Much Ado Over Absolutely Nothing

There was never all of the condemnation when the National Enquirer published the famous cover of Elvis Presley in his coffin back in 1977.

That was a legendary issue. I even have a copy of it although it is in Reno like so much of my stuff.

These days people are upset over a similar photo of Whitney Houston in her coffin. Actually it's pretty benign and she looks like she is asleep rather than dead. I have seen far worse.

I think people should reserve their anger for television shows like Snapped that spend way too much time showing crime scene photos of murder victims. One such episode that outraged me was the one early in the series which touched on the Larry McNabney murder. I knew him although not well, of course, but as a library patron who came in frequently on the weekends at the Washoe County Law Library when I worked there in the years 1994-2002. He would come in and we would make small talk when he could get a cup of coffee. He always wore a cowboy hat, and I always had trouble remembering his name when he would check out a book. That was odd because McNabney was known to have his commercials run on television stations all over Nevada. One time he brought in somebody who years later I recognized as his fifth wife, "Elisa." Of course the entire nation knew her as Laren Renee Sims Jordan who had a 113-page rap sheet and with her "associate" and apparent girlfriend Sarah Dutra killed McNabney in 2001. She committed suicide in jail following her capture in Florida. At the time I saw her, she was helping Larry check out some law books. Nothing out of the ordinary, of course. By that time they were likely married. McNabney was based in Reno but had an office in Las Vegas where he met Sims Jordan.

Anyway, the point is Snapped, while it gave a good account of the murder case, just couldn't resist showing the picture of poor Larry when he was dug up in the shallow grave in a California vineyard. I could have gone the rest of my life and not seen that photo. He was a real person with a family and many friends who loved him, but to the producers of this series, his body was just a way to shock and boost ratings.

The photo of Whitney Houston in her coffin, while tasteless, doesn't quite reach the outrage level of a McNabney or the many other murder or accident victims who met horrible deaths and had their death pictures plastered all over the media and the internet.