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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
In “A Crown of Feathers” (1972), Isaac Bashevis Singer tells the story of an orphan named Akhsa Holishitzer, doted upon by her Polish grandparents who manage the estate of a local gentile Prince inside the Pale. Akhsa grows into a young woman so attached to her grandparents that she cannot settle upon a mate, and thereby suffers a crisis of faith when they die. Longing for their return from the dead, haunted by conflicting dreams of their life plan for her, in her misery she finds herself drawn to the prohibited Book of Job, and from there to the New Testament stories of Jesus's resurrection. She converts to Christianity and gentile luxury, and thereby launches herself on a lifelong pilgrimage of ostracism, exile, and return to her own community. She begins her journey of self-doubt, however, by inaugurating a black mass that conjures up the very figure of Satan himself. Right to her deathbed, in fact, she will be haunted by words Satan tells her when she agonizes over the truths about death and the afterlife she is seeking. “‘The truth,’ Satan tells her, ‘is that there is no truth.’”
1. Singer, Isaac Bashevis, “A Crown of Feathers,” in The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982), 352–71Google Scholar. This story was translated by the author and Laurie Colwin. My epigraph from Peter novel, Høeg's, Smilla's Sense of Snow, trans. Nunnally, Tiina (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1993), can be found on 207Google Scholar.
2. Gourevitch, Philip, A Cold Case (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001)Google Scholar. Isaac Bashevis Singer is quoted on pages 129 and 133; “speaks for the dead” is from page 21. All further citations are in the text.
3. Kathleen Soliah was convicted in a Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD)-related Symbionese Liberation Army bomb conspiracy. Having made a new life for herself as “Sarah Jane Olsen,” she married a doctor, became a mother to three children, and was reportedly active in her church and community. See Sterngold, James, “Waffling Again, 70's Radical Asks to Change Guilty Plea,” New York Times, 11 15, 2001Google Scholar.
4. Ellement, John, “Unsolved Crimes Get a Fresh Look,” Boston Globe, 02 28, 1992Google Scholar. As Craig Savoye notes, special squads still raise the prospect of elitism and internal second-guessing, reviving long-standing associations of detectives with Internal Affairs (Savoye, , “Across US, a Police Push to Solve Old Crimes,” Christian Science Monitor, 02 5, 2001Google Scholar). For the previous devaluation of detective work in Boston, see my Cop Knowledge: Police Power and Cultural Narrative in Twentieth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 175–84Google Scholar. Detective work had also been famously downgraded in light of the famous Rand Criminal Investigation Study of the mid-1970s (see Greenwood, Peter W., The Rand Criminal Investigation Study: Its Findings and Impacts to Date [Rand Corporation, 07 1979]Google Scholar).
5. I refer here to the Vidocq Society, organized in Philadelphia in 1990. See Beale, Lewis, “To Catch a Killer,” Los Angeles Times, 05 13, 1992Google Scholar; Kinney, David, “Sleuth Society Helps Crack Unsolved Cases,” Ottawa Citizen, 05 29, 1998Google Scholar; Smothers, Ronald, “The Heirs of Holmes, Hot on the Trail,” New York Times, 12 2, 1997Google Scholar; and Motluk, Alison, “Shallow Grave,” New Scientist, 04 29, 2000, 26Google Scholar.
6. McCay, Bill, Tom Clancy's Net Force: Cold Case (New York: Berkley Jam, 2001)Google Scholar. The other titles were White, Stephen, Cold Case (2001; rept. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1999)Google Scholar, and Barnes, Linda, Cold Case (New York: Delacorte, 1997)Google Scholar. Grafton, Sue's most recent Q Is for Quarry (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2002)Google Scholar is also a cold case mystery, as is Robert, Parker's Back Story (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2003).Google Scholar
7. Hosted by Richard Crenna, this show was coordinated between a Glendale, California, police officer and an Irvine-based Internet service. See “Web Site Plays key Role in Quantity and Quality of Show's Leads, says CBS Cold-Case Co-producer,” Business Wire, 05 12, 1997Google Scholar. See also “Epoch Networks and CBS Producers Create Web Site for First Interactive Reality-Based Television Program,” Business Wire, 03 12, 1997Google Scholar.
