My complicated relationship with true crime, and the cost of bearing witness
Do these stories help or harm readers, writers and viewers?
On Saturday I ended up working in the car while my daughter was in a class. Often, if I’m just doing work admin I’ll put something on in the background, and my preferred choice is documentaries. I’m always interested in the stories behind news stories, and usually it doesn’t matter if I miss a few chunks when I’m concentrating.
I’ve watched all sorts recently, from the Kylie doco to the French football team refusing to train after a stoush with their manager. But this time around, I chose American Murder: The Family Next Door. I’m interested in certain true crime stories and vaguely remembered the name Chris Watts, and that he’d killed his pregnant wife Shanann. But I was entirely unprepared for what I was about to watch. And I didn’t remember the story well enough to realise what was coming.
For one, I hadn’t remembered that he’d also killed his two young daughters, Bella and Celeste, who were suddenly on the screen in home movies, doing all the adorable things that little toddlers do. But then the story switched to the time after they disappeared, along with their mum, and focused on Watts’s calm denials of any knowledge about what happened, and the police interviews where they slowly coerced him into confessing.
I still didn’t know or remember exactly what he’d done. So I watched on.
Watts was confident enough to take a lie detector test – which he failed. After that, he admitted to his father in the police station that he’d killed his wife. We can now all watch this moment through the station CCTV footage – his father stunned and disbelieving, a hand automatically going out to support his murderer son. But initially Watts insisted that Shanann had killed the children and then he’d murdered her in response.
I’d stopped working at this point, and so the doco had my full attention by the time he began to admit the truth – his voice clear and unshaken as he began to talk, alongside images of the remote location where they were all found. He’d taken his little children in a car with his dead wife and then killed his babies one at a time.
I hastily switched it off in the middle of the confession, feeling that I was about to listen to something unthinkable, delivered in a voice that would torment me for quite some time. So I only know some of this information because I looked it up – still learning more than I wanted to. I’m a crime writer by trade, but I felt that to listen to this heinous admission, while waiting to drive my daughter home to meet up with my other baby girl, would do something awful and irrevocable to my heart and soul.
I was furious with myself. What was I doing, listening to the calm voice of a killer talk about disposing of his wife and tiny children in this unthinkable way, while checking email in my car on a sunny Saturday afternoon.
However, in the following minutes I could just as easily have joined a Reddit group and contributed my opinion. I could have re-sensationalised those flesh and blood victims and set up a running online commentary on Shanann’s behaviour before she died. I could have finished the documentary and tamped down my distress by looking for the next one as distraction. I could have driven somewhere and screamed. None of these options contribute anything of worth to the situation, because there IS nothing for me to contribute, but it might have felt more productive than sitting passively with the terrible knowledge that this kind of thing happens. And will happen again. That we can analyse it and discuss it and mourn over it, but none of us have found a way to stop it. So on it goes.
What purpose does it give us to have this much access to evil deeds? The only one I could think of that in any way justified this documentary was the victim’s family wanting the truth to be heard. Her family were hounded by trolls after Shanann and the kids were killed, people hellbent on destroying her character, suggesting that she’d hurt her own children. The court of public opinion was delivered very much as a sideline to the main story, but it was obviously a horrendous, unnecessary, never-ending grief-on-grief for the family, and therefore perhaps understandable that they would want their side to be heard and for Chris Watts to be seen for the bone-chilling person he is.
My reaction in the hours afterwards swung between fury and despair, for this situation that had unfolded years ago, half a world away. Our bodies cannot possibly hold individual grief for all the children who are mistreated and killed in the many different vile circumstances that occur in our world, and which we can hear about so often now – and this being the case, all we can do is to find a different container to hold what we feel. Some simply switch off the news and retreat to focus on calmer things. Others pray and put their trust in their god to have some kind of unfathomable reason for all this, one that will someday become clear. And then there’s a group who want to fight back, even though the fight is often nonsensical, because you can’t truly fight against something that’s already happened, only look at how to prevent its recurrence. I’m convinced that the rise of current hardline politics is not only about hate and self-focus, but a response to so much visible despair, injustice, suffering and cruelty, which has left us all in ongoing danger of becoming ever more numb and broken.
This mental overload encourages people to seek surety and strength to combat the pain and fear - but when we prioritise protecting ourselves over making everyone safe and seen, the landscape changes. Where is the gap within that, where light can come in, where change can actually occur?
And do stories help – or is there a point where they too become problematised? I once thought that storytelling ALWAYS helped – but now I’m not convinced. If humanity were firing on all cylinders, any one story of abuse would cause an unstoppable tide of the kind of outrage that leads to change. I’m sure that it happened more when I was a kid – but perhaps I’m romanticising.
I didn’t like the way that this doco told the story. The extensive footage of him meant he was given way too much of a voice – I felt it should have been done in third person or through the eyes of Shanann’s obviously distraught and broken father – which would have prioritised compassion over sensationalism, and taken better care of the viewer. To what extent do the documentary-makers have a responsibility here?
I know of crime writers who can write dispassionately about some brutal topics. It’s a different way of being – with its own pros and cons – but it’s not my way. I need to be able to feel the way the characters feel in my stories. I can’t get full access to them without that. And yet, I can sometimes set those feelings aside for the purposes of the story, if I really believe in it. When I wrote Shallow Breath, for the time I was writing I could suddenly hear about and look at photos of animal abuse and suffering, because I felt that I was writing about something important that needed examining and exposing. As soon as it was over, I went back to being unable to go near anything like that – which is the way it should be, I think. A primal function of storytelling is empathy: a cold, detached writer can’t provide that – all that’s left is cruelty for entertainment. There are plenty of those stories too, but they don’t interest me.
Yes, there can be purpose in telling a dark story. But there’s also an effect: a personal effect, a community effect and a cultural effect. And storytelling can be – is being, particularly in politics and media – weaponised more and more to exclude and marginalise certain people, and to promote shock and gossip, rather than any wise, deep or prolonged reflection.
When I was a child, our knowledge was based on the gathering of information. That’s all changed: information is no longer a problem. Instead, it’s our curation of it that determines what we fight for and what we let go. And if we inhale too much true crime like it’s nothing more than fast food for the brain, we risk a different kind of sickness: one that allows us to look away or diminish the stories that should always matter the most.
Author Notes and extras will be coming in an additional post on Thursday this week.