My dad threw out his mom’s long-neglected magazine collection after it began to squeak. Mice had invaded the pulp, causing it to teem with newborn rodents. In her dementia, my grandma Hope had forgotten about the cardboard boxes stacked in the back of her garage. The collection spoiled by the mice had been one of Hope’s prized possessions, a bilingual true crime archive that took her half a century to build.
During my twenties, I started to build a similar collection. I can’t say for sure what compelled me, but I have a theory. Before sharing it, I want to convey the magnitude of my former obsession with the multi-media genre that is true crime. For decades, my bookshelves sagged under the weight of titles like Deadly Innocence, Perfect Victim, and Severed. When aiming my remote control at my TV, I’d flip past gameshows and sitcoms, hoping to land on a documentary about Jack the Ripper or Ted Bundy. One Saturday, I boarded a bus staffed by a sardonic tour guide. As we rode from historic crime scene to historic crime scene, she rattled off grotesque trivia. Whenever we stopped, our tour guide issued a warning. We’d get in trouble if we reenacted any of the horrors that had made the places that we were visiting notorious.
I waited in line at a Los Angeles bookstore to meet James Ellroy, the author of My Dark Places, a crime memoir that became my bible. The book re-visits an unsolved murder case. On June 22, 1958, someone strangled Geneva Hilliker Ellroy to death. Her remains were found near a high school in El Monte. The crime writer was ten years old when he lost his mother, and upon approaching him, he greeted me with a firm handshake. He then autographed my book and doodled a snarling bulldog on the title page. I left the shop feeling star struck. Back then, I loved the line, “Dead people belong to the live people who claim them most obsessively.” The sentiment comforted me. It validated my attraction to stories about female murder victims.
Geneva Hilliker Ellroy is buried in Inglewood. Grandma Hope is buried about twenty-five miles northeast of her, in Whittier. Geneva came from a snowy place. Wisconsin. Hope’s roots were warm. Subtropical. She was born in Guadalajara in 1926. The decade before was one of Mexico’s bloodiest. In 1910, a call to arms initiated a civil war. Magdaleno, Hope’s grandfather, was one of the rebels who grabbed his rifle, saddled his horse, and rode. The guerrillas had various goals. One was to relieve Mexico’s biggest criminal, President Porfirio Diaz, of his head. Before anyone could decapitate him, the thief boarded a ship and set sail for Europe. Diaz died in exile, surrounded by family in a modest Parisian apartment. Banned from returning to the country that he plundered for thirty years, the deposed president remains in France. His bones collect dust not far from Charles Baudelaire’s. The poet and president are both in Montparnasse Cemetery.
Mexico paid dearly for Diaz’s ouster. One million people lost their lives during what historians describe as the world’s most visually documented revolution. My great-great grandfather belongs to these dead. According to family legend, federal troops captured Magdaleno and imprisoned him in Colima. As punishment for collaborating with Villistas, they marched him to a wall and ordered him to face it. Behind Magdaleno, a firing squad took aim. They pulled their triggers and fired. No one knows where, or even if, Magdaleno was buried. His bones are probably in a mass grave somewhere. I’ve seen one photograph of him. In it, he straddles a fine horse and brandishes a rifle. Bandoliers crisscross his chest. He squints. The brim of his sombrero isn’t wide enough to protect his dark eyes from Zacoalco’s sun.
Following the Mexican Revolution, true crime journalism quickly became the country’s most popular form of print entertainment. It might seem counterintuitive that after so much bloodshed, Mexico would seek amusem*nt through violence, but trauma scholars argue that there’s logic to such choices. Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman writes that its common for “traumatized people [to] find themselves reenacting some aspect of the trauma scene in disguised form, without realizing what they are doing.” Might the post-revolutionary market for gruesome entertainment in Mexico be the result of a traumatized nation engaging in a reenactment of epic proportions? The answer is of course, and I can imagine young Hope strolling Guadalajara’s cobblestones, lingering at corner newsstands and kiosks where stacks of tabloids, novellas, and comics beckon. Their accounts of machete murders and mayhem promise to thrill.