8. Ellroy, James, My Dark Places (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1996)Google Scholar.
9. As one example of this union, see Ellement, John, “Boston's Cold Case Squad Hails Mother's Love in Breaking Case [of] Fugitive Who Fled Country,” Boston Globe, 10 31, 1995Google Scholar. The victim Web sites are well known: see, for instance, the Web site for Martha Moxley, at http://marthamoxley.com. By victim circle, I follow the conventional meaning, referring to those closely associated with and including the victim of crimes.
10. By social memory, I mean to refer to what some call collective memory, but in particular to underscore the active recreation of the past through social process, not just intellectual activity. For an overview of the scholarship on this subject, see Frank, Geyla, “Thoughts on Institutional Memory: Narrative Constructions and Future Time,” Narrative Inquiry 9 (1999): esp. 191–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Santos, Myrian Sepulveda, “Memory and Narrative in Social Theory: The Contributions of Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin,” Time and Society 10 (2001): 163–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11. Along the way, I mean to examine policing's material processes as modes of symbolic power that can be reinforced, modified, or critiqued by forms of cultural narrative. Cf. Loader, Ian, “Policing and the Social: Questions of Symbolic Power,” British Journal of Sociology 48 (03 1977): 1–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12. The scholarship on these trends, extending into the 1970s, is well summarized in Carlson, James M.'s Prime-time Law Enforcement (New York: Praeger, 1985)Google Scholar; see also Kooistra, Paul G., Mahoney, John S., and Westervelt, Saundra D., “The World of Crime According to ‘Cops,’” in Entertaining Crime: Television Reality Programs, ed. Fishman, Mark and Cavender, Gray (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1998)Google Scholar. On the 1980s True Crime focus on police detectives, see my Cop Knowledge (130–68).
13. For discussion of these genres, see Rapping, Elayne, “Television, Melodrama, and the Rise of the Victims' Rights Movement,” New York Law School Law Review 43 (1999–2000): 665–89Google Scholar; quotations on excess and sentiment are from Rapping's essay. See also Miller, William Ian, “Clint Eastwood and Equity: Popular Culture's Theory of Revenge,” in Law in the Domains of Culture, ed. Sarat, Austin and Kearns, Thomas R. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 161–202Google Scholar; Weiner, Susan, “True Crime: Fact, Fiction, and the Law,” Legal Studies Forum 17 (1993): 275–88Google Scholar; and Durham III, Alexis M., Elrod, H. Preston, and Kinkade, Patrick K., “Images of Crime and Justice: Murder and the ‘True Crime’ Genre,” Journal of Criminal Justice 23 (1995): 143–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14. C.S.I. and other shows, for instance, often feature a fingerprint-search database that scans available records and then signals a match. In fact, such matching is often a tediously manual and often subjective process.
15. A classic formulation of this ethos is Waugh, Hillary's “The Human Rather Than the Superhuman Sleuth,” in The Murder Mystique: Crime Writers on Their Art, ed. Freeman, Lucy (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1982)Google Scholar.
16. Regini, Charles L., “The Cold Case Concept,” FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin 66 (08 1997)Google Scholar; available at http://www.fbi.gov/publications/leb/1997/aug971.htm.
17. Cf. Ellroy, , My Dark Places, 193Google Scholar. See also Kopenec, Stefani G., “High-Tech Heats Up Cold Case Trails,” Los Angeles Times, 11 19, 1995Google Scholar.
18. See Major Mike Richmond, writing for the federal Office of Special Investigations, “OSI Cold Cases Become ‘Hot’ Topic,” and Lisa Prevost, “Greenwich's Other Murder: 1984 Case Reopened Amid Spotlight on Moxley Slaying,” both from the Moxley Web site. Prevost's article is attributed there to the April 1, 2001, Boston Globe.
19. See Regini, “Cold Case Concept,” and MacQuarrie, Brian, “4 Years After Murder, Squad Makes a Cold Case Hot,” Boston Globe, 10 8, 1997Google Scholar.
