2007-02-26
one more guilty pleasure
|A while ago I wrote about my guilty pleasures. I should have added reading true crime to that list. I definitely enjoy crime mysteries found in the fiction aisles, but there's just something about knowing everything you are reading actually happened. It feeds into my intense fascination with human behavior.
I just can't believe some people are driven to madness and extreme violence. Frequently I will say to my husband, tongue in cheek of course, "Please don't kill me. If you really start to hate my guts just divorce me." And he rolls his eyes in response.
I just finished "Mary, Mary" by James Patterson. While it is a work of fiction it mentioned a "test" of sorts that determined whether your mind worked like a killer's mind. It goes like this. A woman is at her mother's funeral and she meets a handsome stranger but never gets his name, phone number or address. Two weeks later she kills her own sister. Why?
I tried to really think about it and could not come up with anything. Whew, I wiped the sweat off my forehead because it meant I did not have the mind of a killer.
So here's the reason why she killed her sister. Because she wanted to meet up with the handsome stranger again. That's twisted.
Okay so back to the true crime. Right now I am reading Joyce Maynard's "Internal Combustion: The Story of a Marriage and a Murder in the Motor City." This book is of particular interest to me as I am a Motor City gal myself. It's so wild reading about local cities, etc.
I experienced this watching "City Confidential" on A&E once. It was about a 20-something Detroit-area college student who was writing a paper on prostitution. For some reason she decided she could give so much more to the paper, and the class, if she became a prostitute. So she entered into a seedy world, for the sake of the term paper, and ended up dead. What was so surreal was listening to the narrator ( Paul Winfield who had an amazing voice) speak about areas I lived and worked in! It was crazy.
Whenever I usually watch "City Confidential" I don't know the area and I buy into the "sleepy little town known as Bedford, Connecticut." But it was really surreal to see the Farmington Hills Police Department and know that I have driven past that building numerous times. Crazy, I tell you.
Anyway, back to the true crime stuff.
I just am amazed that a person can be pushed to such limits that he or she believes the only way out is murder. I mean, seriously. Think about problems you have had in the past. You mull it over in your head; you contemplate what your options are. Have you ever even considered murder as a viable option? I haven't. I'm guessing most people haven't either. Even if I cannot wrap my head around it, I still find it a fascinating read.
I do wonder, however, what will happen if I am ever investigated by the FBI. What are they going to think when they look at my library records and see what I've been reading? "She was a quiet woman who lived in a sleep little suburb of Detroit who passed her time by voraciously reading true crime. . ."
2007-02-26 at 8:28 a.m.
