Hector Pavon
07/02/2021 19:05
Clarín.com
Magazine Ñ
Updated 07/02/2021 19:26
“Even in the
Bible
there are“ real ”crimes?“ Open it at random. You will find a crime story on three out of every four pages.
Cain and Abel
is a crime story.
Joseph
(Jacob's son) and his cloak multicolored cause another. At the origin of the parable of the Good Samaritan there is a crime. The nature of any animal is to detect danger in its environment. And it is also in human nature. "From the US, Bill James, author of
Popular crime
, he explains the police subgenre known as
true crime
. In his book he analyzes resounding police cases, from the
Black Dahlia
to
OJ Simpson
;
It tells how they were committed and investigated, and how they have profoundly influenced the culture of their country by being incorporated as a present imaginary.
The centrality of the detective genre became devastating in the last five years with the chain production of documentary series on real cases, with solution or unsolved.
They are passionate stories of crimes that are interesting for their relevance or enveloping history, such as
Truman Capote did
with
In Cold Blood
or
Rodolfo Walsh
with
Operation Massacre.
.
Now that great criminal story is fed from podcasts, online gatherings to solve a crime that occurred in 1922, mass conventions, the work of citizen detectives, those who start from a romantic side or from the dream of writing a novel, when dedicating themselves to the investigation.
Amateur, yes, but with the chance to graduate as effective vigilantes, capable of exercising neighborhood patrols and the eventual use of weapons.
Elizabeth Short, known as the black dahlia.
His body, cut into two parts, was found on January 15, 1947, in a Hollywood wasteland.
The case was never solved.
Technology is no stranger to this new hobby.
Dean Fido
, professor of psychology at the
English University of Derby
, interprets the reason for this interest in a paper. In Britain, the birthplace of Sherlock Holmes, that passion never fades: “We need something to excite us. When we mix this desire with insight and puzzle-solving, it can give us a short, sharp adrenaline rush, but of course, from a relatively safe environment. " Impossible to forget the postcard of the old courses from the mid-twentieth century, "Detective by correspondence."
In the United States, a country that centralizes the audiovisual industry, the tourist offer of visiting places where serial killers lived or where these violent crimes occurred is growing.
They did not invent it.
Walking the
Jack the Ripper route
on foggy London nights has been a classic tour
for decades
.
Police Dashboard, Detective Map, Crime Chalkboard - How to Put a Puzzle Together Photo: Shutterstock
The magnifying glass and the podcast
Is true crime the new leisure of the people?
It can definitely become a hard drug. Just take a look at unusual events, such as the convention that brings together crime fans, the investigation and its performances. That is
CrimeCon
, which was held in
Austin
a month ago and which in 2022 will be held in
Las Vegas
. There, cases, scientific techniques are exposed, TV programs, documentaries,
podcasts
are analyzed.
, there are interviews with the protagonists of the police world.
CrimeCon offers an immersion in the world of research: “Our events are about education and experience.
Whether you're interested in wrongful convictions, forensic jargon, unsolved cases, or the latest in forensic science;
we strive for it to combine hands-on learning with the opportunity to have fun. "
The organizers clarify that they never neglect "respect for the victims, the families and the forces of order."
Everything you need to know about real crime: a crowd at the recent Austin CrimeCon.
Selena Gómez (among other celebrities) was "working quietly" with other fans to solve a real case (on file) at the recent convention.
"They were perfect detectives who, along with hundreds of people, helped bring peace to the Sova family, that of the victims."
Our country had some of the fan dynamics with
Buenos Aires Negra
, a literary festival created and directed by the writer
Ernesto Mallo
.
In addition to talks with writers, they used to invite people related to the world of crime, both policemen, such as the commissioner of the
Squadron Mozos Cristina Manresa
or famous criminals such as
La "Garza" Sosa
.
The podcast industry has grown in a
pandemic
and it is estimated that it will continue to quadruple its income by 2030. According to the Spanish consultancy Podimo, more than
17,000 new pieces
are published every day
in the world.
The most listened to are, firstly, those of entertainment and, next, those of
suspense
and
true crime
, then, those of personal development, outreach and finally the romantics.
