By  Seamus McGraw

July 11, 2006

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TAVARES, Fla. (Crime Library) —   It was, even for those who only casually watch the round-the-clock television news networks, almost impossible to escape her haunting image in those frantic late winter days in 2005.

Her name was Jessica Marie Lunsford and in those desperate weeks in February and March of 2005, it was mentioned several times an hour by anchors and commentators and pundits. Her picture, an innocent portrait of a nine-year-old with an impish smile and a floppy hat, was, it seemed, everywhere.

She had vanished, kidnapped apparently from her own bedroom, allegedly by a 47-year-old convicted sex offender, a man named John Evander Couey, who authorities say later admitted to raping her, strangling her, and burying her body within sight of her home. And with his arrest, Couey too became an icon. His image, wizened, balding and unkempt, chain smoking and beer drinking, was for a time broadcast nationwide every fifteen minutes at least. The details of his life, his past arrests, and even his alleged confession, a statement that would later be suppressed because investigators had allegedly ignored his repeated requests for an attorney, were all analyzed and dissected on national television and in print.

It was, of course, far from the first time that the cable networks had plunged so deeply into an unfolding and horrific crime. Ever since the early 1990s, when the national media threw itself wholly into coverage of the O.J. Simpson case, a kind of formula had developed, and a virtual industry had grown up around it. Former cops and former prosecutors and self-described profilers became media stars as they chewed over every available detail of every case that met the criteria.

Some eighteen months before Jessica's death, the national media had become obsessed with another case, that of Dru Sjodin, a 22-year-old student who had been abducted, raped and apparently murdered as she left her job at a Grand Forks, N.D. mall. Like Couey, her alleged killer, Alfonzo Rodriguez, also a convicted sex offender, became a grim celebrity, his image, and the details of his life, aired regularly on the networks.

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Contact Seamus McGraw at seamusm@ptd.net

Seamus McGraw

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