The first brush with mortality I recall was cloaked in the guise of a ghost story, shared under the dim cabin lights at summer camp in Michigan. I was around twelve, squarely in the disco era. In the hushed darkness, a girl recounted a tale about her older sister’s friend – or perhaps a friend’s cousin, one of those distantly related figures that lend a veneer of authenticity to urban legends. She wasn’t a victim, not quite, but she’d had a chilling encounter, a hair’s breadth escape from a man who was later unmasked as a serial killer, the infamous perpetrator of the Michigan Murders. As the story went, she was walking home late from a party in Ann Arbor when an attractive man on a blue motorcycle pulled up, offering a ride. A prickle of unease, an instinctual alarm, made her decline, and she watched him disappear into the night. The next day, the news broke: a young woman found strangled and raped, a gruesome detail about a tree branch used in the assault.
These are the narratives that circulate in the hushed corners of summer camps, the kind of stories girls trade like currency, bartering for shock value and social standing. Whether the boys’ cabins engaged in the same macabre exchanges remains a question. All children grapple with the concept of death; when darkness descends, we whisper about our deepest fears: the near misses, the potential victims we could have been. But why did these stories hold such allure? What possible benefit could be gleaned from hearing about someone like ourselves meeting the most horrific end – not through accident or illness, but in the way girls are so often victimized in these tales: intimately, sexually, violently, driven by someone else’s twisted desires of jealousy, entitlement, or pure rage?
By fifteen, summer camp became a relic of childhood. Counselor-in-training applications were within reach; I was on the verge of applying when my friends and I went to see the newly released horror film, “Friday the 13th.” The movie depicted camp counselors systematically hunted and murdered, one by one. The application remained unsent. Around the same time, my literary tastes took a darker turn, gravitating towards true crime. I devoured the most disturbing accounts I could find, finding a strange, almost equal pleasure in both the sensationalized, mass-market true crime paperbacks and the stark, elegant prose of Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood.” (The latter sent deeper shivers down my spine, yet both held a morbid fascination.) I read about parents who extinguished the lives of their children, children who turned against their parents, spouses locked in deadly battles. The most terrifying were the killers who preyed on strangers, their violence often intertwined with a warped sexuality, blurring the lines between rage and arousal, figures like Ted Bundy, or the phantom behind the Michigan Murders.
True crime became an unlikely companion to the hardcore punk music I listened to and the uniform of all-black clothing I adopted. But the books were more than just a pose. Confronting the stark reality of the world – its latent capacity for violence and suffering, but also the unexpected resilience of survival, the close calls that miraculously turned out alright – this was the unsettling truth I craved. I was both drawn to it and repelled by it. Or perhaps, my attraction was because of the fear it instilled. Then adulthood arrived, marked by the profound vulnerability of new motherhood. Suddenly, true crime became unbearable. A few months later, boxes overflowing with my true crime paperback collection were donated to Goodwill. Only “In Cold Blood” remained on my shelf.
