Murder, mayhem and madness

Here's what I've been working my ass off for the last month to finish. I may never complete it though, since the journal I'm submitting it to has given giving me tons of leeway, which has only led to a great wasting of time...

Here's the intro. Enjoy.

Léa (on left) and Christine Papin before...

...and after the murders they committed. (Here Christine is on the left, Léa on the right.)

One of the most gruesome, bloody and violent murders of modern France is also one of the most written-about crimes of the twentieth century. The event known as l’affaire Papin refers to a crime which took place in February 1933 at the home of the Lancelin family in the provincial town of Le Mans, France. Christine and Léa Papin, two sisters who had worked as maids in the household for six years, killed the mother and the daughter of the family following an electrical outage caused by the iron Christine had been using. Apparently in reaction to Madame’s anger at the discovery of the blackout, the sisters jumped on their employers in a remarkably brutal attack: Christine and Léa ripped out the eyes of the other two women with their fingers, then beat them to death with a pitcher and hammer and sliced their faces and bodies with a kitchen knife. Found huddled together in a single bed behind the locked door of their attic bedroom after the crime, the sisters willingly went with authorities to be questioned at the police station.

Despite the abundance of facts around the case – Christine and Léa were able to give police a detailed account of the murders – there is no single all-encompassing narrative to explain the crime, primarily because of the sisters’ inability to elucidate any reason for the killing. Their lack of emotion and apparent confusion about why they killed has generated such numerous and varied explanations in the both factual and fictive accounts that it serves as a marker for a shift in what it means to solve a crime. Traditionally, this explanation consists of identifying and finding the criminal, bringing him before a judge, and punishing him for his act, the implication being that the crime is solved once the the murderer is contained. Deprived of any sense of finality in this particular case upon discovering the identity of the killers, journalists and other writers found it necessary to assign their own interpretation on the event, as murder is an event for which the public demands a clear, cohesive and rational explanation. Perhaps even more than the lack of motive was the somewhat ready-made quality of the sisters’ story. Faced with the elements of incest, eye-gouging, homosexuality, Oedipus, class relationships, mirroring, and the dualities of light and shadow (the electrical blackout) and Jekyll and Hyde (the two photographs of the sisters,) writers could hardly not write the narrative of this crime.

Speaking of the rise in crime literature in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Ken Morrison states: “The work of detection within literary space was designed to show how murder was to be handled, how it would be investigated, and how it would be accounted for” (305.) This crime occurs at a moment in literary and cultural history where more than just the body of the criminal was required. Questions which had been broached in psychology in general and psychoanalysis in particular compelled the act of detection in another direction. Not only did it involve searching for physical clues, evidence and truths, but looking for deeper hidden truths about crime and the criminal. Morrison goes on to say “The presence of the investigator is predicated on the idea that the truth is hidden from view and that the investigative gaze alone will reveal this truth…The aim of detective fiction is to bring the murderer to justice by unraveling or disclosing the truth” (306.) By 1933, this ‘truth’ had changed. Whereas traditional crime writing focuses on finding the criminal, the question now is shifting from finding the person who committed the crime to seeking dark truths which lay in the heart of a killer. Who were the Papin sisters? How could two killers lurk beneath the calm domestic exterior of their starched maids’ uniforms? Does the blank slate provided by their crime inspire a “delirium of interpretation,” whereby writing the story is imperative to understanding something essential about the human soul?

Amy, my gal

God, it's been a week since I posted anything and here I am, repeating myself. Again. Oh well, I'll blame it on the Papin sisters. Here's my gal, Amy, with my favorite song of hers.



I'm going to Athens tomorrow and am terribly excited about it. I *may* get to see Eds, which will be the first time since my birthday blowout. Way damn too long, I'd say. But the real reason I'm going is that I'm bringing Miss Vanessa Briscoe her way overdue Girl Scout cookie order. I haven't seen Van in much longer than Eds, probably since last year's GS cookie delivery. That sucks. As you all know, for a while Athens was totally off limits to me. What a horrible time that was. But now it's safe for me to go again. I'm so glad that's over now. I'm happy as a pig in slop that it's over, to tell you the truth. These are two of my favorite people in the world, by the way:

Van, an old pic stolen from her Myspace:

See what happens when you blog needlessly? I'll stop now and go write more on my murder article. In fact, in my next entry I will include a portion of my article. Woohoo! You lucky readers!

The Black Dahlia

I have a theory about certain murder cases. When a crime goes unsolved for years and years...the Black Dahlia, Jack the Ripper, the Zodiac...it somehow allows us to see into a period in history more than any other cultural phenomenon or byproduct could. For me, there is something about an unsolved murder case that serves as a window in time. By keeping the momentum of the crime going, via the evidence, photos, and narratives of those who were there, the era becomes frozen, available, alive. This tangible link, coupled with the continued interest in the event on the part of writers and readers and researchers, keeps the crime alive, and I believe it keeps the historical era alive as well. It's as if the idea of "open" in an unsolved murder case carries over into the world itself, creating an opening in time.

When I look at the crime scene photos taken in Mary Kelly's tiny hovel of a room, or the pictures of the hotel where Elizabeth Short was last seen alive, or even reading an account of Catherine Eddowes' last night on earth, the people and places I see and read about remain alive in some way. It's as if in order to understand what happened, contemporary readers need to actually go 'back there' and see when and where it happened. When I read about the Ripper crimes, I experience Victorian London as if it were still there physically, much more so than I would if I simply read an account of life during Queen Victoria's reign. When I look at photos of the neighborhood where Beth Short's severed body was found, Los Angeles of the 1940's looks back at me, real, alive, tangible.

Today marks the 61st anniversary of the discovery of the body of Elizabeth Short, better known as the Black Dahlia. If you don't know the case, there is a good overview here. Beth/Betty/the Dahlia lived a life that, like most, was mostly hidden from those who knew her. Part of the intrigue of the crime is trying to piece together her Hollywood self (and I honestly didn't intend the pun at all...) based on testimony given by those who knew her. She moved to LA from Medford, Massachusetts, partly to find the father that deserted her family when she was a child, partly to find a new start, and probably, partly out of sheer boredom with small town life during World War II. But what she did during that time is shadowy and speculative, especially the last few years.

Her life of moving from place to place, occasionally returning to Massachusetts before setting off again for a new destination, suggests a dissatisfied woman, but was she really miserable, or is this just conjecture? Who knows what Beth Short really thought of her life. She is painted as a Hollywood wannabe, a prostitute, a tease...but what do we really know about her? She was just a person like any one of us, looking for her life and more than likely, not finding it.

In any event, one night in January of 1947 she met up with evil. She was found six days later, her body cut in half, drained of blood and washed clean, in a vacant lot in a middle class neighborhood. She was last seen at a hotel where she told the sometime boyfriend who drove her there in his car that she was going to meet her sister. She got out of his car and walked into six days of hell, torture and eventual death, a time about which no one knows much of anything.

So Betty Short goes down in history, another woman we feel like we knew, but we didn't know at all. Another woman with secrets to tell, secrets of a mundanely mysterious life and a horrible death, secrets we will never know. Another woman wanting fame during her life, yet only finding it in the brutal mystery surrounding her death. Elizabeth Short, rest in peace.