Catching crooks Kansas-style
NOT being particularly close to any seriously violent criminals, the artful way Americans catch their crooks never fails to amaze this simple rube. For example, I had learnt so much about retail justice from Dog The Bounty Hunter, that I truly – really and truly – believed I knew it all.
Sadly, it took Paula Zahn of
On The Case With Paula Zahn to prick this bubble of amiable ignorance. Chasing crooks in Kansas is slow but systematic.
One is reminded of the mills of God, grinding slow but exceeding small. In Kansas slow is the way, while jumping to conclusions, the crazy-paving path to truth.
So it goes like this. Somewhere in the Kansas platteland, there’s a little town where everybody knows your name. Not only that, but nice first-year college students clean the local swimming pool, so that – to quote a typical Kansas daddy – they can learn the value of a dollar. One day, while netting leaves in the pool and learning the value of a dollar, our sad heroine (spoiler alert – she’s gonna die and die horrible ’cause that’s the Kansas way) is murdered. Beautiful, talented, beloved by all, she is violated in the pump house and viciously slaughtered.
But… but… who is Paula
Zahn? And what has she got to do with raped and murdered pool attendants in Kansas? Well, wouldja believe it. PZ – because that’s how I see her – is a kinda, sorta television star and truth seeker. You guessed it! It’s reality television all over again. Take a bow PZ. This is gonna be good.
PZ provides most of the linking narrative in this slender, frequently told moral fable. She communicates sincerity and papal-quality truth value by talking very slowly, using words carefully borrowed from Dick And Jane Play With The Ball. This helps the less focused members of the audience keep up with the byzantine quirks of the narrative.
On the other hand, as soon as we meet the detectives, we realise that talking very slowly is how they do it in Kansas which is just one of the very good reasons the Wizard of Oz’s Dorothy couldn’t fly away fast enough.
Meanwhile, back in the lab, white coated scientists are examining test tubes of red stuff. They are doing the DNA thing. It seems that the murderous rapist bled a little bit while being murderous and rapish, and that this tiny bit of non-victim blood is the focus of the white coated scientists’ careful attention.
They, PZ and ultimately the rest of us staring slack jawed and dribbling at the screen know full well that DNA is better than fingerprints for police forensic scientists, even in Kansas. Just to keep the stuff firmly located in folksy ways, a witness reports on a stranger leaving the pump room on the fateful day, then driving off in a red-brown Ford truck. He – the stranger – is of normal build, dressed in normal clothes and walks in a totally normal way. From this data-heavy report the police artist creates a drawing. This is uncannily like a freelance panel beater who denies everything, blaming the used knickers found in the back of the truck on his girl cousin.
The rest of the cousin-knickersback-of-the-truck narrative is left undeveloped. So the cops let him go. But then seemingly hours later in the show they catch him again. Yes, it was him that did the murder! Oh my God, thank you thank you, Paula Zahn.