What is "Lotta True Crime" About? (Part 1)

Part 2 coming soon

Warning!

I’ll be talking about murder and things like murder here, and also Ted Bundy specifically. If you don’t want to think about those topics, this one may not be for you.

That said, I have no desire to pick through all the details of real murders and I don’t think I need to to make my points. Instead, I’m just going to talk about the victims (or rather one hypothetical, unspecified victim) in broad terms. I’m talking about Bundy and his victims as they exist as icons in our cultural mythology, and I intend on staying away from discussing their real lives. I think this is often how people already talk about these kinds of true crime stories (as if the murderer and victims are characters and not real people) and my goal here is to do so explicitly instead of half-assedly. It’s not that I don’t care about the victims’ real lives, but this is an essay about my fuckass song and the cultural themes behind it, so it doesn’t seem appropriate to populate this essay with unnecessarily painful and specific details about real murdered people. I don’t think I’ll be saying anything here that requires forensic evidence to back it up.

The Beginning:

I wrote Lotta True Crime on a whim, in the summer after my sophomore year of college, after Sweet Hibiscus Tea and Born 2 Run went viral back in the covid days, and after I’d had a drink or two. It was a very different process than what I’m used to now. I was still going for rapid cycle innovation, or the closest thing to rapid cycle innovation that an obsessive pseudo-perfectionist can muster. I didn’t know much about business or the internet, but I understood that when a spark catches, you have very little time to fan the flames. So, Lotta True Crime was designed to be fun and catchy, and to express things that were important to me. I was perhaps not as clear and precise with the message inside of it as I tend to be now, in part due to the harassment and misunderstanding I faced for that very song.

The biggest misconception about Lotta True Crime, which haunts my haters and fans alike, is that I myself am the narrator. I’m not. The narrator is fictional, as is often the case in songs and stories. I invented her to represent a role, and it’s a role that I myself don’t necessarily align with. For one thing, I don’t actually listen to a lot of true crime, and even as I wrote the song I was ambivalent about the true crime craze. That was actually part of what I was trying to get at.

I do feel a certain solidarity with the true crime podcast girlies. I resonate with their impulse to understand and mock men who torture and kill women. I also feel comforted by true crime podcast hosts who make light of a topic that is a source of pain and stress for so many women. It’s cliche to say at this point, but yeah, I am angry and hurt from having grown up in a world where violence against women and girls is so normal. I know it’s not a hot take anymore, and I say this with no sneer, but the hurt is still in there somewhere, it’s still in my body. There is still a part of me that cries and asks why these terrible things have to be, even when the adult in me knows that’s a ridiculous question to ask, that there’s no real answer. So sue me. I enjoyed the silliness and the levity of women seizing the true crime narrative and making it their own. A big part of this has to do with the question of intelligence, and the blatant disrespect these true crime girlies show towards male serial killers who we have all been taught are very clever and impressive men. The tone resonated with me, and it still does. More on that to come.

But the fact is, I am not a true crime girly. To be a true crime girly is usually to side against the murderer, often from the side of the law, the police, and the prisons. No shade to the podcast ladies, I know a lot of them make a point of being openly critical of the American criminal justice system. It just still feels like a lot of them think it’s a good system behaving poorly, and not a sinister system functioning exactly as designed, if you catch my drift. If you listen to true crime podcasts for long enough, you find yourself getting toxic on the same puritanical, punitive rhetoric you get everywhere else in America, and eventually the fact that it’s a woman saying it this time loses its shine.

When I’m being my best self, my politics and my spirituality are much larger than that. They encompass the whole story, all the stories. The angry young people who want to kill their abusers. The mothers at home who are ambivalent about their deceased children’s lives being put on display. The remorseful wrongdoers who do not get a second chance because they resemble the boogeyman. And the bad people, the really deeply bad fucking people, who wonder in their private moments if they could’ve turned out any other way. I aspire to be a person who faces the nuance in our world on purpose, even when it’s hard. So the backlash to Lotta True Crime was very odd and somewhat silly for me to receive because I’m not even a true Final Girl enthusiast. I’m just a casual true crime fan, who is herself painfully aware of the flaws in the genre.

