Savage Appetites

An excellent book examining the causes of murder obsession, its impact on those who experience it and the consequences for wider society. The darker side of murder obsession (notably copycat killers) should not, Monroe argues, detract from the fact that murder obsessions can result in empowering positives such as righting judicial wrongs and victim advocacy.

| By: Oliver Daddow | Published: Aug 11, 2026

Rachel Monroe, Savage Appetites: True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession (New York: Scribner, 2019)

This unique book explores why individuals may be consumed by an obsession with murder, and the impact such obsessions can in turn have on society. Monroe argues that, contrary to the focus on the unsavoury side of murder obsessions, they do not have to be a wholly negative phenomenon. Channelled appropriately, they can be used to correct judicial wrongs and spark campaigns for victim justice. Clearly there is a balance to be struck between glorifying killers and understanding them to improve everyone's safety, especially that of our most vulnerable citizens. Monroe takes us through four genres of murder obsessional, each with a very different story to tell: detective; victim; defender; and killer.   

The murder obsessional-turned detective centres on the figure of Frances Glessner Lee (1878-1962), widely revered as the “mother of forensic science”. Lee’s wealthy industrialist father barred her from attending university because he did not believe it was the done thing for a woman to receive an educatioin to that level. From childhood, however, Lee had been fascinated by medicine. As she grew up she educated herself about medicine’s application to crime investigation, finding what was then known as "legal medicine" to be in a parlous state: under-funded, under-studied, misunderstood, and poorly integrated into police training and practice. She “decided that her cause would be improving and professionalizing death investigation” (p28). After her father died, Lee inherited a small fortune, donating $250,000 (around $5 million today) to Harvard University, establishing its Department of Legal Medicine, the first of its kind in the US (p29). Lee took an active role in the department’s direction throughout her life, sometimes irking the fusty academics. 

In parallel, Lee advocated for reforming the police and judicial practices to include scientifically-informed legal medicine at all stages of murder investigations. Her activism was aided and abetted by her close friend George Magrath, Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School and Boston’s chief medical examiner. In their crosshairs was the US’s system of elected coroners, widely known to be inept, ignorant, corrupt or sometimes all three (p29). Lee and Magrath had them replaced with “medical examiners who had specialized training in death investigation” (p29). To the already lengthy list of Lee’s achievements in the field of forensics we must add her Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, known simply as the 'Nutshells’, which Lee painstakingly began crafting in the 1940s. The dioramas – twenty crime scenes crafted to doll-house size – combined Lee’s finely honed talents for art and science. They may have been small, but Lee had grand ambitions for them. 

Each Nutshell tests officers’ powers of observation and investigative antennae – nothing in each scene is as it seems on first look. Lee’s Nutshells have been used by generations of police trainees to help them think laterally about crime scenes, identify fact from fiction, and improve the rate of safe homicide convictions. They featured in the Harvard seminars for police officers that Lee founded in the 1940s, consisting of “lectures on cutting-edge [forensic] techniques followed by attempts to solve the Nutshells” (p57). In 2017, the Nutshell’s were put on display at the Smithsonian Museum’s Renwick Gallery, establishing Lee not just as the mother of forensic science but, equally, as a feminist and artist (p54). The exhibition shows “how a woman co-opted traditionally feminine crafts to advance the male-dominated field of police investigation and to establish herself as one of its leading voices”. Lee’s unwavering dedication and perseverance meant that “a century after Lee was denied a college education by her father, the field she found so fascinating – now definitively referred to as forensics – became one of the few science careers where the vast majority of students were women” (pp46-7). One woman’s obsession with the truth behind the façade of crime scenes has therefore had a radical impact on how we investigate and prosecute murders today.

If Glessner represents the murder obsessional turned detective, Monroe tells the story of victim-obsessives through the prism of the Family Manson cult murders that took place in Los Angeles over four nights in August 1969. Nine people died during the cult’s killing spree, but none attracted quite the level of attention as glamorous actress Sharon Tate, the eight-and-a-half-month pregnant wife of film director Roman Polanski. The chilling assasinations of Tate and her child have been investigated to the point of saturation over the years. The unctuous Bill Nelson (who turned out to be a convicted child sex offender) is one such prominent exponent. Lisa Statman, another character to have made a healthy living off Tate’s murder, is not far behind. Like flies flocking to dung or vultures picking over bones, victim-obsessives exoploit the detritus murders leave behind in their own interests: “Because she’s dead, the victim can become whatever people need her to be. Because she’s dead, we can say anything we want about her, and she can’t talk back. For some people, she is more valuable this way: holy, symbolic, silent” (p90). This sub-theme concerning reductive narratives about victims will receive attention in my book, concerning the character assassination my father received in court, at the hands of his killers, repeated uncritically in the media.   

