L.A. Noir
I came across the L.A. Times historical homocides blog today searching for a sweater pattern, of all things. Admittedly the story that led me there does mention a sweater:
"I think I just killed a girl."
Cary had killed her, all right. Strangled her with her sweater. Afterward, he drove around the Valley with her slumped under the dash until the left front wheel on his borrowed hotrod collapsed.
It's typical of the stories on the site- tragic, salacious, long-forgotten. Jumping around through decades but ordered by day, the stories present a grim march of history- February 26, 1958 proclaims 'Girl Murdered in Car on Stanford Campus', followed by a February 29, 1908 account of a mining engineer forced to shoot a young widow after she threw a cup of acid at him.
I wasn't surprised to come across a 1995 interview of James Ellroy here, the crime fiction writer whose obsession with the gritty underbelly of L.A. has made famous. They talk about his attempt to solve one of the many unsolved, random crimes listed on this page, the murder of his own mother in 1958.
Whether solved or unsolved, these crimes and murders still feel pointless, with motives so petty and obvious it's almost insulting, and so much time having gone by it seems futile to care. The victims are frozen in grainy black and white photos, and guilty or not the accused have joined them. Life will be taken away eventually anyway, with a bold print headline all that remains.
"I think I just killed a girl."
Cary had killed her, all right. Strangled her with her sweater. Afterward, he drove around the Valley with her slumped under the dash until the left front wheel on his borrowed hotrod collapsed.
It's typical of the stories on the site- tragic, salacious, long-forgotten. Jumping around through decades but ordered by day, the stories present a grim march of history- February 26, 1958 proclaims 'Girl Murdered in Car on Stanford Campus', followed by a February 29, 1908 account of a mining engineer forced to shoot a young widow after she threw a cup of acid at him.
I wasn't surprised to come across a 1995 interview of James Ellroy here, the crime fiction writer whose obsession with the gritty underbelly of L.A. has made famous. They talk about his attempt to solve one of the many unsolved, random crimes listed on this page, the murder of his own mother in 1958.
Whether solved or unsolved, these crimes and murders still feel pointless, with motives so petty and obvious it's almost insulting, and so much time having gone by it seems futile to care. The victims are frozen in grainy black and white photos, and guilty or not the accused have joined them. Life will be taken away eventually anyway, with a bold print headline all that remains.