by Patrick H. Moore
There is no doubt that a certain type of true crime fan seems to take positive pleasure in hating highly attractive female murderesses such as Karla Homolka and Jodi Arias. As opposed to Homolka, who has singularly few supporters (and those she does have typically simply believe she should be left alone), Arias has her share of supporters and quasi-supporters who feel that she was – to whatever degree – “used and abused” by Travis Alexander prior to committing her awful crime.
As a relative latecomer to the world of “true crime”, I am singularly uninformed as to the “fine details” of the Arias case and whether her conviction should have been for second degree murder (crime of passion) as opposed to premeditated first degree murder.
I’m on much solider footing vis-à-vis the Karla Homolka-Paul Bernardo case. What Karla did was clearly execrable, and the intense hatred she triggers on the part of huge numbers of those familiar with her case stems largely from, I believe, several factors.
The “haters” are deeply offended by the fact Karla is thought by many to have thoroughly enjoyed the atrocities she and Bernardo visited upon their poor victims.
The “haters” believe she had absolutely no excuse for what she did; i.e., she was not an abused child and her childhood, although a bit “off”, still fell into the broad range of what constitutes a “normal upbringing. As an aside, the hatred of Homolka is so all-consuming that I’ve recently read several comments by people who take positive delight in the fact that Homokla, who has had three children and must be in her 40s, is reportedly “getting plainer by the day.” In short, the “haters” rejoice in the fact that she is allegedly “over the hill” and will soon by “on the other side of the mountain”.
- In fairness to the Homolka haters, although she still might still be despised, the fury she arouses in the “haters” would probably be nowhere close to the fever pitch at which it has crested and remained, was it not for the fact she got what is perceived as the “ultimate sweetheart plea deal”, a mere 12 years, due to the fact she was the Crown’s star witness against Paul Bernardo. The fact that without her testimony, the Canadian prosecutors would have been unable to convict Bernardo for the murders of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French simply does not seem to register with these folks.
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After she got out of prison, Karla had the audacity to get married and have three children. The “despisers” take great pleasure in reveling in the fact that one day her kids are bound to put the pieces together and discover their mother is Karla Homolka, the notorious rapist and murderer.
- A further trigger for the hatred appears to be the fact Homolka is still apparently an extrovert who posts online quite regularly and is considered to be obnoxious and opinionated.
An oddity within this nexus of vitriol is the fact a good many “bashers” are firmly convinced that Bernardo would not have murdered Mahaffy and French was it not for the evil Karla egging him on: “Let’s do it, Paul. Let’s kill the little bitches. It’ll be fun.”
The Bottom Line
Neither Karla Homolka nor Jodi Arias would be reviled by perhaps hundreds of thousands of crime fans, were it not for the fact that they were both extremely desirable women at the time of their crimes.Edgar Allan Poe once stated that there is no more popular topic for a poem than the tragic death of a beautiful woman. If I might de-center Poe’s theory a bit and update it to our era, the theory would go something like this: There is no more popular crime than the hideous murder of attractive young people perpetrated by a beautiful and highly desirable young woman.
To put it bluntly, a murderess must be young, beautiful and sexually desirable to generate enough “heat” to be hated. I can almost guarantee that Roxanne Jeskey of Bangor, Maine has few if any “haters”, even though the brutal manner in which she murdered her husband Richard is perhaps the most shocking crime I’ve ever read about and included such exotic tortures an anal incision and genital mutilation.
The reason few if any crime fans bother to hate Roxanne, who was just sentenced to 50 years in prison despite pleading not guilty by reason of insanity, is because she is middle-aged, quite plain and has brain damage. There’s nothing sexy about Roxanne; thus she simply does not register on the “hatred scale.”
So why must a murderess be sexy in order to engender real hatred? Perhaps it is that to be hated, a murderess must be interesting, and in our perhaps superficial modern society, a woman – at least in the realm of true crime – is simply not very interesting unless she is beautiful.
A Good-Looking Guy Makes the Crime All the More Interesting
In the case of Jodi Arias, the fact Travis Alexander, whatever his pros and cons may have been, was quite a good-looking guy undoubtedly adds “heat” to the mix. If he had been a 300 pound male librarian with dandruff and adenoids, there would be few, if any, “Justice for Travis” websites. The fact that he clearly reveled in anal sex adds additional flavor to our “witches brew”.
By the same taken, if Paul Bernardo had been “ugly as a mud fence”, I would bet that although the case might have originally been very much in the public eye, the interest would have faded far more quickly. Furthermore, the female followers of the case would be far less prone to favor Paul over Karla if he had been a 300 pound child molester and murderer rather than a rather handsome child molester and murderer.
Thus, for a lurid murder(s) to generate huge interest, the murderess must not only be beautiful but her significant other, whether her partner-in-crime, as in the case of Karla, or her victim, as in the case of Arias, must at the very least be good-looking (Travis Alexander) or strikingly handsome (Paul Bernardo).
It would be be simplistic and hypocritical on my part to put down the followers of these cases, no matter which side they’re on, based on my “necessity of physical beauty” hypothesis, for the simple reason that I too am more or less obsessed by these appalling criminals and their lurid crimes. We probably need Dr. Starks to check in on this matter and I probably need a little psychotherapy while I’m at it. After sufficient treatment, I will perhaps be able to slough off my fascination with beautiful murderesses and give equal time to the Roxanne Jeskeys of the world.