The Murder Business

How the Media Turns Crime Into Entertainment and Subverts Justice

Mark Fuhrman

• Publisher: Regnery
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781596985841
• eBook ISBN: 9781596981294
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Crime stories fascinate the public. But between factual news stories, overblown "human interest" reports, and salacious murder mystery exposes, it's difficult to tell where news ends and entertainment begins. Mark Fuhrman, best-selling author of Murder in Brentwood, explores this fine line, revealing new and shocking details on such high-profile cases as Jon Benet Ramsey, Martha Moxley and Chandra Levy.

CHAPTER ONE

AMERICAN MURDER MEETS AMERICAN IDOL: THE CAYLEE ANTHONY CASE

MURDER IS VERY BIG BUSINESS. It has become—let’s face it—just another branch of the entertainment industry in this country. As in the rest of the entertainment industry, there are many contenders, but only a few superstars. Just as an entertainer has to have “star quality,” a murder has to have the right components of luridness to awaken viewers’ ever coarsening sense of horror—and spur fascination bordering on obsession.

According to the FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC), 614,925 juveniles under the age of eighteen were registered as missing in the United States in the year 2008. But the one bit of good news is only about 100 of those children who are initially reported as missing actually turn up dead in a given year. Of those, about one every year becomes the object of explosive, saturating media coverage that grips the nation’s heart and soul.

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In 2008, it was a 2 ½-year-old girl named Caylee Anthony. She was white, adorable, middle-class, and—according to a myth the media milked for months—not dead but “missing.” It was clear very early in the case that Caylee was dead. Some of her hair was found in the wheel-well of the trunk of her mother’s abandoned car, which gave off the unmistakable stench of a decomposed body. Despite this, the media ran with the story of a child who was missing and might still be found alive.

This is the story of how the media create alternate realities that serve their quest for ratings, while the criminal investigation that might solve the case is all but derailed. The Caylee Anthony murder case lived up to the cliché minted during the O. J. Simpson trial—it “had it all.”

Her young mother, Casey, was beautiful, sexually promiscuous, and seemingly sociopathic. Caylee’s grandparents kept an immaculate home, and represented solid middle-class American values—he was an ex-cop and she was a nurse. They couldn’t be more “normal,” with one exception—George and Cindy’s 22-year-old daughter killed their 2 ½-year-old granddaughter and successfully pretended the little girl was “misplaced” for more than a month before Cindy finally called the cops.

Thus began the notorious, sordid, explosive, and salacious case of the Caylee Anthony murder—a case that epitomized the fusion of murder, mass media, money, fame, and decadence.

In case you were in a coma for the second half of 2008 and missed the daily drumbeat of the Caylee Anthony story, here are the highlights.

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On Sunday, June 15, Casey Anthony was at her parents’ house for Father’s Day. Neighbors observed her having a bad fight with her mother, which was nothing new. Casey was a wild party girl who gave straitlaced Cindy no end of grief—she reportedly used drugs and partied hard, and didn’t even seem to know who Caylee’s father was—while George, quiet and stoic, shuttled between them, trying to keep some peace.

On Monday, June 16, George and Cindy went to their respective jobs: George, a retired cop, worked as a security guard; Cindy, as an RN. George later reported seeing Caylee with Casey when he left for work at 12:30 p.m. He would never see the child alive again.

Casey, meanwhile, went off on what turned into a month-long partying binge, while spinning a tissue of fictions about the whereabouts of her daughter. This included her inventing a fictional babysitter with whom she said she left Caylee.

On June 27, Casey abandoned the family car, which her parents let her use, in a parking lot, claiming it had broken down. Three days later, it was towed to an impound lot. When George picked it up, he noticed a terrible stench in the trunk. Cindy smelled it, too, when he brought it home. She would at first report that it stank like a dead body, then later change her story, attempting to cover up for her daughter, and claim it smelled like old pizza.

On July 15, Caylee Anthony was reported missing. Casey was arrested the next day and charged with child neglect.

At her bond hearing a week later, detectives presented very clear evidence that Caylee Anthony was dead and had been dead for weeks at that point. When they examined the trunk of the car, they found some of the child’s hairs in the wheel-well. How many children do you know climb into the trunk of a car to go for a ride with Mommy?

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Then there was the cadaver stench. A putrefied human body smells like nothing else in this world—certainly nothing like old pizza. It’s a thick stench that instantly engages your gag reflex and causes you physical revulsion on a very deep and instinctual level. Once you’ve smelled it, you never forget it or mistake it for any other kind of stink.

