Stop and Smell the Blossoms!

By Tad DiBiase

In Washington, D.C. at this time of year the cherry blossoms burst into view and thousands of residents and tourists come out to walk and drive through the areas of D.C. and Maryland where the trees and their fabulous blooms are located.  Seeing these blossoms every year is one of the reasons I love living in this beautiful city.  The sight of the millions of pink and white flowers is awesome and the idea that they bloom each and every year without fail is soothing.


 Most of us in the "victim community" (sort of an awful name but what else can we call ourselves?), whether we are victims ourselves, law enforcement or folks who support victims, lead very stressful lives. The dark side of humanity is never very far from our thoughts whether it is because of what we have experienced in our own lives or what we've witnessed in the lives of others.  It's important, yet rare, that we learn to both manage and relieve the stress of what we do and what has happened to us in a constructive way.  


The cherry blossoms always assist me in this process.  Their beauty reminds me of the power and presence of God and his presence in and around each of us even in our darkest hours.  The recurrence of the blooms each year reminds me that life moves on, in cycles, and whatever stress or sadness that envelopes us will, in time, if not pass in full, diminish, just as the flowers on the trees will die and fall to the ground.  


Too often those of us who are victims or advocates for victims fall prey to negative ways to manage stress.  We eat too much, drink too much or self-medicate too much and we simply ignore our own needs on the theory that we're too busying helping others to tend to ourselves.  But what good comes of this if we end up failing ourselves and can no longer help others?  


For me, running has been an important stress reducer throughout my life.  Although I also use it to help me prepare for trials (many an opening and closing have been composed during runs), often I just run. I just run.   I don't usually run with others, just with my thoughts and my music.  The things that seemed so important and stressful before the run, seem less so after.   


We all need the types of releases and hopefully this time of year reminds us to stop and smell....the blossoms.

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.

Victim Identity: I'm Not Okay, You're More Not Okay

From time to time we find an article that speaks to the issue of what this blog is all about, victims of crime, their rights, how they can cope, find hope and overcome.  The following is such an article.

From Psychology Today

Dr. Steven Stosny, Ph.D.

Victim identity beats no identity at all.

Two subtly intertwined evils plague modern relationships. The first is emotional abuse of loved ones. The second is victim identity. They are intertwined because one causes the other.

Victim identity is identification with bad treatment you have suffered. It is focus on perceived damage at the hands of someone else or on personal weaknesses you feel were exploited by someone else. Damage and weakness become an integral part of your identity.

Victim identity carries a retaliation impulse that eventually rises to the level of revenge, enacted either passively (negative attributions and sabotage) or dramatically. All abusers and violent criminals suffer from victim identity, which, in their minds, justifies their abuse and crimes. The retaliation motive of victim identity is so great that you can reliably use the following as a guideline: If you feel chronically like a victim, you are most likely abusive in some way.

Victim identity locks the parties into a reactive narcissism that prevents them from seeing their partners apart from their emotional reactions to them. When I feel good, I put you on a pedestal; when I feel bad, you're inadequate or abusive. The negative emotional states of one feel like abuse to the other. Like the more severe forms of narcissism, this special reactive kind is a failure of compassion for self and other. What they really feel is, "I'm too hurt or vulnerable to recognize your hurt or vulnerability." But it comes out as, "I'm hurt, therefore you're bad, crazy, or abusive."

Victim identity not only worsens abusive relationships, it keeps people stuck in them: "The only way I can feel okay is if you get over your self-obsession and make me okay."

The Diagnosis Duel

When I was an intern in relationship therapy many years ago, dual diagnosis cases - an emotional disorder with concurrent substance abuse - were the most dreaded by young therapists. Since then, effective treatments have emerged for most dual diagnosis cases. Now the more intractable problem is dueling diagnoses. That's when each partner diagnosis the other with a personality disorder or some kind of addiction, brain disease, cognitive deficit, or childhood trauma that explains why he/she is such an idiot.

