It seems to be enough of a compelling mystery with various curious factors. That probably explains it. Not sure any other factor needs to be appealed to.
Does her race matter? Don’t know, The evidence suggests that there are racial discrepancies with crime reporting and publicity. e.g. The links others have provided in this thread, and of course had she been shot by the police whilst unarmed I seriously doubt her death would gather as much attention as if she were black.
But did any of that come into play for this particular incident? I don’t think so.
Cute young blonde from, I presume, a middle class or even upper middle class background, likely murdered by an athletic young man from a similar background. It’s a story made for Dateline and social media.
This question came up in one of my writing group meetings, and more than one of us asked if the case would have garnered as much attention if the woman had been black or some other minority. I even pointed out the same Wikipedia article on Missing White Woman Syndrome when someone said that they hadn’t heard of any similar cases.
It’s true that this got more prominence because she had that internet site, and because of the continuing mystery, but it fits so perfectly into the MWWS model. And I don’t recall any parallel cases where the woman wasn’t white. It’s a sad situation in any case, made even sadder by the way it falls into this trap.
I’m not familiar with any case that has the exact parameters of this one before, so it’s a little hard to compare.
I do know that the “Freeway Phantom” a serial killer in the 1970s in the DC area got plenty of attention at least where I lived, and he targeted exclusively young black girls.
The Atlanta Child Murders of the 1980s which also targeted black children, was a national news story. I definitely think there is some element of MWWS that is true, I just think it’s a lazy explanation people use to try to argue that it explains why any weird missing persons story gets the cable news treatment. There is almost always one or more “weird hooks” in addition to just the person being white and photogenic.
Isn’t this comparing serial killers (victims: people of color) with individual victims (pretty, young, white females), though ?
It didn’t break nationally until a year and ten dead Black kids AFTER the first reported missing child. The Atlanta murders are a poster child for the less dead.
At least now we understand the ratio (10:1).
The Constitution put it at 3/5ths.
Things really have changed, huh ?
Well but it also wasn’t recognized as being part of a series possibly perpetrated by one killer–many serial killers it’s not understood they are actually a serial killer until well into it.
So in 40 years we haven’t had a lot of media coverage of a non-white, non-affluent young woman disappearing. But we have had lots of cases of white, middle class women.
This is an indication that there are very specific circumstances surrounding the disappearance of the white women that have never been duplicated for non-white people. It’s not because no one would give two shits about her.
So dozens of missing children isn’t newsworthy if it can’t be pegged to a single serial killer? Do you think that would be the case if little white girls started disappearing off the streets of Salt Lake City? Or anywhere for that matter?
We’d be able to find a significant difference in the circumstances that pointed to a non racist explanation.
Most of the Atlanta Child Murder victims were not missing children for any appreciable amount of time, they were found murdered often within a day or two.
From Family Guy: That’s not news.
And some not found for months. If you don’t think missing and murdered children aren’t worthy of national attention, how do you explain those (usually white girls) that do get it?
Drop the “significant” part and you’ve nailed it.
I think the issue is you’re working from a very small sample set of a very imprecisely defined thing. Like there are 50 women listed on the list in this Wiki article, and that covers a span of years from 1889 to 2021.
That is such an insanely small percentage of the total amount of missing people, missing white women, murdered white women etc over that span of time that I think it’s difficult to speak intelligently about it being some sort of systemic cultural thing that is well researched and understood.
I think they are more properly understood in a broader context of–crime sensationalism. That puts them in my opinion more in their proper context–as a subset of events like the Leopold & Loeb case, the Lindbergh kidnapping, the Manson murders, the OJ Simpson case, Ted Bundy, the Clutter family murders etc etc–I think all of these are part of basically this larger concept of “sensationalized crime.”
I exclude from this category acts of what I call terrorism or mass mayhem, because I think those are a different phenomenon. Mass terror events like the Olympic bombings, Oklahoma City bombings, some of the political terrorism bombings of the 70s etc are actually news because they are a threat to society itself, maybe not always a huge threat, but it’s the perception that society is “under attack.”
“Sensationalized crime” tends to be sensationalized for what I call a prurient interest, and often times for any one incident of sensationalized crime, there are likely many, many incidents that are very similar but just don’t quite get the same level of attention, so there is an element of mass media being involved. For example there’s far more serial killers that no one has ever heard of than there are Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy types. There are far more missing and murdered white women than Gabby Petito etc etc. Sensationalized crime I think requires some element that appeals to a prurient interest, in addition to other factors–sometimes something as small as it gets the attention of a media personality who tends to be very good at getting more attention for things (because media/journalism is entertainment to some degree–this was true even as far back as Leopold & Loeb.) I do think race and attractiveness of the victim, social class etc absolutely factor in, but they’re part of a list of factors in what IMO is actually a fairly complex phenomenon. Particularly if you follow much true crime stuff and realize the huge weight of similar cases that never get significant interest–many times even cases that meet many of the checklist items that are casually assumed to be determinative such as victim race / wealth etc.
What’s worse about the Atlanta Child Murders is that I’m not convinced it was just the one killer. The authorities were quite happy to close the case, call it a win.
I’m not saying Williams was innocent, just that he might not have perpetrated all the murders.
Maybe we need another category: sacrificial appeasement for minority murders.
Yeah, in some ways I almost didn’t want to mention the Atlanta Child Murders because I think there’s a lot of complex stuff going on there. Not to derail too much further but I’ve studied that case a lot and at least to my mind, it’s highly likely a number of those kids died either to another serial killer, or possibly just fell victims to one off “street murders” that weren’t linked to a “serial killer” as we understand it. At the same time, I think Wayne Williams absolutely is a serial killer who murdered a number of those boys, exactly how many and which ones I’m less sure on. And at least some of them it seems very implausible he was the killer.
Not surprising that something like this would show up in the media. This one’s prominent on the CNN webpage right now
We’ve got a similar article that just came up on our local news, this one for indigenous women:
Silenced Voices: Wisconsin’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women
Maybe we’ll start getting some more fair coverage of people of all colors going forward. It’s a start.