NEWS ANALYSIS : ‘Wrong-Turn’ Killing Struck Chord for a Mix of Reasons : Crime: Experts discount race of blond 3-year-old and her killers as only explanation. They cite urban fears such as getting lost and anxiety about gangs.

What was it about the death of 3-year-old Stephanie Kuhen that struck a chord resonating not only in Los Angeles but across the nation?

After all, in the same week that Stephanie was killed in a Cypress Park ambush, six other Los Angeles children were murdered. But the death of this wide-eyed child captivated and shocked the country, drawing the public anguish of President Clinton and placing it in a gallery of other horrible slayings such as those of Kitty Genovese, a New Yorker whose screams for help were ignored, or 12-year-old Polly Klaas, who was abducted from her Petaluma bedroom.

We may forget the names of victims, but we always remember what made their death so terrible. There was the 22-year-old Utah tourist in Manhattan who was fatally stabbed when he tried to protect his mother during a mugging. Or the 5-year-old Chicago boy dropped from a 14th-floor window after he refused to steal candy for two older children.

Why did Stephanie’s murder vault into the category of archetypal crime horror stories that chill almost everyone?

It’s a question that media critics tend to answer with one hot-button word: race--the fact that the attackers were Latino and the victim was white, her blond locks cascading around her face.

But more than a dozen experts, including sociologists, political scientists and psychiatrists, say the answer is more complex, weaving together several factors--including race--that gnaw at our collective psyche.

A “wrong turn” brought Stephanie and her family to the dead-end street where gang members peppered the car with bullets--a universally frightening fantasy, these experts say. Who among us, they ask, has not gotten lost, wandering clueless through unfamiliar neighborhoods? The horrifying possibility that tragedy will descend out of the blue through no fault of our own has an overwhelming power.

“The circumstances strike a chord because they relate to a common fear, a common nightmare,” said Lynn Chancer, assistant professor of sociology at Barnard College, who is writing a book about high-profile crimes.

She cites the 1989 case of the white investment banker who was brutally beaten and raped by a group of teen-agers as she jogged through Central Park--a rampage that introduced the verb “wilding.”

“It was a white investment banker, a symbol of the rising urban professional who represented a dream,” Chancer said.

The collapse of a dream is a cornerstone of tragedy, from the ancient Greeks to modern day. Its power lies in its unstated role as a tool of survival: a cautionary tale, reminding us of our limits, our fragility.

Stephanie’s shooting, experts say, was made particularly heart-rending not merely because it tapped into the theme of an innocent mistake becoming a fatal misstep, but by a mix of several other components: The victim was very young; the shooting was random; the result was murder. And, lastly, the crime played upon widespread existing concerns: anxiety about gangs and the lack of safety in public places.

The scenario was every parent’s worst dream: You are suddenly helpless, trapped in a life-threatening situation, unable to defend your own children.

“When the set of factors come together, something captures the collective imagination,” Chancer said. “It is an urban nightmare.”

The collection of crimes that lodge in our memory, long past when we can remember details, are emblems that reveal some truth about society, experts say. Kitty Genovese, for instance, a 29-year-old barmaid, was stabbed to death at an apartment complex in the early morning of March 13, 1964. Police later learned that 38 people had witnessed but ignored the attack. Her death showed the coldness of city dwellers, uncaring people who did not want to get involved.

“These crimes seem to symbolize a contemporary crisis,” said Eric Monkkonen, a UCLA history professor. “The contemporary crisis includes fear of violence in public places, a fear that the system of government is no longer in control.”

Some experts believe that fascination for these stories reflects man’s adaptive, evolutionary behavior. Among animals in the wild, for instance, those that survive must evade hunters and natural disasters, recognizing and coping with danger.

By the same logic, man too adapts to his environment. The person who walks into a field and discovers a snake is conditioned to block out everything but the snake--behavior that betters his chance of surviving the encounter, said Timur Kuran, chairman of USC’s economics department, the author of a new book on human values and race relations.

