Society: Being of two (or more) minds on crime victims

By Randy McCall

Society as a whole tends to be in denial in its view of victims of crime.


Victims of crime are recognized as needing society's help and support, yet at the same time many people can't help speculating whether the victim didn't cause -- or at least contribute to -- their own suffering.


Some people want to hold victims up as a noble icon -- the heroic sufferer of outrageous events . Yet society as a whole also sees victims as reminders that terrible things can happen to good people, that there is still a savage underside to society, and that the world isn't as safe as many people feel it is. Feelings which, consciously or unconsciously, makes people want to hide victims from view, so they don't have think about these bad things.


Society says victims are citizens who deserve protection and justice. Yet, there are elements of society who are more than willing to exploit crime victims, particularly when there is the potential for monetary gain or personal advancement.


Just scanning the news for the month of March provides several sterling examples:


Crime exhibit dispute shows families' scars linger

A dispute over an exhibition of gruesome evidence from famous crimes escalated Thursday, showing that time does not heal the scars to murder victims' families even after four decades.
The son of assassinated Sen. Robert F. Kennedy wrote he was horrified that his father's clothing from the night he was assassinated in 1968 was being displayed in Las Vegas. He called it "a macabre publicity stunt."

In this article, we see that officials in Los Angles decided to display evidence items from various sensational crimes to provide the public with an insight on "...tragedy of murder and the difficult jobs law enforcement detectives have in solving often very complicate cases." The items on display included Bobby Kennedy's bloody shirt, the rope taken from around Sharon Tate's neck, and items from the OJ Simpson trial.


According to all reports, no family member of any victim was contacted before the items were put on display; items were removed and apologies were issued only after family members complained.


While the Chief Beck and DA Cooley have offered apologies, the victim's families are not impressed with the fact the very people charged with protecting victims saw no problem with exploiting their loved ones for profit... whether financial gain, increased prestige, or otherwise.


Remember we were talking about society's denial in it's treatment of victims? Well, really, just how successful could a display of murder weapons and bloody clothing be?

"Cooley said it had more visitors in two days than the Los Angeles Police Historical Museum has had in a year. Police detective Dennis Kilcoyne, who oversaw the exhibit, estimated at least 6,000 visitors saw it."

The response of the surviving family members was summed up nicely by the son of Bobby Kennedy:

He said he spoke personally with Beck and that "the chief maintained to me that hanging my dad's bloody shirt from a mannequin in a casino was part of an effort to train detectives. Perhaps he believes that, but to me it seems like a cheap bid for attention."


"It is almost like a traffic cop inviting motorists to slow down and take a good look as they go past a tragedy," Kennedy wrote.

It seems that, sensationalism aside, the people who came to view the display chose to see it as a display of history or technical expertise, looking only at the surface. They chose to ignore the terrible details of the violent events these items represented; of the crimes and suffering which had to take place for a simple piece of rope or bloody clothing to have such "historic meaning."


When asked what he thought of the family member's complaints, one member of the public put his views this way:

He said he found nothing distasteful about it, adding that he thought "it would be more gory."
Asked if he thought it might be hurtful to victims' families, he said: "How would it be hurtful? It's history. It already happened."

Two other stories from this month's collection of media pieces also point out how some people are more than willing to use victims of crime as tools for financial or personal gain.


Georgia House passes bill to keep crime photos sealed

The desire to change legislation comes as a reporter for Hustler magazine made an Open Records request to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation for photos depicting the nude and decapitated body of Meredith Emerson. Emerson was murdered in 2008 after hiking in the North Georgia Mountains.

Just the fact someone would try to acquire these photos underscores my point about the split personality of society when it comes to victims. Why? Very simply, they would not have attempted to acquire the photos if they didn't think they would sell to at least some elements of the public.


Another issue in the news is the use of recorded 911 calls by media, just to wring the heartstrings of their listeners. While some victims support the use of these calls to ensure mistakes by 911 operators or systems are made public and corrected, others find the replaying of loved a one's last desperate call for help to be overwhelming and too much to bear:

...Hoblick, out of town when his son Jake died, heard his older son John's 911 call on the news and asked Cretul to do something about keeping the emergency calls out of the public domain.

So we again see the dichotomy of crime victims in society... with society saying they wish to protect and honor victims, but at the same time feeding off the tragedy and drama of their victimization. The media use the audio tapes to increase their viewership; conversely, the media wouldn't try to use such tactics unless they had been proven effective.


In other words, more people do "tune in" to the media who use the tapes.


Can arguments of free speech and education be made to support these kind actions? Certainly, but:


What education is contained in a scream from a recorded 911 call?


Is the attempt to acquire and publish the picture of a the body of a nude, decapitated woman really a free speech issue?


Is the lure of impressing colleagues and the public (ignoring the topic of revenue generation through admission fees) so seductive that even those charged with protecting victims can't generate the empathy to realize surviving family members might be affected by such a display of items from their deaths?


The answer, sadly, is recorded in our daily news.

...


Wait... hold the presses!


I'll bet you thought I was done, didn't you? Truth to tell, so did I... but the universe sometimes has a way of helping you reinforce the point you're trying to make.


After finishing my article, I thought I'd go to the gym and -- like so many other people -- try and wear off a winter's worth of inactivity. My gym has a bank of televisions set up for those who are using the treadmills, so I was watching a national new channel while trotting away.


