The Lens is Never Neutral: How to Shoot a Crime Scene

The town I grew up in until I was nine, Dayton, Indiana, had, and still has, a population of 900. My mother and I moved to the “the big city” of West Lafayette when she divorced my first (of several) stepfathers. West Lafayette had a population of about 40,000. When I arrived in Los Angeles to go to USC film school, students asked if I was lying about being from Indiana. It always struck me as funny. If I were to lie about where I was from, why would I choose Indiana? But people project. They see what they want to see.

Inside the walls of the houses I grew up in was some alcoholism, some domestic abuse, some physical abuse, though you wouldn’t know it from outside the old Victorian or the townhouse or the mid-century rambler (my mother moved often), and you wouldn’t have guessed it seeing me making Super 8 claymation films in second grade or playing viola in the junior high school orchestra or running for student body vice president. We also project. We show people what we want to show.

—-//—-

There is a gate separating death row from the rest of Louisiana State Penitentiary. We weren’t meant to come to death row, it wasn’t on the agenda, but the assistant warden who’d been leading me through the pale green halls and sunny exercise areas of the prison asked me if I wanted to see it, and I said yes.

“We’re right around the corner here.”

“How many people you have in there right now?”

“Think 10? Yeah, 10. But you know, all these guys in the penitentiary, they’re all on death row, in a way. Ain’t one of them gonna get out.”

This prison visit is to research a movie I’m making about dead girls and the people who kill them. The story is based on a series of copycat murders along the Texas Gulf, where the bodies of more than 30 murdered women and children have been found since 1969.

“They dump the bodies here because of the marsh,” a detective who worked one of the cases told me. “The saltwater speeds up decay, gets rid of physical evidence sometimes within 24 hours.”

The majority of the cases are cold. Only a handful of the killers have been caught and charged. The patch of land is dotted with scrub brush and borders the clear, blue ocean and the Calder Oil Field. Some of the names of the victims are Rhonda, Colette, Debbie, Suzanne. The living room of one of the victim’s mothers was neat like a hotel room. The family were distant relatives of Marilyn Monroe, one of the detectives told me. Mother and daughter had a fight after school and the daughter left on her bike to go to a friend’s. She was last seen at a 7-Eleven payphone. Her body was found in the water the next afternoon and showed evidence of sexual assault in addition to the assault that had killed her. She was 13. Her school photo was set in a silver frame on the fireplace mantel and it was true, she looked like Marilyn Monroe.

The last time I’d been in a prison was to interview an old-school La eMe at the Santa Clarita facility near Magic Mountain in Los Angeles for research on someone else’s movie. The week before, I’d talked with an Aryan Brotherhood rat at the Metropolitan Detention Center who was living with his rival’s girlfriend, who he’d paroled to. He would be shot and killed in a night bar parking lot in Orange County a few weeks after we met, but before he died, he told me about his years in solitary, the guard gangs who mutilated prisoners as initiation, the patch of sky they could see when their cages were rolled outside for an hour of yard time. Last week, the sheriffs at the Orleans Parish Prison told me Louisiana had the toughest prisons in the country. You don’t know California prisons, I thought.

It’s only the assistant warden and me standing at the entrance to death row. My assistant, Ashley, has peeled off to make a phone call and the assistant warden’s staff has returned to their offices. The assistant warden is asking me if I want to walk inside.

“It’s all right if you do,” he says, like it’s a dare, like he would have a story if I did.

Death row is short. A hallway. Maybe a dozen cells. There are no windows in the cells. High rectangles of light come in from the frosted glass across from the bars. Dead end to dead end to dead end. Quiet.

“Sure,” I nod.

“But maybe no pictures.”

“All right.”

The assistant warden gestures to someone behind him and a buzzer sounds. The door unlocks and I step in and the assistant warden stays outside. In an hour, we’ll have lunch with the warden and he’ll ask me, grinning, how I liked it. Did I get what I needed? Nodding, I’ll take a bite of paprika and lemon pepper-grilled bass, the best meal I’ll have had in Louisiana.

“Fresh fish caught by one of our own. Goes down there and catches ‘em every day. Doesn’t get no fresher, right, Danny?”

The inmate will nod, walking past our lunch table on his way to pour a new batch of hush puppies into a metal bin at the buffet.

