by Alice Bolin
But others in the novel seem to view John as a blank slate, too. Jack Wilson, a white mystery novelist who claims obscure Indian ancestry, writes about Aristotle Little Hawk, “the very last Shilshomish Indian, who was a practicing medicine man and private detective in Seattle.” When Wilson sees John, he is shocked at his resemblance to the Little Hawk of his imagination. It seems John can stand in for any Indian archetype, the noble savage or the savage killer. The Indian Killer could be just another hackneyed role that others would have John play. At times it seems like the Indian Killer is a true bogeyman, not an expression of Indian anger but white fear, materialized.
The Indian Killer’s first victim is an arrogant college student, “his head high and shoulders wide.” The Killer stalks him, filled with hatred for the man’s swagger and expensive clothes. In this way, Alexie frames Indian Killer as simple wish fulfillment. He got the idea for the novel in college, saying, “I was sitting at Washington State with frat guys in the back row who I wanted to kill. And I would fantasize about murder.” But the violence and anger that propel the novel can camouflage the complicated meta-moves it is performing, as it comments on genre and itself. Alexie draws a parallel between the stereotypes that constrain American Indian identity and the oppressive expectations of genre, which is also a matrix of received texts and traditions. Wilson is writing a novel about the Indian Killer, a strange mirror version of Alexie’s own, which forces the reader to consider how the story would play out in a traditional mystery. Characters comment on the predictable trajectory of their own story. “Besides, you know how this will go in real life,” Wilson’s agent tells him. “In the third act, they’ll find out some white guy with eagle feathers is doing the killing. White guys are always the serial killers.”
The height of parody in Indian Killer is the white American Indian Studies professor Dr. Mather, who was supposedly “adopted into a Lakota Sioux family.” A transparent stand-in for the long line of misguided white people who have written American Indian history, Mather serves as Alexie’s foil to complicate the aims of the novel. Mather says of one of the Indian Killer’s crimes, “The kidnapping of Mark Jones is actually a bold, albeit cowardly, metaphor for the Indian condition. Indian people have had their culture, their children, metaphorically stolen by European colonization.” Because this theory is put forth by the ridiculous Mather, it preempts the reader from coming to such a simple interpretation.
Ultimately the novel inhabits a place of painful ambiguity, as symbolized by John’s undecided identity. In an interview with The Guardian in 2003, Alexie said Indian Killer was by far his least popular book because people were repulsed by its violence. But as he pointed out, it is a story of doubles and parallels, where each act of trauma receives one in return: “There was an Indian kid being kidnapped and a white kid being kidnapped. Everyone failed to see any ambiguity.” There is even confusion implanted in the novel’s title, a question voiced by a character that seems obvious once it is spoken. “Calling him the Indian Killer doesn’t make sense, does it?” she asks. “If it was an Indian doing the killing, then wouldn’t he be called the Killer Indian?”
Walter and Alexie are friends and kindred spirits: they’re both writers who veer between the realms of popular and literary fiction, both Spokane boys made good. Both take the stance of the outsider—because of being from Spokane, or because of starting as a genre writer, or because of growing up on a reservation, or because of being an Indian in the white literary world—which spurs them toward literary rebellion, writing books that are audacious, self-conscious, and messy. And the thriller is an inherently self-conscious form, whose formulas are so familiar that innovating on them is almost an imperative.
Like Alexie did in Indian Killer, with Over Tumbled Graves, Walter set out to challenge the thriller form, with his implied critique of familiar character types like the philosophical Dupree and the blowhard profilers. He is also denouncing the entire serial killer industry that the book could be a part of. In one scene, Caroline searches serial killer on the Internet and finds “eighty-six nonfiction books concerning serial killers currently in print,” with titles advertising “‘Amazing,’ ‘Evil’ killers and ‘Fantastic,’ ‘Bizarre’ cases.” She muses how a prostitute in Spokane “was worth a couple hundred bucks a day until her looks ran out or she died of AIDS or hepatitis or was shot by an angry john. But if this monster got hold of her, she could be a chapter in one of these books, perhaps even a composite character in the miniseries.” Over Tumbled Graves hopes to be the serial killer book to end all serial killer books—literally.
