Why some murders become folklore (and others barely make the news)

The spectacle of the singular

Most murders are, in the bluntest sense, ordinary. A fight gone wrong. A partner who doesn’t stop at threats. A robbery that escalates. These fill the pages of coronial reports, not history books. But once in a while, a case comes along that feels different. An attention-grabbing story was sent to the newspaper: a six-year-old beauty queen in a basement. A woman was bisected in Los Angeles. These aren’t just killings; they’re spectacles. They carry mystery, symbolism, or grotesque imagery that makes them stick.

The sociologist Stanley Cohen called it moral panic. The media finds a case that crystallises broader fears: innocence corrupted, strangers at the door, evil lurking in suburbia, and elevates it. The case becomes a proxy war for social anxieties.

Whose life counts?

Not every victim is granted folklore. The pattern is painfully clear. Victims who are young, white, middle-class, and photogenic receive disproportionate attention. Journalists call it the “missing white woman syndrome”. The public rarely hears about Indigenous women missing from remote communities, or the three women murdered last week in Port Moresby. These deaths are real, devastating, and socially corrosive, but they don’t become mythology.

Part of that is bias; part is narrative. JonBenét was the perfect symbol of lost innocence, a blonde child in sequins, killed at Christmas. Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, was young, aspiring, and cut down before her life began. The Zodiac wasn’t just a killer; he was a villain who wrote his own script, daring police and public alike. These stories come ready-made with archetypes: the innocent, the monster, the puzzle. Ordinary deaths rarely provide the same cast.

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The comfort of mystery

Another reason some cases endure is that they remain unsolved. The human mind abhors uncertainty. We want endings. When we don’t get them, we fill the gap with theories. Entire industries of documentaries, podcasts, and Reddit threads have sprung up to play detective. A solved case closes; an unsolved case festers, mutates, and refuses to die.

Misclassified suicides don’t spark the same obsession. They rarely make the front page. But they matter deeply. Every misclassification hides a truth, a homicide written off, a family denied justice, a perpetrator uncounted. Yet the public doesn’t see these. They don’t have glamour. They don’t have a mystery. They don’t have a cipher scrawled across the page.

The arithmetic of atrocity

The value we place on human life is inconsistent at best, grotesque at worst. Adolf Eichmann helped organise the murder of millions and was tried for crimes against humanity. Others responsible for tens of thousands of deaths received 10 years’ hard labour. Do the maths: what is a life worth in that equation? In modern tragedies, we still do this calculus. One thousand dead in Gaza may register as a statistic; 3,000 dead in the World Trade Centre becomes an epochal event.

Part of this is psychological distance. Westerners watching Westerners die feel proximity, even identification. The victims could have been us. But part is also symbolism. The towers weren’t just buildings; they were icons of power, modernity, and national identity. Their collapse was theatre, not just violence.

Tradition and inertia

The justice system is not immune to these distortions. We like to imagine it runs on logic and impartiality, but it is shaped by the same cultural currents. Some cases are resourced into eternity. Others are written off as suicide to avoid the paperwork. In emergency departments, coroners’ offices, and police files, decisions are made under pressure, with biases and blind spots intact.

And then, like juries of 12, the patterns become habit. Certain lives get mythologised. Certain cases get buried. The public is invited to mourn selectively, to obsess selectively, and to forget selectively.

At what cost?

The cost isn’t only academic. Resources follow attention. Cold case units chase the Zodiac but not the nameless Indigenous woman. Media obsession fuels political pressure, which in turn dictates funding and reform. Misclassified suicides stay misclassified, not because the evidence is clear but because no one is shouting loudly enough.

The result is a justice system that mirrors our cultural biases, reinforcing them with every docket closed and every documentary aired. Some lives are turned into endless puzzles. Others are reduced to statistics. Both are distortions.

Legal by habit, not by reason

If you were designing a justice system from scratch today, you wouldn’t build it on myth, mystery, and media amplification. You’d create a system that weighed each life equally, audited classifications rigorously, and resisted the gravitational pull of spectacle. But that isn’t the system we have.

We have a system that, like the 12-person jury, endures because it looks right, because we’re used to it, and because it saves us from confronting harder truths. It is tradition masquerading as justice.

And so we keep talking about the Zodiac. We keep watching documentaries about JonBenét. We keep speculating about the Black Dahlia. All the while, other deaths, quieter, messier, less cinematic, vanish into silence.

Rebecca Ward is an MBA-qualified management consultant with a focus on mental health. She is the managing director of Barristers’ Health, which supports the legal profession through management consulting and psychotherapy. Barristers’ Health was founded in memory of her brother, Steven Ward, LLB.