Of serial murder and true crime: Some preliminary thoughts on black feminist research praxis and the implications of settler colonialism

When black women first began disappearing and turning up dead in my hometown of Peoria, Illinois, in the summer of 2003, I was completely oblivious. At the time, I was in law school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign—which is to say, I was living only about 90 miles away from home during the course of the 15-month killing spree. Yet months would go by before I would come to know about what was happening to black women in my city. This would be the case even though many of those women hailed from the same South Side community where I had been raised from girlhood and where my parents continue to live, and even though I had known one of the disappeared women, Tamara “Tammy” Walls, personally.

Nine black women would end up dead or disappeared before an arrest would finally be made in connection with the series of killings in late 2004. By the time Larry Bright plead guilty to murdering eight of the nine women and was sentenced to life in prison in May 2006, I was a graduate student at the University of Southern California. At USC, I began researching the Peoria murders as part of my course work. My primary concern was not with the basic facts of the case. I wasn’t focused, for instance, on who had done the killing or why he’d done the killing or the manner of the killing that had been done—the kinds of questions that are often front and center in discussions of serial murder and are not, in fact, terribly difficult to answer. My research questions involved a more complex set of inquiries. Namely, I wanted to know more, much more, about who those nine black women had been and the implications of their lives, and deaths, for communities like my own. And, I wanted to explore the notion of disposability and how it attaches to the bodies of particular black women, not simply as a function of the monstrous tendencies of this or that “bad guy,” but as the outcome of an interlocking system of socioeconomic policies, strategies, and narratives that effectively set the stage for the various forms of routinized violence black women are subjected to continuously, not the least of which is serial murder. ¹

I would end up writing about the Peoria murders in the final chapter of my first book, Scandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life (2017), but it is only been since that book’s publication that I’ve been able to turn my attention to writing more expansively about the scores of black women and girls in the US who have been victims of serial murder since the latter half of the 20th century. While the specific kinds of cases I look at have received relatively little attention in either academic or popular literatures, the lineage of scholarship, organizing, and activism around racialized gender violence more broadly that informs my work is, thankfully, quite robust. I consequently took the invitation to present on the Black Feminism and Settler Colonialism panel at the American Studies Association meeting in 2019 as an opportunity to outline some of the foundational elements of my ever-developing research praxis, much of which is grounded in the work of black feminist thinkers and organizers, but which has also been influenced of late by the critical work that is being done within and beyond the academy to address the murders and disappearances of native women across Canada and the US.

In my panel comments, I backed into the analysis by way of a discussion of true crime, a genre with which my work has a fraught, but ultimately unavoidable, relationship. I engage true crime for the basic reason that it is the site where, for better or worse, the kinds of stories I am interested in are taken up most often. But, as I suggest in my comments, I am also interested in interrogating the genre because of the mechanisms it uses to produce, organize, and lay claims to “truths” about the people and communities it covers—people and communities with whom true-crime producers ² often have, at best, very attenuated relationships. Good intentions aside, antiblackness and settler colonialism often converge within the regime of knowledge production established and extended by true crime and in the law-and-order fables to which the genre is so deeply indebted.

While I admittedly enter into the discussion of settler colonialism as an “amateur” (King et al., 2020: 6) and will continue to learn from my forum colleagues, among others, as my research progresses, I am convinced that there is much to be gained by thinking about the correspondence between native genocide and serialized black death and how those phenomena are enacted upon the bodies of women and girls who are made especially vulnerable by their socioeconomic positionings. Whatever the debates we will continue to have about the theoretical relationships, or lack thereof, between black feminism, settler colonial studies, and their adjacent fields of analysis and inquiry, the routinized forms of violence to which black and native women are disproportionately subjected every single day suggests the need for a “process of relation” (King et al., 2020: 2) that will enable meaningful conversations that will not just produce more theory, but will also save more lives.

The year is 1979. Jimmy Carter is our president. The Vietnam War ended just four years ago and it’s been barely over a decade since the Civil Rights Movement.

So begins Atlanta Monster, a 10-episode podcast series released in January 2018 that covers the case of at least 28 black people, mostly young boys, but also young girls and young adult men, who were murdered in Atlanta, Georgia, between 1979 and 1981 in a series of killings that came to be called the Atlanta Child Murders. While 30-something-year-old Georgia native and documentary filmmaker Payne Lindsay narrates the series, it is clear from the outset that the story to be told belongs, first and foremost, to the black Atlanta natives who lived through the “Terror”—which is how James Baldwin more accurately refers to the so-called Atlanta Child Murders in his 1985 book The Evidence of Things Not Seen.