In a small, closed space, like the trunk of a car in the Florida summer heat, it is indelible. It can’t be scrubbed or scoured away. But someone had tried. Fabric freshener sheets, the kind you put in the dryer to scent your laundry, were found in the trunk.

The scent of chloroform was also detected in the trunk. If you’ve ever watched any old crime movies, you know that chloroform is an anesthetic that can be used to knock a person out.

On top of all that, there were all of Casey’s blatant lies about where she’d been, what she’d been doing, and where Caylee had been since June 16. Her bail was set at $500,000, and the police investigated the case as a homicide.

And yet, despite all of that, when the national media descended, they played it up as a missing child case. Over the following weeks and months, they pumped “The Search For Caylee Anthony” into a national obsession.

A closer look at the NCIC missing persons statistics gives you some idea of how many contenders Caylee’s story beat out in 2008.

“If they reported every missing child on the news, it’s all you would hear on the news,” was how an NCIC spokesperson put it. “There wouldn’t be time for anything else.”

The NCIC collects missing persons data from around the country, based on reports from various state and local agencies. The total number of cases, including both juveniles and adults, in 2008 was roughly 778,000. That same year, almost as many cases—around 745,000—were closed, meaning the missing person was found. Those closed cases include everyone from a child who went missing for one night to people who were reported missing weeks, months, or even years earlier.

At any given time, about 60,000 juveniles are missing in the United States. Roughly half of those have been missing for a year or more. But when we hear “missing children,” we tend to think the worst: children abducted by strangers, including pedophiles and other predators. These are the cases the media tend to focus on. But those are actually a very small percentage of missing juveniles. According to national studies conducted for the Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), in any given year the vast majority of missing children are either runaways or “throwaways,” juveniles kicked out of their homes by parents or other caretakers. Fewer than one in ten missing juveniles at any given time was abducted, and most of those were abducted by a family member—for instance, one parent snatching a child from another parent after losing custody in a divorce. Of those 60,000 juveniles who are missing as you read this, probably fewer than 3 percent, maybe 1,000 of them, are believed to have been abducted by strangers, according to the OJJDP.

The NCIC database crunches the numbers its own way but gets the same results. Of the 614,925 missing juveniles registered by the NCIC in 2008, about 13,000, or roughly 2 percent, were categorized as “endangered,” which is defined as “missing under circumstances indicating that they may be in physical danger.”

Again—the very good news is that of all those thousands of juveniles who go missing in a year, only a tiny minority are found dead: about 100 a year nationwide, according to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

So why do we hear so much about that tiny minority of cases—so much so that every time we hear the words “missing child,” we think the worst?

Obviously, like the FBI spokesperson said, the media couldn’t make news out of all 600,000-plus missing juvenile cases in 2008. They’re going to focus on the most spectacular, suspenseful, grisly, sexy, twisted, tragic ones—that small percentage of cases where it’s possible the child was murdered—like Caylee Anthony. NCIC data suggest that in the month of July 2008, when Caylee Anthony was reported missing by her grandmother, there were probably about 3,000 other juveniles reported missing in the state of Florida. But only Caylee’s story had the right ingredients to be blown up into national news.

What are those ingredients? Think of it as “American Murder Meets American Idol.” Ideally, both the murder victim and the suspect are attractive and telegenic. The relatives too, if possible. The other elements that go into the mix are a mysterious combination of seeming just like us—average Americans—and yet totally unlike us. They can’t be unattractive, overweight, uneducated, or poor. And above all else, they must be white.

After the O. J. Simpson case, asking the American mass media to go back to a more sober, fact-oriented, and investigative kind of crime coverage would be like asking a band of silver prospectors to abandon the Comstock Lode in Nevada’s Virginia mountains in 1859. With O. J., silver and gold were struck, in unimaginable quantities. The media will never turn back until everything has been mined, until the audience turns away, or until things become so catastrophic in the country that people actually have to turn their attention to their own survival.

I was central to the O. J. Simpson spectacle and lived it from the inside. I have been on both sides of the strange freak show where murder meets media and all hell breaks loose. I have seen how the entertainment juggernaut moves in and overtakes a murder investigation—creating chaos, confusion, hype, and hysteria. The criminal investigation becomes corrupted or even paralyzed, but the rewards in the coffers of the mass media and entertainment complex are so vast that no power on earth can rein them in once they have a case that has “legs.”

Just like every other arm of the entertainment industry, the Murder Business imposes absolute production values, seeds obsession into the national psyche, locks in the audience, and expands the product line as far and long as possible.

