Turning Victims into Saints

Reporters, like vampires, feed on human blood. Tales of tragedy, mayhem and murder are the daily stuff of front-page headlines and breathless TV newscasts. But journalists rarely restrict their accounts to the sordid, unadorned facts. If the victims of such incidents are sufficiently wealthy, virtuous or beautiful, they are often turned into martyred saints in the epic battle between good and bad. Thus the spectacle of a wounded husband, with a dying pregnant wife at his side, desperately calling for help in a reputedly dangerous Boston neighborhood, inevitably set editors' pulses racing.

The Boston Globe told us that the unfortunate Stuarts were not just any couple. They had enjoyed a life "rich with potential" and a marriage "so loving it warmed even those at its edge." In a front-page editorial, the Boston Herald solemnized, "Perhaps it was the very ordinariness of their lives . . . that touched us all."

The statement was blatantly untrue. What made the story so compelling was not that the people were ordinary but that they could be portrayed as extraordinary. In an age of broken marriages and abandoned dreams, the suburbs of Boston had yielded a perfect couple unquestionably devoted to each other. And this couple were set upon by scum.

The standard for journalistic hagiography was set in 1932 with the kidnaping and later killing of Charles Lindbergh's infant son. Lindbergh was already a bona fide hero, so the media concentrated on canonizing his family: the faithful and pregnant wife; the child who was "a golden-haired replica of his famous father"; Lindbergh's "visibly distraught" mother, who, despite her suffering, persisted in teaching chemistry at a high school in Detroit.

Every few weeks, with a different twist, the tale is played out again. Last April the media world exploded in indignation at the rape and beating of a jogger in Central Park. The story was horrible enough on its own. But it was made more poignant by the larger-than-life goodness of the heroine. "All anyone could remember about her," reported the New York Daily News, was her "grace, cheer and success." She was young, white, brilliant, a rapidly rising banker. And despite being overwhelmed by a "wolf pack," she put up a "terrific fight."

Other examples abound. When a doctor was brutally murdered by a half- deranged derelict at New York City's Bellevue Hospital last year, the press promptly pointed out that she was not just any doctor. She was "full of life" and blessed with a "brilliant mind." The nightmare of Hedda Nussbaum and her murdered Lisa was the saga of not just another battered wife but a once lovely, once successful, patiently suffering woman who had been possessed by a diabolical man.