Tate’s family had a far less easy time knowing how to deal with Sharon's untimely death. Her father, military man P.J., tried to avoid the subject altogether, numbing his pain via an unhealthy addiction to alcohol. Sharon’s sisters repressed their grief and moved on with their lives away from the intense, tiresome media scrutiny. Sharon’s mother Doris, however, embarked on a one-woman mission to promote victims’ rights. In the 1960s and 1970s “Researchers were… realizing that the impact of violence on family members and friends...  was much more diffuse and long-lasting than previously thought” (p82). Grief, it was being found, is not confined to individuals but gets “passed around communities like a disease, and ... inside a family like the worst kind of inheritance” (p119). Doris decided to make common cause with other parents who had lost children to murder, founding the Parents of Murdered Children (POMC) support group, part of “a growing political movement calling for expanded legal rights for victims” (p83). After Doris’s death from cancer, Sharon’s sister Patti decided to “connect with the family tragedy that she’d repressed for so long” (p98) and took up the cudgel in Doris and Sharon's memory. We cannot, Monroe argues, understand contemporary justice in the US without accounting for the POMC's advocacy on behalf of victims in the legal system.

At the point of contrast between how these two sets of people reacted to Sharon Tate's murder, we have the crux of the chapter: how we hear from victims after their death matters. “I had never before thought about the terrible privacy of murder – how something so awful could be done to you and the only person who would ever know what had happened was the person who did it. …How they got to own the story” (p91). On the one hand, the Nelsons and Statmans of the world speak for victims in ways, and to a degree, that is exploititative to the point of re-victimisation. On the other hand, the Tate family’s campaign for victim justice and penal reform shows that prosocial movements can emerge from homicide. I took from the chapter that the best we can do for murder victims is not to glamorise their death, their killers, or impose our narrative on theirs. As far as possible we should let victims speak to us on their own terms, through the people who knew them best – but only if, and when, those people wish to tell the victim's story. 

“If the detective knew everything and the victim felt everything, the defender was the one who fixed everything” (p145).  The 1996 'Paradise Lost' documentary about the 1993 murder of three eight-year old boys in West Memphis, Arkansas, had a profoundly unsettling effect on Lorri Davis. “She couldn’t get it out of her head. She kept thinking about the misfit kids from her high school. .. She kept thinking about Damien [Echols]” (p125). Echols was one of three older boys tried and convicted for the children’s murders. Echols had been sent to death row, the other two were sentenced to life imprisonment (p135). 

The conviction was full of holes and manifestly unsafe. It was a by-product of the ‘Satanic Panic’ that gripped the US in the 1970s and 1980s following the Manson Family murders (see above). The US authorities and public became seduced by stories of malevolent cult-type leaders influencing gullible followers to commit vile atrocities, many of them centring on children (p129). The Ronald Reagan administration bought the narrative, that violence against children, as well as against women, was going dangerously under-reported and overlooked in the justice system. The media fell compliantly in line, with police officers turned satanic crime experts extemporising across the airwaves about the thousands of children were dying or in grave danger. Satanic Panic tapped into something deep in the US's fears of violent crime post-Manson. However, it both inflated the actual number of crimes being committed and the structural reasons behind them, which were nothing to do with Beelzebub and more to do with fractures in US society at the time. 

Lorri began writing to Damien in his death row prison cell. Over thousands of letters and, later, regular prison visits they developed a close bond to the point where, after a number of years, they married at a small prison ceremony. Lorri, who from the off had qualms about the conviction of the ‘West Memphis Three’, found that her relationship with Damien only strengthened her resolve to see justice done. Central to her thinking was that “No solid physical evidence tied the three teenagers to the crimes, and no credible evidence suggested they had ever met or interacted with the victims. There was no clear motive” (p154). Drawing on a new form of digital technology known as the internet, the case gained wide public traction through what became a hugely popular website where the case could be discussed and dissected by thousands of amateur sleuths: wm3.org (p145). 

Advances in DNA analysis through the 1990s produced a major breakthrough for wm3 activists, by revealing that there had been thousands of unsafe convictions in the US. 1989 saw the first DNA-based exoneration: since then more than 2,300 people have been exonerated using DNA evidence. The innocents who got freed, disproportionately black men, had served nearly twenty-one thousand years for crimes they did not commit (p161). It still took until 2010 for the Arkansas Supreme Court to reopen the case of the West Memphis Three (p165), to hear the presentation of the new evidence. The convicted men were freed from prison in August 2011 but had to settle for an Alford Plea: pleading guilty while still proclaiming their innocence (p166). They would have preferred a re-trial but this would have taken many more years of emotional strain and heartache. An Alford Plea was the quickest way to end the nightmare – especially for Echols, who by this time was in a state of slow mental collapse. So this was another obsession that resulted in a positive outcome, although it came at a price. There is, Monroe argues, always the danger you might wake up one day knowing you have succeeded but you've been "sucked dry" by the incessant capaigning over such a long period: “there’s hardly anything left of you” (p169).              

