Literature, True Crime

True Crime: From Antiquity to Modern Times

Undoubtedly, one of the earliest and best-known sources of true crime stories is the Bible, particularly the Old Testament. Some of the most popular Old Testament accounts that contain the elements of a crime (the criminal act and required state of mind) are Abel's murder of his brother Cain, Moses' flight from Egypt because he feared apprehension by authorities for the murder of an Egyptian, and King David's plot to have Bathsheba's husband slain in battle so that he could marry her himself.

True crime stories also are found in the ancient classics and plays. The story of Julius Caesar's assassination is an example of a true crime that was originally written in the classics and later appeared in Shakespeare's play. Julius Caesar provides the intent and modus operandi of his murderer, Brutus. The play has continued to captivate audiences from the seventeenth century until today.

Beginning in the seventeenth century until the penny press of the nineteenth century, the public's sources of crime were the broadsides and prisoners' confessions. People who witnessed public executions heard prisoners confess before they were executed. These confessions have come down through history because witnesses wrote down what they heard.

A Scotsman, William Roughead (1870–1952), was one of the earliest true crime authors. He received his law degree from the University of Edinburgh, but instead of practicing law, he decided to write about it. Based on his own court observations and research from the public trial records, he wrote more than forty true crimes as fiction. These were about murder trials that were tried in Edinburgh between 1889 and 1949 (Sante 2000). Although his stories were popular with the public, his colleagues believed they were not appropriate for a lawyer to write and publish (Axelrod and Phillips, with Kemper 1996: 256). Roughead also edited a number of volumes in the Notable British Trial series. Lillian Hellman's play The Children's Hour (1934) was an adaptation of one of Roughead's accounts of a nineteenth-century case in Edinburgh. The case was about a schoolgirl who accused two old-maid teachers of lesbianism.

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