My Dark Places: True Crime Month // Eve Deshane

The summer of 2019, a detective called my cell phone. It was about my father. He'd been dead for almost a month, but no one had claimed his body. "We are so glad we found you," the detective said. I was the last on the list, the only living next of kin my father had.

I hadn't seen my father face to face since I was 12, and I hadn't spoken to him outside of court documents in over two years. I'd always known where my father was—Kingston, in prison and then in a halfway house close by—but we did not seek one another out. We'd learned better. My father and I were strangers. Estranged.

But now I was the only one he had.

"Can I think about this for a couple days?" I asked the detective, and then the social worker who took over the case that afternoon."Just a few days to sort stuff out. I'm not local. I don't know if I can get to Kingston. I don't—"

"It's not a problem. We're just glad we found you."

I sympathized. I'd changed my name long ago, partly to escape my family of origin. The ghosts of my past coming back like this was something that only happened in movies. In drugstore novels. In true crime stories.

I immediately felt better. My story was a true crime story. I understood that. It was the only genre it fit into, the only genre that I'd ever really known.

*

My father is the reason why I like true crime now. Some of the better memories I have of him were when we'd watch TV together. Cartoons, movies, the standard childhood fare until Saturday night would roll around, and all of a sudden, police and detectives and John Walsh were on the TV screen. I was too young to watch America's Most Wanted, but I did. I was certainly too young to hear the story of Walsh's sonAdam, and how his abduction was the main reason why John had devoted himself to catching bad guys.

"Strangers are dangerous," my mother echoed in the daylight hours when I'd rehash John Walsh's tale. "You must always be careful of strangers."

She never watched America'sMost Wanted with my father, but she'd come back from her numerous library visits with books by AnnRule—former best friend of Ted Bundy—poking out of her purse. When I asked about these books, she'd tell me their basic plotlines. Be careful of strangers was always the underlying message. Strangers are everywhere. They look just like us.

WhenI saw the story of John List on America's Most Wanted, and I realized that strangers—killers, murderers, monsters, bad guys—could be just like my father.

John List was a "family annihilator" sub-type of murderer. In1971, he lost his job. He didn't want his family of five to feel ashamed if they went on welfare, so he decided to murder them. He did so methodically: after shooting each member, he laid out their bodies in the living room, wrote a note explaining his actions, and then left gospel music playing. By the time someone noticed the murders,List was long gone. He was caught 18 years later through forensic science magic—long before CSI had made that kind of thing commonplace—when an artist age-projected his face on a bust and America'sMost Wanted aired the final product. List's neighbour recognized him and turned him in.

At eight years old, I saw the happy ending re-cap of the John List story. Forensic science saves the day! Law enforcement saves the day!Ta-da, huzzah! But I could only fixate on the fact that sometimes fathers kill their entire families. Sometimes fathers are strangers filled with danger.

I would remember John List years later when my parents split up after a fight. During this knock-down, dragged out shouting match, my father threatened to kill my mother.

Not once before this fight had I seen an overt act of violence. Coldness, cattiness, and rudeness—not to mention latent addictions—sure, yes. My family was a mess. But suddenly my family’s mess was the mess I'd seen on TV. At ten years old, I was now terrified for my life. I could be kidnapped like Adam Walsh. My father could be John List.

Meanwhile, my mother was Ann Rule, telling me stories, over and over, of strangers and dangers and all these two-faced killers in order to keep me safe. She reinvented our lives after that fight. We moved. We changed the locks. We got real friendly with police. She got me a cell phone when no one had a cell phone, especially not an 11 year old kid, and she told me to only use it for emergencies. She didn't let me stay home alone until I was in my late teens. Even then, I had to call. Check-in. Constantly. The worst could happen at any time, ny moment, and we had to be prepared.

We both read true crime together. It was a bonding moment, a strategy. Away to protect ourselves, since my father did threaten to kill us. If we could just stay one step—one page—ahead of the story, we could survive.

*

Now, 20 years after that summer fight, my father was dead.

My first thought was one of utter elation: I survived. I won. He won't ever get me anymore.

The second thought, however, took me by surprise. He never hurt me. And now he's gone.

I started to cry. I couldn't speak. It was the second thought that made me hang up the phone, not answer the detective’s questions, and completely shut down for days. My father had been an ever-present boogeyman in my life for years. Now he was gone. In the act of his passing, I was forced to confront the fact that he'd been out of prison for years and never once attempted to contact me, let alone harm me.

This was not to excuse the actions I did witness as a child—not even close. But it did complicate the true crime story I thought I'd been living since I was a child, one of survival and triumph.

IfI had survived, however, and there had never really been a threat, what good was that knowledge? What good was that survival? What was the cost of it, especially now, knowing that my father had no one—absolutely no one—to claim his body?

I had no idea. I could not answer it.

So I went back to reading.

*

It was a fluke that I'd already pitched this theme issue of The Puritan's Town Crier Blog on true crime. I'd loved true crime for years, and even as I separated its origins from my father's legacy, I still continued to find the scientific and legal side—rather than the horrific violent side—of these cases fascinating. I wanted to talk about it beyond recommending podcasts to my friends and in-laws. I wanted to showcase other people talking about true crime, especially these writers, academics, and artists for this month, because I think true crime has an immense amount of value.

True crime can help illuminate our prejudices on who has a right to live and who is a perfect victim, as both Emily Diamond and Derek Newman Stille do in various ways. True crime can also be a difficult genres ince it pokes at the very notion of truth itself and what is knowable to us as a society, as EmmaJane McBride points out in her take on unsolved crimes—especially Jack The Ripper—and as I take up again halfway through to discuss the missing and murdered people who fade into the background while the super killers get all the spotlight. In its better moments, however, I think true crime can illuminate a common call to action, as R. Travis Morton speculates with his history of the criminal-slash-super villain trope, along with his endorsement of the “super cop” in fiction and real-life who solve some of these cases. All these adaptations of true crime narratives—such as David Fincher's wonderful Mindhunter—also bring to light the particularly salient case histories which have formed our culture in order to demonstrate the leaps and bounds in our understandings of criminals and their behaviour.

True crime, at least for me and for my pieces in this issue, also illuminates the difficulty of strangers, families, and who we believe fit in either category. Who we call a bad guy and how we frame survival can become so difficult so quickly. I saw it in my own family, and in some way or another, who is familiar and who is strange have been the questions I've followed my entire life. In my closing passage on Kitty Genovese, a crime that continues to fascinate me, I hope I can provide some kind of conclusion.

And I hope, in some way, you all enjoy this month.