“We don’t need any fences here. Dunno if it suits your movie you’re tellin’, but that’s a fact right there,” the warden will say.

“How come?” I’ll ask. The hush puppies are as good as the fish.

“We got the river on one side and then miles of goddamn nothin’ on the other. Where’s anybody gonna go?” The warden’ll laugh. His white shirt pulled across his belly. Red cheeks, bald head so clean his wife must shave it for him on Sundays. He’ll grin at the assistant warden, “Right? Where they gonna go?”

On death row, there is a crooked neck resting on a man’s palm. A shoulder shape against a wall. He told me not to, but I lift my camera to breast height, aim and press the shutter once, twice.

“She’s taking pictures! Stupid bitch!”

Then drop my head and drop my camera to my hip, and turn and walk out. Head down, eyes down. The assistant warden pushes the door open for me with his forearm. The inmate still yelling.

“Bitch! Stupid bitch!”

“Sorry ‘bout that,” the assistant warden says.

“You told me no pictures. He’s right.”

When the contact sheet comes back a few days later, one will show what may or may not be a dark shadow hanging over what may or may not be a cot. The other will be a flash of errant light through an otherwise blank frame. The third will be grey bars blurred. None will be usable.

The regular inmates were congregating near the entry at the Louisiana State Penitentiary when we’d walked in this morning. They were allowed to answer all my questions and, when I asked if I could take their picture, they were allowed to say yes and didn’t smile at the camera, but did smile at me after. They told me their stories, standing shoulder to shoulder. Raw knuckles and old ink creeping from under collars and sleeves. Two inmates, best friends, they said, introduced me to a cat they saved scraps for. She’d just had kittens, and we all three watched as she glided along the grated walls on pointed cat toes towards us. The inmate with an orange knit hat crouched, and she mewed up at him, closing her eyes as he scratched under her chin, and I imagined them watching her dart along their concrete pathways, shimmying through their fences, her cat body sleek and confident, wondering at her preferring to be here with them above anywhere else, given the choice they didn’t have.

The assistant warden leads me from death row to the prison’s admin offices. We stand with two sheriffs and my assistant, Ashley, in a green hallway. The assistant warden leans on his hip, as if the idea just occurred to him.

“Wanna talk to a serial killer? We just transferred him. We can bring him in if you want.”

Ashley and I are led into a large room. Maybe a dining hall at some point, a conference room. There is a long table with two chairs at either end, and a line of metal folding chairs along the nearby wall. There are barred windows. Ashley sits along the wall with her back against the brick. Three weeks ago, she was the head of catering at the New Orleans Sheraton’s Guest Services. Now she is getting paid $750 a week to hold a small video camera and try to figure out how to get the zoom button to work before the sheriffs bring the serial killer in.

“OK if we record?” I ask the detective.

“Doesn’t matter to me.”

Before coming to Louisiana to start prepping the film about dead girls, I twice went to interview workers at the Los Angeles County morgue. In the movie, there are scenes of detectives finding corpses, moving around marked-off, nighttime spaces. How to treat the body as more than a blocking element, was what I wanted to understand. How to show the world from the corpse’s point of view. How to shoot the female gaze. Even from dead eyes. Gone, but still seeing.

The Los Angeles County morgue is small with an eerie metal elevator leading down. There is a chest-high desk with a cheerful clerk. Gurneys with bodies along ceramic tile walls. The detective who took me there told me the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department requires all its trainees to work in the morgue.

“You need to know what a dead person looks like, not be afraid of it. ‘Cause, you know, on the job, you’re gonna come across a few.”

A fat man covered in a sheet. His round, grey belly. Calm, closed eyes. The desk clerk ate her burrito lunch as I made notes: “They found him alone in his apartment. He was pretty far gone.”

We walked back along the hallway and I tripped a floor sensor which opened the gliding doors of an autopsy room. Body on a gurney, top half of its skull removed, someone looking at damage from a gunshot wound to the temple. We walk through the refrigerated room. Shelves stacked high. Tags on the toes. White sheets.

“Back there is the baby room,” the detective said.

“You have a baby room?”

The politeness of separating babies from adults, the civility of that.

“I’m OK,” I said.