As we hear more and more of the profilers’ theories, it is striking how their process resembles that of fiction writers: they probe intentions and motivations, building a character from the ground up. Only Caroline can see that they are not studying a person at all, but a superhuman character of their own creation, a dream nemesis who is inevitably a reflection of themselves. Late in the book, we learn that Blanton takes part in a practice that serial killers are famous for, keeping “trophies” from cases he worked on. It was “for research,” he insists, that he took “some shell casings. Ransom notes. A pair of handcuffs . . . Some teeth.” Caroline realizes the extent that the profilers have been profiling themselves, and the excitement and shame the killer’s violence rouses in them. “She was alone in this, had always been alone,” Caroline thinks with disgust. “Those men were investigating one crime and she was investigating another.”
Like the dueling archetypes of Aristotle Little Hawk and the Indian Killer, both embodied in John Smith, these stories all reckon with the Janus nature of the cop and the bad guy. Randy Weaver and the FBI agents and U.S. marshals were eventually all Wild West outlaws. Serial killers and the investigators who look for them both exploit the bodies of vulnerable women. Blanton admits that he wants killers to be “evil” and “formidable,” that they are “so much more interesting in the abstract than in reality.” Over Tumbled Graves warns against magnifying killers’ power in order to emphasize a duality between good and evil, to fabricate a worthy rival so one doesn’t have to admit that one is encountering the worst of oneself. But it’s an understandable temptation for investigators to view criminals as mythic opponents, to create a theory of violence that looks at the gun, not at where it’s pointing. Because when you take away the monster, what are you left with?
The summer I turned thirteen, I read “The Trail to a Serial Killer” in The Spokesman-Review every day it came out, sitting at the psychedelic diner booth and looking out over our sloping yard at all of Moscow. Some details have clung to me, like the photograph of Melody Murfin’s Mickey Mouse jacket, which Yates kept in his family’s coat closet after he killed her. This was the first time I left the fairy tale of my childhood, or maybe the first time I understood it. That summer held for me both the full swell of puberty and my first depressive episode, when I stopped sleeping for a week and soothed my terror by watching infomercials all night. This was a rough initiation into womanhood, when I learned something fundamental about the place I was growing up in and its desperation and its remoteness. I learned that there were legions of hopeless women and they could be hurt and hidden so easily.
“The Trail to a Serial Killer” does good work to try to understand the stories of Yates’s victims. They are all miserably similar: like that of Murfin, “a 43-year-old grandmother who first used drugs at 12, and couldn’t give up the heroin she called her medicine. She bought it with the money she made selling sex.” Or Michelyn Derning, “a former executive secretary who had moved to Spokane from Southern California a year earlier” and who also resorted to prostitution because of her drug addiction. Laurie Wason is described as “the devoted mother of a 12-year-old son until the summer before [she was killed], when she slid back into a heroin habit after six clean years.” Almost as often as we hear about the victims’ dire drug addictions, we hear about their children and grandchildren, the devoted mothers they strove to be in spite of their disease. Victim Shawn
Johnson’s mother is quoted as saying, “Both her boys just loved her more than anything.”
Alongside these stories, it is even more galling just how many times authorities let Yates get away. He was stopped by police several times, once with a teenage prostitute in his car. During the investigation, Yates’s teenage daughter came to the police department to report him for domestic violence. The police might have caught on sooner if they weren’t so eager to avoid inconveniencing middle-aged, middle-class men—if, as police were subconsciously aligning themselves with him, Yates weren’t also aligning himself with them.
At times during the investigation, police were convinced that one of their own was committing the murders, because of his practice of double tapping, or shooting victims twice, as police are trained to do. It turned out Yates was not a cop, but he had worked as a prison guard and was in the army for eighteen years. One volunteer in the investigation expressed disbelief that someone of Yates’s long military experience could have committed these crimes. “It’s hard to believe someone of that background, that rank, could be that sort of person,” he said. But it was that kind of power and authority that Yates was drawn to: not something chaotic but something orderly. He wanted to control others and mete out punishment.
