At a dinner party early this past summer, some friends and I got to talking about why it was that the media, and especially the tabloid newspapers and the cable television news channels, were so obsessively interested in some stories but not in others which appeared to be at least superficially similar. In particular, we wondered what was the reason for their fascination with the case of Natalee Holloway, the Alabama teenager who had disappeared and was widely presumed to have been murdered—though at the time of this writing her body has not been found—while on a high-school graduation trip to Aruba. We compared the media’s feverish interest in her fate with the almost complete lack of same in the contemporaneous murder-kidnapping of the Groene children, nine-year-old Dylan and eight-year-old Shasta, of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, by a convicted sex offender who had also murdered the children’s older brother and their mother and her boyfriend in the process of extracting them from their home. Poor Shasta, recovered alive before leading the police to the spot where her brother’s body was buried, was the family’s only survivor.

One explanation that found some favor was that people like to moralize—especially when moralizing can serve as a charm to ward off misfortune. Natalee Holloway, who was eighteen, had gone out to a bar called Carlos ’n’ Charlie’s alone and late at night and had not returned to her hotel in the morning. It was believed that she had sought male companionship and