The very first voice heard at the outset of the first episode of Atlanta Monster, titled “Boogeyman,” belong to brothers Eric Cameron and Jasper Cameron, black men who were, as they recall it, “real real little” when the murders were still ongoing: “It was crazy man, like that time was like—the boogeyman.” They go on to say, “It’s literally somebody going around taking kids and they were finding them in the Chattahoochee, they was finding them behind buildings. That was just our life. When you living through something like that it’s kinda like different. It was just something we had to deal with. Watch for the boogeyman.” The brothers go on to recall hearing the voice of Monica Kaufman, a black news anchor whose nightly refrain, “It’s 10 o’clock, do you know where your children are?” remains burned into their memories of the Terror. The former anchor, now named Monica Kaufman Pearson, is also interviewed for the episode. It is she who makes the statement from which the podcast ostensibly pulls its title. As she puts it,

People needed to know that they needed to keep an eye on their boys in particular … . There was this fear that unless you reminded people to ask where is your child, do you know where your child is at this time, at 10 o’clock, your child should be in your house—that people needed to be reminded, there was a monster on the prowl in metro Atlanta.

The first episode of the podcast thus anchors the series in tales of death-dealing boogeymen and monster mayhem and the Terror in Atlanta is manifested as one more true-crime story to be solved. As the self-proclaimed “citizen sleuth” Payne Lindsay initially put it on the series website (which has since been edited),

Forty years after these horrific crimes, one man sits in prison, but true justice has never been served, and closure for the victims [sic] families has never been found. The disappearance and murder of over 25 African American children and young adults shaped the city of Atlanta, and still haunts a generation. Atlanta Monster aims to find truth and open dialogue about a tragedy that can no longer be ignored.

The underlying (or perhaps overbearing) conceit of the series is that Lindsay—who grew up in Kennesaw, Georgia, a small town about 30 miles northwest of Atlanta, but had never heard of the Atlanta murders until shortly before he started developing the podcast—will be able to do in 10-hour-long episodes what scores of city and police officials and community organizers and family members and affected residents have been unable to do in the more than 40 years since the murders occurred. His contention that “the tragedy can no longer be ignored” disregards his own “sleuthing” which ought to inform him otherwise—that even if certain officials and dignitaries and unaffected residents and non-residents, as the case may be, have been able to ignore or disregard what happened in Atlanta, plenty of black residents of Atlanta have never even had the option.

Such conceit is, of course, one of the primary organizing logics of the true-crime genre. The assumption that an outside party can come into a place where some heinous thing happened and know the “truth” about said thing and in reporting out about it is doing a kind of justice or righting a wrong or, at the very least, making us a more well-informed public. In this way, true crime is not so unlike the academy where research protocols sometimes make subjects of communities and “objective” outsiders are allowed to stand in for the experts on a place to the exclusion or subjugation of those with first-hand knowledge and experience of that place, particularly when said place involves minoritized communities.

A similar sort of dynamic occurs in the 2014 documentary film Tales of the Grim Sleeper, wherein English filmmaker Nick Broomfield—who has made films on everything from women in the US army to a fetish parlor in New York to the deaths of Biggie and Tupac—arrives in South-Central Los Angeles, which he describes at the outset of the film as “the poor part of town with the worst schools, the worst hospitals, and no jobs” with his patented boom mic and Nagra tape recorder in tow to tell the story of Lonnie David Franklin, otherwise known in the media as the “Grim Sleeper.” At the time the film was in production, Franklin’s case was still in the pre-trial phase. He had been charged with 10 counts of murder in the deaths of 10 similarly situated black women who were killed between 1985 and 2010 and one count of attempted murder in the case of a woman who survived his attack. He was eventually convicted and sent to serve a death sentence at San Quentin State Prison where he died in March 2020.

One of Broomfield’s gonzo-style “investigative” strategies in the film is to show up on the streets near where Franklin lived and speak to whoever will speak back to him. In one early scene, he is shown standing on a residential sidewalk speaking to a group of black women who are discussing their personal interactions with Franklin when a group of three black men sitting on a nearby porch begin catcalling Broomfield, referring to him as a “goddamn peckerwood” and telling him and his crew to “get ya’ll’s ass out the goddamn country.” This, of course, prompts Broomfield—who contends that he initially thought “peckerwood” was an “endearing term”—to go and talk to the men, who turn out to be three of Franklin’s friends. The interview with the women is ostensibly forgotten and receives no further airing as Lonnie’s friends quickly become one of the film’s primary set of interlocutors.