20. Bai, Matt, “Cold Case Confidential,” Newsweek, 01 12, 1998, 70Google Scholar; Bardwell, S. K., “Incidence of Homicide Continues to Fall Off; Decline Allows Police to Redirect Resources,” Houston Chronicle, 01 1, 2000Google Scholar; and Ain, Stewart, “Nassau's Cold Case Squad Picks Up Chase,” New York Times, 11 21, 1999Google Scholar. See also Savoye, “Across US.”
21. And thus even in those early days, the Boston department was clearly cooperating with federal agencies such as the IRS or the FBI's Violent Fugitive Task Force. A startup date of 1991 is used by Ellement in “Unsolved Crimes.” See also the reference in “Fugitive Convicted After 13 Years,” Boston Globe, 11 10, 1995Google Scholar; Ellement, John, “‘Cold Case’ Squad Finds Man Sought in '82 Killing,” Boston Globe, 08 12, 1994Google Scholar; and McGrory, Brian, “Fugitive in '67 Murder Is Tracked to Md. by Cold Case Squad, Arrested,” Boston Globe, 04 29, 1994Google Scholar.
22. See “No Bail for Man 26 Years on Run,” Boston Globe, 05 19, 1994Google Scholar. For another case, see MacQuarrie, “4 Years After Murder.”
23. These characterizations taken from Smothers, “Heirs of Holmes,” and Kopenec, , “High-Tech.” One also thinks of recent science fiction films like Time Cop (1994)Google Scholar, in which a cop eventually averts his own wife's murder in the past, or the television series Seven Days (1998). Nolan, Christopher's recent movie Memento (2001)Google Scholar is of course relevant here: Nolan's protagonist “Lennie” has no short-term memory at all. Thus, the original crime he avenges is ever-present to him.
24. For examples of local coverage of these squads, see Corral, Oscar, “Heat on Cold Case,” Newsday (New York), 09 20, 1999Google Scholar; Oakes, Gary and Millar, Cal, “‘Cold Case’ Detectives Investigate 3rd Slaying,” Toronto Star, 05 19, 1997Google Scholar; LaLonde, Brent, “Special Homicide Squad Is Revived,” Columbus Dispatch, 11 21, 1996Google Scholar; and S. K. Bardwell's two reports, “Incidence of Homicide” and “Arrest Comes 20 Years After Woman Found Dead,” Houston Chronicle, 06 30, 2001Google Scholar.
25. Letter from Green, James J., “Not Much Pressure in Chasing Cold Cases,” New York Times, 12 5, 1999Google Scholar. This artisanal ethos is famously discussed in Skolnick, Jerome, Justice Without Trial: Law Enforcement in Democratic Society (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1966)Google Scholar.
26. For example, see Robertson, Tatsha, “Cold Case Turns Up Suspect in '76 Murder,” Boston Globe, 01 7, 2000Google Scholar.
27. Barnicle, Mike, “The Cracking of a Cold Case,” Boston Globe, 03 29, 1992Google Scholar.
28. Ellement, “Unsolved Crimes.”
29. The crime wave at the heart of 1960s affluence is a commonplace in neoconservative criminology. See Wilson, James Q., Thinking About Crime, rev. 3rd ed. (New York: Vintage, 1985)Google Scholar.
30. Levingston, Steven, “On the Trail of a Killer,” Boston Globe Magazine, 12 8, 1996Google Scholar. The tension was made evident to me in the spring of 2001, at a Boston College conference hosted by Families of Murder Victims Opposed to the Death Penalty. Here victim families looking for voice and representation spoke of often being pitted against prosecutors. The divergent roots of the movement are well laid out by Weed, Frank J. in Certainty of Justice: Reform in the Crime Victim Movement (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1995)Google Scholar. For another discussion of this movement's evolution, see Shapiro, Bruce, “Victims and Vengeance: Why the Victims' Rights Amendment is a Bad Idea,” Nation, 02 10, 1997, 11ffGoogle Scholar.