The end of “Trail to a Serial Killer” describes how Yates was not a problem prisoner. “He’s a lot more deferential to authority, judges, than you might have from a twenty-year-old gangbanger who’s trying to seize the high ground,” the legal advisor to the Pierce County sheriff told the paper. But of course he identifies with authority figures—the out-of-control entitlement that leads one to commit such bold and depraved crimes would allow for nothing less. The real disease is that authorities prefer the banally evil Yates to the twenty-year-old gangbangers, the drug-addicted prostitutes. It’s like we’re back in an Old West settlement: with the prospectors, the robbers, the mountain men, the outlaws, the sheriff with his shiny badge, the judge far off in his courthouse. There are women at the brothel and the saloon, rumors of Indians hiding in the hills, but I’m not fooled. Even creekside with the earth folding itself into stark foothills, forest and mountain crags announcing the distance—even amid the anarchy, I know who’s in charge.
The Husband Did It
“It’s always the husband. Just watch Dateline,” Gillian Flynn writes in her novel Gone Girl, telling a public who gawked through the O. J. Simpson and Scott Peterson trials what they already know. Flynn’s novel, along with David Fincher’s 2014 movie adaptation, is the subversive American noir of the Court TV era. It features two remarkably odious narrators: Amy Dunne is cruel, self-important, and vindictive as she meticulously frames her husband for her own murder to punish him for cheating on her. Her husband, Nick Dunne, is self-pitying and self-deluded. Told by these two exaggerated voices, the story is a pulpy, shameless thriller, theatrical in every element, including its self-conscious interest in true crime television and the trope that spawned its premise: that a woman’s husband is always the most logical suspect in her murder.
Amy watches shows about police procedure and reads true crime books to plan her stunt, luring Nick into doing classically suspicious things like taking out a life insurance policy on her. Gone Girl depicts the true crime obsession as a feedback loop—“Serial killers watch the same shows we do,” one of the detectives says—and Amy sees in them a chance to transfigure herself. She becomes the author of her own narrative (literally, in the falsified diary that forms her early chapters of the novel), where she was “the hero, flawless and adored. Because everyone loves the Dead Girl.”
What else could she gather from TV’s proliferation of real life murder stories? Beginning with newsmagazine shows like 20/20 and 48 Hours, with Court TV—originally a C-SPAN for salacious nineties court cases, which became popular during the trials of the Menendez brothers and O. J. Simpson—true crime TV is now reaching its gleeful, febrile, shameless apex. Reborn in 2008, the cable network Investigation Discovery is now all murder all the time. A sample of its programming: Beauty Queen Murders, Catch My Killer, Deadly Devotion, Motives & Murders, Nightmare Next Door, Killer Clergy, Unusual Suspects, and Wives with Knives.
If you watch enough hours of murder shows, you experience a peculiar sense of déjà vu: despite what would seem to be a wellspring of new cases, the same murders are recounted again and again across shows, migrating through Investigation Discovery programming blocks. The story of Florida airline gate agent Karen Pannell, who was murdered by her ex-boyfriend Timothy Permenter in 2003, has been on Dateline, Forensic Files, and the Investigation Discovery original program Solved. The most memorable fact of the case is that Permenter wrote ROC, the name of another of Pannell’s exes, in her blood on the wall above her body, lamely attempting to forge a “dying declaration.” This detail gives the story the feel of a whodunit. On Dateline, Forensic Files, and Solved, detectives emphasize the gruesome glamour of this clue, all saying in their interviews variations of “it’s like something out of the movies.”
It’s a clue that announces itself, like the ones in Amy’s sinister scavenger hunt in Gone Girl that lead Nick and the police to all the evidence she has planted. Amy orchestrates a truly grotesque melodrama, and still I find her more sympathetic than Nick, who is so convinced that he has tried, at every moment, to do the right thing. His father was an abusive misogynist, but Nick says, “I’ve tried all my life to be a decent guy, a man who loved and respected women, a man without hang-ups.” When his issues with women do leak through, like when he becomes momentarily furious that a female detective is telling him what to do in his own home, he blames it on being raised by his father and thinks his self-awareness will absolve him. He is the classic male victim. Even his misogyny is something that was done to him.