So if I wasn’t trying to talk shit about serial killers in this fuckass song, what was the deeper point I intended to make? What is Lotta True Crime really about? 

To me, it’s really all about intelligence.

Intelligence Part 1:

How do you measure intelligence? I personally believe that intelligence has very little to do with things like logical capabilities, speed of thought, spatial reasoning, good decision making, etc. I don’t often see those things being measured effectively, or meaningfully tied to our actual perception of a person’s intelligence. I do think that intelligence is something we perceive, and not something that can exist in a person’s brain, even if everyone on earth agrees that they’re not intelligent. You can’t be objectively intelligent and then practically unintelligent in the real world. In other words, I think that intelligence is a social construct which measures how close a person is to the intellectual norm and/or ideal in a certain context.¹

I have felt pretty intelligent for most of my life. I’ve also been a good student, and to be completely honest with you, it wasn’t particularly unpleasant or difficult. This isn’t a flex – I actually feel deeply ambivalent about not really “earning” all of my good grades, and about being an antisocial nerd – but my relationship with academia informs my thoughts on Lotta True Crime. School was made easy for me. I had every opportunity to learn, so I did. Perhaps as a result, I’m comfortable writing and speaking, I’m confident in my ability to think critically, and I enjoy using my brain to solve problems. For all the things people may not like about me, I’m usually perceived as smart.

I have friends who are more functional outside of the classroom than they are in it. They are more socially fluid, and they handle uncertainty and ambiguity with much more grace than I do. More than that, it’s easy and natural for them to handle these things with grace, to respond more or less authentically in the moment. They have not had to work hard to learn how to do so the way that I have. They don’t have to sit down every day and do therapy homework in order to respond appropriately in social situations because their instincts are naturally better than mine. In these situations, I feel insecure and out of my depth, whereas these friends of mine seem intelligent.²

We all have abilities that are easily accessible to us and ones that are less so, and we all have our useful and also our painful proclivities. We learn, we adjust, and we grow. It’s not a hippie liberal copout to say that our differences do not equate to hierarchy. I don’t say that just because it sounds cute. I really believe it, and I believe that science is on my side here. This is the value of diversity. Before you can answer the question “What is best?” you have to first tell me, best for what. We find our niches and integrate into our communities precisely because we are each a little different from each other. This is so obvious and trite that I sound like a preschool teacher saying it, but it’s true, and it’s a principle I don’t see being genuinely honored much lately. I could not fill the role that my friends fill, and they could not fill mine. We create an organism that is greater than the sum of its parts. This is life. This is generation. The beauty of the fractal, the miracle of love, etc. We work together to create a context in which genius can come about. So with all of this in mind, what does it really mean to say that Ted Bundy was a genius?

Ted Bundy:

I know more about Ted Bundy than I care to. Ditto Elon Musk. You run your mouth one time and suddenly everyone’s sending you articles.

Without doing more research, and accepting that I may have missed something, here’s what I know so far. Ted Bundy was raised in a hellish, dysfunctional family that neglected and tormented him. He suffered a serious head injury as a child. As an adult, he tortured and murdered women. Somewhere in the midst of that plotline, he learned to dress fashionably for his time and got a really good score on his law exams. He also escaped from prison once or twice. Finally, he represented himself in court and was subsequently executed.

Part of the Bundy mythology is that he was supposedly very handsome and very smart. I have nothing to say about his looks. I snarked about them in the song because I was trying to be funny. I don’t think seriously about his looks, and I wouldn’t know how to.

As for the genius part - I have a few thoughts on why this idea is out there, and I have to say I am not a fan of it. I’d like to be very clear now because this is the point I was never able to express well on social media: I do not think Ted Bundy was a genius, and that has nothing to do with whether or not it would upset me if he were a genius. 

It’s not that I think Ted Bundy is stupid because I hate him, or because I wish he were stupid, or because I think only good people should get to be smart. I’m not challenging his intelligence because I don’t like him. The claim that he is a genius is not offensive to my delicate sensibilities. I just truly do not agree, and the reasons why I don’t agree are important to me. It is the very roots of the idea that he’s intelligent that I find troubling and offensive. It’s not even really about him, it’s about the ideas behind the myth. I don’t know how else to explain so I’m just going to stop dancing around it and get into it.

