What Would Hitchcock Do?

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  It’s a conflict that faces every author—and reader—of crime fiction. What we’re writing about—and reading about—is usually terrible . So how do we balance the reality that we are focused on crime—without making it exploitive and sensational?

Then add to that true crime—where in real life, there’s no fictional literary buffers to call into play.  It’s heartbreaking—and it’s often  violent.  Difficult to look at, difficult to think about, and difficult to report.

So the juggle for the experienced and skillful Lis Wiehl was to take a riveting and ghoulishly gruesome real life story—and show why it mattered.. And do so without relying on the hideous details that gave the Manson murders a place in the annals of inhumanity.

How Hitchcock Did It

By Lis Wiehl

My daughter and I got lost the other day on our journey home, and I decided to make a quick u- turn in to a circular driveway in front of an old hotel in order to get back on to the road home.  The hotel was run down and kind of creepy looking, and the day foggy and overcast. My daughter said, “It looks like the Bates motel. By the way mom, did he kill all of the people that stayed at that hotel?” And I replied, “The only one that any one remembers is the woman in the shower. And the images of his dead mother in the rocking chair.”

Norman Bates may well have been a serial killer with dozens of victims stacked up in the basement of that fictional Bates Hotel. But what is important to us, what resonates and sticks with us, is the horror of the shower scene, complemented with terrifying music.  We feel the fear and panic of one woman, as we imagine the likelihood of many more victims whose stories we will never hear.  That is the key to the genius that was Alfred Hitchcock.

Hitchcock was able to convey fear and horror in fiction while spilling relatively few drops of blood on screen.  True crime is different because it demands showing true crime scenes. And true crime scenes are, by their very nature, full of blood and guts and gore.

We live in a world saturated by images of man’s inhumanity to man. Our evening news splays those images every night on our television screens, and the internet carries images of absolute brutality that can make it hard to sleep at night.  As a writer of true crime, I do not feel compelled to add to arbitrary images and then move on to storytelling about the humanity or lack thereof behind the action.

In writing “Hunting CharlesManson”, for example, I devote only two chapters in a 36-chapter book to the actual murders in August of 1969. The narrative is linear, but there are no bloody crime scene photos in the book. I write about facts descriptively, but not overly colorfully.  

 I assume that if you’ve picked up a book about Charles Manson you’ve probably heard something about the murders, so I’m less interested in the gory details of the murders than in the preamble to the murders. What lead up to Charles Manson’s amassing his following, for example? How did he get his ‘Family’ to murder all those people, while he stood by in the wings without so much as lifting a knife? And what was this grand scheme of Helter Skelter?

After the Manson murders of August, 1969, the LAPD completely bungled the investigation. And, for a while, Charles Manson was a free man.  How could the police have missed the clues that were literally written in the victims’ blood at the crime scene? Why were the different investigative agencies not communicating with each other and apprehending Manson and his followers earlier? These were the questions I was interested in asking in my book.

Once the police finally did get their man, the prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi, had a not to be underestimated task before him: How was he to convict a man of multiple murders who had never wielded a murder weapon and who not even at the crime scene during the time of the murders?! 

Bugliosi masterfully used Manson’s own theory of Helter Skelter to prosecute him: his plan to use the murders for starting a race war in Los Angeles which he could stop at will and thereby assume leadership of further actions. Bugliosi persuaded a jury that Manson had effectively convinced Tex Watson and the “girls” to commit the murders, i.e. “do something witchy”, in the pursuit of Helter Skelter. And it worked. Manson was convicted of all seven murders. And sentenced to death. (Which was later commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole.)

In writing “Hunting Charles Manson” I made a deliberate decision not to focus on the gory details of the murders.  Instead, I studied the man before the murders, his followers, the police and their investigation, the prosecutor’s tactics. And I studied these things and events with a goal: to understand why these events happened, so we may learn from history, lest history repeat itself. 

I believe that if we learn from the mistake that was Charles Manson and his playbook of wooing young women in to his “family” and using them to murder innocent people, then maybe we can spot and stop fledgling Manson’s out there today. 

I, for one, would be happy to have fewer real life stories of blood and guts and gore to write about.  It would challenge all of us true crime writers to aspire to be more like Alfred Hitchcock and tell a spell binding story without bloody crime scenes.

HANK: Yeah—I have to admit I’ve found myself reading scenes in some books that are hauntingly gruesome—and you know? I skip them. And then, often stop reading the book.  But that's just me. And so many writers—and terrific writers—do not shy away from the close up descriptions.  In my own books, I write about the search for justice more than I write about the elements of crime.

So where do you fall in the close-up-to-crime spectrum? How do you feel about that?

And LIs will be stopping in today! What would you like to know about her book? And a copy of the new paper back to one lucky commenter!

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Lis Wiehl is the author of HUNTING CHARLES MANSON (Nelson Books; available in paperback on June 25, 2019) and former legal analyst for Fox News. She has appeared regularly on Your World with Neil Cavuto, Lou Dobbs Tonight, and the Imus morning shows. The former co-host of WOR radio's “WOR Tonight with Joe Concha and Lis Wiehl,” she has served as a legal analyst and reporter for CNN, NBC News, and NPR’s All Things Considered, as a federal prosecutor in the United States Attorney’s office and was a tenured professor of law at the University of Washington. She lives near New York City.  www.liswiehlbooks.com