Seldom do I find myself in the position of great poets of the past, but I just underwent an Ovidian transformation of sorts. According to Ovid’s playful testimony he had just written the first words of a martial Virgilian epic when his nemesis, playful Cupid at his shoulder, reached down and stole one of the feet out of his first hexameter line. Now the line was in elegiac meter, forcing the poet to return to his habitual genre of naughty love poems. Well, I had already written the better part of an essay about affirmative action in college admissions, a sort of supplement to my last, when it occurred to me that probably neither I nor my audience was up for back-to-back ponderous political posturing. But mainly I was distracted by an article in the morning paper about the indictment of a suspect in the Gilgo Beach serial murders.
Given the publication statistics of “true crime” literature I at least can claim plenty of company in my interest in historical episodes of homicide. There is probably a reason that the murder mystery is among the most popular of fictional genres. Most people are at least aware of certain celebrated historical episodes, such as those involving Jack the Ripper and Lizzie Borden; but I often go back further than that. Just at the moment I am deep into the case of a famous and consequential murder that took place on the public street in Paris in 1413. During the endless frustration and ennui of the library lockout of Covid, I discovered many podcasts and Youtube channels featuring or even specializing in homicide, most of them crude and off putting, but a few thoughtful and thought-provoking. I got caught up in the recent trial in the Murdaugh case in the South, which presented in a particularly troubling form both the “banality of evil” and the Pauline “mystery of iniquity.”
I had not been aware of the case prominent in today’s Times, which manifested itself in the discovery in 2010 of the remains of four murdered prostitutes deposited on wasteland on Gilgo Beach in the greater New York City area. Gilgo Beach is part of an infrequently visited thin ribbon of land—it rather gives the appearance of a barrier reef—that parallels part of the south shore of Long Island. Other remains, possibly the work of the same killer, were also found later. Police made little headway, and the case went cold. As is frequently true, some critics of the police claimed that they had “bungled” the job or perhaps even did not invest much energy in it because of their disdain for the victims. That is the angle taken at the Times reporters who largely credit the apparent late success of the investigation to a new woman director who reanimated the investigation after its long drift in the male doldrums. This police executive merits high praise. However, not every problem in the world is the result of malign discrimination. Sadistic sexual murder visited upon a prostitute is no less heinous than sadistic murder visited upon a nun or a neurosurgeon; but it is much more frequently and easily achieved. The occupational activities of such victims are almost always conducted with a certain degree of stealth, and often enough in a recklessness of personal desperation. If there is no opprobrium to be found in renting out one’s body for the sexual gratification of random clients, there should be no opprobrium to be found in the nouns prostitution and prostitute, both of which have long and stable linguistic histories and are more precise than the obvious journalistic euphemisms “sex work” and sex worker”. The occupational perils of a woman habitually advertising sex for money on Craig’s List in New York City must surely be significant, and easily rival those of Grand Prix racing drivers or of sky divers. Two points struck me in the bail application document of the criminal indictment recently delivered by a grand jury and now printed in the press. The first is that the highly intelligent killer was as careful and disciplined in his efforts to conceal his identity as he was evil and sadistic in the brutality of his murders. He enjoyed tormenting relatives of his victims in what he undoubtedly thought were untraceable phone calls, and seems like many deranged murderers to have considered his own considerable intelligence and cunning superior to the pedestrian efforts of a bunch of flatfoots. This was not an easy case to investigate, and the police certainly did make at least one serious mistake in not earlier fully realizing the significance of a report of the sighting of a vehicle possibly connected to the killer. The second is that the police work leading to the indictment, however slow-moving and slogging, was eventually brilliant, and to a large extent enabled by forensic techniques and experience not available fifteen years ago.
The accused man is a successful middle class professional, an architectural consultant with recognized savvy concerning the complicated world of NYC’s construction bureaucracy. He fits several of the expected categories of earlier serial killers. He is a white male. He is of such “ordinariness” that he fits plausibly into the protean profiles devised by serial killer experts, an apparently numerous fraternity. The first requirement: Nobody would have ever expected this of him, though of course at least one neighbor, once the accused had been fingered by the police, was not in fact surprised. This must raise the question of whether one does know people of whom one does expect grotesquely vicious, cruel, and perverted homicides. All this seems to be par for the course, serial-killer-wise. The “true crime” literature might seem to suggest that in cases of this sort sleuths would do well to begin by ruling out all those they think might have done it and concentrate solely on the multitudes who couldn’t possibly have done it, for there only is he to be found. After the publication and press coverage of the grand jury’s detailed legal document, there doesn’t seem to be a lot more left for prosecutors to do in a trial. This is less an instance of trying a case in the newspapers than of announcing the likely pattern of a forgone conclusion. So the police and the press sure better be right.
If the Gilgo Beach murders offer no relief from our burden of apprehension of the unfathomable depths of human depravity, one may at least take heart at ingenious advances in criminal science. The indictment document is mainly a meticulous catalog of the accused’s cell phone activity. The techniques police experts used in analyzing it, though too complex for brief summary here, seemed to me dazzling. It would appear that the wizardry of electronic communications is now promising to offer as much of an advance in criminal forensics as the analysis of DNA did in recent decades. Even though I have difficulty with the most basic functions of my own phone, I dimly grasp the damning implications of the various charts and maps of the suspect’s wandering phone(s) and other features of his complex telephonic life illustrating the indictment. Perhaps it is no bad thing that I usually can’t find my phone. There is also DNA evidence of an oblique but convincing nature.
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