A convicted felon who stabbed a jogger 15 times says he targeted her because he wanted to look like her.
Phoenix police say Lauren Heike was ambushed then stabbed 15 times in the chest and back while jogging on a popular trail on April 28.
Zion Teasley, 22, was arrested on May 4 at his mother’s Scottsdale, AZ apartment and charged with first-degree murder. …
Teasley reportedly told police he killed Heike because he struggled with his sexuality and he wanted to look like her. …
He said he struggled with his sexuality growing up in a Christian home and that he hadn’t had sex in a long time.
… He was released from prison in November 2022 after serving time for armed robbery, robbery and disorderly conduct.
Teasley had recently been terminated from his job for “being aggressive toward female employees,” according to court documents.
This strikes me as a 1970s-sounding crime. Or at least the kind of crime that would draw interest from movie and TV screenwriters of the time (in adapting the true crime story, they’d drop the fact that the killer was part black, of course). I’d assume that historical causality flowed in both directions: as more bizarre sex crimes were perpetrated, more movies about bizarre sex crimes were made, and as more movies were made, more sickos could visualize themselves doing something similar.
Over the course of the 1960s and well into the 1970s and maybe the 1980s and early 1990s, there appears to have been, according to baseball stats guru and true crime fan Bill James, a big surge in weird sex crimes (e.g., serial killings).
I’m guessing that was due in part to the loosening of morals to the “Do what thou wilt” notions that emerged by the late 1960s. E.g., I’d long assumed that Hitchcock’s 1960 Psycho was released without the Hays Code censors’ approval, like Wilder’s Some Like It Hot, but instead, the censors simply approved the first slasher film without even all that much controversy.
Maybe something like that is going on again in the 2020s? After all, our culture (theoretically) worships The Transgressive.
On the other hand, young people appear to be a lot less audacious, outgoing, and energetic than in the 1960s. And porn to every taste is vastly more available, so less urge to do-it-yourself. Life is much more virtual now. Transgressiveness is supposed to manifest more in identity than behavior.
Perhaps the difference between the 1960s and the 2020s will be that the 1960s were the age of Do What Thou Wilt while the 2020s are becoming the age of Don’t Bother Doing What Thou Ought, such as putting on your seatbelt.
