Behind the Stand: Stephanie’s True Crime Blog

True Crime Book Clubs: Making it Ethical without Censorship.

When I refer to true crime, I refer to it as the cases of murder, assault, theft, and any type of crime that has been committed. This all falls under the umbrella of the true crime genre. Assassinations, Organized Crimes (The Mob), as well as the times of outlaws, all go into that category as well. So many books are in the true crime genre category its hard to narrow it all down for your book club. One way to narrow down what books to read is asking your group how they consume their media. If you have a lot of people in your group that all say they listen to Audiobooks, you know that you will need to find books that are available in that format. If your patrons say they need large print, making sure your books come in large print is a great way to narrow down books fast. Being accessible and accommodating to others is great way to let people know that your book club is open to anyone and everyone. Another easy way to narrow down your book list is simple to ask your book club what types of books they don’t want to read. This is a great starter. For instance, in my book club my group doesn’t want to read anything that has to do with children being harmed as the main subject. Children, for my group, means anybody under the age of 18. That means we can’t read Dear Jacob: A Mother’s Journey of Hope by Patty Wetterling, JonBonet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation by Steve Thomas or even Koresh: the True Story of David Koresh and the Tragedy of Waco by Stephen Talt. However, if the harm of a child is described in the book is brief and the book doesn’t go into detail then my group is okay with reading that book. Now you might be wondering what all this has to do with ethics and censorship. Denying a book to be apart of your book club when it breaks the ‘will not read’ category that has been established is not censorship it’s being ethically responsible towards your patrons and protecting them. What is censorship is denying a book based on your personal opinions towards the book or letting a person decode for the whole group that a book will not beAppropriate based on their own opinions. This also goes for authors as well. With that, let’s’s go into more about what an unethical book looks like and what to do when one gets picked for your book club. When you start to see the pattern of what is unethical, it will be easier to have discussions with your book club participants instead of having the urge to ban the book. An unethical true crime book will interject the authors opinions in the book rather than fact. The book will start to look like fiction more, “here’s what I know happened because it’s so obvious, and less here is what we think happened based upon the evidence and the expert testimony we were given.” The book will go into more and more detail with little to no evidence or fact to back it up. Unless these details can be direct quotes or backed up with witness statements, these details can be merely speculation. Take the book You Think You Know Me by Ryan Green. The book goes into an astounding amount of detail, for a good chunk of the book about how Herb Baumeister is the I-70 killer. Green goes into detail about how Baumeister murder these men, dumped their bodies as well as committed a slew of other crimes in very graphic details. Here’s the problem, there is absolutely no evidence that Herb Baumeister is the I-70 killer. There is speculation and there are theories that police are looking into but to write a book where half of that book presents to the audience that Baumeister as the I-70 killer as fact is unethical. This is why it’s important to do a small bit of research, before your book club and also to ask yourself and your participants the important questions. Why is this author writing this book? What is to be gained out of writing this book, what about reading this book? What research was done for this book? Finally, what resources are given for the works cited? These are the general questions that I ask my patrons when we start discussing a book and followed by more in detail questions about the book and the author. Another hint how well done a true crime book is done is how many friends and family of the victim the author got involved in the making of the book. Are there massive amounts of quotes and stories told by people who now have to go on without their loved one, or is there very little to nothing of the sort. Whenever I come across a book and the author states that the friends and family of the victim wished to remain private, I always ask myself two things. One, did they want to truly remain private or did they just not want to talk to you, and two, if the family wanted to remain private why are you writing this book.

When this topic is brought up I always think of Down the Hill: My Descent into the Double Murder in Delphi by Susan Hendricks. She not only included both families very heavily in her book but she also let Kelsi Siebert, Libby’s older sister write the introduction. This act allowed Kelsi to be apart of the story and to let her tell Libby and Abby’s story in a respectful way while also letting Susan Hendricks write the facts and her outside perspective of the crime. Another key factor that goes into how you can tell if a book is ethical or not is how the author treats the victim or victims. Does the author victim shame/blame, does the author hyper focus on the serial killer and not at all on the victims. How much detail does the author go into about the victim besides just listing off key facts about them such as their name, what they looked like and what happened to them. A perfect example I always find myself going back to in looking at is the book I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Women’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer by Michelle McNamara. I cannot express the amount of times I have ranted to my family and friends about how amazing this book is, and how i hope we never have another book like this one. For everyone who is new to the true crime world and/or has never heard about this book here is the back story. Michelle McNamara was a writer who was obsessed with finding out who the Golden State Killer was. Michelle went to whatever lengths she could to try to figure this case out. She contacted everyone that she could, she went down every single rabbit hole she could there was no lengths this women would go to in trying to figure who this guy is, and it killed her. Michelle McNamara got so obsessed with this case she started not sleeping and having nightmares, she took medication and one night went to sleep and never woke up. Her story is a tragedy and her death is a loss to the true crime community and her own family. Because of her involvement in this case it sparked a new interest by the public and with it brought back that determination to find this guy by the new detectives alongside the old detectives who had long since retired. Along with talking to all the old detectives involved with the case she also started to talk to the victims. First a few here and there. Then because of her kindness and respect, it got passed around that she was nice and so more and more victims of the Golden State Killer wanted to speak to Michelle. This is what I think her true legacy is. Having compassion and respect toward another person when speaking to them about the worst day of their life and getting them to open up to her. Then to take that and write it down in a book where you know that person is relying on you to treat that story with care was her greatest strength. Having a true crime book that has the upmost respect and compassion to the victims of the crime that have been committed is the most positive sign when reading your book. This is why the questions that you present to your book club are so important. It can help your patrons think outside the box. Looking past the average questions from your other type of book club such as “Did you like this book, What did you learn?” It can help with the bigger picture and strengthen the critical thinking aspect from your patrons. Such questions as “How did the author portray the people in the book?” “What details of the case stood out to you, why?” “What impact has the case made?” “What does the writing style tell you about the author and how does that shift how you see the book?” Overall the questions I always ask my patrons, why this author, why this case, why did they write it when they did. Any questions such as these that can make your patrons think of the bigger picture of what true crime case they are consuming and the effect this has on survivors and victims families. So with all this in mind lets talk about censorship. I do not believe in censorship, I don’t believe in telling people what they can or can’t read. I have the thought that you should form your own opinions of books. Now saying that, are there some true crime books I have read that have made me question my involvement in this genre, absolutely. However I would never tell my patrons or anybody really they can’t read something because of my opinion of the book or because of something I don’t personally believe in. This is widely different then saying we are not going to read this book during our book club because of this trigger warning that my patrons themself have set in place. One is censorship the other is keeping a book away due to patrons personal reasons.Take the book We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence by Becky Cooper.

