Deeply unsettled after finishing a story on a murder trial. The verdict is in and I disagree with the jury's decision. How did they not find the killer guilty of murder? Why just "aggravated manslaughter"? I mean she didn't just shoot her wife, she tried to bury her in the yard.
Sometimes being a reporter is not enough to get the whole story because there are elements that are hidden. Did the victim's mother disapprove of her daughter's marriage because it was to another woman, or because she believed it to be abusive? Why was there a gun in the house?
How am I, who have covered so many murders over three decades, to believe that "the gun just went off"? And if the ME says there was stippling on the victim's face, then how could the jury believe the shooter when she claimed she was six feet away?
I really want to talk to the jurors, but I totally get that they don't want to speak to the press. It's an arduous job. But you want to know if they view lesbian couples differently from straight couples. Do they see the victim as deserving of justice or not?
So many questions.
So many questions.
This is why I also write fiction: So I can tell stories in which I have the answers. Maybe I can get an interview with the killer before or after she is sentenced in April. It's always an interesting experience, interviewing killers. They are almost never monsters.
The one serial killer I interviewed was one of the most sympathetic prisoners I have ever talked with, and I used to teach literacy classes in prisons, so I have met a lot of women and men behind bars. But Aileen Wuornos was in so many ways a really sweet and vulnerable person.
So you just never know what will be revealed when you talk to someone who has taken someone else's life. Sometimes it's gruesome, other times it leaves you so unsettled because there appears to be literally nothing to distinguish between them and us except circumstance.
The temptation to editorialize when reporting news is so intense. I felt it so very deeply when writing this story, I can't stop thinking about the details--hence this thread. I mean can it ever be as simple as "the gun went off" when there is already a history of conflict?
