Thread by @Delafina777

So I finally started listening to @yourewrongabout's series on the DC snipers and the first episode is a *masterpiece* of structure. (Thread)

I hadn't gotten around to listening to the DC snipers episodes because it was a series, and I didn't really remember anything about the DC snipers beyond that they'd shot a bunch of people in DC.

The episode starts off by asking why, when the DC snipers:

A) killed a lot of people
B) left behind Tarot cards and engaged in the sort of cryptic, active back-and-forth with police that serial killer stories LOVE
C) were really damn good at being unpredictable...

...why haven't a million books been written about them? Why isn't there a TV show? Why haven't they inspired a bunch of crime fiction?

Like, they did the "brilliant and malevolent serial killer" thing par excellence?

Why isn't the whole true crime industry ALL OVER THEM?

And the easy answer to go to there is that it's because they were Black, and don't fit the mold of the White Male Genius serial killer.

That's probably a big part of it. Another big part of it is probably that the case was presented as terrorism rather than serial killing.

The easy answer to go to there is that John Allen Muhammad was Muslim, so again, he fits our pop culture narrative better as a terrorist.

So the podcast spends some time exploring this, and honestly, that issue by itself is FASCINATING and would have been a must-listen all by itself.

But then they pivot and spend most of the rest of the episode talking about John Allen Muhammad from the perspective of his wife, Mildred, based on her memoir.

And that seems like a strange pivot at first. What follows is a slow, increasingly horrifying ramp-up of domestic abuse. And, in some ways, the worst kind, because it's not physical so she doesn't fit the mold of a "battered woman" and no one believes her.

And at this point in the podcast, you're probably thinking, like me, that the point of focusing on the slow, creeping horror of how he treated his wife is supposed to primarily serve as foreshadowing for him being a serial killer.

Two side notes:

1) Mildred Mohammad is possibly the most empathetic person who's ever lived. When she finds out he was cheating on her, her first instinct is to put herself in the shoes of the Other Woman, and to have compassion for her.

(This leads to that thing you always WANT women who've both been deceived by a cheating man to do, but almost never happens in real life: they team up.)

When John tells her he wants a divorce, her primary concern is making sure he'll be okay without her.

And when she ends up in a women's shelter, with women who don't believe her because she hasn't suffered the "right" kind of abuse...

...her response is to become an advocate for them.

As Sarah and Mike note in the podcast, if humans were sensible, we'd build statues to people like Mildred Mohammad, not generals.

Side Note 2) You're Wrong About consistently makes me feel compassion for everyone involved in whatever they're talking about. It's one of Sarah and Mike's great gifts.

John Allen Mohammad is the exception to that.

I was primed to feel sympathy for him because I was sure that, look, he's Black and Muslim, he probably experienced enough prejudice that he just *cracked.*

Mildred's compassion and empathy for him in her memoir notwithstanding, after learning how he treated her, I wanted him dead.

And this leads into why the structure was so brilliant:

The twist, in the last 10 minutes of a very long episode, is that this is a domestic abuse case.

He appears to have been killing random people to disguise that he was trying to kill Mildred (and people who helped her get away from him, like their accountant). His first words when he was arrested were "It's Mildred's fault."

And it's astonishing to me how much of the reporting on this case treats his domestic abuse as simply incidental to, or foreshadowing of, his killing spree when it was actually the *reason for it.*

(Oh, also: the reason that this got tried as terrorism, a framing which is probably a factor in why it's not talked about as serial killing, is because that way they could get the death penalty.)

But yeah, well done, You're Wrong About. That was a perfect hook at the beginning, and a gut-punch of a twist at the end. I'm eagerly awaiting having time to listen to the rest of the series.

Anyway, profoundly worth your time.

ALL the domestic abuse content warnings, obvi.