HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: It’s a conflict that faces every author—and
reader—of crime fiction. What we’re writing about—and reading about—is usually
terrible . So how do we balance the reality that we are focused on crime—without
making it exploitive and sensational?
Then add to that true
crime—where in real life, there’s no fictional literary buffers to call into
play. It’s heartbreaking—and it’s
often violent. Difficult to look at, difficult to think
about, and difficult to report.
So the juggle for the
experienced and skillful Lis Wiehl was to take a riveting and ghoulishly
gruesome real life story—and show why it mattered.. And do so without relying
on the hideous details that gave the Manson murders a place in the annals of
inhumanity.
My daughter and I got lost
the other day on our journey home, and I decided to make a quick u- turn in to a
circular driveway in front of an old hotel in order to get back on to the road
home. The hotel was run down and kind of
creepy looking, and the day foggy and overcast. My daughter said, “It looks
like the Bates motel. By the way mom, did he kill all of the people that stayed
at that hotel?” And I replied, “The only one that any one remembers is the
woman in the shower. And the images of his dead mother in the rocking chair.”
Norman Bates may well have
been a serial killer with dozens of victims stacked up in the basement of that
fictional Bates Hotel. But what is important to us, what resonates and sticks
with us, is the horror of the shower scene, complemented with terrifying
music. We feel the fear and panic of one
woman, as we imagine the likelihood of many more victims whose stories we will
never hear. That is the key to the genius
that was Alfred Hitchcock.
Hitchcock was able to convey fear
and horror in fiction while spilling relatively few drops of blood on screen. True crime is different because it demands
showing true crime scenes. And true crime scenes are, by their very nature,
full of blood and guts and gore.
We live in a world saturated
by images of man’s inhumanity to man. Our evening news splays those images
every night on our television screens, and the internet carries images of
absolute brutality that can make it hard to sleep at night. As a writer of true crime, I do not feel
compelled to add to arbitrary images and then move on to storytelling about the
humanity or lack thereof behind the action.
In writing “Hunting CharlesManson”, for example, I devote only two chapters in a 36-chapter book to the
actual murders in August of 1969. The narrative is linear, but there are no
bloody crime scene photos in the book. I write about facts descriptively, but
not overly colorfully.
I assume that if
you’ve picked up a book about Charles Manson you’ve probably heard something about
the murders, so I’m less interested in the gory details of the murders than in the
preamble to the murders. What lead up to Charles Manson’s amassing his
following, for example? How did he get his ‘Family’ to murder all those people,
while he stood by in the wings without so much as lifting a knife? And what was
this grand scheme of Helter Skelter?
After the Manson murders of
August, 1969, the LAPD completely bungled the investigation. And, for a while,
Charles Manson was a free man. How could
the police have missed the clues that were literally written in the victims’
blood at the crime scene? Why were the different investigative agencies not
communicating with each other and apprehending Manson and his followers
earlier? These were the questions I was interested in asking in my book.
Once the police finally did
get their man, the prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi, had a not to be underestimated
task before him: How was he to convict a man of multiple murders who had never
wielded a murder weapon and who not even at the crime scene during the time of
the murders?!
Bugliosi masterfully used
Manson’s own theory of Helter Skelter to prosecute him: his plan to use the
murders for starting a race war in Los Angeles which he could stop at will and
thereby assume leadership of further actions. Bugliosi persuaded a jury that
Manson had effectively convinced Tex Watson and the “girls” to commit the
murders, i.e. “do something witchy”, in the pursuit of Helter Skelter. And it
worked. Manson was convicted of all seven murders. And sentenced to death.
(Which was later commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole.)
In writing “Hunting Charles
Manson” I made a deliberate decision not to focus on the gory details of the
murders. Instead, I studied the man
before the murders, his followers, the police and their investigation, the
prosecutor’s tactics. And I studied these things and events with a goal: to
understand why these events happened, so we may learn from history, lest
history repeat itself.
I believe that if we learn from the mistake that was
Charles Manson and his playbook of wooing young women in to his “family” and
using them to murder innocent people, then maybe we can spot and stop fledgling
Manson’s out there today.
I, for one, would be happy to
have fewer real life stories of blood and guts and gore to write about. It would challenge all of us true crime
writers to aspire to be more like Alfred Hitchcock and tell a spell binding story
without bloody crime scenes.
HANK: Yeah—I have to admit
I’ve found myself reading scenes in some books that are hauntingly gruesome—and
you know? I skip them. And then, often stop reading the book. But that's just me. And so many
writers—and terrific writers—do not shy away from the close up
descriptions. In my own books, I write
about the search for justice more than I write about the elements of crime.
So where do you fall in the
close-up-to-crime spectrum? How do you feel about that?
And LIs will be stopping in
today! What would you like to know about her book? And a copy of the new paper back to one lucky commenter!
*****************-
Lis Wiehl is the author of HUNTING CHARLES MANSON (Nelson
Books; available in paperback on June 25, 2019) and former legal analyst for
Fox News. She has appeared regularly on Your World with Neil Cavuto, Lou Dobbs
Tonight, and the Imus morning shows. The former co-host of WOR radio's “WOR
Tonight with Joe Concha and Lis Wiehl,” she has served as a legal analyst and
reporter for CNN, NBC News, and NPR’s All Things Considered, as a federal
prosecutor in the United States Attorney’s office and was a tenured professor
of law at the University of Washington. She lives near New York City. www.liswiehlbooks.com
