I suspect the all male jury just didn’t want to admit to themselves that a female of good upbringing could wreck such havoc.
For darn sure the verdict was a product of its time. Which time included a lot of misogyny and a lot of women on pedestals. A very odd and foreign concept to us here and now. Or at least here and recently.
In many states- and not too long ago, a good defense for killing a man was “he needed killin’”, Not a horrible idea back then, but not today.
Here’s an odd one in today’s Guardian
The I-70 killer.
In the month-long period in the spring of 1992, six people were murdered, all in retail shops located in near proximity* to Interstate 70. Five were women, and the single male was working in his mother’s ceramics shop.
Although two eyewitnesses were able to provide composite sketches, nobody was ever arrested or charged in any of the six murders.
*Wichita is 90 miles south of I-70.
Not so much tradecraft as a combination of the wrong person being given clearances and some extremely lax security practices by the defense contractor (RTX in the movie).
Christopher Boyce ( Christopher John Boyce - Wikipedia) was a smart kid with a distinct lack of ethics (he escaped from prison and carried out a string of bank robberies), but his buddy, Andrew Lee ( Andrew Daulton Lee - Wikipedia), was a bumbling idiot who got picked up (for littering!) by Mexican police outside the Soviet consulate with microfilm in his pockets.
That of Susan Smith, the monstrous mother who did her two sons (Michael and Alexander) in by having her car roll into John D. Long Lake in the Union area (the children were in their car seats), and having them drown (later claiming, and for a while insisting, that an unknown, unseen Black man carjacked her car at a red light; she eventually broke down under pressure, and capitulated to having murdered them by making them go into that lake in that car).
And, of course, she just had her first parole hearing 5-6 months ago. I don’t know of anyone who actually believes that she deserves to be released, so it was no shock to me me that she was denied in a unanimous vote.
And there is a very good animated adaptation of the story on YouTube by a user named Ray William Johnson-- it’s called She’s the worst mother in history // The Susan Smith Story; Johnson brings the whole sordid tale to life with excellent animations and art, and you can relive the whole thing as it happened.
I recall there being a to-do 20 years ago or so when it turned out Susan Smith had a profile on a dating website for prisoners to meet people on the outside. Aside from the existence of such a site itself being ALL kinds of problematic, I recall her mentioning therein that “I love my kids” and she was working to make up for the ways that she let them down, without mentioning that the particular way she let them down was by murdering them.
She really was shameless.
I remember when that happened; I had just graduated from college, and it was men and children who figured out she was lying almost from the get-go. Women found it harder to believe that a woman would do anything like that; the men were saying things like “What’s a black man going to do with two little white boys? If anything like that happened to me, I’d be hanging on the back bumper” and young children were saying things like “Why is that lady fake crying?”, something adults were less likely to pick up on.
Right now, I’m following this case, and more so on a true-crime website I post on.
And there are several books on EBay that go into the case, and I’m looking forward to purchasing and reading them-- the journalism around it was, IMO, very in-depth.
OTOH, as long as she doesn’t get pregnant again, there’s no chance of her becoming a repeat offender.
There’s a whole reality TV show “Love After Lockup”. Convicted felons just want to be loooved, is that so wrong?
Not to mention male killers doing 99-life getting married behind bars. WTF, ladies?
I was never exactly fascinated by the story of Gary Krist, who kidnapped a woman for ransom and buried her in a ventilated box for days, but was amazed that even after being convicted and sentenced to a long prison term (following a stint on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list), he thought he could fulfill his ambition of becoming a physician.
It turns out that he did in fact get accepted to a foreign medical school and graduated, practicing medicine for a time in Indiana before having his license revoked, for not revealing a disciplinary action during his residency.
He went on to get in trouble for trifling matters i.e. smuggling cocaine and illegal immigrants.*
*when he was caught after the kidnapping, he confessed to a series of murders.
I’m familiar with the Barbara Mackle story, which was the basis for the book and movie “83 Hours Till Dawn.” AFAIK, she’s still living. I didn’t know that one of her kidnappers got out and became a doctor! Egads.
Check out those faces magnified. They don’t make craggy countenances like those anymore.
Some of those guys are nearly 40.
My knowledge of the case is solely from your post and the Wikipedia entry, but the flash photos don’t seem all that mysterious to me.
Per the Wikipedia entry, “ninety flash photos were taken between 01:00 and 04:00, apparently deep in the jungle and in near-complete darkness.”
So they were either attempting to use the camera as a flashlight…or trying to scare off a predator. This was after being lost in the wilderness for a week.
I wonder what fraction of the current male US populace could grow the least impressive 'stache in that very manly collection? Much less the most impressive.
Manly physiology just ain’t what it used to be. I blame microplastics, glyphosate, and chemtrails. Especially the chemtrails. 