There are plenty of self-help books that feed the dueling diagnosis syndrome with oversimplified checklists that take behaviors out of context. (It's distressing to see that this website has added a couple of victim identity blogs that tell readers, in effect, you're not okay because you're married to someone who's more not okay.) Partners who diagnose each other often rely on the same self-help checklists or Google searches. Many abusers read the checklists out loud to their partners during arguments to prove how screwed up he/she is. They very commonly rely on their less than ethical therapists who diagnose the partner without even meeting, much less examining and testing him or her. You'd be shocked to see how many therapists married to other therapists engage in the diagnosis duel. More shocking is how often a therapist or psychologist uses "superior knowledge" or "professional expertise" to diagnose a partner - a particularly insidious kind of abuse.

Dueling diagnoses are always inaccurate and abusive because they are neither motivated by objective scientific inquiry nor by a compassionate desire to understand. Rather, they are motivated by a need to feel morally superior and to justify failure of compassion. Such self-righteousness in reaction to a partner's hurtful behavior is understandable, maybe even natural as a defense - it does give momentary relief of pain, anxiety, and depression. But the temporary relief of distress comes at a high price.

Healing vs. Keeping the Wound Open


The mere impulse to justify contempt or failure of compassion (e. g., diagnosing pathology in your partner) tells you that you are violating your deepest values, which creates a war within you. Thus contempt of a loved one causes self-contempt: "He/she is so crazy or abusive that I was such an idiot to believe and trust him/her." Your relationship may have wounded you, but patholigizing your partner keeps the wounds open and infected.

If you want to heal, recover, or prevent getting into a bad relationship in the future, see victim identity for the cancer on your soul that it is. Renounce it along with the self-help books and blogs that encourage it. Focus on your resilience, strengths, and your capacity to deeply understand your hurt and the hurt and vulnerability of the people you love. Respect your self-healing capacity; that will make you respect the self-healing capacity of prospective lovers and get you out of the dangerous need to rescue or be rescued.

Self-value, self-respect, and compassion will make you feel more valuable and reduce the need for idealized value from others. It will reduce the likelihood that you will project idealizations onto potential lovers and tolerate any bad behavior when the idealizations dissipate. Fidelity to your deepest values will make you whole and keep you safe, by helping you see yourself and those you love more compassionately and realistically.

Once Upon A Time In Mexico: Victim's Rights In A Foreign Land

By Michelle Simonsen


Americans traveling outside of the country has always held some sort of inert danger, but in recent years it has become more apparent that no one is safe when on vacation, and justice is usually never likely when something bad happens. We tend to "let down our hair" and throw caution to the wind because all of the smiling foreign faces seem harmless and safe. We've all heard stories about vacationers being robbed, assaulted, even killed, yet it is still a popular belief that something like that would never happen to them. 


How can we forget the infamous case of 18-year-old Alabama native, Natalee Holloway, who went missing while on the island of Aruba in May 2005, while celebrating her high school graduation with her fellow classmates? Let's also not forget about 24-year-old Amy Bradley, who was last seen in March 1998, while vacationing with her family on the Royal Caribbean cruise ship after docking in Curacao, Netherland Antilles. Most recently, in April 2007, Phylicia Moore, an 18-year-old New Jersey native was with her high school class traveling to Ghana on a good-will mission when she was mysteriously found dead in her Ghana hotel pool. There were no witnesses, no clues, and no answers for her family.


When we leave our borders we are subject to the laws of the country we are staying in. For victims of crime, this can become a living nightmare due to lackadaisical laws, police corruption, blatant cover-ups, and the lack of proper resources.

Rebecca Sinnott, a married 40-year-old North Carolina mother, thought she had hit the jackpot when her 19-year-old niece, Ashley won a vacation of a lifetime - a five day trip to Cancun, Mexico.  Rebecca had never been out of the country, let alone on a plane. This was going to be the trip of her dreams - a trip to paradise. Little did she know it would turn out to be a rape in paradise.


