Trials and tribulation at heart of true crime confession
EVER since the runaway success of the podcast Serial and documentaries such as Netflix’s Making A Murderer, true crime as a genre has experienced a renaissance, not least because it makes for a riveting subject. Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich’s The Fact Of A Body comes heavily trailed as the must-read true crime account of the summer, boasting comparisons to Truman Capote’s classic In Cold Blood.
It is a haunting dual narrative about the author’s experience of working as a law student in Louisiana on a child murder case and how this impacts on her understanding of the darker secrets of her own New Jersey childhood.
The child of two solidly middle-class lawyers, Alexandria believed her position on the death penalty, one of strong opposition, to be set in stone. But then she started to work as a volunteer on the case of Ricky Langley, a child murderer convicted of the 1992 killing and probable abuse of six-year-old Jeremy Guillory in Iowa, Louisiana.
More than 10 years later, Langley’s defence team secured him a second trial. In an extraordinary ABUSED: Marzano-Lesnevich twist, the self-confessed paedophile was saved from the death penalty by the dramatic intervention of Lorilei Guillory, Jeremy’s mother (a sequence of events dramatised in the 2003 play Lorilei). But when Alexandria watched the taped confession of the killer, she realised she simply wanted him dead. In part, this was because her involvement in Langley’s case unearthed long-repressed memories of her own abuse at the hands of her maternal grandfather and the unhealed wounds caused by her family’s reaction to it.
Once her parents realised what was happening, they swept the matter under the carpet, choosing familial silence over calling the police.
The abuse stopped but unlike Langley, Alexandria’s grandfather went unpunished for his crimes. Alexandria
painstakingly pieces together Langley’s life story from his court appearances, press coverage and family history although she is open about the fact that “at times I’ve layered my imagination onto the bare-bones record of the past to bring it to life”.
Langley’s is a sorry tale. He grew up in extreme poverty amid family tragedy and sought help for his paedophilia before he committed his final crime.
He is in every sense someone who belongs in an institution. But he is simply not interesting enough to hold the weight of the narrative.
While Alexandria’s memoir makes fascinating reading, she never persuades the reader that Langley’s personal history is worthy of sustained attention.
Nor does she address the conflict between her eventual decision that Langley deserves to die and the decision of Jeremy’s mother to appear for the defence in the belief that he is culpable but mentally ill.
Alexandria’s book is a story of her journey from believing that the law can bring simplicity to society’s thorniest issues to her realisation that “law doesn’t find the beginning any more than it finds the truth. It creates a story. That story has a beginning. That story simplifies, and we call it truth.”
The Fact Of A Body is a curiously uneven work.
At times breathtaking in its honesty and direct in addressing the wilful amnesia of the author’s family, it is let down by the sheer banality of the murderer at its core.