Those Empty Eyes

Journalist Tracy Carr, seeing a young girl emerge from her parents’ house after her family is murdered, articulates the descriptor that comes to publicly define Alexandra Quinlan: “the empty-eyed girl” (31). This heavily used moniker haunts Alex throughout her trial, and the stigma associated with the image of “empty eyes” is partly what gets her convicted. In addition, the “empty eyes” identity becomes the image that true crime fanatics obsessed with Alex’s life use to describe her. The origin, interpretation, and use of the “empty eyes” label throughout the novel represent how true crime as a genre sensationalizes and often misrepresents the truth of a crime and often has devastating results for innocent people.

Why Alex’s eyes appeared “empty” in the wake of the murders is open to interpretation: The reason is likely that she was devastated by her family’s murders and didn’t yet have the emotional capacity to respond to what she was experiencing. Tracy and her fans, though, choose to interpret the emptiness as apathy and a sign of guilt. Consumers of true crime, seeking a sensational explanation, reduce ambiguities to their most salacious interpretations. The sensationalized epithet “empty eyes” thus unfairly brands Alex and creates a single