Hope brought her appetite for true crime to California. After marrying a gringo, she settled in Norwalk, a Los Angeles suburb that boasted an alligator farm and a psychiatric hospital. The latter had a glamorous air about it. Three generations of Marilyn Monroe’s family, including her mom Gladys, were institutionalized there after they began to shriek and sob uncontrollably. My dad says that his mom sometimes yelled and wept uncontrollably. She also hurt him, my uncle, and my aunts, beating them black and blue with a riding crop. Hope said she didn’t like hurting her kids, but that god had told her to do it. She couldn’t say no to god. To hide the evidence of her crimes, she applied makeup to her children’s bruises.
When Hope wasn’t raging, she sat by the TV and pored over issues of True Detective, a pulp magazine that featured shapely damsels in distress on its covers. When relatives visited from Mexico, they brought gifts, issues of Policia and the cadaver packed Alarma! One day, Hope peered at my dad from across the top of one of her magazines. She said, “I’m reading about a mother who dunks her children’s hands in boiling water.”
My dad turned clammy; his mother’s reading material made his hands tremble.
He worried that she was reading for inspiration.
I wish that I could ask Hope about her obsession. I want to know what sense she made of it. I want to know if someone beat her with a riding crop. I want to know if someone hid her bruises. I want to know if she was ever chased and forced to do endure things that she hated. I’ve talked to my dad about his mom’s taste for true crime, and he thinks that that her interest was sad*stic. I sympathize with his interpretation but, I disagree. It’s hard for him to see Hope as anything but a perpetrator since he was her victim. Because I never experienced Hope’s violence, I’m able to see her differently. I believe that true crime likely fascinated my grandma for some of the same reasons it once fascinated me. In both cases, gender has a lot do with it. So does forgetting.
My girlhood and adolescence were both awash in domestically produced true crime. We watched COPS, America’s Most Wanted, and Unsolved Mysteries as a family. We subscribed to PEOPLE Magazine, and I opened our mailbox to find Jeffrey Dahmer on its cover not once but twice. In 1992, three different networks produced three different made-for-TV movies about Amy Fisher, the Long Island teenager who shot her rapist’s wife in the head. Drew Barrymore starred in the ABC version. Alyssa Milano starred in the CBS version. True crime trading cards debuted that same year, and I watched collectors swap Charles Manson for Richard Ramirez, John Wayne Gacy for Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme. In 1994, when OJ Simpson led law enforcement agencies on a low-speed chase, true crime became participatory. Crowds holding homemade signs and banners flooded LA streets, sidewalks, and overpasses. Fans cheered for the football hero turned murder suspect on the lam. A few months before I graduated from high school, Yolanda Saldívar, the president of Selena Quintanilla’s fan club, shot the Tejana singer after she was fired for embezzling more than $60,000 from the club and various businesses. The murder landed the singer her first PEOPLE Magazine cover.
Some women say that they consume true crime for educational purposes, that it teaches us how to protect ourselves. I reject this argument. I swam in true crime for the first nineteen years of my life, and it failed to prepare me for an encounter with a deadly misogynist. It was the year after Selena died. I walked along a sunny sidewalk. A stranger crept behind me. He grabbed me and held me captive. Once I felt his breath on my vulva, I screamed. He released me and ran. What chilled me most about him was his smile. He wore a grin even as he fled. Beyond police and family, I told few people about this attack. When I did disclose, I minimized the violence, narrating what happened as if it was no big deal. The last thing I wanted was pity. Instead, I wanted to excise the memory of the smiling stranger between my legs.
Several months after the attack, while I was watching the local news with my family, my perpetrator’s mugshot appeared onscreen. Just as it had during the attack, time froze. The news anchor explained that the man – his name, I learned, was Tommy Jesse Martinez – was the suspect in a murder case. His alleged victim was Sophia Castro Torres, a shy migrant farmworker who made it a habit to bless the staff at the homeless shelter she frequented. Like Geneva Hilliker Ellroy, Torres was found next to a school. Unlike Geneva, Torres had been beaten to death. The police caught her alleged killer after he’d tried kidnapping another woman at knifepoint. Martinez was young, just nineteen years old, and I believe that if he’d remained free, he would’ve escalated. He was on his way to becoming a serial killer.
