Twenty years ago, maybe more, when CNN was my go-to news source (it ain’t anymore, now that it has become a penny-ante contrarian knockoff of Fox News) I started noticing its obsession with missing or dead pretty young blonde White women. If someone answering to that description was found strangled or hadn’t contacted her family in a week — bang! — her grinning photo’d be right at the top of that day’s website and the lead image on that night’s newscast.
I could have predicted (and pretty much did) the emergence of Black Lives Matter because of it. And if I have to explain the connection, you’ll never get it anyway.
In any case, this week’s New York Times bestseller list, paperback nonfiction, includes at no. 8, College Girl, Missing, by Shawn Cohen. If you’re in Bloomington, you know the basics of the story. For those outside the town, the missing person in question is Indiana University student Lauren Spierer, whose disappearance on a June night/early morning in 2011 was huge news in these parts, in no small part because she was a pretty young blonde White woman.
Lauren Spierer: Her Life Mattered.
Plus she came from big East Coast dough. Her parents hired private investigators to dig into the case and, no doubt, university honchos chewed their fingernails to the bone worrying that moneyed families from New York and New Jersey might think twice about sending their kids to college out this way, a trend that has kept IU’s cash registers ringing for years.
Colleges and universities, once lavishly funded by their respective states, now are pretty much on their own and forced to market themselves like high-end department stores or gourmet restaurants. Ergo the influx of ungodly rich East Coast and Chinese students able to pay now-extravagant tuitions. If you haven’t wandered around big college campuses of late, you’d be surprised to see how many undergrads are tooling around in Maseratis. Cheap ramen soup is no longer the college kid’s stereotypical dinner but Balenciaga sneakers at $1300 the pair on fashionable freshman feet have become increasingly common.
Back to Lauren Spierer. The fact that this now-13-year-old story remains hot enough to be the subject of a bestselling true crime book shows that the missing blonde girl trope still holds strong. Hell, there was even a 2023 Lifetime movie called Black Girl Missing, recounting the contrast between the disappearances of two college-aged females, one Black and one White. The story primarily is about the efforts of the Black girl’s mother to get reporters and for-profit media outlets to pay a bit of attention to her daughter’s case*, all the while TV and newspapers are tripping over themselves covering the killing of Gabby Petito who, needless to say, was White.
Gabby Petito: Her Life Mattered.
[* For the life of me, I can’t figure out if the “Black Girl Missing” story is based on a real young woman’s disappearance or if she’s fictional. No matter; the point remains.]
Cohen’s choice of a title is a kick in the stomach to all those Black families missing a college-aged daughter. Of all the possible titles Cohen could have selected, did he have to rip off the one that indicts for-profit news media for its preoccupation with Barbie dolls?
Cohen makes no bones about the fact that he’s joined at the hip with the Spierer parents, Rob and Charlene. He was a reporter for the Westchester County, New York, Journal News at the time of Spierer’s disappearance. In the book’s preface, he recounts wooing the Spierers. He writes: “We became close to the point Ron and Charlene, raising two daughters in the same suburbs where I grew up, felt like family….”
No sin there.
Clearly, though, Lauren’s Spierer’s entire case is rife with sin. Seemingly within hours of her disappearance becoming known, several male IU students — Lauren’s boyfriend, his rival for her affections, and a few other lunkheaded hangers-on — lawyered up. At the time, I asked a dear friend who happens to be a big shot lawyer in town about it and this person said, essentially, Golly, gee, of course, everybody should get a lawyer at a time like that. Which is precisely what any lawyer would say, except the rest of us understand that those who lawyer up generally have something to worry about.
The truth of the matter is I read Cohen’s book through the end of the first chapter, in which he recounts moment by moment Lauren Spierer’s actions that fateful night/early morning, and then I was finished with it.
See, when I was Lauren Spierer et al‘s age and drifting in and out of various colleges and universities, I avoided people like her and her pals as if they carried a brain-eating virus, which, for all intents and purposes, they did. These are/were kids who, when they reach the age of 50 and are asked what was the last book they read would cite the last one they were assigned in senior year and whose college years were a whirl of binge drinking, coke and crushed-pill snorting, puking, using Mom & Dad’s credit cards to buy bottles of energy drink, and forgettable sport fucking. And they loved it.
My crowd loathed that gang and they, in turn, loathed me and my pals, which was fine by us.
The reason I put the book down and won’t take it up again unless I’m assigned to write something more about it is I couldn’t care less about these people and their vapid lives. As a reader, you have to feel something for the protagonist — even a missing, presumed dead one — and I didn’t in College Girl, Missing.
I needn’t tell you how horrible it is for a parent to lose a child. Every recounting of Lauren Spierer’s case drives that home with a sledgehammer. I wish Lauren Spierer were still alive, no matter how much I couldn’t — and can’t — stomach her gang.
