Murder--It Takes More and More Gore to Grab Us

Lee Kastle and his ex-wife, Patricia, reportedly had coffee together at a quiet bistro in Newport Beach, and then Patricia decided to stop by his mobile home to pick up some of her things.

That was where Lee Kastle pumped the bullets into her head. Then he killed himself. Patricia Kastle was 26 years old.

Betty Lou Hahn, a homemaker, was entertaining her mother for the Christmas holidays in her Tustin home a year ago. Then she killed her, with a hammer, by pounding her on the head. Helen Gretz was 83 years old.

Police in Orange may never know who killed Floy Faye Redmon almost 25 years ago; Redmon may have died with the only real clues. She served the killer coffee, even had a cup herself. Then she collapsed on the kitchen floor, felled by blows from the steel lid of a pressure cooker. Floy Faye Redmon was 75 years old.

Murder has many guises.

Endlessly fascinating, we absorb its details.

How did it happen? Oh, Lord God, why?

It is the details that feed the ravenous beasts of the media. We read them in newspapers, in books; we see them on the screen. It is the brutal end of life, the lives of others, that makes us reflect on our own.

The murderers, most of the time, know their victims. It happens a lot at home. People kill in anger, in confusion, in fear and out of spite.

Murder today is so commonplace that the odds are you cannot remember most.

Paul Moyer was working late at an Anaheim Pizza Hut, just about to close up shop on a January night in 1986. Then a robber, police said, came calling. He sliced Paul Moyer’s head with what looked like a medieval ax.

I had no idea who Paul Moyer was until I read that he had died. Now I remember the ax.

Ignominious death merits a mention in the local newspaper, but how much of a mention? Well now, that depends. Who was the victim? How did he die?

What makes this murder any different from the rest?

“I think the more morbid and gruesome the death, the more likely the probability that we are going to pay attention,” says Dr. Paul Blair, a psychiatrist who teaches at UC Irvine.

“We are constantly bombarded with such bad news, news of death, that in order to stimulate ourselves, we have to go beyond being jaded. We need higher and higher fixes of morbid, lurid things to get some thrill out of it,” he suggests.

Maybe that’s it. Who can really tell? How many of us have reached so far inside ourselves to come up with an answer? Most of us don’t even want to ask the question.

Murder, no matter how prosaic it has become, still remains the ultimate taboo.

We want to know, but not too much. Show us the cleaned-up version and we’ll watch it on TV and call it a thriller. We don’t know those people on TV. We just know how they died, on TV.

It’s the same with books, newspapers and magazines. There’s a line. Most people come right up to it, but they don’t want to cross it.

It is the abyss.

“If it is used by a storyteller and explored properly as a theme, (murder) can be cathartic to read about, moving, socially instructive,” says a master of the genre, novelist Dean Koontz of Orange. “But if handled badly, it is nothing but cheap titillation.”

Watch the television news shows, Koontz says. They show us the blood on the sidewalk and more if they could, the stains of rage, of vengeance, of cruelty.

We are shocked, of course, and usually outraged. And a lot of times, we are just plain scared.

“There is an anxiety people experience about their own life, about their families,” says Dr. Lawrence Sporty, the director of the psychiatric consultation service at UCI Medical Center. “Murder makes them think about what they can do to protect themselves and their families.”

And knowing that you cannot protect yourself or those you love, not really, not completely, that is what truly chills us.

It could happen to me. It could happen to my child.

“We have a natural protective instinct when it comes to children, when it comes to the innocent,” Dr. Sporty says. “It raises much more of a sense of horror in us.”

“When murder involves the innocent, there is a horrid fascination,” Koontz adds. “It tells us all that no matter how we live our lives, we are vulnerable.”

Murder is innocence shattered, arrogance turned vicious and justice perverted. And that makes it everywhere.