When we stepped outside to the parking lot, my clothes smelled of death. I took off my jacket, my sweatshirt, my shoes, and tossed them in the morgue’s dumpster. Standing outside the back door of my apartment, I took off my T-shirt and jeans and tucked them deep in my trash bins. After showering, I threw away my underwear and my bra. My son, he was four then, must not know where I’d been. Where I went when I was not with him washing his baby hair, making his baby cereal, reading Frog and Toad, singing him to sleep. Mommy work. And then Mommy’s other work.

They sit the man they told us was a serial killer across from me at the other end of the long table. They shackle his legs to the legs of the chair and his arms to the arm rests.

“Watch his eyes, when he talking to you,” the assistant warden had said in the hallway.

“How do you mean?”

“Just watch, watch where he’s looking when he’s looking at you.”

I still didn’t get it.

He tried again, “See if he doesn’t look at your hands.”

“OK.”

The man is short. White. He wears glasses. He nods at the guard who shackles him to the chair. He doesn’t smile.

“Thanks for talking with me,” I say. “Just wanted to ask you a few questions.”

“OK.”

“About growing up. That sort of thing.” It seems important to make clear right away I don’t know about his crimes and don’t intend to ask about his crimes, “You’re from around here, right? Louisiana?”

“Yes.”

“Grew up in Louisiana?”

“Yes. Grew up in Louisiana.”

He sniffs a little. This is an affront. He isn’t a freak show. He’s right.

“So we’re telling a story about a few crimes committed down in Texas City. I’m really …well, really just looking to make sure I get the story right. The characters. You know? That all the characters and their world feel authentic.”

He nods. He waits. Doesn’t give a shit.

“What was it like for you? How you came up, I mean. High school. Friends.”

“High school was satisfactory.”

“Yeah?”

“I attended a smallish high school. Sometimes it was hard. But it was all right.”

His word choice is formal. He could be a high school science teacher, a guidance counselor.

“You were raised by your mother, was it just the two of you?”

“My mother, she was a bookworm,” he says.

“She liked to read?”

“She would be sitting in her chair. By the window. All the time, she was reading.”

He felt smarter than most of the people around him, he said. Had a few friends. The guard steps out of the room and leaves Ashley and me alone. We glance at each other.

The man’s shoulders have rounded a little. He tries to gesture as he speaks, seeming to forget the restrains. Eventually, he talks about his time in prison. He’d never been before.

“You know where I’d go, if I could go anywhere? I mean, if they could transport me really anywhere?”

“Where?”

“I’d be put in a space capsule.”

“Yeah?”

“I’d have them put me in there and then shoot me out into space. Forever. I’d love it out there. Just floating.”

“How come?”

“Ah, I wouldn’t feel so …,” he’s looking for the right word, he waits until it comes to him. “Bombarded. I wouldn’t feel so bombarded all the time.”

“What do you feel bombarded by?”

“Everything,” he shakes his head. “All the time.”

It was clear now no one was going to try to discuss his crimes, morality or Jesus. He lets himself blink slow. He lets his eyes watch my hands as I take notes, I do see that. The guard comes back in and stands behind the man. Time to go.

“Really appreciate you being willing to talk,” I say.

“Well, don’t have much choice, do I?” he laughs, not looking at me.

“Let me ask you this,” I say. “If you don’t feel like answering, I understand. I get it. I’m just… so I can try to see all the points of view. When they arrested you …”

He cuts me off. He knows what he wants to tell me.

“When they arrested me, they brought me in, they sat me down in this little room, this little table. And they showed me photos, they spread them out on the table, photos of what they said I did. And I couldn’t put it together.”

“How do you mean?”

He looks at my hands as he thinks. On instinct, I fold them, one over the other, and make them very still.

He makes a gesture with his shackled hand like a dealer laying out cards, wrist pulling against the metal. “I looked and I looked, but it made no sense. Like hearing a dog meow. Or a cat bark.”

The guard pulls his keys and unshackles him.

“Thank you,” I nod.

“Good luck with your movie.” And they walk him out.

Later that night, the two detectives who’d arrested him meet me at the production office. The office is dark and empty, save the UPM and the accountant. New Orleans shines like paste-jewels through the reflecting windows. The detectives pour themselves coffee. They lean against my desk.