María de los Ángeles Bernárdez and Anabella Guimarey produce the successful podcast "It's a crime."
In our country,
María de los Ángeles Bernárdez
and
Anabella Guimarey
produce the successful podcast “It's a crime”, one of the last chapters of which is dedicated to
Ricardo Barreda
under the particular classification of “Murderers who have me fed up”. In May 2020, Chartable, a podcast statistics site, ranked “It's a Crime” as the sixth most listened to true crimes podcast in the world. At the end of 2020 they had
more than 300,000 listeners
from Argentina, Mexico, Spain, Chile, the United States and Colombia.
"Elena in the Country of Horrors" is the cycle of the Spanish
Elena Merino.
It tells the most sordid crimes in history: it disturbs and fascinates. "Legends legendarias" is one of the most listened to in
Mexico
, made by José Antonio Badía, Eduardo Espinosa speak of crimes but also of paranormal phenomena and witchcraft. "Crime junkie" is a boom in
America
; there Ashley Flowers presents a real crime every week. "Crimes: the musical", another of Spanish origin is conducted by the Spanish writer
Mar Abad
, who narrates the crimes of the Spain of the
Belle Époque
, with a musical accompaniment according to the theme.
It also invites forensic scientists, criminologists and specialists to contribute ideas and reflect on events that occurred more than a hundred years ago.
Diego Galeano, Argentine historian and professor at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, author of Traveling Offenders.
In
Brazil
, two very successful podcast series such as
Praia dos Ossos
and
Caso Evandro
are the furor that mitigates the Covid. The first takes femicides and the second, cases of political-judicial corruption. They are heard mainly in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, where young workers and students spend hours on public transport. “The Evandro case has a very interesting element, unlike Praia dos Ossos, it tells of a recent case in a small town on the coast, so it is possible that the whole town has listened to the podcast. As the chapters were being put together as they were published, there was a constant interaction between the audience and the script (they asked for the right to reply, gave new evidence, answered what was said, etc.) ", he says.
Diego Galeano
, Argentine historian and professor at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro.
He adds: “Although it is an extreme case that the public is inside the work, that element is recognizable in smaller or more nuanced doses in many of the most successful podcast examples.
It is at the base of the interest among young people accustomed to being spectators / interactive ”.
Perverse minds, righteous morbid
David Berkowitz at the time of his arrest in 1977. He was known as Son of Sam.Photo: AP Photo / Carlos Rene Perez.
There was a murderer who marked the history of crime and traumatized New Yorkers.
David Richard Berkowitz
, known as
"The Son of Sam"
, would go out at night in
Queens
and kill his victims at point-blank range with a .44 caliber revolver. He was captured in August 1977 and confessed to murdering six people and wounding seven others. in New York between 1976 and 1977. He declared that
a demon had possessed his neighbor's dog
and ordered these murders. His figure penetrated deep into popular culture and is cited, interpreted and analyzed in countless fiction series, documentaries and even sitcoms, such as
Seinfeld
and songs by
Marilyn Manson
or
Cypress Hill.
. He is depicted in
Mindhunter
, a shocking series that reconstructs cases of
serial killers
. Its common thread is two detectives who remove files to build predictive patterns and psychological profiles. Berkowitz, who survives in a
New York
state prison
,
returns to terrorize in
The Sons of Sam
, a series that places key importance on context. At last he exposes a more horrifying thesis: Berkowitz would not have acted alone and the children of Sam would be several. This is the theory of
Maury Terry
, a journalist who argued that in the background of the serial killer there was a satanic cult, which led to
Charles Manson
. Yes, of course, he also diagrammed the
map of the murderers
on a board at home. He focused on the clues Berkowitz left that led to rituals and a satanic cult called
The Children
.
In the series
The Faceless Killer
and
Don't Mess With Cats
, citizen detectives are starring protagonists. In the first, the investigation of the writer and blogger
Michelle McNamara is key
, who, with the help of two other amateur researchers, devoured public files, crawled the entire web and, with a righteous obsession, resumed an abandoned investigation. Between 1974 and 1986, a criminal committed fifty rapes and a dozen murders in the state of
California
. Today more of this story is known from the series and McNamara's book,
I'll Be Gone in The Dark
, which served to find the identity of the so-called Golden State assassin:
Angelo Jr's Joseph James
, a former military man who in August 2020 was sentenced to eleven consecutive life sentences without parole.
