Maggie Nelson is a poet with fascinating ideas about murder, mourning, true crime, and the death penalty. Simon & Schuster's Free Press just published Nelson's book, The Red Parts. She came to it with an important bona fide: her aunt, Jane Mixer, was kidnapped by ruse, strangled and shot in 1969. 
For decades, Jane Mixer's murder was thought to be the work of John Norman Collins, the only serial killer well known to his native Michigan. Then the family got a phone call decades later with DNA results that would rewrite the family history and lead Maggie Nelson to an unsettling set of experiences.
She tells her story quickly and sparely. I drank the book in a sitting. She is an emotional prism, reflecting and separating others' reactions to her aunt's murder. Whatever you think she might have to say, she may well surprise you.
The book is part true crime, part memoir, always an interesting blend, touching on the mysteries of misogyny, sexual murder, the crime media, and her own childhood shadowed by death and blame. The theme of her work is grief, its many forms, how it is used and abused.
The author was interviewed twice for a documentary by CBS' 48 Hours Mystery about her aunt's murder. In a pre-interview meeting, she talked to a producer about the true crime genre. She struggles with her own interest in murder -- she mentions she liked Norman Mailer's Executioner's Song, about Gary Gilmore (one of the seminal books in true crime, one of the ten best, Pulitzer winner). But the true crime documentarian she's speaking with hasn't heard of Norman Mailer.
She then wonders, naturally enough, about the focus of the show. She quotes his sales pitch --
He says that although 48 Hours Mystery strives to entertain, it always keeps a serious social issue at stake. When I ask him what the issue might be in this case, he says this episode will be about grief. About helping other people to mourn. He says that my family's involvement could really help other people....
With less graciousness than I'd hoped to display, I ask if there's a reason why stories about the bizarre, violent deaths of young, good-looking, middle- to upper-class white girls help people to mourn better than other stories.
I thought it might come to this, he says good-naturedly but warily....
Later, while on camera for CBS, Maggie Nelson fussed over the fact that she didn't wear makeup to the interview. Don't worry, she's told. You look good. This is prime time. No black people, no bad teeth.
The 48 Hours show will "make heavy use of the crime scene photos" while covering her aunt Jane's murder. The trial will be played live on Court TV, including live streaming the autopsy photos, which will also be available to the public later online.
The author also finds a disgusting sameness to newspaper accounts of serial sex killers, both at the time of her aunt's murder and now; the print media's stories are formulaic, pairing "sentimentality with quasi-pornographic descriptions of the violence each girl had suffered."
Rather like the documentary, eh?
She writes --
Perhaps the shame I feel is a stand-in for the shame I think someone ought to feel.
Or perhaps it's due to the fact that during Leiterman's trial, I sat in the courtroom every day with a legal pad and pen, jotting down all the gory details, no different or better than anyone else. Details which I'm reassembling here -- a live stream - for reasons that are not yet clear or justifiable to me, and may never be.
Maggie Nelson mentions several books she's read and admired in the genre: James Ellroy’s My Dark Places, Devil in the White City, and American Taboo -- three of the best books of literary true crime published in recent years -- and also mentions Angela Carter, a baroque author who wrote hypnotic fiction, sometimes about historical crime figures like Lizzie Borden and Bluebeard.
How can someone who enjoys the best that true crime has to offer explain the prurient and even pornographic elements of our culture's obsession with beautiful young white female sex murder victims? Is it so ubiquitous to be beyond objection at this point? Will our granddaughters rise up against it? Something about this thoughtful book invites a sequel. It's sure to provoke the interest of the true crime reader who struggles with these same questions.
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Read an interview with Maggie Nelson
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