Word: strangerness
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...parenting and worried about their own capacity for violence? But this was not the typical child murder, the experts rushed to explain, not an outburst of uncontrollable rage turned accidentally fatal. This was cold calculation. Parents who began the week trying to explain to their own children about Stranger Danger ended it having to explain something far scarier...
...public in 1986 about the "disappearance" of her daughter Loralei and, three years later, her daughter Heather, and is now serving a life sentence in connection with their murders. And then there was the case of Diane Downs, the Springfield, Oregon, mother who claimed in May 1983 that a stranger waved down her car on a deserted road and shot her and her three children, killing seven-year-old daughter Cheryl Lynn. She too is now in jail for life, convicted of murder...
Susan Smith knew what a kidnapper should look like. He should be a remorseless stranger with a gun. But the essential part of the picture -- the touch she must have counted on to arouse the primal sympathies of her neighbors and to cut short any doubts -- was his race. The suspect had to be a black man. Better still, a black man in a knit cap, a bit of hip-hop wardrobe that can be as menacing in some minds as a buccaneer's eye patch. Wasn't that everyone's most familiar image of the murderous criminal...
...process of demonization reached meltdown five years ago when Charles Stuart, a white furrier from a Boston suburb, claimed that a black stranger had leaped into his car as he and his wife were returning from a natural- childbirth class, forced them to drive to a remote location, then robbed and shot them both, killing her. It was Stuart, of course, who had murdered his pregnant wife, then shot himself to make his story unassailable. Stuart would eventually be unmasked and take his own life, but not before Boston police had bought the lies, rounding up scores of black...
This grounding in fact, though, and the scientific research that went into the book do make it necessary that a critic attack its propositions on the level of rational discourse, not by using some even stranger theory as a weapon...