Turning the tide on our obsession with true crime - Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll.

Like many women my age, our childhood and adolescence was tinted rather superficially by true crime. My mum, alongside many other mothers of my peers, spent evenings and nights glued to the TV screen obsessing over excessively produced crime shows about scorned lovers and angry families. This obsession was passed onto their children, many of us spending our weekends watching Netflix’s limited true crime series about famous serial killers and criminals alike. Recently, Netflix has released their hit show Adolescence, examining a young boy accused of murdering his classmate. Whilst this show (created by Jack Thorne and TV star Stephen Graham) is not a true crime drama, the discussions of radicalisation via the media and the manosphere incites a familiar feeling amongst its audience identical to the feeling incited by true crime dramas. 

The dread as one of our biggest fears becomes a reality. Perhaps the love of true crime passed down from mother to daughter is intended to teach us, the daughters, a lesson- a cautionary tale about how we can learn from victims so we don’t become the next one.

Jessica Knoll’s Bright Young Women is a fictional retelling of the victims of Ted Bundy- a serial killer who needs no introduction. Knoll creates a narrative that follows the perspective of two women- Pamela (an eyewitness and friend of a victim) and Ruth (one of Bundy’s victims). 

Knoll calls out and subverts typical true crime in her book, taking the power away from Bundy. The protagonists refuse to acknowledge him by anything other than “the defendant” and centres the story back to where it should have been all along- on the women who were most affected by his crimes- “Right here, right now, I want you to forget two things: he was nothing special, and what happened was not random.”

Knoll utilises Pamela as an almost direct juxtaposition to the defendant- she is the top in her class, on her way to Colombia law and eventually turns out to be a successful family lawyer. The Defendant is barely scraping by in comparison, yet it is he who the judge calls a “comrade” and who’s future he mourns- in comparison to the victims, the youngest being 12 years old, and their bright futures. 

Knoll takes all the glitz and glamour away from true crime and provides us with the harsh reality of what it really is- violence against women. Knoll ‘creates’ (said loosely, as the novel is inspired by true events) a world where justice is harder to reach than ever and retribution leads to harsher crimes than murder- seen through the police’ dismissal of Tina Cannon, the partner of Ruth. It harps back to the original message of true crime being a cautionary tale. Instead of looking at the mistakes made by the victims, who “got that feeling about him, that funny one we all get when we know something isn't right.”, Knoll looks to the mistakes of the American justice system and calls for a solidarity between women whilst urging us to focus on the victims the potential that was lost.

Knoll finishes the novel with Pamela and Martina planting fir trees near the site Ruth’s body supposedly lies- using scientific studies made by a friend of theirs looking to use nature to solve crimes. The book’s ending is the perfect symbol to the moral of the story- using the work of clever women to solve the mistakes of a crime system that was too interested ogling at a serial killer than giving families and friends enough space to mourn and celebrate the lives lost. 

By Maisie Mullen

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