A provocative and original investigation of our cultural desire for crime, linking 4 archetypes—Detective, Sufferer, Defender, Killer—to 4 true tales about ladies driven by obsession.

With this illuminating exploration of ladies, violence, and obsession, Rachel Monroe interrogates the selling point of true criminal offense through four narratives of fixation. In the 1940s, a disappointed heiress started creating dollhouse crime moments depicting murders, suicides, and unintentional deaths. Known as the “Mom on the subject of Savage Appetites: Four Accurate Stories of Females, Criminal offense, and Obsession of Forensic Technology,” she revolutionized the field of that which was after that called legal medicine. In the aftermath of the Manson Family members murders, a woman moved into Sharon Tate’s guesthouse and, over the next two decades, entwined herself using the Tate family. In the mid-nineties, a scenery architect in Brooklyn fell deeply in love with a convicted murderer, the supposed ringleader from the West Memphis Three, via an intense series of letters. Once they wedded, she committed her life to getting him freed from death row. And in 2015, a teenager deeply involved in the on the web fandom for the Columbine killers planned a mass shooting of her very own.

Each female, Monroe argues, represents and identifies with a specific archetype that delivers an entryway into true criminal offense. Through these four cases, she traces the history of American crime through the growth of forensic science, the evolving function of victims, the Satanic Stress, the rise of on the web detectives, and the long shadow from the Columbine capturing. In a combined mix of personal narrative, reportage, and a sociological examination of violence and mass media in the twentieth and twenty-first century, Savage Appetites scrupulously explores empathy, justice, and the persistent selling point of assault.