Table of Contents
In seeking truth you have to get both sides of the story.
Walter Cronkite
PROLOGUE
AT ANY GIVEN TIME, there are about 100,000 missing persons in the United States. About 80 percent of them are found alive. The rest are not. A small number of these cases explode into national obsessions as a mass media feeding frenzy ensues over their stories. Typically, the victims are female. Without exception, they are white and very pretty. In a ghoulish moment, American Murder meets American Idol, as America chooses its prettiest corpse, onto whom our collective horror is projected. It begins with a photograph that quickly becomes iconic in our culture, a name we adopt into our national conversation as if we were speaking of someone we all knew. JonBent. Caylee. Stacy Peterson. Laci Peterson.
The media want stories to acquire legs, but the right elements have to be present for it to happen. Even if the suspect is famous, it doesnt guarantee our full attention. In post-O. J. Simpson trial America, in times of economic instability, the sordid truth is that the perfect murder victim generates a lot of money. It creates its own industry that springs up, like a traveling carnival or freak show, in American living rooms. It sells dread to people safe behind locked doors, who hang on every update, needing to believe that following each case and focusing on each detail can make their own communities safe from evil. No detail is too petty, as the story is combed for players, who quickly acquire a status, a mask, and a persona of either good or evil. The suspect fuels the frenzy; the unanswered questions keep it alive, driving up ratings and feeding the media.
It is the suspect who gets the ball into the air and keeps it there. Nobody ever got that ball aloft like O. J. Simpson in 1994and the media never got over its desire to re-create the scope, length, and depth of that sensational trial. They all want the next O. J.
You could abolish famine in several third world countries with the money generated by one O. J. Simpson trial or, for that matter, one Caylee Anthony story. Considering the power and size of todays mass media, publishing industry, entertainment industry, and memorabilia markets, you literally cannot tabulate the colossal earnings of a single perfect murderone that has everything.
In this climate of increasingly breathless, sensationalized murder cases, stoked, fed, hyped, and marketed by the television media, the system set in place to investigate and prosecute crimes stands increasingly helpless in the storm. Against the seductions of mass media, tedious, detail-oriented, sober law enforcementcops, detectives, judgescannot compete. More often than not, the media beast takes the crime and runs away with it, obstructing and desecrating the case itself. Those in the media have bought off potential informants, made investigations nearly impossible to conduct, compromised witnesses, tipped off the defense about prosecution strategies, and made it nearly impossible for an impartial jury to be composed, because anybody with a TV set already has their mind made up.
Even as I write this, the media machine is cranking into overdrive disseminating Michael Jacksons death being classified as a homicide. Theyve spent weeks obsessively reporting on his memorial concert, career, custody battles over his children, and family squabblesreally, anything Michael Jackson that will prolong public interest. (To his familys dismay, even his recent internment was disrupted by media helicopters.) And though his physician has yet to be charged of a crime by police, the subsequent media spotlight has left Dr. Murray afraid to return calls or emailseven to supporters, as he explained in a video to the public, as he waits for the circus to end. Media attention should never get in the way of an active investigationyet these detectives every move is broadcast for the world to follow, which could easily harm their efforts to gather evidence and talk to witnesses.
Media and law enforcement all too frequently work at cross-purposes because they have different goals. Law enforcement wants to solve a case as fast as possible and put the guilty behind bars. The media want a case to drag on as long as humanly possible, and do all they can to extricate every last bit of drama, drop by bloody drop, in order to hold the attention of the millions of viewers who have gotten hooked. Law enforcement must abide by rules. The media make their own rules, and even then break them, or find ways to work loopholes into them. All that matters is ratings.
If people knew how its donehow the media seduce, buy, bribe, and corrupt, like an inevitable, malignant cancer on a murder investigationthey might be too sickened to buy the next ticket to the carnival.
I am a detective but have crossed over into media, as a commentator and criminal investigator for FOX News, in the wake of my notorious role in the O. J. Simpson murder trial.
I hesitate to describe my experiences in that case. Everything that I remember, when placed on paper or spoken out loud, seems like whining or a plea for sympathy. I have been the target and subject of the media, been a cop for twenty years, been involved in the highest-profile case to date, and now I work for the media. Perhaps my experience can help change the way the media report murder.
The unfortunate truth is that today, each murder has many victims, and high-profile murders can hurt innocent people who get burned by the spotlight, whether or not they sought it out themselves. I learned that firsthand as a police witness in the O. J. Simpson trial, a wrenching experience that showed how the criminal justice system can be manipulated by money, power, politics, and fame. I have never revealed the full inside story of that casethe shocking missing chapters of history which only a few knew aboutuntil today. Though I had seen a lot of darkness in the hearts of men over my career as a homicide detective, I was completely unprepared for the lengths the media went in pursuit of the story, and the betrayals I experienced as people jumped out of the way of the media machine.
However, the Simpson trial came to serve as a template for high-profile cases, when it should have been seen as a model to be avoided.
Following the Simpson trial, I have covered almost every major murder case as a journalist, writing books and magazine articles, and providing commentary and analysis on television news programs. Now I work exclusively for FOX News, which gives me the freedom and the resources to investigate cases almost the way I did as an LAPD detective. This second career is challenging and fascinating. I am grateful for the opportunity to continue my detective work as a private citizen. Yet it is not without its frustrations.
Even though I now work as a journalist, at heart Im still a cop. This gives me a unique perspective on high-profile murder cases. I try to balance the often-conflicting responsibilities of truth, justice, and the publics right to know. For me, the greater good of helping law enforcement solve a case outweighs any other considerations. Every day I walk a line between my journalistic responsibilities and my desire to see justice done. It isnt always easy, but its the only way I could do this job and sleep at night.