The series - directed by
Liz Garbus
(a documentary filmmaker about
Nina Simone
and
Bobby Fischer)
- reconstructed the story with interviews with the rapist's victims.
There, in addition, the null importance that was given to
rapes
at that time is revealed
:
sexual violence
against women was treated as a minor crime and, in many cases, was not reported.
That minimized the significance of this criminal.
The Golden State Killer.
Only arrested in 2018, he was convicted of 50 rapes and 12 murders.
Don't Mess with Cats
shows an extraordinary level of community organization thanks to social media, which emerges when a young
exhibitionist
shows on YouTube how he tortures and kills kittens.
The outrage of Internet users spread to hunt -literally- all over the world, this pervert.
The
drama
grows when elements begin to emerge that indicate that this enemy of animals is trying to become a murderer.
The investigative strategy works, but there is an unexpected victim along the way.
A young man is wrongly suspected of being the wanted character.
Furiously harassed in the networks, he commits suicide.
Luka Magnotta killed cats and a man.
A detective community cut off his career as a serial killer.
The
digital hunt
became a concrete reality, the murderer was surrounded and the route that was traced on Facebook took them through
Montreal
,
Paris
and
Berlin
in search of a very unique
Luka Magnotta
.
He ended up in prison.
The
detectives citizens
take elements of fiction for their formation, are assumed as defenders of lost causes, both which were in time as those of the recent past that they found no solution.
They copy the police map or board in which the data, photos and newspaper clippings of a case are arranged to see it in all its dimensions.
But, as in this case, they can acquire a power that they do not know and turn to a parapolice activity.
Melanie Haughton
, a professor of psychology at the University of
Derby
, says that behind these plots “there is a lot of romanticization of these dark figures, like the American serial killer
Ted Bundy
, who has committed horrible acts, and women can be intrigued by the danger". A language of “blaming the victims” is still used in police circles, public opinion, which implies that the
fault lies with women
, which further romanticizes the perpetrators and diverts the attention of the victims, turning the lives of serial killers in the spotlight. For example, Ted Bundy was recently played by the seductive Zac Efron, in the movie
Extremely cruel, evil and perverse
"which shows to what extent people are attracted to serial killers and idealize them."
Between 1974 and 1977, Ted Bundy abducted, raped and heinously killed at least 36 women.
The series that brought him back to the spotlight is
Conversations with Assassins.
The Ted Bundy tapes
.
Ted Bundy raped and killed at least 36 women.
He was executed in 1989.
Another notable series is the one that stars in the
Hotel Cecil
in
Los Angeles
known as "the Suicide" because dozens of people went there to end their lives.
All kinds of crimes were also carried out there.
In 2013 an event occurred that led to the
Crime Scene
series
: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel.
Everything arose with the viralization of a surveillance video of the hotel elevator in which a woman (Elisa Lam) enters and exits the elevator several times, as if she wanted to hide from someone. Shortly afterwards he disappeared until his body was found in one of the water tanks on the roof of the hotel. Complaints from passengers of the strange taste and low water pressure led hotel managers to one of the tanks. Everything remains a mystery. And the hotel does not stop receiving passengers eager to know its rooms where murders occurred.
Ryan Murphy
would have been inspired by the Cecil hotel for season number five of the
American Horror Story
series
in which
Lady Gaga
participated
. Also they
The Cohen brothers
“honored” him in the great film
Barton Fink
.
The Cecil Hotel, Los Angeles.
A whole record of suicides and even a death in the water tank.
Within the classics of the police genre there was room for amateur detectives, for example. This was interpreted
James Stewart
and
Grace Kelly
in
Rear Window
, by
Alfred Hitchcock
, who play at being detectives and very close to the danger. They may die. Also in
Manhattan Murder Mystery
(
Woody Allen
), four stars like
Diane Keaton
,
Angelica Houston
,
Alan Alda,
and Allen himself become makeshift investigators to solve the case of a neighbor who got rid of his wife ... has in the footprint left by
Errol Morris
in the pioneering and detailed documentary
The Thin Blue Line
.
