The Mammoth Book of Bizarre Crimes (Mammoth Books) by Odell Robin

Author:Odell, Robin [Odell, Robin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Constable Robinson
Published: 2014-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

Mixed Media

The written and published word have played a leading role in defining the history of crime. Printed accounts of the execution of criminals accompanied by stark illustrations of hanged felons were a source of public information throughout the nineteenth century. They also served as a reminder to the general populace that crime does not pay. As the printed word evolved and was augmented by other media, especially the visual dimension of film and television, so opportunities arose for graphic reporting of events. The new developments also brought scope for the exercise of criminal ingenuity.

Death sometimes imitates art and such was the case when Konrad Beck contrived a murder in a locked room in his Berlin apartment. He had stolen the idea from a novel he had been reading. The mystery was solved when investigators found a copy of the book in his flat, which conveniently fell open to the page providing the solution. Krystian Bala had a different idea. He committed his murder first and then wrote a fictionalized account of it in a novel. And Snowy Rowles gleaned his ideas about disposing of his victim’s body in Australia’s outback after reading a story about a fictional crime.

Murderers are chiefly motivated by passion or enmity and know full well who their victim will be. But where the objective is the calculated business of gain, it may be necessary to seek out victims. One of the means of doing this is by advertising. Part of Elfriede Blauensteiner’s strategy was to find elderly men to kill and fleece them of their savings by advertising for gullible companions in the newspapers. Here was an echo of an earlier example established by Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez and their exploitation of Lonely Hearts Club advertisements in 1940s America.

Words can also entrap, for example, when a policeman lay dying from gunshot wounds in a London street and wrote the name of his killer in his notebook. Or when Ghislaine Marshal, mortally wounded in a knife attack in her flat in the south of France, scrawled her attacker’s name on a door using her own blood.

New media present new opportunities for law enforcement. Thus wireless was used in 1910 to pinpoint the arrest of Dr Crippen and television has been successfully used to acquire public information about crimes and criminals. Programmes such as the BBC’s “Crimewatch” and 20th Century Fox’s “America’s Most Wanted” have played a significant role. In the US, John List and William Hewlett, both fugitives from justice, were caught due to public responses to television appeals for information.

One of the great debates of modern times has been about the possible effect of movie films and, later, of television, on impressionable minds and leading to criminality. In 1952, when a young man shot and killed a policeman on a warehouse roof in south London, the question asked was whether his actions were influenced by having watched a gangster film depicting gun violence.

While sociologists debated what they saw as the issues, they were overtaken by rapid developments in the media industries.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.