"To Succeed in Becoming Criminal Without Crime": The Algorithm of True Crime Texts

“The pretty little girl, dressed just so, in ribbons and lace, who now wore jeans and a sweatshirt, and lived behind a razor-wire fence. I wanted to know why.”

—Clark Howard, author of Love’s Blood

Aphrodite Jones’s Cruel Sacrifice, from the Pinnacle Nonfiction True Crimes series, features four teenage women who torture and murder Shanda Sharer, another teen involved in a lesbian love triangle. The text graphically depicts the brutal actions of Laurie Tackett and Melinda Lovelace, in passages like the following: “Melinda took Shanda’s head and slammed it into her knee a couple of times. Shanda’s mouth started to bleed profusely. Then Melinda and Laurie each took one of Shanda’s arms and Melinda tried to cut Shanda’s throat. Melinda tried to use her foot to push the knife into Shanda’s neck, but the knife was too dull” (25). As Laurie returns from beating Shanda with a tire tool, the text reads: “‘You should have felt it!’ Laurie yelped as she banged a black tire tool down on the dashboard. ‘It was so cool! I went like this and I could feel her head caving in!’ ‘Smell it!’ Laurie said, and she stuck the tool up in Melinda’s face” (28).

After detailing the murder,Cruel Sacrifice turns to the project of trying to “understand” what made the teens behave as they did, and, more importantly, what led two of them to become lesbians. The text links Laurie’s murderous tendencies with diagnoses such as borderline personality disorder (182) and antisocial behavior (221), and it classifies her “troublesome sexual feelings” (179) with a wide range of pathologized practices, including wrist-slashing, blood-sucking, and self-scarring. Likewise, Cruel Sacrifice depicts Melinda’s lesbianism as an aberrational, pathological response to incest and sexual abuse. Melinda starts to feel “somewhat masculine” and “aggressive,” and both of her sisters develop a “confused gender identity” (102), because their father has sex with them, he watches his wife having sex with other men (60), and he wears his wife’s and daughters’ lingerie and makeup (64).

At the level of discourse or logical possibility, Cruel Sacrifice distinguishes, distributes, and uses (Discipline 272) aberrational sexuality to evoke and police the boundaries of the heterosexual norm. The text seems to play out what Camilla Griggers labels a “sacrificial exchange between social bodies and social violences in which the lesbian channels violence for the community” (Griggers 164). By ingesting the violence of these white, middle-class lesbians, the community purges itself of the outcomes of its own violence and preserves the illusion of non-violent social relations within the white body politic (Griggers 172).¹As author Aphrodite Jones explains in her preface to Cruel Sacrifice, “we can learn” from what happened with Melinda and Laurie, and “make this place a safer world” (7). This “tragic story of . . . sadistic killing in small-town America” (cover blurb) also follows the familiar pattern of transforming a community crisis into a call for strengthening family values. When the high school principal laments, “This is supposed to be an area protected by the values system. When this happens, where do we have a safe place to raise a family?” (243), he joins several community authorities and parents who advocate tightening the family reigns and increasing surveillance of children (332). Morevoer, like other true crime novels, Cruel Sacrifice chronicles how attempts to break free from constraints inevitably lead to the ultimate reterritorial-ization—confinement in prison.

With this epistemological project of re-membering, “comprehending,” pathologizing, and disciplining criminals, Cruel Sacrifice thus fits squarely within the realms of traditional criminology and conservative political discourse about female criminality. Indeed, at the level of logical possibilities—the level of representation and identification—this text and others like it fuel the frenetic impulse to build ever more prisons.

However, while doing fieldwork at the Minnesota State Correctional Facility for Women, I discovered that true crime texts are by far the most popular items in the prison library; inmates sign up on waiting lists to read and reread...