Note: Elliot Grant is a pseudonym, but this refers to a real case. People who follow such things may even be able to identify which one. If so, I kindly ask that you do not reference it, as that would include personal information on where I grew up, where my father worked, and so on.
My parents, as they go to bed, turn on the TV and watch Leno. It’s part of their ritual. My ritual is slightly different: I turn on the DVR and watch some non-arching crime show. Law & Order got a lot of viewing this way. Since I’ve seen so many of those, though, I’ve drifted to Cold Case, Numb3rs, Flashpoint, and other shows of the sort. One crime show that I never got into as much was Criminal Minds, though I’ll watch it when I want a sure-fire haven’t-seen-this-before episode of something. I’ve always found something about the show off-putting. Some of it relates to Elliot Grant.
One day, somebody found a dead body on a huge plot of land. They looked further, and they found more dead bodies (all women). The local PD decided that they had a serial killer and asked the FBI for a profile. The FBI sent one back. The type you would generally expect: loner, has trouble with women, possibly this, probably that. And from that point, nearly everything Grant did fit that profile. He was initially very cooperative, just as the killer would be. Then, once realizing that the police were looking at him, became very uncooperative, just as the killer would do. They found pornography on his computer, which the killer would have.
I am not entirely a fully impartial narrator. Though I don’t think I ever met Grant, he was an employee of my father’s. My father tends to be a very good judge of character, and my father found the notion that Grant was a serial killer to be absurd. And so I, too, am inclined towards disbelief. Not all that many people were. The newspapers ran his face, asking if Elliot Grant was getting away with murder. The father of one of the victims began terrorizing him, trespassing and leaving threatening phone calls (the police would tell him to stop and/or leave the property, but never prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law).
The only thing that the police lacked was proof. Any proof. They searched his house and his ranch and found not a thing (but they wouldn’t, said the profilers, because the killer would be meticulous). Eventually Grant went on television and took a lie detector test administered by a former FBI muckity-muck (the police had asked him to take one, but he had declined because he did not trust the police), which he passed on the question of whether he did it or had any knowledge of who did (he did lie about something less germane, however). This was enough for the FBI, who said that as far as they were concerned, Grant was cleared. The local PD disagreed.
For the next several years, any time a girl went missing, they would turn his ranch upside down and re-search his house. His name would be mentioned in the press again. Elliot Grant got another one. Unless they found the girl, in which case he didn’t.
About half a decade ago, for the first time in a few years, another girl went missing. Elliot Grant killed himself.
There are people that, to this day, believe that Grant was guilty. His death was only emblematic of the fact that he couldn’t live with the guilt. The detective in charge of the case conceded, who had been unmoved by Grant’s death, that Grant may have done it or may not have done it. The father that had terrorized him said the same (and that he regrets terrorizing him). To be sure, there is no proof that Grant didn’t do it. But the strength of the case against him relied partially that his land was where the bodies were found and largely on the profile.
And so… a show about profilers doesn’t excite me all that much. It’s not unlike how Law & Order SVU and Without a Trace are – to me – emblematic of our culture of paranoia surrounding sex and children and therefore less enjoyable to me.
??? Grant’s land?
Oops. Fixed.
I’m not sure if I’m the only one, but I’m having trouble following this post. Are you outlining an episode of CM, or something that happened that makes you unfavorably disposed toward CM? I think it’s the latter, but I’m not sure.
If it’s the latter, is there something about CM that makes it come in for your ire in particular? It take it the answer is yes, but I’m not following what it is.
For my part, I can’t stand procedurals, but I think Criminal Minds is just simply too well done a procedural not to enjoy, though it is sometimes too intense for me (which is saying something). The regualr characters are characters, the acting of those characters is almost universally great, and the plots are almost always harrowing. There is a lot of sex in their violence: I think that actually is in the nature of serial killers though. I can see your critique about sexual hysteria, but… this stuff is really out there. Are you saying they overemphasize it for the sake of sensationalism? I’d be willing to bet that the number of cases in the show in which sexual obsession plays in the pathology of the killer is not wildly out of proportion to the number of serial killers in the world in which it does.
Would you want to specify a bit more what bothers you about the show in particular compared to other procedurals?
My eyes skipped over the note above the image at first. but luckily I guessed right, s the rest of the comment applies.
Sorry if I was unclear. Criminal Minds is built around the profiling of serial killers and (often) working from there. The Grant case was about a profile for a serial killer that was, I believe, wrong (or, alternately, painting a sufficiently wide brush that it became easy to convince the police that the wrong guy was the right guy). And their getting it wrong had some pretty severe consequences. It makes it more difficult for me to have all that much confidence in the methodology being employed as a crux of the show.
I actually like the characters of CM a good deal, which is all the more a pity.
The sexual hysteria was not really in reference to CM (and I will grant I was very unclear about this, where I was intending CM:profiling::WoaT:teensex). It was more about SVU and WoaT. The sexual obsession in those shows transcends the existence of sex crimes or the sexuality of crime into “You would not BELIEVE what young people are doing nowadays!!” with the result of scaring the bejeezus out of people with regard to what their sons and daughters are up to. (sometimes as bad as “If you don’t think your daughters are going to parties and playing round-robin with oral sex, you are woefully naive.”)
No, I see now the last line was clearly about those shows. So the issue is profiling per se. And you say that your problem is more IRL than with the show as such, it’s that that’s an obstacle to your enjoying the show.
That’s probably just a weightier matter than can be dealt with in the context of entertainment television, period. Within the context of Hollywood, I find the analysis we see in CM pretty interesting and complex as TV procedurals go, I guess is all I can say. But it definitely adds to the overall cultural cache of the FBI profiler mystique. Though I also think it humanizes them a bit as well. Clint Van Zandt or whoever the celebrity real-life profiler of the moment might be can seem really clinical and haughty when we see them talking about real cases. I don’t know why – seeing the real ones lionized that way gives me the heebies more than fictional shows about them do for some reason. But I can see it the other way too.
I remember reading a John Douglas book about profiling, and was astonished both at how seriously people seemed to take his work (or so he said) given that there seemed to be a ridiculously small sample size and the grossest of generalizations.
I agree wrt L&O:SVU (Sadism and Voyeurs Unit). I didn’t get all that much !!teensex!! from WoaT — people vanished for all sorts of reasons, only some of which had to do with !!teensex!! I liked that they didn’t always find the MP, and all too often, the MP was dead when they found them. I didn’t care for the silly soap opera that pervaded it after a while, but the cases were quite fascinating.
It’s entirely possible that I have simply seen the wrong episodes of WoaT. The round-robin line (I can’t remember what the wording was, but that was the gist) came from one of the few I’ve seen.
Law enforcement doesn’t pay enough to get good profilers.