UBC: Robert Kolker, Lost Girls

[truepenny]

Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery by Robert Kolker

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a fascinating, disturbing, terrifying, and deeply sad book. It's a study of the deaths of five women, all of them "escorts" who advertised on Craigslist, four of the five (if not all five) murdered by the same person. Kolker isn't so much interested in the investigation as he is in the biographies of the victims and the stories of the people who survive them. He's compassionately non-judgmental (I think the only person I could actually tell Kolker didn't like was Shannan Gilbert's last john) and what he ends up writing is a study of modern American poverty as much as it is anything else. These women didn't resort to prostitution because they were corrupt or lazy; they resorted to prostitution because they needed the money. The money they could make at "honest" jobs (and those "honest" jobs being hard to come by) just looks ridiculous next to the money they could make as escorts. Kolker comments at the end, "The demand for commercial sex will never go away" (381), and the truth of that is something America has been failing to cope with for a very long time. In most ways, the world that these women lived and died in is very different from the world that Helen Jewett lived and died in (The Murder of Helen Jewett), but in some ways it is horribly the same. And if you compare the hardship--and outright lethal danger--of trying to make a living as an escort via Craigslist with the relative safety and security of the women at Mustang Ranch (Brothel: Mustang Ranch and Its Women) it kind of makes you despair of a society that would rather blame the prostitute than admit any shred of responsibility on the part of the john. Would rather condone murder than give women (and men) a chance to do this job safely and with dignity.

Kolker doesn't try to impose a narrative on something that is intrinsically narativeless. There's only parts of a story here, parts that can't be lined up with each other. Lost Girls is a gentle ironizing of books like Someone's Daughter, as Kolker records the alliance formed by the mothers and sisters and friends of the murdered women, and then records the way that alliance falls apart under the pressure of the horrible anti-closure of the case. The arc of redemptive community, of the survivors coming together to create a family, ends with a woman unwilling to talk to the accidentally encountered father of her murdered sister's son because she's afraid of looking like a stalker. There is nothing, Kolker suggests, that is redeemable about these crimes, only destruction.






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