Bad Blood: Serial Killers, True Crime, and the Racial Imaginary in Shadow of a Doubt

Abstract

Concepts of racial identity and parentage played an important role in Canadian media coverage of the 1927 case of Earle Nelson, a well-publicized true crime story that was adapted into Hitchcock’s 1943 film Shadow of a Doubt. Nelson, known as the Dark Strangler, was identified as the killer of over twenty women in the United States before crossing the border into Canada, where he was captured, tried, and hanged. The evidence presented in Winnipeg in the Dark Strangler case centred on his physicality as a man perceived as mixed race. The narrative around Nelson, which was circulated several times in true crime magazines after his death, found its most famous outlet in the Hitchcock film based on the Dark Strangler case, Shadow of a Doubt. In Hitchcock’s film, the question of racial and familial identity raises its head in disquieting relationships between a mother and daughter and their serial killer relative. By examining the film through true crime paratexts, in this paper I explore how Shadow of a Doubt made taboos around illegitimacy and race visible for audiences of the 1940s.