31. On this effect of victimization surveys, see Kotre, John, White Gloves: How We Create Ourselves Through Memory (New York: Free Press, 1995), 107Google Scholar.
32. See Weed, following Lawrence Friedman, on victims and “rights consciousness” (Certainty of Justice, 21ff.)Google ScholarPubMed. The preference for victimization surveys (over the Uniform Crime reports) in neoconservative criminology is also relevant here (see Wilson, , Thinking About Crime, 66–68Google Scholar).
33. Cf. Weed, , Certainty of Justice, 32Google Scholar; and Christie, Nils, “Conflict as Property,” in Perspectives on Crime Victims, ed. Galaway, Burt and Hudson, Joe (St. Louis: C. V. Mosby, 1981), 234–44Google Scholar.
34. Gewirtz, Paul, “Victims and Voyeurs: Two Narrative Problems at the Criminal Trial,” in Law's Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law, ed. Gewirtz, and Brooks, Peter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 135–64Google Scholar; quote, 142. Contrast Shapiro, “Victims and Vengeance,” and Rapping, “Television, Melodrama.”
35. In Levingston's story, for instance, the cold case squad in fact refuses to say how it broke the case (on the grounds it doesn't want to show its methods to other fugitives).
36. Quote from Regini; see also Kopenec, “High-Tech.”
37. Regini, “Cold Case Concept” (emphasis mine).
38. This reversal was underscored by the Boston detective Richard Nagle, quoted in MacQuarrie, “4 Years After Murder”: “We had to go out and re-interview a lot of people, some of whom weren't as reticent as they once were.”
39. Ain, “Nassau's Cold Case Squad.”
40. Ellement, “Unsolved Crimes.”
41. Regini, “Cold Case Concept.”
42. Regini, “Cold Case Concept” (emphasis mine).
43. Cf. Curriden, Mark, “Making Crime Pay: What's the Cost of Using Paid Informers?” American Bar Association Journal 77 (06 1991): 42Google Scholar; Lehr, Dick, “The Information Underworld Police Reliance on Criminal Informants Is a Dangerous Game for Both,” Boston Globe, 16 10 1988Google Scholar; and the PBS Frontline report entitled “Snitch,” which aired on January 12, 1999, transcript available at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/snitch/etc/script.html.
44. I am thinking here of the patterns in the drug war described in Massing, Michael's The Fix (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996)Google Scholar. And it should be added that, as in Barnicle's rendering (“Cracking of a Cold Case”), a racial subtext is rarely far removed from the idea of a cold case squad freed from local political pressure.
45. On these conventions in True Crime, see my Cop Knowledge (esp. 130–68). In one interview, Philip Gourevitch confesses to this parallel. Asked whether he identified with Rosenzweig, he said that for all their differences, “there was a great deal in common in the sort of obsessive, investigative, needling, relentless nature of the work that we do …”; the author also compared A Cold Case to his own investigative work in Rwanda, , resulting in his harrowing We Wish to Inform That You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998)Google Scholar. The comparison has also been made in Stossel, Sage, “A Tale of Two Murders,” Atlantic Unbound, 08 1, 2001Google Scholar.
46. For these tastes on Serpico's part, see Maas, Peter, Serpico (1973; rept. New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 22Google Scholar. I have written about this ethos in “Undercover: White Ethnicity and Police Exposé in the 1970s,” American Literature, forthcoming.
47. See especially Knight, Suzanne M., “Rights for the Rape Victim: Lifting Statute of Limitations for Prosecution of Violent Crimes,” Buffalo Women's Law Journal 8 (1999/2000): 11–12Google Scholar. The screenwriter for The Naked City, Malvin Wald, had himself apprenticed under Robert Flaherty, writing World War II training documentaries. See his afterword to The Naked City, ed. Bruccoli, Matthew (Carbon-dale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979), 136–37Google Scholar.
48. See, for instance, Wilson, Thinking About Crime, or Kelling, George L. Jr and Coles, Joanna, Fixing Broken Windows (New York: Martin Kessler, 1996)Google Scholar.