While the hostility the trio initially direct toward Broomfield is indicative of the potential consequences of speaking to outsiders and the reason for the fear some community members have in doing so, this concern is, ironically, born out on the body of Richard, one of the three friends. Although Richard is initially a staunch defender of Franklin, he shows up later in the film expressing his own doubts about his friend and claiming to have received permission from Franklin’s wife to provide Broomfield with relatively incriminating evidence about Franklin on camera. Subsequently, Richard approaches Broomfield on the street with a discernable limp and a badly swollen face. He had been recently released from the hospital after having gotten jumped by four men at the behest of Franklin’s son for “talking bad” about his father to Broomfield. While there is much more to be said about this film, the final point for the current purposes is that, in the end, Broomfield got his film—Tales of the Grim Sleeper was ultimately picked up by HBO films and was even shortlisted for an Academy Award in 2015. But what is not clear is what, if any, ethical commitments or sense of accountability guided the work or what the community that was so responsible for enabling the film received in return.

The final example of this intersection of true crime and serialized black death that I want to briefly mention involves the case that initially motivated my current work. Between 2003 and 2004, nine similarly situated black women were murdered in my hometown of Peoria, Illinois, a small Midwestern city of about 115,000 residents that sits halfway between Chicago and St. Louis on the Illinois River. The bodies of four of the women who were killed during this period, we would come to learn, were burned to ash in a fire pit and thus never recovered, while the others were found strangled and discarded in rural areas in and around Peoria. A local man eventually confessed to committing eight of the nine murders and is currently serving a life sentence in prison. In the wake of the killings, a true-crime writer from Boston, a white woman, published a book she titled Bone Crusher (2010). The book features a picture of the killer on the front cover and includes pictures inside the book of various crime scenes and murder artifacts, including bone fragments of some of the victims whose bodies had been burned. It also includes details from the murder investigations that family and community members had not themselves had access to. The book caused some feelings of betrayal and outrage in the community, as very few of the victims’ family members had even heard of or spoken with the author prior to its release. As Carmea Erving, the oldest daughter of Brenda Erving, the final woman killed, once put it to me: “It’s not right. How you know I want you to tell my story?”

I’ve spent time on these three examples—the Atlanta Monster podcast, the film Tales of the Grim Sleeper, and the book Bone Crusher—not because I’m interested in a per se take down of the true-crime genre (although I do believe much of what counts as true crime needs to be taken down) but because I’m principally interested in what the genre presupposes about the notion of truth and what is knowable and how it gets to be known. The places where the stories I am interested in most often get taken up publicly, when they get taken up at all, are mostly within the realm of true crime, where instances of death, trauma, dispossession, and plunder are packaged, again and again and again, as shock and awe. This is the world where murderabilia—artifacts from serial killers and serial killings produced either during the killings themselves or while the killer was incarcerated—are bought, sold, and traded; where true-crime books and podcasts lure in their audiences with the promise of all the gory details; where terms like “prostitute,” “drug addict,” and “high-risk lifestyle” are used to render verdicts on victims; and where tales of monsters and boogeymen stand in for the kinds of radical commitments to justice and liberation that are the prerequisites for ending serialized black death.

But while true crime has been a particular site of engagement for my work, I have found something of an antidote in the scholarship and organizing of black, Indigenous, and Latinx thinkers and activists who engage and organize around racialized gender violence, particularly those who identify as feminists or involve themselves in feminist practice. They have challenged me to formulate a research agenda that refuses the limitations of pathological discourses, both within and beyond the academy, that function to either normalize racialized gender violence as the inevitable outcome of personal failure or exceptionalize racialized gender violence as the outcome of the failures of marginalized communities. Accordingly, the five principles and commitments I outline below emerged by way of two broad but substantive questions I continuously come back to as I consider how best to move forward my project: One, how can I be mindful of the lessons taught, in particular, by feminists of color and thus avoid some of the pitfalls of true crime and some forms of academic inquiry? And two, how, in practice, will I go about attending to the themes of antiblackness, gender violence, coloniality, and seriality that animate, structure, and inform my work?

Five guiding principles and commitments

One: I will make no apologies for grounding my work in black feminism and black feminist practice, nor for my focus on black women specifically

When I discuss this work, I am often asked about how it corresponds to the deaths of other vulnerable groups of people. Sometimes the question goes, “Well, but doesn’t this also happen to white women?” Or, I’m asked for qualifying data to verify that black women are somehow more disproportionately affected by serial murder than are white women. To the extent that this is a kind of “all lives matter” inquiry, there is much in the black feminist literature to explain the necessity of attending to blackness in its specificity. But even when the question is more substantive, it strikes me as odd. While there is certainly evidence to support the claim that black women are, in fact, disproportionately subjected to violence of all kinds, including serial murder, the underlying assumption, that somehow there is only a project worth engaging if black women are more harmed than white women or that my concern with black women means I am therefore not concerned about violence against all women is troubling on its face and seems to suggest that the experiences of black women cannot be a baseline for theorizing violence against women, or people of any gender, writ-large. Finally, this kind of inquiry calls for a form of data collection that is at odds with the primary intention of my work (about which I say more later).

