Crime News: Why We Feel the Call

This crime news article is published in issue 38 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until September 17, 2024.

A girl is found on a beach.

It is not known where she came from, it is not known how she died. The silence of that morning, in which there is only the man who discovered the body and a person who no longer exists, is about to be torn apart by an increasingly insistent chorus of voices, morbidly contradictory. The police, the doctors, the press, the curious, the neighbors, the distant acquaintances, the politicians. A scene from a distant time, which It could be a scene from today. The noise, the obsession for the dynamics of the facts return with amplified means, between documentaries and podcasts: the monster, when it exists, is splashed across the front page and on Spotify. In some cases, though, with greater attention to how we treat these stories.

Going back to that girl: it is Wilma Montesidied in April 1953 and was found on the seashore in Capocotta (Rome). The story of her death, never really solved, creates a before and after in Italian crime news: unprecedented media coverage, thanks also to the alleged involvement of names linked to the Christian Democrats and the Roman dolce vita. Montesi’s private life, his relationships, the underwear he wore: everything is shared with the public and, in the meantime, the opposing factions within the government are waging war over his body.

This chorus of voices, from Greek tragedy (and, after all, it is at least from Greek tragedy that we become passionate about bloody events), returns in Wilmasecond novel by Silvia Cassioli (the Assayer). The writer and poet had already dealt with a news story in the book The goaton the monster of Florence. Montesi arrived there without the intention of creating a dark saga.

«I almost drowned one summer, and I think that’s what struck me. story of a girl who maybe drowned, maybe not“, Cassioli says. She remembers, as a child, having heard about it, and somehow it must have remained in her memory: “When the teacher made us pray in class once I asked that the Wilma Montesi case be solved”. What she wanted to convey on the page was how the story was told, and above all “the feeling of navigating a sea of ​​conflicting informationas we also do today on the Internet: you can find everything and the opposite of everything.”

Excerpts from newspaper articles, which have a personality like real characters; imagined comments from neighbors, parents, sister, Wilma herself, who otherwise no longer has a voice. Medical reports, opinions from professionals, the police, people accused at a certain point (Piero Piccioni, Alida Valli’s boyfriend and son of the national secretary of the DC; the “marquis” Ugo Montagna) they crowd throughout the book, sometimes repeating themselves, often contradicting themselves. «I was interested in recovering the sensational tone of the programs of the time», explains Cassioli.

70 years have passed since «first media case of republican Italy»but the same curiosity for crime news remains. In October 2014, it was released in the United States Seriala podcast by
investigative journalism. After that first season, the audiovisual landscape has changed:
since 2020, Serial is owned by the New York Timesbut in the meantime true crime podcasts are
blooming everywhere.

In Italy there was Poison by Pablo Trincia, then Elisa True Crime which is consistently at the top of Spotify’s overall charts. In 2022 Investigations by Stefano Nazzi, which focuses more on the investigative and judicial aspects of the cases covered, rewrites the rules of the game once again. The offer today is vast, so much so «that we find ourselves always listening to the same cases», says Caterina C., who from reading crime novels has come to podcasts. «When it was called crime news, we enthusiasts were considered a bit strange, now it’s true crime and it’s a trend».

Not only closed or never resolved cases, far from us: we comb through the news and we question ourselves about the bloody event of the day. This summer, while we were still fresh from the documentary on Yara Gambirasio, a murder that occurred not far from Brembate filled the news for its brutality: a girl was out for a walk, and a stranger attacked her without knowing her.

«In listening to even very dramatic stories, which really happened, and in going to see the
places – I think of the “horror tourism” –, those places and those stories become effigies of something that calls us in an enigmatic way, as if we wanted to understand more. This allows us to explore emotionally very strong internal states and It gives us the opportunity to identify with the different actors, without running the risk of participating or being subjected to them“, observes Dr. Giada Fanti, a psychologist with a psychoanalytic orientation. “Furthermore, they allow us to locate evil outside, outside of ourselves.” In reference to the case of Sharon Verzeni, the girl killed in the Bergamo area, Fanti notes that “regarding the man who hit the girl, someone said that he had a borderline personality. Those who commit these acts are often described as “crazy, inhuman.” So Let’s separate the “alienated” from us who read, who are instead “normal”».

The key word to understand the passion for true crime, according to Fanti, is “disturbing”:
something that is both foreign and familiar. On the one hand, violence is outside, in a person
unknown. On the other hand, «these events call us because they are human, too human“. Very
more “normal” than we think, in short. Freud said that hate comes before love,
psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller that nothing is more human than crime: «To be in a
society, creating bonds of friendship and love, instead it takes a commitment that cannot be taken for granted”, he says
Infantry. And he emphasizes that There are not always pathologies in people who perform acts
criminals: of course, the issue of the “banality of evil” returns, but it is also necessary “not
superimposing vulnerable people onto the concept of social dangerousness».

The problem of the representation of crime in the media, for Fanti, is «thein a sensationalist voicewhich then leads to thinking that the only way is to lock up these “crazy” people, separate them from society”. Furthermore, The more you push on the morbid side (the number of stab wounds, how much blood), the more you increase the perception of living in a dangerous place.. «Telling crime stories well helps exorcise fear, to process violence. If done in a scabrous way, the world seems terrible. And maybe it is, but we are all part of it».

And the ethical dilemma has finally arrived even in the varied world of podcasts. «Describe in the
detailing the wounds received and the blows inflicted only makes sense if it serves to reconstruct how they
the investigators reasoned, otherwise I prefer to gloss over it, and I say it explicitly”, he says
Federica Frezzawhich with Martina Peloponesi he created Bouquet of Madnessa podcast where a
each episode tells two different news stories, often foreign.

“Usually We try to put trigger warnings when we talk about events involving minors, or stories of abuse or suicide». Bouquet of Madness (BoM for fans) was born in the midst of the pandemic, Frezza and Peloponesi knew each other as YouTubers, and had the idea of ​​doing a project together, in which they shared the stories that struck them the most. The structure remained the same as in the beginning: each one chooses a case, without revealing it to the other. Possibly, little known. Then they prepare, collect the sources and tell the story to the other. The tone is, as much as possible, colloquial, two friends commenting on a fact.

Their community is very fond of them, so much so that they have started recording live episodes, in front of the public. «At least 85 percent are women. I think it’s partly due to the fact that as women we are more exposed to danger. It seems surreal to me to have this conversation, but Every week we talk about women who have lost their lives: the ratio is 80 to 20“, says Peloponesi. Again, delving into true crime to exorcise fear: in the case of BoMthere is also a further step: «Those who listen to us write to us that they feel more aware. Sometimes when we deal with cases with toxic relationships, they tell us that they look at their own and maybe realize some things.“. “We have a catchphrase in BoM“Better safe than dead”, came directly from our community», adds Frezza.

Of all the cases they studied, the ones that struck them the most were the “closest”: people with the same interests as them, of the same age group, or who performed extremely everyday gestures like them before disappearing into thin air. «Man is always attracted by things he does not understand. It has been like this since the dawn of time, what we do is the continuation of the stories that were told around the fire in prehistory».

With the necessary evolutions: if a case like that of Wilma Montesi, which dragged on over time, without any culprits, and reached politics, happened today, how would we tell it? «Maybe the interest in delving into private life, as it was then, would no longer be the case: it is too obvious, we would be indignant. But I do not exclude more subtle, more disguised forms“, reflects the writer Cassioli. They are still very, too human facts.

To subscribe to Vanity Fair, click here.