Image used under a Creative Commons license, courtesy of slack12.By now, I'm sure most of you have heard about the horrifying murder of Annie Le, a 24-year-old Yale graduate student who, just days before her wedding, was killed in her lab at the university, her body hidden in the wall. She was found only after her body decomposed enough for cadaver dogs to find her, according to Yale President Richard Levin. I felt sick to my stomach reading the Yale Daily News and New York Times coverage of Le's death, feeling oddly bookended. Suzanne Jovin, a Yale senior whose murder has never been solved, died four years before I arrived on campus; Le died three years after I left. Other than a car accident that killed several students my freshman year, and a senior who overdosed when I was a junior, while I was at Yale the campus seemed to be, if not tranquil, relatively untouched by anything as heinous as what happened to Jovin or Le.
But I think my reaction to Le's death was more than a ghostly sense of familiarity, a kinship with the place where she died. This summer, I've found myself drawn to mysteries, re-reading Sherlock Holmes stories and Philip Pullman's Sally Lockhart trilogy. Two of the novels I enjoyed most were both about the brutal murders of young women, Mystic River and The Lovely Bones. I was talking to a friend who has a daughter who said he didn't think he could read either book, because his fear that something would happen to his daughter was too real for him to be able to enjoy reading about that same terror. I suppose it wasn't real enough for me. I spent part of Labor Day weekend lounging through a Law & Order: Criminal Intent marathon, including an episode where the detectives find the mummified bodies of two young women hidden in a wall. I've been watching a lot of Bones, too, in preparation to write a season preview of the show on Thursday.
When I first graduated from college and moved into my own place, I was genuinely frightened by the possibility of being attacked. It wasn't because of where I lived, but more because I didn't have a roommate, I was single, and so it was entirely possible I could be missed for quite some time before anyone raised the alarm. I liked watching cop shows because they seemed to offer a formula for safety: make sure your windows lock shut; don't date mercurial and violent men; moonlighting as a hooker to pay for anything is probably a poor decision. Then after a while, I suppose I stopped being frightened and started enjoying the nervousness, the dynamics between the inevitable pair of detectives, the pleasant predictability that all procedurals offer their viewers. The ghoulishness just increased my sense of confidence in whatever set of partners were on screen in any minute: I could enjoy watching those bodies removed from the wall because I knew Goren and Eames were going to put it all together and make sure the killer was adequately punished.
Le's murder makes me feel guilty for that enjoyment. I desperately hope her family and her fiancee get the very thin consolation of seeing whoever did this imprisoned forever, but when it's real, I recognize how utterly useless that will actually be to them. I can't even imagine what it's like in Detroit, where 7 in every 10 murders went entirely unsolved in 2008. I don't particularly think crime fiction is unethical: The Wire in its own way is a profoundly moral work. But I am disturbed when I think about how easy it is to distance yourself from the consequences of crime through art. There aren't a lot of portrayals of the aftermath for victims and their families, and I understand why: it's hard to get actors who can carry the weight of that kind of grief, and I'd imagine hard to pull in audiences for that kind of emotional experience. Sympathy isn't always comfortable. So maybe movies and books like Mystic River and The Lovely Bones do us a service by forcing us to reckon not with the dead, and not with their killers, but with those left behind by murder.