Beyond Ramsey : America's Love of Whodunits

Aug. 30, 2006 — -- The arrest of John Mark Karr created a new frenzy of interest in one of the most heavily covered news stories of the 1990s, the murder of 6-year-old child beauty pageant winner JonBenet Ramsey.

For those who want to condemn contemporary Americans for their apparent fascination with the salacious details surrounding a child's tragic death, a little history.

This is just the most recent instance in the long American pastime of devouring juicy whodunits -- a hobby that's older than baseball and that has drawn Americans' attention since our earliest days.

"The clearest time for the origin of sensationalist newspaper stories would be the 1830s and 1840s, the time of the emergence of the Penny Press in New York City," said University of Massachusetts-Amherst professor emeritus Stephen Nissenbaum.

"These papers cost just 1 cent rather than the traditional 5 cents, thus 'democratizing' their distribution."

Nissenbaum has spent much of his life studying some of the most dramatic crime stories of the American past.

Penny newspapers, often just four pages to eight pages in their entirety, were much shorter than present-day newspapers.

Most of them published less hard news than dailies do today, and often also published short fiction and poems alongside the news in the small space they had.

"When you look at 19th century newspapers that showcased serialized fiction, sensational crime stories sort of fell into that same line," said Dennis Binette, assistant curator at the Falls River Historical Society, which archives some of the more sensational news events of that time.

"Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and several authors that in today's literary world would remain unknown wrote their stories for the newspapers, and they would go on for weeks."

Perhaps the earliest notorious case that gained national interest was the story of a wealthy woman accused of murdering her parents with an axe.

Maybe you've heard of it even though it wasn't shown on Court TV: It was the Lizzie Borden trial.