When Ashley won the trip to Cancun, Rebecca thought it would only be natural for her to join her as a chaperone. Rebecca had raised Ashley and their family agreed it would be safer for Rebecca to accompany her, instead of Ashley taking a college friend. Rebecca would be the chaperone, the adult, the one in charge, and the one that made sure Ashley would be safe from harm. Little did she know, she would be the prey and not her naïve 20-year-old niece.

On May 6, 2007, Rebecca and Ashley flew towards their idyllic vacation spot of Cancun, Mexico, ready to take in the ocean air, the warm sun, and beauty. She was ready to relax and enjoy the opportunity for the vacation of a lifetime.


On their third night, Tuesday, May 8, 2007, Rebecca and Ashley decided to enjoy dinner and drinks on one of the many popular dinner/party cruises that Cancun offered. From approximately 7:00 p.m. until 11:30 p.m., they enjoyed their dinner, drinks, music, the beautiful boat, and the serenity of the ocean around them. The experience gave her a new vitality and when the cruise ended, Rebecca and Ashley decided to check out some of the night clubs that were near their hotel.


At approximately 3:00 a.m., on Wednesday, May 9, 2007, Rebecca and Ashley walked back to their hotel after an enjoyable evening. As they walked along the streets, breathing in the fresh and warm night air, they decided to stop at a convenience store that was next to their hotel. As they walked towards the store, two security guards befriended them. The guards, who identified themselves as Carlos and Javier, offered to accompany Rebecca and Ashley to a table in front of the store, where they could relax and chat. To Rebecca, Carlos and Javier seemed to be friendly locals, so they all chatted for the next hour, about how much they were enjoying their vacation, how lovely Cancun was and even exchanged stories about their families and children. 


Carlos explained that he and Javier were security guards for a nearby night club. Rebecca was not familiar with the club, so Carlos offered to show her the inside the closed club, telling her stories of how American bands such as Guns-n-Roses had previously played there.


At this time, Rebecca and Ashley mentioned that it was getting late and they were going to leave.  Ashley told Rebecca to go ahead and look inside and said she would meet her in their room in a few minutes. They separated for what could have been the final time.


Rebecca recalls the next moments vividly.


"I remember going into the club and looking around with Carlos and up until this point, no warning, no hint, no flirting, no touching, nothing to make me think anything other than I had met a nice gentleman security guard in Cancun," Rebecca said. "After we came out of the club I remember saying 'thank you' and how nice it was to meet him, so when he offered to walk me to the hotel for my safety, I never thought anything of it. And when he said, 'Here, let's cut through the club, it comes out in the back of the lobby,' I never doubted him. Once inside the club, we walked down a hallway and when I was in the back of the club, I remember coming to a locked door and asking him to unlock it."


Rebecca continues her story.

"I remember him saying, 'Give me what I want and I'll take you where you want to go!' I remember him wailing on my head with his fist and saying 'American Tourista' and 'you know you want it'. At one point, I could clearly see his face standing in the doorway and he was smiling at me, while he backhanded me across the face and knocked me to the floor. I remember him tearing at my top; I remember pushing him and saying, 'NO!  Don't do this!'  I remember grabbing his genitals and how his jeans tore at my fingernails as I tried desperately to hurt him enough to get him off me. I remember his face and his rage and his right hand coming at me and knocking me into a wall. Then I remember telling myself to lay still and act like I'm dead and maybe he'll go away. I remember the colors of the walls; I remember the blood, so much blood."


The next thing Rebecca remembers is being in her hotel lobby and seeing her niece screaming and passing out at the sight of the blood and her appalling injuries. Rebecca started screaming, "Go get Carlos!  He did this! Ashley knows where he is! Tell them! Go get him! Help me!" Little did Rebecca know, through her swollen and bloody face all they could make out were moans.