The news anchor, running through a list of stories, said, "...now listen to this". Low and behold, they started playing a partial recording of a 911 call; a transcript overlaid on the screen showed the 911 operator telling the caller to "put the phone down now", as a threatening person was in the room.


As the audio faded out, the anchor said that what followed next was a vicious beating, which we would get to hear right after a break for commercials.


Unbelievable. My condolences go to the victim of this crime. Their call, their assault, their pain and cries for help were reduced by a media outlet to a sound bite, used to entice jaded viewers to not change channels during the commercial break.


Media companies in general are publicly very supportive of victims of crime, yet at the same time they have no qualms about using those very same victims to appeal to the lowest of sensation seekers amongst their audience. Why? All in the name of retaining viewers, since viewers watch commercials, and the selling of commercial time is what makes them money. The larger their regular audience, the more they can charge for air time, and the higher their profits.

The Use and Misuse of 911 Recordings

By Angela Dove


“Disgusting”


“Completely inappropriate”


“Immoral and tasteless”


This is just a sampling of more than 150 reader responses to the article, “Brittany Murphy’s Mom’s hysterical call to 911” on People.com. On January 8, the entertainment magazine published audio of Sharon Murphy’s call to an emergency operator as her daughter, actress Brittany Murphy, lay dying in the actress’s California home. The move prompted immediate backlash from readers who vowed to boycott the magazine and told online editors, “You should be ashamed of yourselves.” None of the comments criticized the accompanying article, which included heartbreaking quotes from the call; instead, online users were united in their belief that encouraging the public to listen to a mother live through the worst moment of her life is despicable. Within 48 hours, the magazine removed the audio file.


While I agree that it is unpardonable to parade a family’s pain under the banner of entertainment, I am nonetheless intrigued by the power of such recordings. With—and only with—the family’s permission, a 911 recording can be an effective tool, particularly during the investigation of an unsolved crime.


It was for my family.


When my stepmother, Debi, was murdered in 1988, police were unable to make an arrest. Debi’s mother began a relentless media in hopes of bringing forward an informant. During the ensuing nine years her efforts landed Debi’s case on numerous true crime shows, most of which I avoided watching. There was one time, however, when I accidentally caught part of a show (I won’t mention any names) and watched in morbid fascination as several detectives offered a condensed version of the case: Debi was murdered in our house with a knife from our kitchen, my father found her the next morning, my baby sister slept through the attack just a few feet away, and there was no sign of forced entry.


By the time this show aired, Debi’s murder had been unsolved for more than a year, and I had moved across country in part to get away from the celebrity that comes to survivors of unsolved crime—relentless media aftershocks that can bring new devastation to lives already in ruin. What I was not at all prepared for was the tape of my dad’s frantic call to 911. The crime show played the call, and the panic and desolation in my father’s voice winded me like a punch to the stomach. I stumbled to the TV set and turned it off, sobbing in my now-silent living room.


At the time, I felt my family had been revictimized by the show. What I did not realize, however, was that the same recording that sickened me had actually convinced others that my father was not Debi’s killer.


Because of my naivety (I was only a teenager when Debi died), or perhaps because of my grief, I had somehow missed the fact that many area residents, and even some members of law enforcement, suspected my father had murdered his wife. Sure, the spouse or boyfriend is always questioned first, but even a year after Debi’s death there were those who doubted my father’s innocence. But anyone who knew my father beyond mere acquaintance would have been hard pressed to listen to that call and believe him anything other than innocent. Perhaps, if it had been released sooner, my father would not have suffered such ostracism and hostility during his own grieving process.

Aside from testifying to the state of mind of those on scene, 911 calls strike a chord even with strangers. (Over 150 comments to People’s online editors—and those were only the ones who bothered to log into the site long enough to tell them off!) Who knows if one of those listening strangers may hold the key to solving a crime?


When Debi’s mother, Jacque MacDonald, waged a war for justice in front of the cameras, it was only because she believed that someone, somewhere, knew who had killed her daughter. “There was one person who knew,” Jacque says, “and my job was to get them to come forward.” Were they afraid? Or did they think their one little piece of information wasn’t important? Jacque knew she had to break down their reticence or apathy. So she and my father laid their pain out there to the public. Eventually, Jacque’s “one person who knows” came forward with the information we needed.


Today Debi’s murderer is in jail, and Jacque fights for justice on behalf of other victims and survivors through her radio and television talk show, “The Victim’s Voice.” Based in central California, Jacque continues to counsel survivors of unsolved crimes to use anything they have at their disposal—including 911 recordings—in their search for justice.


“Other people understand panic and fear and loss,” Jacque explains. “Maybe they’ve lost a loved one or a friend. So that tape makes a connection.” If the family is able to connect to their ‘one person who knows,’ as Jacque did, then a shared understanding of loss may convince the informant to come forward.


Again, I want to be perfectly clear that I do not support the hawking of other people’s tragedies. Whether it is a mother’s 911 call or photos of disaster victims, I abhor the way some news and/or entertainment venues package and sell the heartbreak of others. But in the wake of an unsolved crime, it may be that sharing a vulnerability with the public can lead to a strong personal victory.


***


Angela Dove is an award-winning columnist, speaker, and author of the true crime memoir, No Room for Doubt: A True Story of the Reverberations of Murder (Penguin/Berkley, 2009). She welcomes feedback at www.AngelaDove.com.