It’s easy to see the still-unfolding case of Lindsay Clancy as unique. It’s horribly unusual for a mother to admit to murdering her own children and novel to use “postpartum psychosis” as a rationale for acquittal. But the national attention bordering on fixation that the case has attracted puts it in an American media tradition: what can be called a “crime of the century” — crimes so dramatic that they captivate the public, owing to both their horror and their novelty. Their attention can be dismissed as press sensationalism, but they serve an important purpose as revealing snapshots of a changing society.
The “crime of the century tradition” can be dated at least to the 1932 “Lindbergh baby” kidnapping: the abduction of the son of the celebrity pilot Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh. The combination of a ransom and its payment, the discovery of the boy’s body, and the ultimate capture and execution of the kidnapper played out over four years, but it was a “crime of the century” because it told a novel story: Even the rich and famous were not insulated from terrible crime. Celebrity, then relatively novel, can be a curse.
