Sex, Power and True Crime

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 …