This is why Nick’s is the more damning characterization: because Amy bears no resemblance to any person who has ever walked the planet, but she bears a resemblance to women as conceived of in the nightmares of men like Nick, and there are many of those men walking the planet. For “decent” guys, comfortably vested with patriarchal authority, the nightmare is merely to be questioned, to no longer be the narrator of their own story. In Gone Girl, Flynn cracks open the American mainstream and lets Nick say one of our unsayable beliefs: that it is scarier for a man to be accused than to be killed.
The noir genre was born from the economic upheaval and disenfranchisement of Prohibition and the Great Depression, which relates closely to its function as, in the writer Sarah Nicole Prickett’s words, “a grim and slippery indictment of American masculinity.” When has the masculine fantasy (the American Dream?) been about anything other than control, about taking what’s yours, in sex or in business? Prickett, in her brilliant n+1 essay on the May 2014 massacre at UC Santa Barbara, “The Ultimate Humiliation,” writes about the ways that violence against women is so often connected to men’s professional and financial frustration. “It’s hard not to think these killings might have been slowed, might even have been stopped,” she writes of the Santa Barbara murders and others, “if more members of what is generously called ‘the system’ had the slightest acuity, maybe a little bit of feeling for a pattern, when it comes to fallen, immobilized men and their as-ever easiest targets.”
In fact, identifying patterns is exactly what it takes to prevent domestic violence murders—and they can be prevented. The Amesbury, Massachusetts, Domestic Violence High Risk Team, founded in 2005, seeks specifically to prevent domestic violence homicide by coordinating the efforts of the various agencies that deal with aspects of domestic violence cases. A July 2013 New Yorker profile by Rachel Louise Snyder detailed their remarkable success in cutting the number of domestic violence homicides from one a year in Amesbury—a town of only 16,000 people—to zero. They have been so effective that the Obama administration studied them for its own initiative to reduce domestic violence. Team members try to disrupt the behavior of the abusers, rather than disrupting the lives of the victims by relocating them to shelters. They de
termine the risk that a domestic violence case will escalate to murder by looking for a number of red flags, including, tellingly, an abuser’s chronic unemployment. Snyder describes how the risk of murder is closely correlated to moments of upheaval, “spiking when a victim attempted to leave an abuser, or when there was a change in the situation at home—a pregnancy, a new job.” We hear in passing toward the end of the Karen Pannell episode of Solved that Timothy Permenter quit his job the day of her murder.
It is chilling how closely Pannell’s murder mirrors the High Risk Team’s warning signs for domestic homicide cases. She had broken up with Permenter a few weeks before; she told her family he had choked her and she was afraid of him; she called the police ten days before her murder because he was stalking her. (She also had a history of domestic violence with the boyfriend Permenter framed, though he assures the host of Dateline, “She gave as good as she got.”) But on the murder shows, all these facts are elided or saved for the end of the episodes. At the beginning, it’s all about the crime scene, the clues, and the giant letters written in Karen’s blood on the wall. In fact, we hear the story of the murder as Permenter wanted it to be told.
On Solved, the detectives describe the change in Permenter after he realized he had not gotten away with Pannell’s murder: “his demeanor . . . changed from this very cooperative, very talkative person to dark, quiet, angry person.” Isn’t that convenient? His demeanor reflects his depravity the moment they discover it. This kind of transformation must be a common sight for the legion of detectives and other authorities who still don’t see the pattern. Snyder quotes from the coordinator of a group counseling organization for domestic abusers who emphasizes that abusers usually seem normal and even likable. Their partners become the focus for all their rage, so it rarely seeps into other areas of their lives. “I didn’t hate and fear all women,” Nick says defensively in Gone Girl. “I was a one-woman misogynist. If I despised only Amy, if I focused all my fury and rage and venom on the one woman who deserved it, that didn’t make me my father.” Aren’t they all one-woman misogynists? When you consider that the Department of Justice claims that three women are killed by their partners every day, and according to the National Network to End Domestic Violence, domestic violence murders claimed 11,700 women between 2001 and 2012, it’s no wonder that true crime fans roll their eyes at the predictability that the husband did it. Because it’s not a mystery.