TOW #13 - The Case of the Vanishing Blonde

"From the start, it was a bad case."  These are the words Mark Bowden uses to begin his chilling tale of a Florida crime case cracked open.  While the first sentence may seem dramatic, much of Bowden's essay is written in this way.  Through short statements and surprising truths, Bowden tells the story of a woman found raped and beaten on the edge of the Everglades, and how two men turned the case from a dead end, into the surprisingly complex outcome it became. Bowden begins with a general telling of what happened.  The woman only remembered pieces from that night, but immediately hired a lawyer and sued the hotel she had been staying at for negligence.  Upon hitting this point in his telling, Bowden switches to giving background information about the private investigator that was hired to find the facts of the case.  Through quotes such as "I'll find out what happened.  I'm not going to shade things to assist your client, but I will find out what the truth is", Bowden reveals the contrasting agendas that each person involved in the case had.  In addition, by switching from telling the story, to giving background about the main players, to quoting these players, Bowden is able to build tension to the eventual climax of his story, and allow the reader to form opinions and inferences about his topic.  Another effective tool Bowden uses is to lay out the evidence in the same order that the detectives in the case found it.  He doesn't give all the answers first, and then explain how they realistically arrived at those answers, and instead leaves the reader guessing and wondering.  In this way, Bowden is able to bring his audience in as a part of the case, and by the end, the readers feels as if they have solved it themselves.  Not only is the case Bowden describes an interesting one, but he intricately weaves the tale in a way that forces the reader to want to keep reading.  He also subtly includes the doubts he has about the victim's tale, an idea that becomes increasingly important.  By only subtly including his biases, the reader almost believes they came to these conclusions alone, and that they have been a small factor in solving the case.  Bowden plays to his audience's emotions and assumptions, and is very effective in making this real life crime feel almost as though it could have been created for the big screen.