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Defender, reported on the case and on Elder’s victims. The coroner declared Roberta’s killing spree an “unheard of thing” that read like something out of a story book, and still it received little attention. Elder was sent to prison, having never confessed, and her killing and victims went on unremembered.4 A female serial killer, a novelty to reporters and scholars alike, seemed to arouse no interest. The same year as Roberta’s prosecution, a white woman named Nannie Doss, was accused of killing four out of her five husbands. Called Lady Bluebeard or the Giggling Grannie because she giggled every time she was asked about the killings, the police later suspected that Doss may have killed eleven family members. Nannie Doss’ case garnered national attention and continues to arouse public interest today, evidenced by her name appearing in top ten notable female serial killers as well as studies on female killers.5

Doss’ notoriety and popular culture capital, nearly seventy years after her crimes, reveal the disturbing trend in American history that Black victims do not draw the kind of media scrutiny and interest that white victims do. Studies have shown that Black perpetrators are disproportionately overrepresented in the media, while Black victims are underrepresented. Meanwhile white victims are overrepresented out of proportion to the rate at which whites are crime victims. Psychologist Scott Bonn argues that myths about serial killers and their victims have led to the assumption that Black serial killers do not exist in significant numbers. He argues that this occurs because 90 percent of serial murderers kill people of the same race. Because American culture devalues Black lives and misrepresents violent crime as something perpetrated by Black criminals against white victims, Black violent crime victims remain invisible.

The media perpetrates this myth by giving air time to the kinds of killers that target sympathetic victims, particularly white women. Bonn describes this phenomenon as “missing white girl syndrome.” In his analysis of the veracity of the missing white girl syndrome, Zach Sommers argues that race and gender disparities in news coverage of Black versus white victims are supported by the evidence, and that the race and gender of a victim effects not only whether the victim receives any attention, but also how much attention. Though Sommers analyzed missing, as opposed to women confirmed dead, media studies scholar Sarah Stillman argues that these images and messages offer “a subtle instruction manual” on which victims to empathize with and which ones to overlook. This has led to the marginalization of Black victims in both media portrayals and by extension the public consciousness.

This kind of sensational news coverage of “white women and girls in peril” not only obscures a portion of violent crime victims, it reifies the value of whiteness over non-whites who are often at greater risk of violent crime. Not strictly an American affliction, Stillman argues that in at least one particularly egregious case, Canadian news broadcasts ran hours of news coverage of a whale that died after colliding with a boat propeller, while simultaneously ignoring the murder and disappearance of thirty two indigenous women. She points out that the deaths of non-white people, particularly women, have become “naturalized” in media coverage. According to her this is made brutally apparent by the value of one whale’s death over that of indigenous women, while white women’s disappearances and murders continue to circulate and are even commodified.

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