As I start my true crime storytelling journey, which will mostly be done
via captions and images on Instagram, I got to thinking.
As a society, people are obsessed with true crime. There are plenty of
successful television shows and movies
based on real life criminals and cases.
But where do we draw the line?
Is anything just up for grabs because we as people
have a right to know? The freedom of information act
technically says we as a society have a right to most information
within reason.
My plan has always been to start with a case that is sort
of close to me because I lived in the city my whole life
and I unfortunately knew people who lived in the area and
were also apart of the various search parties. It hit extremely close to home
to me anyway. To this day, a children's movie and it's subsequent sequels reminds
me of this child whose stepmother brutally murdered him. Speculation
around town was more or less that on top of punishing her friend whose
husband she stole, she wanted to punish him. It's a little unclear on why.
At the time, her lawyers (who she actually tried to fire multiple times
but was eventually incapable of representing herself and was judge ordered
to have this legal council regardless of her wishes) tried to argue for a
change of venue because they thought it would be hard to find a jury who didn't
already have opinions, but that was rejected because the population of
Colorado Springs is nearly half a million. They also argued it would be hard
to find citizens who didn't see all of her various interviews with the news
companies. As for those interviews, it got progressively worse as time
went on, each getting increasingly crazier. There was desperate attempts at racial
profiling in strange attempts to avoid being suspicious herself.
Reality was that the changing stories only served to make her seem more suspicious.
Over time, the stories got more and absurd causing more suspicion.
My favorite part? After being incarcerated while awaiting trial for her crimes,
she ended up writing a desperate letter to the judge in which she
insisted she was "very smart and has a doctorate in education," a
statement that could not be validated by anyone but there was proof
of her being fired from jobs in schools because of her alleged
abuse of children.
What the letter actually did? Proved she was not insane as she claimed
in an attempt to get not guilty by reason of insanity. In the end, she was assessed
a minimum of four times by various doctors, not one finding proof
of her "insanity" except the one who was hired by her defense to say that
she was. Mind you, this was also after a cell mate revealed that
she tried to get them to help her escape the jail.
That's going to be my starting story, so please stay tuned!
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