The next 24 hours were a blur for Rebecca. Ashley recollects no one being able to speak English except for the ambulance driver, who quickly asked her, "How much money do you have?" as her Aunt laid on the ground screaming and bleeding profusely. A credit card was her only ticket to the hospital, where they immediately did a rape kit, and started prepping her for an operation on her battered and broken body. She remembers speaking to her crying husband on the phone, who was screaming, "Get out of there before they kill you! Get out of Mexico! Just come home no matter what! They are going to kill you! Don't trust anyone, come home!"

With those words, from her husband of 20 years, Rebecca got up, signed some paperwork that she couldn't see, let alone read, and her hotel concierge immediately put her in a wheelchair and told her he would get her on a flight home back to the states right away.

As soon as Rebecca was back in North Carolina, she was rushed to a hospital, where she learned the extent of her injuries. She had lost three teeth, both of her eye sockets and cheek bones were broken, her nose was broken and she had several broken ribs. When the doctors were finished, she was also left with over a dozen stitches, both inside and outside of her mouth, and another dozen around her left eye.

"By all rights my face should have caved in from the pressure on the plane and why it did not is a mystery," Rebecca said, adding, "I was in a hell of a shape, but I was ALIVE."

Since the alleged incident, Rebecca's life has never been the same. It has caused her to develop severe depression and post traumatic stress, for which she had to start taking medication and seek intense therapy. Due to the depression and stress, Rebecca lost her job because she could not perform her duties the way she used to.


Rebecca vowed to herself, and to countless other victims, that Mexico would not forget her name. She began to speak to anyone who would listen to her story - lawyers, politicians, the media, and the Mexican authorities.


In August 2007, North Carolina Senator Elizabeth Dole referred Rebecca's case to the U.S. Department of State and they sent her a letter stating that the U.S. Consular Agency in Cancun inquired with local police on her behalf and learned that a suspect had not been apprehended in connection with her case; however her case remains open.


Rebecca has become a crusader and continues to fight her case with the Mexican authorities and has no intention of giving up the hunt for her rapist and those who helped cover it up.

Trait Examination OR Character Assassination?

By Sandra L. Brown, M.A.                           

Part of the problem we face in trying to get to the nitty-gritty of pathological love relationships is that ‘how we do it’ or ‘what we call it’ is judged so severely that it impairs sharing the valuable outcomes that are learned.

There are groups of professionals, women’s orgs, and service agencies that tip toe around what we ‘call’ patterns of selection in relationships. There are unspoken rules and heavily weighted opinions about ‘what’ we can discuss and ‘how’ we discuss the outcomes.

What am I talking about? Since the 1970’s and the women’s movement, discussing the specifics about women’s choices in relationships, patterns of selection, personality traits, mental health, sexual addiction/deviancy has been largely discouraged and ‘semanti-sized’ as ‘labeling the victim’ or ‘victim blaming.’ It has put the victim off limits for any in depth studying other than from a victimology theory that was developed in the 1970’s.

It is hard to get around the billboard image of ‘victim’ to talk about any kind of relationship dynamics or other psychological aspects (including biology or temperament engrained traits) that is happening in the pathological love relationship. The rules are that we may study him but we already have a ‘theory’ for her which is not to be disturbed.

Compare this to any other field of mental health and it’s absurd that we would say ‘We already understand depression, no more theories, no more studying! Don’t call it depression or you are blaming the patient for their own depression.’

In this kind of rationale, to study her is to blame her. To measure her traits to see if there are vulnerabilities or pattern typing is to suggest she is flawed.

·        The victim assuredly has been through trauma.

·        Studying the victim in no way says they have not been through trauma.

·        The victim is not to blame for what happened to them.

·        Studying the victim in no way says they are responsible for what happened to them.

·        The victim did not ‘choose’ the victimization, but in relational dysfunction, she did pick the victimizer.