They have countless ways of doing this. When, for example, Caylee’s skeletal remains were finally found by Roy Kronk in December 2008, his background and life became fresh fodder for the story. He was paid a sum of $20,000 by one of the major networks to come on TV and be interviewed about his grisly find. Of course, they were paying for the licensing of the blurry photo he took of the swampy area where Caylee’s remains were found, not the interview. Yeah, right.

This peak moment capped a frenzy that had been going full tilt for six months, while the grandparents stonewalled, while the suspect lied, while her legal dream team crumbled, and while increasingly outlandish scenarios were peddled to the hooked audience about the fate of the child.

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Caylee’s disappearance hit the national news in July 2008. By August, the media-besieged family had a public relations spokesman representing them. He would quit, or be fired, in November, following allegations that he’d pocketed money NBC thought it was paying for Anthony family photos. But everybody connected to the case seemed to be striking deals, and lots of others hopped on the gravy train, too. Home videos of the child started to hit the media market, selling for astronomical sums. There was a T-shirt with Casey’s mugshot on it and a quote from her first angry jailhouse call (“Waste, Huge Waste”); another shirt mocked the imaginary nanny “Zanny”; there was a Casey Anthony voodoo doll on eBay, and even a doll “inspired by” Caylee Anthony, called the “Caylee Sunshine Doll,” that sings “You Are My Sunshine” when you press its belly-button. This sold for $29.99 online. It was briefly taken off the market due to complaints, but was soon brought back “by popular demand.”

Beyond the crush of relentless media coverage on network and cable television, a new media epiphenomenon developed: Youtube clips of Caylee Anthony gurgling, dancing, and playing with her mother in various stages of toddlerhood. And then there were the photos and video clips of her mother in various stages of gyrating decadence, apparently enjoying South Florida’s disco-and-Jello-shots nightlife while her only daughter was missing and possibly dead. She became known as the “hot-tot mom.”

The Very Cute Innocent Child and the Very Bad Wicked Mother had now been minted as characters in this drama, and products—clips or pictures—that fed those images were in high demand. Hundreds of thousands watched each Caylee Anthony clip, and commented passionately about each gurgle and word she uttered. Thousands wrote in and swore they loved her as much as if she were their own child, and Caylee Kitsch was born—countless video montages with images of the little girl superimposed with roses, birds, animals, and sad music.

Everybody settled into a comfortable seat to watch the show, which not only must go on, but on and on and on, spinning off the very axis of facts and forensic evidence that, in the normal world, would bring the case to a screeching halt. This is the first real problem of Murder in the age of Mass Media—doubts, mysteries, and questions fuel the fire like oxygen.

The second problem is that law enforcement and media work at cross purposes. They want opposite things. Law enforcement want to solve and close a case as quickly and effectively as possible. The media want to prolong the whole thing as long as possible, and everything they do contributes overtly or covertly to that goal. This is why they don’t investigate, ask tough questions of suspects, try to eliminate speculative scenarios, or do anything at all to contribute to solving anything. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry who wants to chime in with an absurd new angle or wrinkle is given tail-wind by the blowing machines. Every family member who has any unexpressed or not yet exhausted set of emotions is invited on TV shows again and again, while the pot gets stirred and stirred. They manufacture questions, but never try to answer them, even when the answers are right at their feet. They pretend victims are alive even when it is patently clear there is no chance—just to keep the story alive, to maintain the taut bubble of tension that is required, as in every soap opera, to keep the viewers hooked.

I’m sure every news producer in national TV knows that almost all of the 100 or so missing kids who are found dead every year were murdered within a few hours of their disappearance. Not six months, or six weeks, or six days. A few hours.

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This Murder Business makes a mockery out of plain facts, evidence, and logic. It ropes entire families into the circus, making it impossible for them to live their lives...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Praise
• PROLOGUE
• CHAPTER ONE - AMERICAN MURDER MEETS AMERICAN IDOL: THE CAYLEE ANTHONY CASE
• CHAPTER TWO - KILLER COP: DREW PETERSON
• CHAPTER THREE - WHEN CRIME TV GOES TOO FAR: MELINDA DUCKETT
• CHAPTER FOUR - MURDER AND THE UPPER CLASS: MARTHA MOXLEY
• CHAPTER FIVE - PORTRAIT OF A MAMA’S BOY: SCOTT PETERSON
• CHAPTER SIX - DEATH OF A TROUBLED PRINCESS: JONBENÉT RAMSEY
• CHAPTER SEVEN - THE STRANGE DEATH OF A WHITE HOUSE COUNSEL: VINCE FOSTER
• CHAPTER EIGHT - THE CASE THAT STARTED IT ALL: O. J. SIMPSON
• CHAPTER NINE - THE WITNESS EVERYONE “FORGOT”
• INDEX
• Copyright Page