Murders old and new
We came of age in—if you’ll forgive me—a “golden age” of murder stories.
And this past week a story that seems something of a throwback to that era—the shooting of a health-plan CEO in Manhattan—has captured oodles of attention. Mine included.
It is important to keep in mind, of course, the tragedy at the heart of this story—the cold-blooded murder of a father of two. But much about this story is indeed fascinating in a tabloid kind of way:
The apparently meticulous planning behind the shooting.
The murderer’s also seemingly well-planned escape—which included, in a sylvan touch, a bike ride through Central Park.
And the hint that the murder was somehow in retribution for sins of the organization the victim headed: UnitedHealthcare. For carved on the bullet casings apparently were the words: “defend", "deny” and “depose”—all presumably references to strategies health insurers use to avoid paying claims.
The fascinations of this case recall some of those of the more shocking, lurid and sensational murder stories that seemed to appear, one after another, in the previous century:
The Boston Strangler was said to have been responsible for murdering 13 women in the Boston area between 1962 and 1964. Albert DeSalvo confessed to being the Boston Strangler—though there is considerable doubt that he was responsible for all or even most of the killings. All but one of the victims were single women who were sexually assaulted, raped, murdered and strangled with a piece of their own clothing tied around their neck in a bow.
At least five people were murdered by someone known as the Zodiac Killer in the San Francisco Bay area in the 1960s and 1970s. Letters staking claim to these murders, and a few dozen more, were often signed: "This is the Zodiac speaking." No one was ever charged with the murders.
A bizarre, counter-culture cult with a disturbed but charismatic leader, Charles Manson, murdered nine people, including the pregnant actress Sharon Tate, at four places in the Los Angeles area on two nights in August 1969.
David Berkowitz, a New Yorker who had had a troubled childhood, pled guilty to eight shootings in the New York area between July 1976 and July 1977, which resulted in six deaths and terrorized the city. Berkowitz, who called himself, the Son of Sam, claimed to have been obeying the orders of a demon manifested in the form of a black dog belonging to his neighbor, "Sam.” Wielding a .44 caliber gun, he tended to target young male-female couples, who were often sitting in cars.
On the day before the Memorial Day holiday in 1979, his mother allowed six-year-old Etan Patz to walk by himself, for the first time, the two blocks to his school in lower Manhattan . The child was never seen again. Thirty-seven years and one mistrial later, a man with some mental deficiencies, who had confessed to strangling a young boy while working in a local store, was found guilty of killing Etan Patz. Not much of a resolution for a story that led to a couple of generations of children being forced to lead more circumscribed lives because of the fear it implanted in their parents.
Once a well-respected math prodigy, Ted Kaczynski, dubbed “the Unabomber” by the FBI, mailed a series of bombs from 1978 to 1995 to individuals he felt were moving modern technology forward and thereby helping despoil the environment. The bombs killed three people and injured 23 others before his brother recognized the prose in a manifesto and Kaczynski was captured.
O. J. Simpson, a hugely successful football player, football commentator and actor was arrested—after a dramatic televised car chase—in 1994 for the murder of his ex-wife and a friend of hers. Simpson’s eight-month-long trial the next year was televised live and dominated the news for much of that time. Simpson was acquitted, but later was imprisoned, in a separate case, for armed robbery and kidnapping.
Then, of course, there were the horrific serial killings by Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy.
In this new century we have had, alas, no shortage of outsize tragedies involving assault weapons and deranged, amoral individuals trying to become famous. But these deeply, deeply tragic incidents—sometimes even involving children—are mostly anonymous encounters.
The shooter holds down the trigger and tries to see how many people—most of whom he doesn’t know—he can dispatch before the police arrive. Next comes the usual bio of an unstable loner who should have never, never, never been allowed to come anywhere near an assault weapon or any other kind of weapon. And then, even if he survives, aside from the occasional meaningless court hearing, we never hear from this mass murderer again.
Why aren’t there more traditional, one-on-one or one-on-a-few murders in the United States as this century progresses? Part of the explanation has been an overall decline in the number of murders. The murder rate in the United States, which had been 9.4 for every 100-thousand people in 1990 had slipped by 2023 to 5.7 per 100,000 people. And that includes the mass shootings, so that means there are a lot fewer one-perpetrator, not-that-many-victim killings.
Part of the explanation is also our increasingly partisan news media. Some publications and cable networks seem to have replaced old-fashioned murders as a means of riling up their audiences with scare stories about immigrants or trans people or their political opponents.
The UnitedHealthCare murder is a “compelling”—I’ll beg forgiveness one last time—throwback.