I grew up watching crime series with my mom. But after my best friend from high school was murdered, I can't watch anymore — and I miss her every day.
Courtesy Anna Sullivan
I was waiting for a coffee in the Dunkin' Donuts drive-thru when I found out my best friend from high school had been murdered. A friend had called with the shocking news. When I answered the phone, she was sobbing and could barely get the words out.
"What's wrong?" I asked in a panic.
Through tears, she told me what had happened. Viv had gone missing a few days before. When she didn't show up for work, her coworkers alerted the authorities. The police went to the home she shared with her boyfriend to interview him, but he denied knowing her whereabouts. Two days later, he died by suicide at a relative's house. When the police returned to Viv's house, they found her body in a closet. Eventually, her cause of death was ruled as blunt-force trauma. Viv's boyfriend had murdered her.
In the years leading up to Viv's death, we'd lost touch. I hadn't even known she was living with someone. At her memorial service, I learned that her relationship had been volatile and that there'd been a history of domestic violence. Viv had been making plans to leave him — and move to New York City — but like many victims of abuse, she never got the chance.
From a young age, I grew up watching murder-mystery shows. My mother's favorite television program was "Murder, She Wrote." Every Sunday night, I'd crawl into my parents' bed and watch Angela Lansbury piece together an unsolved mystery while Mom folded the laundry. As I got older, we watched "Law & Order" together as a family. One of the reasons I continued to watch the series as an adult was because the show reminded me of home. From the safety of my living room, the predators and rapists who roamed the streets at large seemed like they were a world away.
But after Viv died, I stopped watching crime shows. What happened to my friend could have easily been scripted for an episode of "Law & Order: SVU." Suddenly, each female victim looked like Viv, and every terrified scream made me wonder what her last few moments had been like. Scenes with grieving family members and friends felt too real, and the plotlines hit too close to home.
Viv and I met the first week of our sophomore year of high school. I was a new student, having just moved to our small Vermont town, while she had transferred the year before from a different high school. Within weeks, the two of us were inseparable. Viv introduced me to "I Love Lucy" — her favorite TV show — and I can still picture her laughing as we watched together, snuggled up on the couch in her mom's living room.
Viv was a voracious reader and a brilliant writer. She wrote about home; hers was quiet and a little lonely. Mine was lonely, too. At the time, my parents' relationship was fraught. My father hadn't moved to Vermont with us, and my mother had to raise three teenage daughters by herself. The two of us recognized a sadness in each other, one we didn't yet understand about ourselves. But knowing I had a friend like Viv made me feel less alone.
After high school, Viv attended a big university in Boston while I went to a small liberal-arts college in Connecticut. A few months before our college graduation in June 2002, I saw Viv for the last time. We met for drinks at a bar in Boston and discussed living there together, but I went to New York City instead. Over the next few years, we lost touch. I always thought we'd reconnect — but we never got the chance.
It's no secret that our society is obsessed with the true-crime genre. Some of the most popular shows of the past few years have been true-crime documentaries, such as "Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story" and, "Making a Murderer." Lots of people even confess to falling asleep to murder podcasts. Why is our culture so fascinated with rape, homicide, and the dead female body?
Interestingly, a 2010 study from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign discovered that the women surveyed liked true crime more than the men did. Women seem to be particularly interested in the motives of killers, especially when their victims are women. Researchers have connected this back to our most primal, evolutionary mindset: survival. Many of us watch true crime to better understand criminal behavior and possibly lower the risk of becoming a victim ourselves. Though these shows tend to increase feelings of anxiety while watching, in the end, they bring viewers a feeling of relief because they escaped danger. The audience is left feeling like they had control over the outcome.
Some scientists believe our desire to watch people get murdered has something to do with emotional validation. As humans, it's natural to want to feel things, like sadness, outrage, and, perhaps most importantly, empathy. Experiencing a horrified reaction to a brutal crime assures us that we are not bad people. But, too often, these shows exploit — and dehumanize — women's bodies to evoke this type of reaction from the viewer.
In the United States, statistics show that one in four women aged 18 and older have been the victim of severe physical violence by an intimate partner. There are many different reasons a person stays in an abusive relationship, including fear, financial restraints, and shared children. But in most cases, the longer someone stays, the more isolated that person becomes.
It is common for abusive partners to cut their victims off from family and friends. I often wonder what I would've done had I known what my friend was going through, and the survivor's guilt is real and unending. It plays and plays like a reel in my mind, repeating: I should have reached out more. I should have done something.
To me, Viv wasn't just another victim; she isn't just a statistic. She was a living, breathing, young woman, full of potential. Watching bereft family members on-screen becomes less abstract when you have witnessed real people mourn the loss of a loved one to an act of violence. I can't watch the true-crime genre anymore for the same reason I don't watch programs about breast cancer. After my diagnosis, I have a deep understanding that life is fragile and can be clipped like a thread. I still feel that sense of initial horror and outrage about what happened to Viv — but mostly, I just miss her every single day.
I often wonder what would've happened if Viv had made it onto that bus to New York. Would we have reconnected in the city and become roommates? Would we have navigated the chaos of our twenties together, like an episode of "Friends?" I like to think that Viv would have become a famous writer or a successful businessperson. But I'll never know — she never got the chance to write her own ending.
