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 Penny Press: Birthplace of the Salacious Crime Story

"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."

Grandma of Them All: Lizzie Borden

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.

"This 1890s case was perhaps the most widespread reported of all 19th century nonpolitical events, in part because of the cold-blooded brutality of the murders and the perceived social standing of Lizzie herself," Nissenbaum said. "But, also in part because of the ubiquity of newspapers at this time and the new technologies of communication and distribution -- including the typewriter and the telephone."

In fact, the Lizzie Borden trial was early fodder for such newfangled wire services as The Associated Press, which helped spread news of the case nationwide.

Without video cameras in the courtroom, incredibly vivid language was needed to describe the dramatic scenes.

"Any illustrations would have been drawings from courtroom artists," Binette said. "So the writing was certainly more descriptive than it was today, because they didn't have a lot of pictures to explain all the drama that happened in the courtroom."

Is History Repeating Itself?

The revelation that John Mark Karr's apparent confession was a fraud wasn't the first time what seemed like a hot break in a big crime story turned out to be a hoax.

"The one element that the Borden case lacked was sex, but even that was introduced in a hoax perpetrated on the Boston Globe by two con men named, unbelievably, Trickey and McHenry, who concocted a wild story about witnesses who overheard Lizzie telling her father that she had gotten pregnant by a lover who had abandoned her," Nissenbaum said.

The Globe was so hot to push anything it had on this competitive story that it ran a rare evening edition with the sexy new information.

The story collapsed within hours when other papers' reporters trying to follow up on the Globe's information discovered that the names and addresses were all made up.

History apparently keeps repeating itself many times over, so why does the American public keep eating up these crime stories like apple pie on the Fourth of July?

"We see with Lizzie Borden that there are people that are the most bizarre individuals totally obsessed with the violence and those with whom you can have an educated discussion that a woman can be tried for murder in 19th century America," Binette said.

Guilty Pleasure? Or What's Really Happening Out There?

Whether JonBenet Ramsey's age will give this crime story staying power in American history books remains to be seen, but the discussion of the relevance of these stories continues.

The case may be the first involving the killing of a young child to gain such widespread attention.

"With JonBenet Ramsey, a murder of a child that age, you don't necessarily hear about it. … I can't think of any that involve someone as young," Binette said.

Does that mean American values have completely collapsed, that people will focus their attention so eagerly on the tragic death of a child in a case tinged by sex.

"People are constantly saying that over and over again in American culture -- this is the time that American culture has gone to hell in a hand basket," said Emory University professor Catherine Nickerson, an expert in American cultural history. "I don't see the media has done anything worse here than they would have done with cases in the 19th century."

"You could probably one-for-one the 21st century and the 19th century as far as things reported in the news," Binette said. "I think that if you look at the newspapers of that day, things were as horrible in the news then as there are now."

In a world with so much news tugging for our limited attention spans, was this latest injection of JonBenet a waste of our collective mind space?

"I don't think it's a waste of time," Nickerson said. "The heros and villains that we create are very important in our understanding of the world. It's important to get to the truth, but as we all discuss these cases, there are more important issues that come out of it."