Getting Into It:

I think that what a lot of people are thinking but not saying is that we think Ted Bundy is an apex predator. There was skill and planning involved in his schemes to capture and kill women. We feel like we should be impressed by his ingenuity, by his thinking outside the box, by the way that he hid his true intentions and skillfully manipulated his victims such that he was able to murder dozens of women before getting caught. There is a sense that he outsmarted the victims, that they fell prey not only to his violence but to his intellect, to his manipulation. This narrative leads to a separate one that sneaks in under the radar, which I find troubling and offensive. This sneaky narrative goes like this: 

If he outsmarted his victims, then he is smarter than them. 

Therefore, if you say that he’s not smart, then you are effectively calling the victims stupid for losing to a man who isn’t smart. 

The victims can’t be remembered as smart unless he is remembered as a genius. 

And this is the sleight of hand. When we see the Bundy murders as a battle – Killer vs. Final Girl – we see a victim’s death as Bundy’s triumph over her. He killed her so he’s stronger. He killed her so he’s smarter. I’m suspicious that this, more than anything else, is what’s really at the heart of a lot of the Bundy discourse.

So my first big issue with this is that Bundy’s victims weren’t final girls, they were real human beings. They were not in a horror movie, they were in reality. They had ideas, priorities, and anxieties that they were managing just like any of us, and being a Good Final Girl™ was probably pretty fucking low on that list. Unlike serial killers, most of us do not orient our entire lives around serial murder. Most of us have communities and careers and rich internal worlds to attend to, and it would actually be insane of us to put all of these things on the back burner and focus instead on being an excellent Final Girl.³ Depicting the Bundy murders as a kind of irl escape room that his victims failed to escape might be entertaining, but it’s entirely inappropriate in serious discussions about violence and intelligence. In reality, Bundy and the women who had the misfortune of encountering him were on completely different paths.⁴ The victims’ primary goals were probably succeeding in their personal, professional, romantic, and social lives, and Bundy’s primary goal was finding an unsuspecting victim he could enact his compulsive violence on. This was not a battle of wits. It wasn’t a battle at all.

If Ted Bundy had enacted his compulsive violence on Albert Einstein, would we have concluded that Einstein was an intellectual loser? Because he was too busy solving scientific mysteries or whatever and he didn’t spend enough time preparing for the one in a million chance that he would be randomly caught off guard in a moment of contemplation and murdered for no discernable reason? Would we feel the need to stroke Ted Bundy’s dead intellectual ego, for fear of insulting the murdered Einstein’s intelligence? 

Albert Einstein lost to Ted Bundy, so Bundy must be smarter. 

Or maybe we would take stock of the insane tragedy before us and marvel at how fucked and unfair it is that a person can be minding their own business, working on their own shit, and then get fucking murdered by somebody they’ve never even met, or even by somebody they thought they knew. 

Part 2 Coming Soon…

1. You might think that the capital G Genius breaks this theory by being so clearly intellectually ideal while also straying significantly from the norm. Maybe, and this is a larger debate, but I’d just ask you to consider a broader idea of what our intellectual norm actually is. Sure, a lot of our Geniuses have been quirky, but are they really truly outside the acceptable neurotypical realm of normalcy? I don’t think so. If they were well outside this realm, would they still have been Geniuses? If Albert Einstein had been so far from the neurotypical norm that his community was unable or unwilling to understand him, how could he have become the archetypal Genius that he was?

2. It might feel odd to call this social effectiveness “intelligence”. Maybe it would feel more natural to call it emotional intelligence. I don’t feel strongly about using this particular word “intelligent” for this particular kind of proficiency, but I’d like us to consider that maybe our resistance to doing so is sexist.

3. I don’t use this word “insane” lightly here. I am literally in treatment for the kind of cognitive distortion that this behavior would entail. Abandoning your normal, healthy activities to obsessively plan for one horrific, extremely unlikely possibility is actually right up my alley, and the worst thing about it is that it doesn’t even work because we can’t control everything. The belief that we can and should control everything is itself a real threat to our lives.

4. You might even say they were playing different games.