History doesn't repeat itself, Mark Twain among many others is supposed to have observed, but it rhymes.
Decades ago, the case that both fascinated and repelled Angelenos and the rest of the American public went by the name of the Black Dahlia murder. Just give us lots of copy, gruesome details true or false or in between, and, mutatis mutandis, watch sales rise or videos multiply. The social media, it turns out, isn't so much social as sociopathic, mesmerized by murder by any name. Murder most foul, as dear Miss Marple would and did say. We're not a nation of crime fighters so much as one of crime watchers.
This time it was called the Case of the Grim Sleeper, but in another century the phrase in the headlines was the Black Dahlia, for we all love a mystery by any name, preferably a crime that goes unsolved for decades.
Did you happen to spot that photo in the paper the other day? It could have been a movie poster, complete with the menacing figure in his mask. That shot had everything but ominous music in the background--and surely that too would have been added by the time it hits the (anti-)social media.
The more things change, the more we love a mystery, preferably one that goes unsolved for decades. Who was that masked man, Bela Lugosi? The names escape us but not the cheap thrills, the cheaper the better, or rather the worse.
This time the mass murderer is named Lonnie Franklin Jr., but his interchangeable name scarcely matters. Does anybody now remember the name of the suspected serial killer so long ago, also in Los Angeles, home of the lonely and lovelorn?
In modern times, the now convicted suspect has been identified as a trash collector and garage attendant for--get this--the Los Angeles Police Department who, in a line that might have been taken from any paperback novel of this or any time, "had been hiding in plain sight" all these years.
Truth isn't just stranger than fiction, it's a helluva lot more boring, or at least repetitious. Does anybody ever update this tattered old script? Excuse us while we stifle a yawn. For this is where we came in.
What a pity all these innocent young victims couldn't find their way out of this much-too-told story. The name of the author keeps changing but the plot line never does. Angela Thirkell? Surely not. She was a real talent. Maybe it was Mickey Spillane, who wasn't.
Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial on 05/22/2016