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current Monday
Report below!
This week's report by Cantara Christopher
Murder in the Genre
These are the facts from the police blotter: In the early hours of July 22, in
the quiet seaside town of Cape Coral, Florida, Joshua Henninger, 16, and
Jeremy Chapman, 23, lured an acquaintance, 17 year-old Mariner High honor
student Annamarie Randazzo, to Henninger’s home with a cell phone call.
Once she arrived, one of them struck her. Both of them then tied her up, put
her in her own car and drove it to an unknown location, where they killed her
with repeated blows. They then drove to a wooded area where they placed
her body in an abandoned refrigerator and set her afire, then drove her car
back to Cape Coral and set it to blaze in a vacant field.
Motive? As Henninger confessed when the police finally found her remains
on August 6, they wanted to see what killing someone would feel like. They
chose Annamarie because, at four feet eleven and one hundred pounds,
she'd be no trouble. Filipinas like her and me tend to be small.
How I discovered this case has to do with the blogosphere and my
desperate desire to make it in the romance genre. The mother of Chapman,
you see, is Sheila Lynn Viehl, who in seven years has managed to publish
twenty-nine books in the categories of contemporary romance, Christian
romance, romantic thriller, romantic fantasy, and romantic science fiction.
That her books are, overall, merely sketchy, formulaic and derivative
escapist fare is an insignificant factor, compared to her considerable value
over the years to the self-styled writing community of which I am a fringe
member.
She is, from all reports, a nice woman. She is helpful to beginners. In the
area of mutual stroking that is the unique engine of this genre, she is
generous. And--until this incident--she has remained accessible online to
everyone. It was this trait, in fact, along with her prolificness and cheery
professionalism, that drew me to her blog, Paperback Writer, which until
yesterday I kept on my own blog’s list of daily reads. On Tuesday morning
the 9th I checked in at Paperback Writer as usual, and found an uncommonly
grave posting:
“The press may or may not have a field day with this story. I don't know; I've
never been in this position before,” it began, and then went on to recount
the story of Jeremy, her son, the one never mentioned in her official bios.
His mental instability, his criminal record. Her long humiliating efforts to help
him and stick by him through his encounters with the law. Her final decision,
once he reached adult age, to cut ties with him. “I felt threatened by his
behavior...I did this to protect my two younger children, their father, and
me.” It ended with the news she had gotten, that her son had just confessed
to murder.
Within three minutes of this posting came the first comment, and it was
supportive. Within twenty-four hours, over a hundred and fifty comments
were in, almost all sympathetic--the few upsetting comments having been,
understandably, deleted. I was tempted to add my own condolences. After
all, I was also a mother with a son the same age, and with a history of mental
illness (albeit war-rape trauma) in my family.
What stopped me was a strange omission I noted while scrolling through the
comments: There hadn’t been one single mention of the victim by name
(actually, victims--after killing Annamarie, Chapman killed his 66 year-old
roommate).
Whereas, as I counted, there were no less than 28 uses of the word “hug” in
the comments--as in “big hug”, “bear hug” and “you need a hug”.
Now, I’m not going to join the other camp, the one blinded by rage and grief,
that is lashing out at Sheila Viehl for the crimes of her son. I believe that she
did her best, that she is a decent enough person and that this incident will
stay with her for the rest of her life. I believe, too, that she has not played
unfairly by not letting her fans and readers know about Jeremy before now.
Authors are not obliged to be ruthlessly honest about their personal lives.
But cozy easy sympathy is the weakest of human virtues, inadequate at
best, unctuous at worst. Since Tuesday, bloggers have been nauseating in
their support of Viehl. One praised her for not getting “drama-tastic”.
Another accused her detractors of being “subhuman”. Yet another
composed a parable about little forest animals and a duckling who did a very
bad thing. When compared to the blogs of Mariner High students, their rage
and grief raw and real on the screen, from the time Annamarie was abducted
to the time her body and her killers were found--
“They burned her fukin car”--"Please bring my sister back!!!”--“I can’t go on”
--those postings of praise take on a particular moral repugnance.
“You all offered the understanding and support that I needed so desperately
today, and I'm so grateful,” Viehl posted yesterday. “A few others in the
writing community have not been so kind, and I'm sure there will be more of
that. What these people say about me may seem vicious, but ultimately it's
meaningless. To them I'm not a person, but an opportunity. Don’t defend me
to them... Keep us in your thoughts.”
Her only mention of the murdered: “Families, loved ones and friends of the
victims are suffering, and some of them are taking that out on me. If you
come across something like this out there, don't attack these people. They
don't know me or my family, or what we're going through.” Now, even if you
take into account Viehl’s likely shock and emotional numbness in the face of
the situation, this still comes across as a measured, regally distant,
unchecked by reality, and needlessly self-interested statement that teeters
dangerously close to demagoguery.
If you think I’m exaggerating, think of of those 150 (or 500, if you count her
other websites and personal email) comments that came unbidden, within
hours, from her well-wishers. In the face of such loving support, how could it
not be tempting and justifiable to almost any of us writers to want to come
out, eventually, with a surefire bestseller--entitled, say, A Mother’s Anguish:
Stardoc’s Creator Speaks Out on Her Troubled Son, or even to become the
founder of a national support group called, say, Mothers of Murderers?
Because. Because. You have to remember. You have to remember. That on
this day, at this hour, even as I am writing, Annamarie Randazzo’s charred
body is lying in a coffin at a funeral mass in Florida, surrounded by her
heartbroken schoolmates, her best friends, her sister Melissa, her parents.
That is the reality, and there is no percentage in seeking the crown to this
particular court of pain when all you can ever hope to be is the retinue.
Twenty-nine books in seven years is an exceptional achievement, maybe
even an enviable one. As it turns out it almost certainly came at a price.
A lesser writer might defend the separation that was so clearly evident,
might insist that the authorial distance must always be kept between the
perfect world of a writer’s creative mind and the imperfect world of the
reality in which she lives.
But it would be better to admit, with humility, the debt that all of us writers,
whether of escapist fiction or so-called serious fiction, owe to reality: To let
reality inform not only what we write, but how we write, and the choices
we’re compelled to make in order to keep on writing.
The alternative is to build on sand, ignoring the fact that the concrete
truck is about to pull up any minute. And that's not authorial distance.
That is insanity.
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Cantara Christopher is Editor and Dogsbody of
the online litzine, publishedinnewyork.com
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