Composite Sketches

The Biblical tale of Cain and Abel is the original true crime story. Murder ballads were once quite popular throughout Scandinavia and the British Isles. Victorian penny dreadfuls, with their grisly chronicles of wrongdoing, often sold millions of copies. Magazines from The New Yorker and Vanity Fair to True Detective, with its classic lurid covers, have long sated people’s appetite for deadly sins.

In 1966, Truman Capote struck gold with In Cold Blood, which details the gruesome murders of the Clutter family, outside of Holcomb, Kansas, in 1959. That “non-fiction novel” opened the floodgates even wider. Since then, countless bestsellers have followed, about the likes of Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, and Charles Manson (Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter, from 1974, being the most successful of them all).

Of course, Hollywood has also mined the true crime vein. HBO’s The Jinx and I’ll Be Gone in the Dark and...