On Teaching (and Not Teaching) True Crime in Creative Nonfiction

My second CNF course is underway, and the class members are enthusiastic and engaged. We’ve just started the essay, both lyric and personal, and students are enjoying sharing their favourite David Sedaris pieces.

But we’ve also just learned of a tragic death in our college community, and I’m feeling jolted back to last winter, when a student at the college was murdered. One of her friends was in my CNF section and I had (ill advisedly, as it turned out) included a week of True Crime reading/writing on our course outline. I knew from surveying class members about their interests that this was a favourite sub-genre, but the timing was wretched.

When I checked in with students at the end of the term, views about teaching True Crime in CNF were mixed: some really appreciated reading Amanda Knox’s impassioned approach to journalistic ethics in the investigation and prosecution of murder. Others were moved by Rebecca Godfrey’s account of a local murder that became internationally infamous, as described in her book Under the Bridge, adapted to television. T

rue Crime raises a lot of issues about how creative nonfiction is crafted, and for writers it’s a helpful way to think through the stakes for the real people whose lives are affected by what we portray.

But for a few students, True Crime was much too much.

It re-triggered experiences of violence and abuse, or it overwhelmed them.

I should note that all of these readings were optional, and I included detailed content warnings, but that didn’t prove adequate. We don’t always know in advance what we can tolerate on any given day.

And some of the class members who reacted most strongly to the True Crime content were people who were dealing with legal processes in their own lives as the course was underway.

That was something I hadn’t anticipated at all. And I should have, because over the decades I’ve had students describe their involvement with courts, and way before that, even, I trained to do trauma-informed court accompaniment. I know that crime isn’t just theoretical–or fictional–for some of my students.

So this term, I nixed the True Crime section (and, perhaps predictably, a few class members have expressed disappointment–but they can work on crime stories for two of their assignments, which are very open in both form and content).

For some years now I’ve been contemplating a True Crime project of my own, because I’m haunted by a local murder case. It took place several blocks from where my family was living, just a couple of years after we moved to Victoria.

We were still newcomers, and Victoria (because it’s a beautiful place, and it’s on an island) can be a wee bit insular: it takes a while for Come-from-aways to be accepted.

But we were welcomed by our neighbours, which included the Oak Bay police officer and his family next door; their daughter became our babysitter. And I became a bit more police news-informed than I had been previously.

Oak Bay is quiet. We don’t have a lot of violent deaths. But in the two decades that I’ve lived here there have been two horrific instances of what’s called familicide, or family annihilation, where a family member–almost always male–kills his whole family, often then committing (or attempting) suicide.

One of these was this 2007 case, where a man killed his wife (who had sought help several times), her parents, and their young son. The other was the Christmas day murder of two little girls by their father several years ago; he was in debt and estranged from their mother.

Here’s a thing about policing in my city: we have multiple police forces that work cooperatively but separately for Oak Bay, Victoria, and Saanich. And then there’s the RCMP, which covers much of the West Shore, including Langford. This is in a small geographic area, which means that an offender–like the father in the 2008 case–might have pending charges in multiple jurisdictions that are adjacent. And back in 2007, information sharing was not as efficient as it is now.

My controversial and oft-stated view, which makes me unpopular with, say, Oak Bay police neighbours, is that we need integrated policing.

Right now, the burden of policing downtown Victoria falls entirely on the Victoria police; policing “downtown” Oak Bay is quite a different matter, in scope and scale. This makes working in Oak Bay a desirable gig, and we get a lot of former RCMP officers seeking to ease into a quieter and less stressful life.

I get it. My stepbrother was a beat cop in Winnipeg for 25 years, and a heart attack killed him the year he was due to retire. Policing is stressful and exhausting; every day is a potential disaster.

And we had wonderfully sympathetic and helpful assistance from the Oak Bay police when we had an attempted break-in back in 2015, and we were all home, asleep.

It was a scary experience, but it was enlivened by the arrival of the sniffer dog and his handler, and the willingness of the police to brief me on their investigative techniques as they took fingerprints, measurements, and photos. It was highly informative, but I was also in shock, and talking helped. They were very kind to me.

But women and children who are dealing with violent former spouses/fathers are not well served by potentially having to work with multiple police forces. We need to change this.