Rachel Monroe

A provocative and original investigation of our cultural fascination with crime, linking four archetypes—Detective, Victim, Defender, Killer—to four true stories about women driven by obsession. In this illuminating exploration of women, violence, and obsession, Rachel Monroe interrogates the appeal of true crime through four narratives of fixation. In the 1940s, a frustrated heiress began creating dollhouse crime scenes depicting murders, suicides, and accidental deaths. Known as the “Mother of Forensic Science,” she revolutionized the field of what was then called legal medicine. In the aftermath of the Manson Family murders, a young woman moved into Sharon Tate’s guesthouse and, over the next two decades, entwined herself with the Tate family. In the mid-nineties, a landscape architect in Brooklyn fell in love with a convicted murderer, the supposed ringleader of the West Memphis Three, through an intense series of letters. After they married, she devoted her life to getting him freed from death row. And in 2015, a teenager deeply involved in the online fandom for the Columbine killers planned a mass shooting of her own. Each woman, Monroe argues, represents and identifies with a particular archetype that provides an entryway into true crime. Through these four cases, she traces the history of American crime through the growth of forensic science, the evolving role of victims, the Satanic Panic, the rise of online detectives, and the long shadow of the Columbine shooting. In a combination of personal narrative, reportage, and a sociological examination of violence and media in the twentieth and twenty-first century, Savage Appetites scrupulously explores empathy, justice, and the persistent appeal of violence.

Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession

Savage Appetites

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I like to imagine her authority in that room, with all those detectives listening intently to her words. [...] Perhaps she finally felt satisfied as the burly men bent over her small models, the care she put into them rewarded with the care of their gaze. 

I thought about how the detective's gaze--slow, hungry, attentive--is not so different from a caress.

I had never before thought about the terrible privacy of murder--how something so awful could be done to you and the only person who would ever know what happened was the person who did it. [...] How they got to own the story. How it was an evil kind of intimacy. 

If the detective knew everything and the victim felt everything, the defender was the one who fixed everything.

"Counsel, what harm is there in allowing him to present evidence from the last seventeen years?" one of the judges asked. 

The prosecutor look startled. "Well, the harm is the finality of a criminal judgement. The harm is--is to the criminal justice system's interest in /finality/."

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.

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