The Johnson County War and who killed Nicole?

Both the Johnson County War and the O.J. Simpson case are true crime landmarks and both came under discussion at the conference on The Image of Violence in Literature, Media, and Society last weekend in Colorado Springs.

Ones could guess that a conference like this might bring together a host of criminologists who would spend their time complaining about how reporters get in the way of their investigations.

Not so. What we ran into were mostly literature professors with books in the works, and their students, whose investigations involve things like why Cormac MacCarthy uses no quotation marks. Our own guess --- to inspire literary criticism.

University of New Haven’s famed criminologist Henry C. Lee showed up Friday night to wow the crowd with his quick wit and pointed insights. Lee argued that the evidence in the criminal trial of O.J. Simpson suggested their were two murderers using two knives and at least two sets of unexplained bloody footprints at the scene. Dr. Lee showed a picture of Nicole’s body that indicated police botched the crime scene investigation by failing to collect DNA from a bloody droplet on her shoulder, blood that must have dripped from a cut on one of the killers. He also hinted --- but only hinted --- at who one of the killers might have been. There might be more in Cracking More Cases, Lee’s 2004 book with co-author Thomas W. O’Neil, which goes into the Simpson case. It should be noted that Lee testified for the defense at the trial, although he insists that he stuck to the facts and even angered O.J.’s attorneys by being supportive of the value of DNA evidence.

The story of the Johnson County War may be less familiar though it was a bedrock historical “true crime” event. The war took place in Wyoming before the end of the 19^th Century and involved a battle between settlers and cattle barons that inspired one of the first classics of Western literature, The Virginian. The notable thing about that novel, in our “post-modern” times, is that it takes the side of the cattle barons. Patrick McGee of Louisiana State University, author of From Shane to Kill Bill, has traced how that rather limited range war inspired much of the western fiction that followed. McGee said it was not until the 1930s that writers and film-makers switched sides in portraying the frontier battles between poor homesteaders and the great land-owning capitalists who hired gunslingers to run them off. For a book that details the war itself, McGee suggested The War on Powder River by H. H. Smith is the most detailed and academic. We’ll be looking into that ourselves as time goes by.

And one day --- or week --- we’ll spend some time with one of Lee’s books though our list is getting long and the lawn needs mowing.