WHO MURDERED HER was never a mystery.” The opening sentence of this book warns away those who are looking for a “whodunnit”. Its mostly dispassionate tone discourages the sensation seeker. But this is a murder story. a true one. It traces the life of a serial killer and that of his last (you hope) victim. Lee Snavely. Until the plastic bags containing her remains were dug out of a shallow grave in Ousted. Michigan.
Mystique and excitement this book
has little chance of selling well. nor will it be made into a film. Joe Public prefers the sensationalism of a ghoulish cult film like Silence of the Lambs where they can watch pretty white girl (Jodie Foster) applying to a cannibal for help in trapping a serial killer in a land. Where the psychopath is prince” and having her nose rubbed in a good deal of filth in the process.
Crime has always been a source phone number list of entertainment (“everyone likes a good thriller”). That hundreds of thousands of persons who would not say boo to a goose are fascinated by films about cannibals. rapists and torturers arises from a social pathology which is not new. It does not need the encouragement which the entertainment and media worlds have been so disposed to give it in recent years.
Encouragement is what it is given in a world
Whose values are utilitarian through and through and whose thrills are vicarious but vicious. A comparison with the last years of Imperial Rome is difficult to avoid. Perhaps we should be grateful for the invention of television and stories can contain various stickers such as fun icons cinema for providing surrogates to the real thing. Without them the demand for live shows might be too strong to resist. This is not a cult book. but similarities with Thomas Harris’s novel are there nevertheless. Both stories are about a maniac serial killer.
Lee Snavely “didn’t heed the warnings”
Such as the one at school not to walk up the side of the stairs (the boys can look up your skirt). Reaching seventh grade Lee needs a whatsapp filter bra but doesn’t wear one. she wears “what she damn well pleases”. She never really grows up. she remains “daddy’s baby”. Easily taken in by any man who promises her a rainbow. or even a packet of dollars. just as she believed her father’s lies about her mother. She marries a man whom she meets in a haze of marijuana.