apartment.  A man got out, holding a cat in a carrier.  He forgot to lock his car door.  He entered the apartment building.  We heard his steps on the staircase.  But wait!  A maintenance worker drove by on a lawn mower….

While amusing, our little game disguised an evil fact:  the number one hobby of American women is Not Getting Murdered.  Also known as true crime.  It did not begin with social media, but social media gave power to its fans.