Trillin - Killings

R eporters love murders. In a pinch, what the lawyers call wrongful death will do, particularly if its sudden. Even a fatal accident for which no one is to blame has some appeal. On a daily newspaper, in fact, an accident is one of the few news events whose importance can be precisely measured by the editors who decide how much space and prominence each story is worth. In general, the space it is assigned varies directly with how many people were killed. Sufficient loss of life can elevate an accident story into a category of news that is almost automatically front-pagea disaster.

I have always been attracted by stories of sudden death. For fifteen years, starting in the fall of 1967, I traveled around the United States to do a series of reporting pieces for The New Yorker called U.S. Journala three-thousand-word article every three weeks from somewhere in the country. (Magazine writers asked, How do you keep up that pace? Newspaper reporters asked, What else do you do?) Once or twice every year I found myself at the scene of a killing. When I began writing somewhat longer pieces, the attraction continued. Several of those longer pieces are included in this edition of Killings, along with a 1986 profile of Edna Buchanan, whose job as the Miami Heralds homicide specialist called upon her to approach the subject from a different angle.

What attracts me to killings is not importance as a newspaper editor might measure itthe number of people killed, for instance, or how closely they resembled the readers (According to airline officials in New Delhi, there were no Americans aboard the plane), or the prominence of the victim in the community or in the nation. A magazine like The New Yorker does not have the record-keeping function that a newspaper has. If a federal judge is assassinated in Texas or twelve people are killed by floods in the West, The New Yorker is not responsible for registering the event for the record. By the same token, it canand did in some of these piecesrecord the death of a single unimportant person without feeling the need to justify its interest the way a newspaper might in what reporters sometimes call a nut graf (The Iowa murder is part of a growing national trend toward vaguely disreputable people in small towns killing each other).

While I was in the South working on one of the stories in this book, I happened to meet some reporters for the local newspaper, and they couldnt imagine why I had come all the way from New York to write about a death that probably hadnt even made their front page. Only one person had died, and she had not been an important person. Her family was not particularly important, and neither was the person accused of causing her death. The way she had died did not reflect any national trends. Her death had been the central event in what struck me as a remarkable family drama, but it seemed trivialized by the old newspaper phrase used to describe such dramasa human-interest story. The best I could manage was It sounded interesting.

I often wished that I could come up with something grander than that, particularly when I was asked by relatives of some victim why I was pursuing a subject that caused them pain to discuss. Not having to justify your interest is a great luxury for a reporter, but it is also a small burden. At times, I would have welcomed the opportunity to say The public has a right to know or This story could prevent something like this from happening again. I couldnt even claim that I was an innocent party who had been assigned the story by the callous city editor of newspaper legend (Hey, champ, get on your roller skates and get out to Laurel Avenue and talk to this lady whose husband just shot himselfand dont come back without their wedding picture). Ive chosen which stories to do for The New Yorker myself, mostly on the basis of what sounded interesting.

What Ive been interested in, of course, is writing about Americaor, as I realized a few years after I began U.S. Journal, in writing about America without an emphasis on politics and government. Some ways of doing that didnt suit my needs. I wasnt interested in doing what is sometimes called Americanastories about people like the last fellow in Jasper County, Georgia, who can whittle worth a damn. I didnt want to do stories about typical or representative Americansstories about, say, the struggles of a Midwestern Farm Family to make ends meet. Although I was interested in places, I wasnt comfortable writing about a city or a state or a region in general terms; I didnt do stories that could be called Boston at Three Hundred or Is the New South Really New? I went every three weeks not to a place but to a storyto an event or a controversy or, now and then, a killing.

A killing often seemed to present the best opportunity to write about people one at a time. There were occasions, of course, when I found myself treating a killing as an element in a controversy that involved blocs of people rather than individuals. I once did a piece in Seattle after a white policeman had shot and killed a black armed-robbery suspect: in the controversy that followed the shooting, they both became so enveloped by their roles that the incident could have been described in just that waya White Cop had killed a Black Suspect. There were occasions when not knowing the identity of someone involved in a killing meant writing about a sort of person rather than a personthe sort of person who might get killed that way or the sort of person who might do the killing. Once, in the early seventies, I went to the west coast of Florida to do a piece that involved efforts by the authorities to learn the identity of a body that had been found in a trunk left in the woods next to a restaurant on the interstate. The body was that of a twenty-five- to thirty-five-year-old woman. She had bad teeth. She had no scars. She had a bolo tie pulled tight around her neck It turned out that a lot of twenty-five- to thirty-five-year-old women were considered missing by someone. In the first few days after the trunk was discovered, fifty people called the St. Petersburg Police Department to say that they thought they knew who the dead woman might be. A man in his late forties phoned from central Florida to say that he thought the woman in the trunk was his wife, who had run off, with several hundred dollars of his money, in the company of a man in his thirties who drove a truck for a fruit company. A woman in Tampa said that her daughter had left home on October 28wearing a white blouse, pink pants, and green flip-flopsand had not been in touch since, although it had been said that she met some men in a bar in Tampa and went with them to the dog races in St. Petersburg. A twenty-six-year-old woman had been missing from Wimauma, Florida, ever since her father threatened two men who had been staying with her. A man in St. Petersburg phoned to say that the woman in the trunk might be the daughter he had thrown out of the house three months before. She had been carrying on with several different men while her husband was in Vietnam, the father said, and only the intervention of his wife had kept him from killing her himself on the day he threw her out. The man became so angry talking about what he would do if he ever got his hands on his daughter that he had to be warned that he could be considered a suspect and that anything he said might be used against him.