The Audacity of the L&O Franchise

A beautiful child actress is murdered in her basement on Halloween night. A pedophile in Viet Nam emails a crime author with details about the killing, and 14 years later, he is arrested for the girl's murder. NYPD travel to the Far East to bring him into custody. They fly him back First Class, plying him with champagne en route, hoping to loosen his tongue. Cable news anchors -- particularly a bottle blonde with a regional accent -- are aghast at the preferential treatment the creepozoid gets.

Sound familiar? It's tonight's epiosde of Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Clearly it has nothing whatsoever to do with JonBenet Ramsey and Jon Mark Karr because she was murdered in a basement on Christmas, and the pedophile who emailed details about the crime to an author was apprehended in Thailand. She was a beauty queen while this little girl was an actress. These cops are from New York, those cops were from Boulder. See? Very different.

I just saw a commercial for this Friday's episode of Law & Order, the original. A celebrity goes on a tirade about Jews and how Jews are out to get him. Another episode, "ripped from today's headlines."

Perhaps all this should offend me, but it doesn't. Instead I'm amazed by the sheer nerve of Dick Wolf and Co. Aren't they worried about libel? Or do they have a team of lawyers who know exactly where the line is, and just how much they have to change to avoid crossing it?

Greetings from the Midwest

Maybe it's because of Halloween. Maybe it's the studious John Callaway series on Leopold and Loeb on PBS. Maybe it's because when you can't sleep, it's just natural to think about things that go bump in the night.

But it occurs to me that Chicago has had more than our share of horrific characters, monsters in losers' clothing. Leopold and Loeb were our first "crime of the century," self-anointed geniuses who "thrill killed" a child to see if they could get away with it. And even with antiquated forensics, they were caught right away. (What a pair of depraved dumb asses.) Then Richard Speck, the bogeyman of my girlhood, who killed 8 student nurses in their home. Pockmarked and chainsmoking, even with his cuffs on, he looked like the perfect villain. As an adult, I look at him with horrified contempt. He was a failure at everything he did, except mass murder. And most recently, the Killer Clown, John Gacy. A predator who understood that many parents were ashamed of their gay sons, and therefore didn't go looking for them, Gacy gave these poor boys a home -- in his crawlspace.

I love Chicago. It's the most beautiful, most alive, most livable city I've ever seen. But we have a darkside that's as inky black as it can get. (I didn't even mention Al Capone and that unfortunate Valentine's Day incident in the garage.)