Crime stories are “the equivalent to the snake in the modern world,” Kuran said. “There is a biological foundation to the tremendous interest we take in these crimes.”

Not everyone agrees that evolutionary behavior explains an appetite for certain crime stories or that such tales capture a primal imagination. Some people follow crime stories for the same reasons they watch soap operas, other experts say.

“It really is voyeurism,” said Richard Friedman, professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. “Crime grabs attention when it resonates personally, when it could have been me.”

Another reason certain crimes draw such empathy is the growing need for definition of right and wrong in a world that seems increasingly fraught with violence and fractured by diminished opportunities, other experts say. Simply put, people want to know there are good guys, and they want to boo villains. Some horrible crimes feed that desire to see the world in black-and-white terms.

“We take refuge in this imaginary world of cops and robbers where everything is simple,” said Stuart Scheingold, professor of political science at the University of Washington.

The lure of certain crime stories is similar to an interest in “the sports world where there are clear winners and clear losers,” Scheingold said. “The clearer the line between good and evil, the more appealing it is because it allows us to respond in a way which is satisfying, rather than ambiguous.”

In the case of Stephanie Kuhen, the line seems very clear. The fact that Stephanie was 3 made her death even more senseless, more painful, experts say.

“The innocent victim is what catches us all,” said Leon Eisenberg, professor of psychiatry at Harvard University.

In the 1990 case of Brian Watkins, the 22-year-old from Provo, Utah, was blameless and brave. In Manhattan to see the U.S. Open tennis tournament, the young man was stabbed to death when he tried to protect his mother as a gang mugged his family on a subway. His heroism made his story even more poignant, said Helen Benedict, an associate professor at Columbia University’s School of Journalism.

In most cases, victims come under scrutiny; they do not instantly garner sympathy just because they were murdered. Everyone weighs a crime story trying to determine if the victim, in some way, brought the crime upon himself. City dwellers have become hardened to urban crimes, such as gang- or drug-related deaths, Eisenberg said.

“In those, there seems to be provocation and a sense that the victim contributed to his demise,” he said.

Had the driver of Stephanie’s car knowingly and intentionally turned up Isabel Street, would the outcry over Stephanie’s death have been as loud? No. Though still a tragedy, this would have become a tale about an adult who made a poor choice and endangered a child.

Similarly, when 18-year-old Jennifer Levin was found strangled in Central Park in 1986, the crime--known as the “Preppy Murder”--created a stir but the victim received little sympathy, said Benedict, author of “Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes.” Because Levin had dated Robert Chambers, her murderer, she was not viewed as a completely innocent victim, Benedict said.

Blaming the victim allows us to feel safer, that the crime could not have happened to us.

“We blame the victim because then we can feel somehow it doesn’t seem quite as terrible if the victim was culpable, even though ethically, that’s cuckoo,” said Monkkonen of UCLA.

Many experts say that race, class and celebrity play a role in whether a crime story becomes a touchstone of our society and our conscience.

During the same week that the media reported the case of the 1989 investment banker in Central Park, there were 28 other first-degree rapes or attempted rapes across New York City. In most of those cases, the victims were black or Hispanic women.

Of the six other children murdered in Los Angeles during the week that Stephanie was killed, none were white. Four were Hispanic, two were black. Stephanie also was the only one younger than 15.

At the Los Angeles Times, the story of Stephanie’s death and her picture landed on the front page. That decision, however, was made without knowledge of the child’s race, according to Managing Editor George Cotliar.

Earl Hutchinson, author of “Assassination of the Black Male Image,” said race is a factor in determining the level of outrage prompted by a crime.

“There is always a feeling when the victim is white and the alleged perpetrator is a person of color that there is a different standard,” Hutchinson said. “My grandson is 3 years old; suppose it was him. Would there have been public outrage? I don’t think so.”