A detective told me that compared with Torres, I was fortunate. I didn’t feel that way. Instead, I felt guilty for having survived. I also felt guilty about feeling guilty, and when I think about that time in my life, I visualize myself as a snake swallowing her own tail, a hungry animal suffocating herself. To ease my emotional burden, I courted amnesia. I abstained from participating in Martinez’s trial. I insulated myself from details regarding it and his other victims. I had no idea that prosecutors had charged Martinez with attempting to sodomize me. At school, I immersed myself in my studies. I exercised compulsively. I became a walking muscle. Anniversaries of the attack came and went. I convinced myself that I was “over it.” I graduated from university with honors.
Then, in my mid-twenties, I found myself emulating Grandma Hope.I was mostly drawn to accounts of femicide, especially those involving dark-haired girls and women who’d also been sexually violated. I became an amateur Black Dahlia expert. That was the nickname given to Elizabeth Short, a dark-haired woman whose brutal murder turned her into a household name. I couldn’t bring myself to go near the baseball field where Torres was found and so I went to other graves. I made pilgrimages to visit Short at Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland. I also sat in the lobby of L.A.’s Biltmore Hotel, the last place where Short was seen alive before a pedestrian mistook her remains for a dismembered mannequin dumped in a vacant lot.
The wall that I erected around 1996 was so tall that I couldn’t see the tunnel connecting my true crime fixation to my trauma history. I thought that reflecting on this past would constitute navel-gazing, an expression of ingratitude for my survival. What did I have to cry about if I was alive? Lamenting sexual assault was tantamount to weeping over spilled milk. As an unmurdered woman, I had no right to complain. As an unmurdered woman, my grievances didn’t matter. Crime fractured into a binary: murder/non-murder. According to this binary, I wasn’t a crime victim. I was too alive to be one. While steeped in this denial, I couldn’t see what I can now, that every dark-haired femicide victim haunting me was a proxy. These ghosts spoke on behalf of 1996, but guilt prevented me from properly mourning all that Martinez had stolen.
The need to grieve can overpower the desire to forget, and I’ve come to think of grief as a bullet that lodges itself in the body. One corpus that it burrows into is made up of media. In the article “Murder/Media/Modernity,” Professor Mark Seltzer characterizes true crime as “a body of more or less mediocre and clichéd words and images.” The most egregious true crime cliché is also the one that I was most powerfully drawn to, the femicide victim who becomes a footnote in her own story. My Dark Places is a classic within this subgenre. When I finally found the courage to face the events of 1996, I knew that I had to confront the body I’d been avoiding. I had to reckon with Torres, but when I tried, I found an unexpected challenge. The archives that I dug through contained far more information about her killer than they did about her. By ending a woman’s life, Martinez became important. If we measure a person’s significance according to how much is written about them, then Martinez’s significance overshadows Torres’s and mine.
Given that I had so little to work with, I decided to re-create Torres as a found poem. For material, I mined language from the document with the most information about her: Martinez’s death penalty appeal. After choosing words, numbers, and phrases, I arranged them in the shape of a woman. This is the what that I used to sculpt her abdomen: thinking about something born in Mexico San Luis Sonora 135 pounds came to the United States 23 years old speak English always a long blue jacket carried a black purse creative very neat and clean person in the street usually walking alone worked temporarily at a bar Los Tres Amigos quiet not appear to consume alcohol or drugs too inhibited independent hard-working very meek boyfriend killed.
Professor Seltzer describes true crime as a cliché that performs an important social function; it offers a sense of “community at its purest.” By providing a common language, a vernacular rooted in genre, true crime unites fans, inviting us to gather around the body. Through consumption of true crime, we participate in a community that brings together the living and the dead. My found poem commemorating Torres became a page in Mean, my true-crime memoir. At the time, I didn’t know I was writing a true-crime memoir. Instead, I thought I was drafting experimental prose fragments that no one else would ever see.
