Cogito Ergo Sum: True Crime
by Cinda in Minneapolis

The mystery genre has been a favorite of mine since I was a young girl. I loved watching murder mysteries on television and reading mystery novels—Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, romantic suspense mysteries, Sherlock Holmes. The Hound of the Baskervilles scared me silly. I read it one August day fogged in at our summer lake house, lying on the sagging sofa in front of a crackling fire. Despite the reassuring ending to that story, I still had nightmares about the hound.

As an adult, I’m always on the lookout for a new mystery writer who can captivate me as others have done, like P.D. James, Tony Hillerman, Louise Penny, Ann Cleeves, and Jo Nesbø. I will read or try watching almost anything, and that’s how I discovered true crime—not books, but television’s True Crime Network. I was quite ill in 2015 and searching for something on TV that would take my mind off my illness, and I found the True Crime Network while surfing channels. I don’t recall now the line-up of shows on the station’s schedule, but Dateline has been a part of that line-up from the beginning. I love anything about forensics, and police procedure, and especially about the criminals as characters. What makes people do what they do?

What hooked me into true crime? They are mystery stories, usually murder mysteries, and they actually happened. Real detectives worked the cases and put the clues together, they used forensics to scientifically identify the killer, and they solved the mysteries. I noticed that there were no shows about mysteries that were still unsolved—at least not back then—so it was fascinating to watch real detectives at work and enjoyable to see them succeed.

When I think about it, I realize true crime has always been a part of my life, beginning with my family being on the periphery of a murder that occurred at a house up the lake shore from our summer house. My older brother woke one night scared out of his wits because he’d heard a car. When he looked out his bedroom window, he saw an idling car on our property, the headlights off. Then he watched it turn around and travel back up the drive. He woke our parents, but by then there was nothing to see. There weren’t even tire prints in the grass of our yard. But two days later, they learned of the gruesome and bloody murder at the house up the lake shore, a house that looked remarkably like ours. We began locking up before bed each night.

In high school, I was active in the choir and drama club, and won the job of stage manager for their plays when I was a junior. I was always recruiting for backstage help, and one drama club member, Kathy, was a dependable volunteer. She was a slender girl, sweet and outgoing, with long blonde hair and large blue eyes under feathery bangs. I liked her a lot. She was a senior, off to college in Maine the following year, my senior year.

The next year, I ended up taking Latin with three other seniors. Our teacher was the head of the English Department and one of the Drama Club advisers. One day that fall, he was a little late coming to class. When he arrived, he looked right at me and announced to the class that he’d just heard the news that Kathy had been found murdered in Maine, at the edge of the college campus that she attended. I felt the blood drain from my face. The teacher saw it, and he became flustered—maybe he shouldn’t have given us the news like that. But I wasn’t the only one who was shocked and upset by Kathy’s death—everyone in the Drama Club mourned. Over the following weeks, we learned that the police detectives had ruled out a hit-and-run accident because of the cause of Kathy’s death—blunt force trauma to the back of her head inconsistent with a car accident. Her body had been found in a wooded ravine and down an embankment that led to a small stream. There was a suspect, but to my knowledge, her murder remains unsolved.

Then, of course, living in a large metropolitan area, I hear now about all sorts of crimes, although most of them are solved within days, sometimes hours. For example, last year in my neighborhood, there was a domestic abuse murder in one of the apartment buildings—a man killed his girlfriend and then fled. Neighbors in the apartment building where they lived identified him to police as the killer, and they found him within hours in one of the northern suburbs.

In 1984, there was a murder in Uptown on the east side of Lake Bde Maka Ska that had everyone on edge. A young woman was found murdered by her roommate. The first police on the scene secured it, but then left the apartment, and some of them threw up outside. That was all we needed to know how horrific it was—plus the word “eviscerated.” I recall a friend calling me to tell me that the police had issued a warning to all single women living in the area to not open the door to a stranger or go out alone at night. This murder also had an odd resolution. We learned that a clinical psychologist had contacted the police with information about who the murderer was, but I don’t recall if the murderer was ever arrested.

I’ve lived in a basically low crime neighborhood my entire time in the Twin Cities. During summers, because more strangers come into the neighborhood to swim at the lake or attend evening concerts, we see more assaults and petty crimes close to the lake. Car-jacking and theft of all kinds are year-round. Murders are rare. True crime, however, is never far away from our lives. Especially on the True Crime Network.