December 9, 2024
In my first video on Sarah Boone (“Are You There, God? It’s Me, Sarah Boone”), I called her charismatic. I received several unhappy comments in response, and I want to take a moment to talk about why I called Sarah that.
The first reason is that I genuinely believe that she’s charismatic—at least in the right circumstances. It might be hard to imagine if you’ve only watched her trial, but she was unusually quiet and sedate during the trial, which I suspect has to do with the enforced sobriety of being in a tightly run jail. Her police cams present an entirely different person, one who’s loud, impulsive, and manipulative, and her letters reveal her bitterness and rage. But I think it’s her two-hour police interview that actually reveals how all of this comes together. She’s quick witted, snapping, “Tell us and we’ll both know,” in response to a question, and her gestures are large and dramatic.
Charisma is a mysterious quality, and not one about which people always agree. What is charismatic to one person might be obnoxious to another. For me, charisma overlaps closely with intrigue. I want to understand this person who’s behaving in ways I can’t fathom. That’s what drew me to the Daybell case, and that’s what drew me to Sarah Boone.
I see a lot of people desiring to call her pure evil—and that’s certainly not confined to this case. Lots of people who follow true crime seem to want to declare every criminal the worst of the worst, a psychopath, unredeemable evil. Frankly, I’m not interested in that. Those sorts of declarations – at best – are shallow, and at worst, perpetuate crime. This occurs in two ways.
First, people use the idea of unredeemable evil to avoid closer examination. They say things like, “There’s something wrong with him,” or “He’s just a bad person.” That dismissal is too easy and produces nothing. Our refusal to look at crime and criminals precludes our ability to prevent crime. We can’t prevent crime from occurring until we understand why it occurs and who commits it. There’s a famous example of this from USSR, where police failed to acknowledge the existence of a serial killer because they believed a perfect Communist society wouldn’t produce criminals and that serial killing was a result of capitalism. Fifty-two victims later, they realized they were wrong, but if they had just been willing to consider the evidence in front of them instead of looking away, many of those lives could have been saved. (The documentary In Plain Sight is a fantastic warning about the dangers of refusing to see all sides of a person.) We can’t save the next Jorge Torres until we understand why Sarah Boone killed him, what the warning signs were, and what intervention could have saved his life.
Second, dismissing criminals as “evil” is a form of dehumanization. Ironically, the root cause of crime is often dehumanization. We become more like Sarah Boone when we deny the ways in which she is like us. And believe me: no one wants to be like Sarah Boone. The solution is to refuse to see each other as less than whole people, and that means acknowledging that Sarah has some good qualities. No one is suggesting that they outweigh her negative qualities or that their existence means she shouldn’t be held accountable for her actions, only that there’s no point in studying a single dimension of another person.
The desire to reduce people to pure evil is counterintuitive to me, because what I find interesting is the complexity of people. How could Chad Daybell be a soft-spoken family man and also a diabolical cult leader? Many people would say that the family man was a façade, a mask he wore, but I think it would be more accurate to compare him to Two-Face, the Batman villain. He is both of these things. Maybe if we were better at acknowledging the entirety of people, we’d be better at recognizing what they’re capable of and the path they’re headed down much earlier. If the police hadn’t assumed that Jorge Torres was the aggressor because he was a man and Sarah Boone was the victim because she was a woman, maybe she would have ended up in the batterer’s intervention program instead of him, and maybe that would have been enough to change the outcome.
Sarah talked a lot about forgiveness in her pre-sentencing statement. (And in case you think I’m going too easy on her, I’ll say that her statement was one of the most offensive, disgusting, vile things I’ve ever heard.) My mother told me once that I’m the most forgiving person she knows, but I doubt that’s true because I’ve never experienced forgiveness. If you ask me what it’s like to forgive someone, I’ll tell you I don’t know. What I experience is that when I’m angry at someone, I can only see the part of them that hurt me. My anger blots out everything else about them, and my mental concept of them is dominated by the behavior that hurt me. Eventually, after my adrenaline has ebbed away and – sometimes – after the person has apologized and placated my ego, my mental picture of them starts to expand. I return to the place from which I can see their complexity and nuance. I reengage my humanity and remember that they, too, are worthy of compassion and understanding. That’s my experience of forgiveness.
Maybe this is how everyone experiences forgiveness, and we just don’t talk about it enough that I can recognize myself in others’ experiences. I don’t know. But I do know that I always want to return to that place where I’m seeing the totality of other people instead of focusing on their worst qualities. I don’t do it for them. I do it for me, because I want to live in a world where we can be imperfect without being condemned, because I find the contradictions of the human experience beautiful, because I look at Sarah and Chad and Lori and think, There but for the grace of God go I. So I will continue to call Sarah Boone charismatic. I will continue to acknowledge that I think she can be witty, and kind, and a good friend, and also a narcissistic, abusive murderer who will – and should – spend the rest of her life in prison.
Perish the Thought 