ARTICLE: "A Grief Like No Other" (12 Midnight)

"During the past twenty-five years hundreds of articles
in psychiatric journals have examined the homicidal mind.
Fewer than a dozen have explored how a homicide affects
the victim's family."

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Eric Schlosser, the writer of the Atlantic Monthly article "A Grief Like No Other" spent over 1 1/2 years writing the story of the impact of homicide on families. He focused most of his attention on the Kansas City Chapter of Parents of Murdered Children and exhibited a depth of compassion and understanding that is rare today. In addition he has continued to stay in contact with the Smith's to see where they stand in their continued fight for justice. The Atlantic Monthly Editors are also to be commended for their sponsoring such a story. It is the longest article this magazine has ever published in over 100 years of publication.

I would paste the article in its entirety below, but its over 50 pages long on an HTML page I found available online. However if you're interested in reading it its also available in a PDF version here:www.geocities.com/pomc_il/Articles/grief.pdf

Hour 15!

Reference: http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/97sep/grief.htm

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September 2004

Americans are fascinated by murders and murderers but
not by the families of the people who are killed -- an amazingly numerous group, whose members can turn only to one another for sympathy and understanding

by Eric Schlosser

On the first Friday evening of every month thirty to forty men and women gather at Our Lady of Sorrows Church in Kansas City, Missouri. They meet in the parish hall, a low modern building not far from the headquarters of the Hallmark Cards corporation. They bring cookies and sodas, newsletters, notebooks, and photographs of their children. They sit in folding chairs around two large banquet tables. They are white, African- American, and Latino, middle-class and working-class, a cross-section of midwesterners. From all appearances this could be a session of the local PTA or of a church group planning its next book fair. The meeting opens with everybody explaining, one by one, why he or she has come. Each story seems more poignant and more horrific than the last. This is the monthly gathering of Parents of Murdered Children, Kansas City chapter, a support group for the relatives and friends of homicide victims. A hand- stitched quilt on the wall has the photographic image of a different face in every square -- mostly young men and women, innocent, full of promise, unaware of their impending fate. The quilt seems as American in its own way as the violence that brought these families to this room.

The fear of murder has grown so enormous in the United States that it leaves a taint, like the mark of Cain, on everyone murder touches. One might expect that the families of murder victims would be showered with sympathy and support, embraced by their communities. But in reality they are far more likely to feel isolated, fearful, and ashamed, overwhelmed by grief and guilt, angry at the criminal-justice system, and shunned by their old friends. America's fascination with murder has not yet extended to its aftermath. As a result, the victims' survivors must seek comfort from one another. Throughout the country hundreds of support groups like the one in Kansas City meet every month. The amount of bloodshed in the United States is difficult to comprehend, like the carnage of a shadowy, undeclared civil war. During the past two decades nearly half a million Americans have been murdered, and an additional 2.5 million have been wounded by gunfire -- more casualties than the U.S. military has suffered in all the wars of the past 200 years

The murder rate in the United States (the number of people killed each year per 100,000) has been declining since 1993, most dramatically in New York City. Nevertheless, it is still extraordinarily high compared with the rate in Western Europe or even in the United States of just a generation ago. After years of diminishing violence in the 1950s, a murder wave began to engulf the United States around 1960. By the late 1970s the U.S. murder rate had doubled, reaching an all-time high in 1980. Since then it has fallen slightly, climbed a bit, and dropped again. The U.S. murder rate today is roughly the same as it was in 1989 -- eight homicides per 100,000. About 70 percent of the murders in America are committed with a firearm. About 90 percent are committed by men. The murder rate among men of all ages in the United States is approximately five times as high as the rate among men in Canada, eleven times as high as the rate among men in Germany, and twenty times as high as the rate among men in Ireland or Japan. The murder rate among young men inthe United States, aged fifteen to twenty-four, has roughly tripled since 1960. It is now about thirty-five times as high as the murder rate among men of the same age in England.

