Mary Winkler just got her three kids back. Winkler was the woman convicted, in 2006, of voluntary manslaughter in the shooting death of her minister husband. She killed him with a shotgun blast to the back, but after she testified that he’d spent years physically and emotionally abusing her, a jury found her guilty only of voluntary manslaughter. She was sentenced to three years in jail, but spent most of it on probation. Her kids had been living with her dead husband’s parents until a judge ordered them returned to her custody.
Her story almost—but not quite—fits the profile for a good episode of Snapped. She’s too sympathetic, her actions too understandable, and her husband seemingly too despicable, to work really well, however.
Snapped is a TV series about real murders in which the perp is always a woman — almost always a very greedy one — and the victim almost always a foolish man. However premeditated the murders, the women on Snapped—well, they just “snapped.”
My husband loves Snapped—especially the marathons, where three episodes run in a row. (FYI, Snapped runs on the Oxygen channel, which, like Lifetime, is a “women’s” channel.) Snapped is a lot like A&E’s City Confidential, except Snapped confines itself to female murderers. (Although around 90 percent of murders in America are committed by men, women account for a hefty 30 percent of the murders within intimate couples.)
Where City Confidential relies on the inflated metaphor (as in, “Rumors spread through town like a Texas tornado”), Snapped is played straight. The show usually includes such boilerplate wonders as, “On June 7th, 2003, Susan Jones walked into the Walker County Courthouse to stand trial for the murder of her husband Larry” (intoned by a female narrator who sounds a lot like a social worker).
Snapped lasts a lean, mean half hour, and the events are matter-of-factly told. First we see still photos of the victim and the perp romping together during happy times. Then we see photos of them looking not so happy. Next we see police photos of the victim (almost always a man, although occasionally a mom or a friend) sprawled out on the pavement or floating in a river, or — more gruesome, somehow — a photo of a white, duct-taped, fridge shoved into the corner of a storage unit.
Once the female perp is picked up for questioning, we watch her (on police videotape) while she tells very obvious lies to investigators. She then goes to trial, where she sits staring out like a fish until the jury rules for conviction. At the end of the show, we read that her case is on appeal.
Like City Confidential, Snapped is made on the cheap — stock photos of a small town in Texas, Arizona, or Utah, vague courtroom procedures, and a couple of 20-second interviews with relatives or friends all gussied up for the camera, ready to help viewers understand the motives of the perp and the virtues of the victim.
On Snapped, the women who murder are ordinary women, leading ordinary lives right up until they suddenly commit the very unordinary act of murder. They’re neither Roskolnikovs (suddenly committing a motiveless murder), nor Medeas (harboring deep longings for revenge against a husband’s betrayal). Instead, they’re almost always women caught up in very venal matters.
Whereas men seem to mostly murder women out of sexual rage or jealousy, Snapped proposes that women mostly murder out of greed. On Snapped, most of the women seem terrible at handling money. Once they’ve used up their victim’s assets, they become desperate to get hold of the insurance money. None of them seems to ever consider divorce to be an option.
Nor are any of them very smart. They like to take out large life-insurance policies on their victim a month before the murder, and use their credit card to buy acid at the hardware store or rent a large U-Haul truck. None of them seems to have ever heard of luminol, or to understand the concept of cell-phone towers or cell-phone records. Nor do they understand the pervasiveness of surveillance cameras.
In a perverse and trashy sort of way, however, Snapped is a feminist program. It’s payback time for all the male serial rapist-murderers who have committed violent acts against women over the years. Its stories add up to a crude evening out of the murder score with men. Snapped makes it almost refreshing to see women stand up and be murderers.