In 1977,
Randall Dale Adams
was sentenced to the death penalty for a crime he did not commit: the murder of a police officer.
Ten years later, Errol Morris unearthed his story, reopened his case, and had a key influence on the defendant's freedom through an accurate reconstruction of the events.
The film was considered by the
New York Times
as one of the thousand best films in history.
James Stewart and Grace Kelly in Rear Window by Alfred Hitchcock (1954).
Amateur detectives.
In 2010, a
University of Illinois study
found that 70% of
Amazon
reviews of
true crime books are from women. In turn,
Michael Boudet
, host of the very popular true crime podcast
Sword and Scale
(USA), says that 70% of his followers are women between 25 and 45 years old. Police novel author
Francesca Dorricott
told a conference: “The majority female audience has a lot to do with gender
inequality
in society. Most women have been taught to restrain their actions, their thoughts, and sometimes even their imagination. We can witness the settlement of an accusation of
harassment
without being ourselves in danger, we can see a bad person put behind bars and feel relieved, we can explore our own behavior and thoughts without being judged ”.
Dean Fido
adds that even though men are more likely to be victims of crime, as the Office for National Statistics (Great Britain) reports that 2.3% of men are victims compared to 1.2% of women, women tend to be more afraid of crime than men: "If they are more fearful, they are more interested in knowing how these situations can occur." The mostly female audience of
true crimes
It could also have something to do with compassion for the victims: women may find it easier to put themselves in the shoes of the victims, mostly women, that these programs examine. "
Randall Dale Adams.
A decade in jail until Errol Morris's documentary The Thin Blue Line acquitted him.
On February 2, 1922, the body of
Hollywood
director
William Desmond Taylor
, shot in the back, was found on the floor of his luxurious
Los Angeles
bungalow
. The crime remains unsolved ... That is the initial slogan, hours before the appointment a detective box arrives at the home of each registered person. The public via zoom becomes the detectives of a case that mixes theater, mystery and collaboration to decipher codes under the guidance of
Mickie McKittrick
, author of bestsellers on true crimes. For 85 minutes they must solve Taylor's murder. It is a game, but the crime is real even if it happened a century before and remains unpunished.
The stories of
true crime
find formats and antecedents in unexpected spaces. Not only are cases found in the
Bible
. Isn't
Pedro Navaja
, the most famous song by Rubén Blades, an account of a true crime or infinite fictions "based on real events"? The historian
Diego Galeano
(author of
Traveling Delinquents
, edited by Siglo XXI) maintains that the taste for these stories stems from an "intrinsic cultural pregnancies to crime and, especially, to homicide, which makes it prone to the forms of the story."
And they also argue that “the key is in the modes of circulation of mass culture in modernity and, even the narration of crimes is one of the fundamental elements to understand this cleavage.
That is, the stories of the crime are in the
brochures and pamphlets
of the 18th century, they are present
in the
brochures and
the explosion of the popular press in the 19th century, on the radio and radio plays, in the cinema, in television series, etc".
Real tears at CrimeCon.
And real events inspired by police fictions also occur. At the end of May, in the town of
Pensacola
,
Florida
, an eleven-year-old girl used a resource that the
Law and Order
series
: Special Victims Unit
had suggested to her. While waiting for the school bus to go to school, a man got out of a car and tried to kidnap her. The cameras of the place recorded the situation and there it is seen how the girl defends herself until the attacker fled. Shortly after, he was arrested. How? Thanks to the girl having marked her attacker with
slime
, a blue viscous rubber that he was playing with because "I knew that it might be a better test if the police found it."
The girl had heard in the series that in a situation like this, it was necessary to keep something of the aggressor or the attacker to keep something of the victim without realizing it.
And so it happened.
When the police arrested him, the suspect "had blue slime on his arms."
The passionate and morbid taste for
criminal stories
has been with us for a long time, since we liked to be told stories.
Today they live a renewed apogee with the overload of reality, which is "based on real events."