I hate this book, the rants to my friends I have had about this book are the reason I have a time limit on how much I can talk about true crime. The problems I have with this book are way too many so here are the highlights; the author borderline stalks the professor she insists is guilty for murdering Harvard student Jane Britton, you find out more information about the author than you do Jane, the author compares herself to Jane on more than one occasion and the author writes heavily about Jane’s family and Jane’s boyfriend trying to convince them that it was the professor or possibly Jane’s boyfriend with no proof, lastly the author contacts Jane’s family a lot to try to get information about Jane without telling them she is writing a book or planning on publishing this information in any way. The book was more about the author trying to prove that the professor killed his student and that he was allowed to continue teaching on campus as if nothing had happened. When the truth was that Jane was killed by a complete stranger. And her professor suffered from the misinformation being spread, vile rumors about him and the loss of a student he admired and cared for all in the name of “True Crime”. Now would I ever tell my book club we cannot read this book, absolutely not. That would be censorship. Even though this book has everything I don’t like in a true crime book I wouldn’t forbid it. Instead I would have my patrons come into our book club so we can talk about this book in an open discussion. There are tons of ways to make your book questions ethical. The biggest one would be to make it open and accessible to everyone who comes in. Making sure everyone knows the rules of the book club that you have set in place of what cases you can talk about and what subjects to avoid are also key in gaining and keeping respect for book club participants. Also remembering how you talk about the victims in the cases you are reading about can have a huge impact too on keeping everything ethical. Remember these are real people you are talking about not characters. Finally keep in mind of the questions you ask and how you ask them. Emphasis on the questions revolving around the overall questions of why, what, and who, are all vital. All of this combined will have a positive impact on your book club but also on true crime as a whole. It’s important to always remind yourself why putting respect and ethics back into True Crime matter. When people stop seeing the people in true crime with as people and ethics is taken out of the equations you end up with a case of what happened to the survivors of Kings Street house in Moscow, Idaho. For those that don’t know the case, back in November of 2022 four University of Idaho students, Kaylee Goncalves, Xana Kernodle, Madison Mogen and Ethan Chapin, were killed in their off campus home. After 3 years Bryan Koeberger pleaded guilty and has four lifetime sentences without the possibility of parole. However there were two more students in the house Dylan Mortensen and Bethany Funke and they survived unharmed. Because the internet will always remain the internet, it wasn’t long that speculation grew that Dylan and Bethany were both involved in the murder of their 4 best friends. All caused by supposedly “online sleuths” trying to link them to the murder in anyway shape or form, even though all the evidence supports they are innocent and victims themselves. This greatly impacted their lives negatively even now. This is what happens when true crime goes to far, this is what happens when we take the ethics out of the casual enjoyment of wanting to learn about true crime. Ethics needs to be brought back, if not now then I fear it never will be. What we saw happen in the aftermath to the survivors at the King Street house should never happen to anybody every. In the book While Idaho Slept: The Hunt for Answers in the Murders of Four College Students by J. Reuben Appelman the author goes on to record all the information he knows about the murder, which isn’t a lot as the book was published in 2023. Only one year after the murder. At this point there was no information that was being leaked to the public, Bryan Kohberger was arrested a few months before the book was published and all the author had to go on was news reports, official statements, and his own speculation. Even though we still ended up reading this book for my True Crime book club as the case was resent and it was relevant, my book club hit all the important questions that needed to be asked with any book. Having a true crime book club is not easy and presents many challenges but the topics are interesting, the patrons are great and the discussions might surprise you. So go offand create your own, but remember everybody you will read about was once like you and me so treat them with empathy and respect.