The fourth and most dangerous murder obsessionals are the copycats who take their murder obsessions to deadly levels of their own. This story is told through a mass shooting designed to take place on Valentine’s Day 2015 at a shopping mall in the Canadian city of Halifax. Its principal architects were Lindsay Souvannarath, 23, and James Gamble, who was 19, with assistance from Gamble’s friend, 20-year old Randall ‘Randy’ Shepherd, who operated as the plot’s chief “cheerleader”. Souvannarth was supposed to meet Gamble at his home in Halifax on 13 February 2015, where he would already have shot his parents. They would spend the night together then on Valentine's Day, with the Halifax Shopping Mall at its busiest, they wanted to shoot as many innocents as they could with hunting rifles. They further planned to lob Molotov cocktails around for dramatic effect, all the while making sure those filming the killings survived to make their atrocities famous. The conspirators wanted a place in history.   

As you can see from their obsession with image and the visual 'performance' of murder – Souvannarth in particular was obsessed about what they would wear at the mall – the plot’s origins lie in the Columbine school massacre of 14 students and one teacher on 20 April 1999, with a further 21 injured. It was “the second-most covered news event of the 1990s” after the trial of O.J. Simpson (p187). The online dissemination of the papers and writings of the two shooters responsible, released as part of the judicial process, had the unintended consequence of turning Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold into “icons of rebellion” (p189). In the digital world of the “Columbiners” – fans who fixated on the crime and the perpetrators – Harris and Klebold got re-narrated as misunderstood revolutionaries fighting back against school “jock” culture. The shootings thus produced a distinct and disturbing internet fandom, glorifying the murderers as “love objects” in a fashion usually reserved for pop stars and sports icons (p195). 

Meeting online through one such Columbine fansite in 2014, Souvannarth and Gamble represent everything dangerous about the Columbiners, who venerate mass murderers to fill some kind of psychological emptiness in their own lives. The Nazi inflection to the Columbine fandom in general, and the Halifax plotters in particular, is the most egregious amongst the “various manifestations of a worldview that insisted what mattered most was power, and that getting attention gave you power, and that the quickest way to get attention was through violence” (pp222-3). I took from this chapter the idea that “Many Columbine experts posit that neither Harris nor Klebold would’ve murdered their classmates on their own; rather, there was something fatal in their dynamic” (p198). The same went for the Halifax plotters. In other words, those involved in a conspiracy might not have had the motive or the means to commit the act by themselves. However, a toxic relationship can breathe life into a conspiracy, as potential conspirators egg each other on,, magnifying each others' worst traits and darkest ambitions. This sub-theme around the social-psychology of murder conspiracies will also feature in my book, as an explanation fort the unstoppable momentum that can build behind them, which becoems greater than the sum of its parts.    

Not all murder conspiracies succeed, however. The Halifax conspirators’ plot was foiled when the local “police’s Crime Stoppers tip line received information about a local teenager, his online girlfriend, and their Valentine Day’s plans” (p215). The police surrounded James’s house and called him on his mobile to encourage him out for questioning. While the officers waited there was a loud blast from inside the house: Gamble had shot himself in the head (p216). At that point, Lindsay was on a flight into Halifax from Illinois. The police did not take long to connect her to the crime and she was arrested at the airport, along with James’s friend Randy Shepherd who had been detailed to collect Lindsay and deliver her to James’s house for a night of passion before the rampage (p216).  

In November 2016 Randy was convicted of helping James keep the massacre a secret, despite knowing everything the pair planned to do, and for intent to supply some of the materiel the pair would use. He was sentenced to ten years in prison for conspiracy to murder. Six months later, charged with conspiracy to murder, Lindsay switched her plea to guilty after she realised her extensive chat logs and fawning neo-Nazi sketches and musings, would be admissible as evidence against her (p217).  She was sentenced to life in prison (p229). Columbine is clearly an obsession that has never released its grip on her. In August 2025 Souvannarath was considered for parole at a ten-year review hearing. However, it was noted that during her time in custody, Souvannarath had exchanged messages with an American neo-Nazi classified by the Canadian government as a terrorist.  There was more: “You have made conscious decisions to deceive people about your thoughts that support radicalized violence”. The Correctional Service Canada was left with only one option: “it does not believe your risk is manageable on conditional release”. Souvannarath remains in custody. 

This excellent study reads as four books in one, but because they coalesce around the unifying theme of murder obsession it never feels too much. For the most part it alights on the positives that can come from murder obsessions. However, the darker side of murder obsession is always lurking stage-left, as something we have to live with as a society. The results at the darker end of murder obsession can be fatal, so they should never be ignored, indulged or exploited. At times unsettling, always insightful and thoroughly well crafted, the last word has to be Monroe’s: “Perhaps true crime stories are contemporary fairy tales – not the Disney versions but the dimmer, Grimm-er ones, where the parents are sometimes homicidal, where the young girls don’t always make it out the forest intact” (p233).  

Image credits: 
Image 1: author’s own
Image 2: courtesy https://flashbak.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/frances-glessner-lee.jpg
Image 3: author’s own
Image 4: author’s own.