Related to this first principle, I am also asked often about how my work corresponds to the work being done on the femicides, or feminicides, of maquiladora workers and other Latinx people on the border, or disappeared and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada and the US, or the murders of trans women of color throughout the US. This is a vital consideration and I believe that the work all of us are doing around racialized gender violence, genocide, and settler colonial violence can and should inform each other’s work. I also believe that it is important to be mindful of the specificity of forms of violence and how differently situated peoples are differently affected by violence. While, for instance, settler colonialism and antiblackness are intersecting modes of oppression that are at points deeply entangled, and as Stephanie Latty and Megan Scribe argue, “all violence, including anti-black violence in all its multifarious forms, is situated on a colonial landscape,” (2016: 131) settler colonialism and antiblackness are also contingent and differently coded. By contextualizing my work by way of theorists such as the members of the Combahee River Collective, who were instrumental in the organizational efforts that happened in Boston in 1979 when 12 similarly situated black women were murdered within the span of approximately six months (Williamson, 2017), my intention is to gesture with some precision toward the kinds of work that most immediately inform the context in which vulnerable black women have been, and are being, killed throughout the US.

Two: I will eschew the foregrounding of raw data and what Katherine McKittrick calls “a descriptive analytics of violence” (2014: 25)

Part of the intention of my work is to reckon with, as Saidiya Hartman puts it, “the precarious lives which are visible only in the moment of their disappearance” (2008: 12). Acknowledging that “social science writ large is an expansion of the settler colonial project” (Tuck et al., 2014: 58–59), my intention is to think numbers, data, and data collection differently than is typical of the vast majority of work on serial murder, much of which emerges from within the social sciences. ³ My invocation of the terms “seriality” and “serialized black death” are meant to index serial murder as a gendered form of premature black death that is continuous and ongoing and is irreducible to the specific locations or circumstances in which individual deaths occur. By using the stories of the communal and familial which are so central to the stories of the accumulated losses to foreground those who are gone rather than those who did the taking, my hope is to render the work without “serving up pain stories on a silver platter for the settler colonial academy” (Tuck and Yang, 2014: 812).

Three: I will not make men into monsters, however monstrous their behavior

In The Evidence of Things Not Seen, Baldwin argues that

the cowardice of this time and place—this era—is nowhere more clearly revealed than in the perpetual attempt to make the public and social disaster the result, or the issue, of a single demented creatures or, perhaps, half a dozen such creatures, who have, quite incomprehensibly, gone off their rockers and must be murdered or locked up. (p. 72)

Baldwin insisted that whoever was doing the killing in Atlanta, whether it was Wayne Williams or some other person or persons—and many residents, and likely even Baldwin himself, doubted that Williams had committed all or even any of the murders—that the conditions of possibility for those deaths to occur were not and could never be assigned to any individual person, but were the outcome of the entire sociopolitical apparatus of the United States. As Baldwin further put it,

these present days, to describe a person, or group of persons, as leftists, guerrillas, or terrorists is to dismiss their claims to human attention—we are not compelled to think of them at all anymore, except as vermin that must be destroyed. (pp. 72–73)

Four: My primary commitment is not to the academy or my job, but to the people and communities who gave rise to the work

While I have career obligations that are important to me and are crucial to my own economic self-preservation, these obligations cannot supersede my accountability to those who make my work possible. Full stop.

Five: I refuse to artificially speed up or alter the work to meet an external deadline

Related to the previous point, I cannot ask the people with whom I work and engage, who I am often asking to discuss deeply traumatic moments in their lives, to speed up their process of working through their trauma for the sake of my career goals and aspirations. Sometimes this will mean I cannot get the interview done when I’d like to. Sometimes this will mean I will have to come back for a second or third or fourth interview that I didn’t initially plan to conduct. Sometimes this means I won’t get the interview at all. This means, also, that I must take continuous stock of what the work is doing to me and how I am processing and sitting with all that I am learning and engaging. This is not just an individualized concern about self-care, but a process of critical self-reflection that helps to keep me accountable to the work and that gives me space for working through the pain, anger, frustration, sadness, and—yes—even joy, that comes with doing this work. For this is, in fact, care work and the work of caring is reciprocal.