The increase in the U.S. murder rate has been accompanied over the past few decades by a rising incidence of crimes once considered rare. Mass murders, serial murders, and murders committed by strangers have become more commonplace. A mass murderer kills a number of victims at one time and often then commits suicide. A serial murderer kills a number of victims over an extended period and tries to avoid capture. After studying old newspaper articles and police reports, Ronald M. Holmes, a professor of justice administration at the University of Louisville, concluded that there were fewer than twenty mass murders in the United States from 1950 to 1960. Holmes says that three or four mass murders are now committed every month. Eric W. Hickey is a professor of criminology at California State University at Fresno, and an expert on serial murder. According to his count, there were about nineteen serial killers in the United States during the 1950s -- and about 114 during the 1980s. Various estimates place the number of serial killers at large in the United States today at thirty-five to 200.

Instead of producing widespread revulsion toward violence, or mass demonstrations, or an "anti-war" movement against the daily slaughter, America's murder rate has inspired an altogether different response: a culture of murder, with the murderer at its core. Edgar Allan Poe invented the detective story more than 150 years ago, with the publication of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and tabloids have always relied on crime stories to lure readers. But only in recent years has the serial killer become a national icon, endlessly portrayed in movies, books, and popular music. The first mainstream Hollywood "slasher" film, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, was released in 1960, as America's murder rate began to climb. Six years later In Cold Blood, Truman Capote's nonfiction tale of murder, was published to great acclaim. Both works were inspired by real murderers; both created whole new genres; and both continue to be widely imitated by lesser talents. The slasher film and the nonfiction murder tale share a fundamental premise: the killer is the protagonist.

Since 1966 hundreds of books have been published that follow murderers along their paths of destruction. Every serial killer, it seems, now has a biographer or two. And yet just a handful of books have looked at murder from the victim's perspective. Slasher films are even less likely than their literary counterparts to address the plight of the victim. Indeed, a slasher film's plot, characterization, and internal logic are far less important to the audience than the methods and choreography of its murders. Comedy plays a large role in the genre, with humorous crime-scene details and serial killers tossing off one-liners.

Even academic elites are drawn to the figure of the murderer, which has long been a focus of attention for psychiatrists, sociologists, and criminologists. A vast amount of research has been conducted on murderers in order to predict their violent behavior, understand their social context, restrain them, rehabilitate them, and promote their moral and spiritual reform. During the past twenty-five years hundreds of articles in psychiatric journals have examined the homicidal mind. Fewer than a dozen have explored how a homicide affects the victim's
family.

In a study of murder in Romantic literature the theater scholar Laurence Senelick used a phrase, "the prestige of evil," that goes a long way toward explaining why our culture has become obsessed with the murderer while ignoring the victim. The murderer is a powerful figure who dares to violate the central tenet of almost every human society: Thou shalt not kill. "There's no greater feeling of power on earth," a former gang member once confided, "than what it feels like to take another person's life." Most serial killers are impelled by a craving for power, by a desire for the sort of control over life and death that is usually attributed to God. When the murderer is the protagonist of a story, we can vicariously experience that power. The victim is a defeated soul, a loser in this contest of strength. Perhaps it is easier to identify with the murderer. To do otherwise means choosing the side of the powerless -- and confronting some unsettling truths.

Almost twenty years ago Lucy N. Friedman, the director of the Victim Services Agency, in New York City, helped to organize one of the nation's first support groups for the families of murder victims. Friedman says that the survivors of murder victims are often treated like pariahs, avoided like a source of bad luck. They feel cursed. Even the counselors who work with survivors come to feel stigmatized by their jobs. What they have learned contradicts the way the rest of us would like to view the world. We want to maintain an illusion of safety, Friedman says; we want to believe that the children of good parents will never be harmed. Our refusal to acknowledge the plight of murder victims and their survivors is a dangerous form of denial -- a flight from reality that allows lethal violence to flourish.

More than anything else, the relatives of murder victims need to be heard. The stories of a few survivors in Kansas City give a sense of what murder in America really is and what it does. Kansas City is by no means the murder capital of the USA. It is a midsize city in the middle of the country with a level of violence comparable to that of many other urban areas. The aftermath of homicide in Kansas City is emblematic of what ordinary men and women are experiencing every day throughout the United States. A culture of murder now surrounds us, like a dark, poisonous fog. By looking at the victims of murder and listening to their survivors, we may find a way out.