Could we learn something about that?

How will Cancer be won or a cure for AIDS is found if we don’t study the problem from all angles? If we conclude that studying the victim blames them, then we have cut off one entire segment of research that can help us in prevention, intervention and treatment–whether it’s a medical disorder or a pathological relationship.

Studying victimology, including aspects of the victim, is not victim character assassination. It might be trait examination or pattern of selection analysis. It might be a lot of things that have nothing to do with blame and shame and everything to do with understanding or creating new paradigms in which to see these relationships. It might piggyback off of theories developed in the 1970’s…surely we have learned SOMETHING new about relationship dynamics, pathology in relationships, personality disorders as intimate partners, violence and addiction and their part in these relationships…surely we can UPDATE a theory without our own assassination or that of the victim?

In some ways, I envy the Scientific and Research communities that look at the data and pass all the darn political correctness and emotional politics of ‘labeling’ it something that certain groups find offensive. They test and crunch numbers and put it in a journal without all the rig-a-ma-rol. But in our case, where we are a notch below the researchers, what we study and how we describe what we found, is subject to so much scrutiny that many clinicians and writers hesitate to publish what they found.

So it has been with many of the things that The Institute has studied, found, reported, and written. In many organizations the first book ‘How to Spot a Dangerous Man’ was rejected for looking at family role modeling, patterns of selection, and other aspects that women themselves said contributed to their pathological relationship. (On the other hand, it has been hailed by many domestic violence agencies and used widely in shelters, treatment centers and women’s prisons.)

We stepped it up a huge notch in the ‘Women Who Love Psychopaths’ in which we used testing instruments to test women’s traits to see if there were temperament patterns in women who ended up in the most dangerous and disordered of relationships. This caught huge attention from some groups as the ground-breaking trait identification that it was and yet still; the victim groups saw it as labeling. How can we help women if we don’t understand their own biology?

Ironically, what we found was significant–super-traits so perfectly and symmetrically seen in 80 cases. Did we hurt a victim by studying that? Or have we helped now thousands of women who have read the books, been counseled by our trained therapists, come to our treatment programs? How would we have gotten here today without daring to look deeper…to even risk looking at her! Not to blame her, but to understand her.

Some of the biggest breakthroughs that have been happening are in understanding the biology of our own brains and the consequences of our biology on our behavior, choices, and futures. We know that MRI’s are being done on psychopath’s brains–revealing areas of brains that work differently. Some day, I think that may cross over and other personality disorders and chronic mental illnesses will be MRI’d as well so we understand how those disorders effect biology and brain function.

But what about victims?

·        If we put the word ‘damaged’ away and instead looked at how ‘different’ brain regions in victims function, over function, under function, are influenced by stress, PTSD, adrenaline, cortisol, and early childhood abuse–could we come to understand how their brain might function in their patterns of selection in dangerous relationships?

·        Could we come to understand that even temperament traits might give proclivity to how the brain ‘chooses’ or how the brain categorizes (or ignores) red flags, danger, or is highly reactive to traumatized attraction?

·        Could we understand brains that have higher tolerance levels because of certain brain areas that operate differently than other people?

·        Could we understand traumatic memory storage and why good memories of him (even as awful as he might be) are so much stronger than the abuse memories?

·        If we know what part of the brain distorts memory storage, can we work with that?

·        Could we come to understand trait temperaments as risk factors or certain brain functions as possible victim vulnerabilities?

·        Then would we know who is at risk?

·        Would we understand better, how to TREAT the victim in counseling?

·        How to develop prevention and intervention?

·        Or how intensity of attachment could be either a temperament trait or a brain function instead of merely ‘victim labeling.’