“Did he look at your hands?” They’re smiling.

“A little, yeah.”

“He would sever them post-mortem.”

“His victims’ hands?”

The detective nods. “He liked to collect them. Jerry, my old partner, said this asshole said during his confession, he said he was hiding behind a tree when Jerry and them were looking for him near one of the crime scenes, using one of the hands to wave at a police car as they went by. Dunno if it’s true. Could be true.”

The other detective pulls a manila folder of photos from under his arm, “These are from his house.”

Rows and rows of books. A nice rag rug carpet. Clean sofa. New drapes. Biographies of the Kennedys. Lincoln. Books by Graham Greene. Novelizations of Star Trek.

“He loves Star Trek,” says one of the detectives.

“He talked about space,” I say.

“Did he?”

The other detective sets down his coffee, “We have this camera. We did a scan of his house after he was arrested, you know? The wife had no idea, by the way. Married over 20 years. I mean, the guy had no priors. Night shift at the 7-Eleven. Totally clean record, right? Look here.”

Photos of the kitchen in low greyscale. Sharpie lines pointing to bright white smatterings of chemical signifiers on the linoleum tile floor, the countertop, the backsplash. All the places they found traces of blood.

“He brought a woman here when his wife as out of town. Killed her. Severed her head. Was jacking off into it, into the base of her skull.”

Now we’re looking at a Black female body laid out on low grass, surrounded by woods and lit by headlights.

“This was his last victim. Friend of his.”

She’d worked with him at the 7-Eleven. Driven him in her car to this lone spot in the woods and he’d killed her there. In closer photos, we see her open eyes, her open face, her relaxed feet. He’d flayed the tops of her thighs and spread apart the muscle.

“Why’d he do that?” I ask.

“Cutting her open?”

“Yeah.”

“We asked him. He said he wanted to see what her bones looked like in the moonlight.”

—-//—-

For my film about train hoppers, I convinced my train hopper friend to take me with him (“You’re a mom and you’re a girl. I dunno.”) and we set out from a train yard in Portland, Maine, were nearly locked in a boxcar, hitchhiked, sat on a beatdown front porch stoop at 2 a.m. listening to oldtime music played for no audience and no record contract and no producers, but just for the sake of playing the music on a beatdown porch at 2 a.m. For my film about Dr. Audrey Evans, we moved gingerly through the hallways of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, peered into small, orange-lit research rooms, watching smocked technicians lift slides and bend over trays of tubes, designing bespoke treatments for their patients’ specific cancer, sat on small kid-sized chairs and spoke with the parents of children with cancer, spoke with children with cancer. We spoke with Audrey, 97, with bright blue eyes and strong hands, carefully placing the chocolates I brought her on the side table beside her chair, which was set in clear view of the patio where she watched the birds who came to visit.

Give me the crime scene photos, the $10-in-your-pocket trains, the crushing uncanny valley of a child with cancer. Tell me your worst, and I can help make it into a story for you. We can narrativize it. And in narrativizing it, we can control, at least, how the story ends. Any child of an alcoholic will likely tell you they have a similar instinct. At some point, we hid our story. We projected out. And I’m not sure, but maybe that’s how I’ve come to see such value in the small diamond truths: A murderer’s memory of his mother reading, the wet wind cutting through your jacket on the back of a train car, the toy car the child ran back and forth along the carpet in the play room of the hospital. We walk onto a film set with where we came from walking beside us, and there is no such thing as a neutral lens or an objective camera placement. So I try to remember I’m holding someone’s diamond truth in my hand. They have trusted me and given me permission to set my lenses and choose my wardrobe and pick my colors and mix my music and talk to my actors and compose my shots in order to create the most ephemeral of entities to house that diamond truth, a film.

At the Louisiana State Prison, the assistant warden reached in to close the conference room door after they’d led the inmate back down the hall, and kept his eyes on the tile floor as he shook my hand and walked away.

The exit signs in the prison were green and posted over sun-blind windows and I turned to Ashley as she fumbled a little switching off the camera.

“Did you get it all?” I asked.

“Yeah. Damn,” she nodded.

“You OK?”

“Yeah. You?”

“Yeah.”

All images courtesy Ami Canaan Mann.