I was wrong.
In 2017, Parul Seghal reviewed Mean for the New York Times, writing that “it feels as if Gurba is drawn to [grotesque] details not from ghoulishness but from a need to make her own suffering and fear more real to her.” This assessment is correct. Seghal is also partially correct when she writes that I used “a dead woman, a stranger” against which to project my “fantasies and fears.” Torres is dead, but she’s not a stranger. She and I share an unfortunate intimacy that makes her a familiar figure. Torres and I belong to a small group of women who learned what it’s like to be terrorized by Martinez. This knowledge produced bonds.
The first time that I visited the park where Torres died, my parents went with me. Fifteen years had passed, and I finally felt strong enough to visit the place I’d been avoiding. I brought a bouquet of flowers but felt confused about where to leave them. When I noticed children having fun in the nearby playground, I got mad. To me, the place isn’t just a park. It’s a place where a woman was sacrificed. It’s a place where she fought for her life. Why were children playing there? Why was there nothing to commemorate her? No plaque? No shrine? No chapel? Not even a small crucifix.
That visit marked the beginning of the end for my true crime obsession.
That visit also changed my relationship to geography. I think it made me better at it.
Scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore says that “being a good geographer means going to look and see.” She says that a good geographer must challenge herself by asking, “What am I really seeing?” Once I was able to see the park as both a grave and a crime scene, I began to see the world as both a grave and a crime scene. I began to acknowledge all the sidewalks, parks, houses, and mundane places where sexual violence happens. This change in perspective affected the way that I perceive true crime. I began to understand how the genre obscures the truth about violence, especially gender-based violence. By promoting murder as a benchmark for determining whether a victim is worthy of compassion, true crime plays a magic trick. It hides living survivors. It obscures how myriad rapists and perpetrators degrade the quality of female life. So many of the day-to-day indignities that girls and women survive are, technically speaking, crimes. Yet these offenses are rarely prosecuted. In fact, female survivors are much likelier to be incarcerated for engaging in self-defense than perpetrators are for hurting us. When authorities choose to ignore or minimize the violence experienced by female survivors, they teach us that our well-being isn’t a political priority. Their overarching message is that female existence is synonymous with silence and suffering.
Once I was able to grieve and mourn my losses, I was able to break up with true crime for good. That wasn’t easy. This country makes it hard to grieve. American cultural norms dictate that we withdraw from society to mourn. Public displays of grief are rare here. The step in the grieving process that we often reward female survivors for taking is denial. The step that we most punish them for is anger. To properly mourn what misogyny robs us of, female survivors must violate American cultural norms. When I was finally able to reckon with the horror of my own history, I was able to stop appropriating the pain of others.
I apologize for playing with bones that were not mine to play with.
Grief taught me that I had been treating true crime not as a genre but as a place, a catacomb into which I could descend to commune with stolen people, places, and things. Now, when I think of true crime, I recall the warning that appears at the entrance of Paris’s famed catacombs: Stop! Here is the empire of death. If our society were to transform, evolving into one that provides substantial and life-affirming support to survivors of gender-based violence, women’s interest in true crime would wane. We would no longer have to hide in the catacombs of true crime to mourn. Instead, we would be able to do so aboveground. Together.
I don’t know what Hope saw when she turned to true crime. Maybe true crime gave her a place to mourn Magdaleno. Or perhaps my dad’s theory is right; she was simply a sad*st. I think Alzheimer’s disease, the illness that took Hope, provides a clue. I suspect that she was also using true crime as catacomb where she could commune with people, places, and things that had been stolen from her. There were sexual abuse perpetrators in her family, and girls who survive that are at elevated risk for Alzheimer’s. Sexual assault survivors develop more white matter hyperintensities in our brains, and these lesions are associated with cognitive decline. Dementia. In the end, Hope forgot everything, and I pray that that brought her some peace. I also pray that our remembering and grief will bring justice.