49. On this lament, see especially Skolnick, Justice Without Trial.
50. I refer here to the no-doubt unintentional — unless the name is a fiction — allusion to Dan Cody in Fitzgerald's novel. On the disruptions in police authority in the 1960s, and their mythologizing in recent criminology, see Walker, Samuel, “‘Broken Windows’ and Fractured History: The Use and Misuse of History in Recent Police Patrol Analysis,” Justice Quarterly 1 (1984): 75–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
51. We might call this a disarticulated reference to racial tension. On articulation in cultural discourse — as a matter of stressing discursive or ideological correspondences — see Slack, Jennifer Daryl, “The Theory and Method of Articulation in Cultural Studies,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. Morley, David and Chen, Kuan-Hsing (London: Routledge, 1996), 112–30Google Scholar.
52. Kotre, , White Gloves, 36Google Scholar.
53. Important scholarship, of course, has reminded us how much contemporary criminals do consult this popular culture archive. See, for instance, Hobbs, Dick, “Professional Crime: Change, Continuity and the Enduring Myth of the Underworld,” Sociology 31 (02 1997): esp. 64–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
54. Berlant, Lauren, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), esp. 25–53Google Scholar.
55. McAuliffe, Dennis, Bloodland: A Family Story of Oil, Greed and Murder on the Osage Reservation (San Francisco: Council Oaks, 1999)Google Scholar; originally published as The Death of Sylvia Bolton (1994).
56. In comparing civil to criminal case remedies, Ochoa, Tyler T. and Wistrich, Andrew J. write, “Evidence regarding remedies sometimes improves as time passes. It is generally more difficult to predict the future than to reconstruct the past. In a personal injury case, the extent of the plaintiff's impairment will be an important question” (“The Puzzling Purposes of Statutes of Limitation,” Pace Law Journal 28 [Spring 1997]: 453–514; quote, 477)Google Scholar. For the place of precisely this kind of reasoning in the victims' rights movement, see Shapiro's account of Mothers Against Drunk Driving proponent Janice Harris Lord's testimony at a crime victims' conference in 1996 (“Victims and Vengeance”).
57. For the implementation of this “rational” choice-making model into the processes of law enforcement, see especially Wilson, , Thinking About Crime, 128–46Google ScholarPubMed. Contrast my Cop Knowledge, 179–81.
58. Cf. Ochoa and Wistrich, “Puzzling Purposes,” 471, 464, and passim. Compare Dunn, Amy, “Statutes of Limitation on Sexual Assault Crimes: Has the Availability of DNA Evidence Rendered Them Obsolete?” University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review 23 (Spring 2001): 839–68Google Scholar; Olson, Walter, “Stale Claims,” Reason 32 (11 2000)Google Scholar, available at http://reason.com/0011/co.wo.stale.shtml; and Knight, , “Rights for the Rape Victim,” 11–12Google Scholar.
59. Chavez, Anthony, “Statutes of Limitations and the Right to a Fair Trial: When Is a Crime Complete,” Criminal Justice 10 (Summer 1995): 2–6, 48–51Google Scholar. For an overview on Son of Sam laws, see Roberts, Sam, “Criminals, Authors, and Criminal Authors,” New York Times, 03 22, 1987Google Scholar.
60. See, for instance, the cases discussed by Bai in “Cold Case Confidential.” And while Gourevitch in A Cold Case ends by showing us the gratitude of Glennon's daughter (173), a rumination in Rosenzweig's own evaluation seems to cut in a different direction. “What's funny is I got into [this case, the cop says,] because … I was thinking especially that I wanted to put it to rest for the victims' families and survivors. The thing I didn't think about was that many of them had long ago found their own ways of dealing with it. So while I was going for closure, I was just re-opening it for these people. My idea of laying it to rest was their idea of an upheaval’” (174).
61. On changes in the urban landscape, see Harvey, David, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000)Google Scholar. On “vigil,” see A New English Dictionary of Historical Principles (Oxford: Clarendon, 1928), vol. 10, part 2, p. 197, definitions 4 and 5Google Scholar.
