How many "cold" cases are actually just forgotten victims?

From Jack the Ripper to the Gilgo Beach murders

If someone commits a crime, does it mean they can’t be victims of another crime?

It seems in case after case, victims are more easily written off if they’ve already committed a ‘crime’ — even if that crime was to simply exist outside the parameters of what the powerful deem acceptable. We routinely make villains out of victims to suit a narrative.

Even now, Kilmar Abrego Garcia is unequivocally a victim: he was sent to a notorious prison in El Salvador despite having protected status in the U.S., no criminal record, and no good evidence that he is a gang member. Still, he was characterized by AG Pam Bondi as “not a Maryland man” (he’s resided in Maryland for over a decade). Bondi claims that if not for the initial administrative error that landed him in prison, he would be deported there because El Salvador is his “home country, where he belongs.” Fox News was generous enough to identify Abrego Garcia as an “alleged” MS-13 gang member in a recent headline — hardly the salient point of his predicament. What is Abrego Garcia’s crime, apart from wearing a Chicago Bulls hoodie? He did initially enter the United States illegally, but in 2019 a judge ruled that he could not be deported for safety reasons. Still, Trump has refused to take action to recover him, even after several courts ordered he do so.

This is an example of person reshaped into a villain so that we might excuse ourselves into forgetting them.

We saw another example of making a victim into a villain in the Netflix hit Adolescence. It attracted a great deal of attention for its depiction of misogyny and male violence against women, but also fell down in its framing of the murder victim. I won’t go into detail since there is no shortage of excellent essays on the series, but it did portray a voiceless Katie as complicit in her murder since she harassed Jamie on social media. This flawed depiction is deftly unpacked by Y.L. Wolfe on the On The Outside.

Thanks to my (slight) addiction to true crime series’ about murdered women, I noticed the same habit playing out in the new limited series Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer on Netflix. This isn’t new, of course. Women who are raped or murdered are routinely blamed for putting themselves at risk in one way or another. The problem for me, this week, was that I watched it over the same few days as I listened to the Bad Women podcast, which also shows us how the Jack the Ripper victims were victimized after their murders.

This week has been like watching women bang their heads against a wall for a hundred and fifty years.

But first Gone Girls. It takes us inside the badly fumbled investigation of a series of bodies discovered on Gilgo Beach in Long Island, New York. The identified victims were all sex workers. There is a lot of old boys’ club drama inside the Suffolk County Police Department that I won’t bother to share, but suffice it to say they declined support from the FBI, failed to follow important leads and closed rank when the police chief was revealed to have hired sex workers to perform acts inside his police car. He was also rumored to call the murders of sex workers “misdemeanor murders” (a claim he denies). The police, in an attempt to calm the community as the many bodies were discovered, said the victims were involved in “high risk business.” It took more than ten years for the police to make any serious breakthrough in these murders.

In the Bad Women: The Ripper Retold podcast and book The Five, historian Hallie Rubenhold shows us how claims that all of the 1888 Jack the Ripper murder victims were prostitutes are based on flimsy evidence. The first victim, Polly Nichols, had been married with five (FIVE!) children when she left her family for unknown reasons and tried to make it on her own. By virtue of being a woman alone in Victorian London, she was already a victim. She was poor, homeless, and desperate. Still, based on Rubenhold’s research, there is no evidence based on her life and movements up until her murder that she was a sex worker. Further research indicates that police and society generally labeled any single, destitute woman, or any woman who had sex with anyone outside of marriage, as a prostitute, whether she solicited for sex or not. Polly’s roommate and her father both testified that they did not know Polly to be “fast” or “unclean” — yet Polly and four other women have been labeled as prostitutes for over a century. As Rubenhold notes, they were “characterized as society’s waste.” Perhaps if the police had not made this assumption from the start, Jack the Ripper would have been captured.

And now for another example from the 20th century. New York Times reporter Kim Barker investigated a cold case in her hometown of Laramie, Wyoming. Shelli Wiley was murdered in 1985, and her murderer is still unidentified. A police officer, Fred Lamb, was in an apartment next door at the time of the murder, did not rush to the scene to help, and was not treated as a serious subject for decades, despite his blood being at the scene. In one early police interview with Lamb, there is this exchange:

“Apparently this chick ran with a pretty heavy crowd, they weren’t the salt of the earth types.”

“Well, it might have caught up with her.”

In further interviews, the police asked her friends: Was Shelli promiscuous? Did she like sex? Did she have any quirks when it came to sex? Did she have any homosexual tendencies?We’re looking for a motive…

The implication of their line of questioning is that Shelli was engaging in risky behavior. She had it coming, as they say.

In all of these stories, the women were revictimized after their deaths. The cases were categorized as “cold,” but did they need to be? In the Laramie and Gilgo murders, police looked the other way when their fellow officers were implicated in any way, and treated these victims as unworthy of attention because they put themselves at risk by (potentially) having sex.

I am the oldest of six girls, and the daughter of a police officer I respect and admire. He warns me relentlessly about taking steps to protect myself in various situations, all based on crimes he’s encountered at work. His advice includes being aware of my surroundings, not carrying a big purse, etc. But it’s also advice on how to avoid an attack by a bad man. I’ve been in a few questionable situations that made me think, if something bad happens, Dad’s going to be so mad at me. At the same time, however, I wonder why it’s my responsibility to learn how to not get raped or killed, instead of society telling men to learn not to rape or kill women? And not only that, how about actually punishing the men who commit the crimes, rather than making up reasons the victims were somehow responsible.

I know the answer, but it’s still incredibly frustrating.

In most cases, these women suffered before their murders simply because they shirked societal normals, and in some cases turned to prostitution as a way to survive. After their murders, they were victimized all over again by being labeled “bad” for the same reasons. Even for victims who are not sex workers, we ask, why did she go into his hotel room? What was she doing walking alone at night? She shouldn’t have worn that skirt or had that drink.

We want to believe we will be safe because we’re not like them. But are we really so different? Just a few things need to go wrong for life to begin falling apart. Polly had a brand-new Peabody flat, a husband and five children — and ten years later she was murdered in an alley in London. Abrego Garcia has lived in the U.S. since 2011. He has family in America, a wife and child. And now?