I am not only interested in the psycho-biology of the victim but how the psycho-biology affects patterns of selection and reactions in the most pathological of relationships. When we start really dealing with an open dialogue about these survivors, looking past ridiculous theories that asking questions is victim blaming, then maybe we can really offer some new theories into victimology that by-passes band aid approaches to complex psycho-bio-social understandings. This is what The Institute intends to do.

Interviewing Victims Of Crime

By Diane Fanning, Guest Writer

As a true crime writer, I am often asked if I feel fear, apprehension or anxiety when interviewing a murderer or travelling to a remote site where a killer left a body or going into a less than optimal neighborhood in search of an interview subject.  The short answer is: Yes, of course, I am.

However, my reaction to those situations pale in comparison to the intensity of my nervousness I feel when doing another aspect of my work—talking to the family members and friends of the deceased.  The first telephone conversation or face-to-face meeting churns acid in my stomach and makes my hands shake.

I am not afraid of these people but I am fearful that I might say the wrong thing or display the wrong reaction and, without intending to do so, cause a surviving loved one additional pain.  When I meet the victim’s family members and close friends, they are experiencing the worst time in their whole lives.  The world has turned upside down.  They are shattered by grief, desperate for justice and fearful of the emotional price a trial will exact or depleted by the one they just survived.  Their pain is palpable and infectious.

At times, I have been known to cry along with them.  At other times, I’ve sat silent and listened as they ranted about the perpetrator, the crime and the agony of the judicial process.  Some have told me later that being able to share their sorrow and anger with someone not directly involved in their tragedy eased some of the oppressive burden. 

There have been a few along the way, who refused to talk to me or set up conditions that made it impossible because their demands crossed my ethical boundaries or financial limitations.  Although I could readily understand their reluctance, it always broke my heart because I knew that I had failed to reassure them.

One of the reasons I write true crime books is because the most important person in any of these stories is the victim.  I believe that any time we lose a life to a senseless act of violence; it impacts all of us even when it is a stranger.  Those closest to the deceased person feel the loss most keenly but the pain ripples out to the community and beyond to all of us who value life.

When my readers pick up one of my books, I want them to see the victim as a real person—as someone who deserved to live their life to the fullest.  Only family and friends can supply me with the anecdotes and the information about personality that enable me to shape a portrait of their deceased loved one and thus, allow my readers to understand the magnitude of the loss suffered by this crime.

I have found through the years that the people who shared their memories and thoughts with me are grateful that they did.  I’ve received many notes and emails thanking me for remembering their loved one in my book.  Some of these people continue to maintain contact, years after publication.

The more in-depth information I can gather, the better job I do.  When I wrote GONE FOREVER, I had an amazing treasure chest of information about Susan McFarland—access to her personal journal, a sibling’s perspective on her childhood and the memories of friends throughout her life.  I felt a strong emotional connection to her.  I wrote about this feeling in the Afterword of the book:

One morning while driving up Interstate Highway 35 to Austin, Susan McFarland became so real to me that I thought about how much more I would enjoy the ride if she were sitting beside me sharing stories and passing the time together.  Then the realization struck—I would never be able to meet her.  I would never bump into her in Central market.  I would never laugh with her over lunch.  I would never hear the sound of her voice or see the sunny glow of her smile.

At that moment, I was hit by a sense of loss so visceral; it took my breath away and formed pools of water in my eyes.  The light of a life-enriching personality was snuffed out, never to brighten anyone’s day again.   Gone forever—all because of the violent selfishness of one man.

To this day, I think of Susan when I enter the dark recesses of a crime—talking to killers, looking at crime scene photos, reading autopsy reports.  She is my bridge to surviving family and friends, one that allows me to glimpse the inner strength and determination that many of them possess.  She reminds me that her story has the potential to save the lives of other women.  I owe her a debt of gratitude that I can never repay.  

God bless you, Susan McFarland.






Diane Fanning is the author of several true crime and mystery books, including "Mommy's Little Girl," the story of the Caylee Anthony case.  She is also a contributor to the blog, Women In Crime Ink.