“There’s been 11 hardback books on me,” the serial killer John Wayne Gacy told a reporter on the eve of his execution in 1994. “Thirty-one paperbacks, two screenplays, one movie, one Off Broadway play, five songs and over 5,000 articles. What can I say about it?”
What can be said about it is that murder makes a lucrative story, something authors of the true crime genre have exploited in recent years to forge a multimillion-dollar industry, placing serial killers on our screens, funneling their voices into our ears, recounting their “exclusive” tell-alls in best-selling books. We may consider the obsession with true crime a contemporary preoccupation — with Etsy shops selling enamel pins of Ted Bundy’s face and his Volkswagen, and crime conventions filling casino-size hotels with teenage girls in “Murderino” T-shirts. But these grisly stories, and our insatiable thirst for them, have been monetized for hundreds of years.
Long before the self-styled Zodiac Killer mailed his letters to California newspapers, threatening killing sprees and bombings if his messages were not printed, there was an English prison chaplain named Henry Goodcole who bolstered his modest salary by selling stories about death and sin. Between 1620 and 1636 Goodcole served as “Ordinary,” or “Visitor,” at London’s notoriously lawless Newgate Prison, his job being to attend to the prisoners’ spiritual welfare — preaching, hearing confessions and leading services behind the thick, dank walls.
Newgate was rife with killers (as well as debtors and thieves) and, thus immersed in tales of blood and abomination, Goodcole saw a market opportunity. But how to make his money? Literacy was on the rise in England, and the political, social and religious upheaval of the 1600s meant the public was ravenous for information. Murder, Goodcole shrewdly realized, was among the stories they liked best.
So, the chaplain turned his hand to producing broadsides: cheaply printed prose pamphlets detailing the lives and crimes of the prison’s most dangerous inmates. The broadsides featured hyperbolic, often wildly embellished last confessions and “interviews” with the condemned, and for a long time Goodcole was one of the most eminent authors on the true crime scene.
But he wasn’t the only one making money from murder. Around the country, town leaders and clergymen reported on gruesome local killings as a means — at least officially — of deterring the criminally inclined. Such publications as “The Triumphs of God’s Revenge Against the Crying and Execrable Sinne of Wilful and Premeditated Murther,” written by an Exeter merchant named John Reynolds and sold on Fleet Street beginning in 1621, exaggerated the details of both the scandalous crimes committed by his subjects and the punishments meted out to them. Who could be blamed if the public was willing to empty its pockets for such titillation?
Soon enough, anyone with access to a printer’s shop could produce broadsides and tout them to an audience hungry for sensationalism. By the 19th century, murder mania had seized London. Killers such as William Corder, James Greenacre and Daniel Good became household names, their effigies erected in wax in Madame Tussaud’s infamous Chamber of Horrors. Theaters put on shows about the dastardly and the depraved. So-called penny dreadfuls — cheap, serialized novellas — told of wayward highwaymen and slaughtered maidens.
For much of the century, capital punishment still took place in public. Huge crowds turned out to watch the carnivalesque spectacles of hangings, including Charles Dickens, who wrote in a letter to The Times of London in 1849 that he’d never seen a “sight so inconceivably awful as the wickedness and levity of the immense crowd.” He attended hangings more than once, purely to get the full picture for use in his writings, of course.
London’s broadside and street ballad salesmen pounced on the true crime fervor with gleeful entrepreneurialism, leading the satirical magazine Punch to accuse them of profiting from “the abomination of blood.” The broadsides were churned out quickly and sequentially whenever a crime caught public interest. First, they covered the particulars of the crime; then the trial; and, finally and “most profitably,” as the historian Judith Flanders writes in “The Invention of Murder” (2011), the “sorrowful lamentation” or “last confession” of the criminal, often including a vivid description of the execution (even if it hadn’t yet taken place). Such intensive coverage transformed killers into celebrities. At James Greenacre’s hanging, pies and portrait illustrations were sold in his honor.
Some broadsides sold over a million copies, often at the foot of the gallows with a body still swinging. In 1849, at the double hanging of Frederick and Maria Manning — a husband-and-wife duo who murdered Maria’s lover and stashed his body beneath their flagstone floor — an estimated two and a half million broadsides were purchased, more than 30 times the number of copies of the popular Illustrated London News sold the year before.
Over time, broadsides grew more sophisticated, if not in content then at least in format. From single sheets for the semiliterate, they blossomed into multi-page editions featuring intricate woodcuts of dead bodies and brutally comic action scenes. Headlines promised “Barbarous and Awful Murder,” “Great and Horrible News” or “Elegiac Lines on the Tragical Murder of Poor Daft Jamie.”
The stories themselves were sometimes patently plagiarized. One popular broadside, “A Copy of Verses on Mary Arnold, the Female Monster” (1843), told of a woman who, in order to make her daughter a more successful beggar, blinded her by placing beetles in nutshells and tying them over her eyes until they ate through her flesh. Presented as fact, the story was a plotline lifted from G.W.M. Reynolds’s “The Mysteries of London,” a penny dreadful series that in the 1850s attracted more readers than Dickens.
As public hangings ceased and newspapers became cheap enough for the working class to obtain, broadsides eventually fell out of favor. But the precedent was set. Today, theories about our appetite for true crime stories abound. Some posit that we read them to satisfy a human need to play detective, to bring order to chaos. As Alice Bolin puts it in “Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession” (2018), “Our cultural obsession with murder stories and the criminal justice system is a prime example of the impulse to narrativize a reality that is basically unexplainable.” Others submit that we turn to such tales for lessons in how to avoid becoming victims ourselves, or because they encourage empathy, which has a beneficial social function.
Yet the idea that we feed ourselves true crime stories because they have something to teach us — because they are good for us — sidesteps an uncomfortable truth: We read these stories because they provide pleasure. We are gluttons for the grisly. We devour and we clamor, voraciously chewing over the details of murder. And so, just as there will always be crime, there will always be someone, pen held aloft, waiting to write all about it.
