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October 27, 2006 1:03 PM

Why would a newspaper reveal a murder victim's house value and transaction history?

The Vancouver Sun posted a story about a missing woman yesterday. Later, it was confirmed that the woman's charred body had been identified -- and it sounds like it was a homocide, although no one has said that. Anyway, in yesterday's article, the Sun wrote:

The couple bought the lot on which their house now stands on May 10, 2002 for $122,000. The lovely new suburban house -- with its pumpkin lights already up -- is now assessed at $452,000.

Why provide this information? Is there strategic value to it? The next sentence notes there is a tent trailer in the driveway. The Sun has previously used a lot of details to out people it couldn't name. But they have named the people in this article and, while the police are being tightlipped about certain details, I can't a reason to use this info to out something.

Is the reporter just showing off their ability to pull up housing info? FWIW, $452k is probably around average for a house assessment value in this city. So it's not like they're trying to say these people were rich.

posted by acoutu to Law & Government (9 answers total)

If the journalist had an inside source at the police station there may be thoughts inside law enforcement or aspersions that her going missing may have to do with money or financial assets. It might have nothing to do with it, but the fact that this information was included may give a clue to the reasons of disappearance.
posted by parmanparman at 1:08 PM on October 27, 2006

The first part of the article is all about how successful they were in making lives for themselves individually and as a couple, so maybe the article included the valuation of the house as another illustration of how successful their lives had gone since they got married - not that they're rich, but that they've done well for themselves since they married.
posted by pdb at 1:09 PM on October 27, 2006

Probably because they can. The Sun probably runs every subject through the same battery of public databases in an effort to pad out fundamentally short articles.
posted by GuyZero at 1:37 PM on October 27, 2006

Best answer: Here's why, as a general rule, journalists do this— It tells you more about the people and their lives. While it's unfortunate that people tend to think through stereotypes, one of the things that was drilled into me when I was writing obituaries was that details like that paint a picture of the person, even if they don't seem especially important. It tells what kind of house they lived in, because I'd bet by picturing the neighborhood and thinking about those housing prices, you have a pretty good idea of what the place was like (at least in America, this is true). Does it also answer gossipy questions for the neighbors? Yeah. But hey, gossip sells papers.
posted by klangklangston at 1:50 PM on October 27, 2006

Response by poster: Yeah, but it's just an average-valued home, as far as I can tell. Do you think they are trying to make it clear that this isn't a gangland killing, in case people are stereotyping? They're trying to show that these are just regular people -- high school teachers who fell in love and started a family, bought a house in the burbs, and did normal family things? But why say what they paid for the lot? Is that to show that they got into the market early, so it's not like they were a rich family either?
posted by acoutu at 2:18 PM on October 27, 2006

Because it's information that was easy to find by a lazy-ass journalist.
posted by megatherium at 3:38 PM on October 27, 2006

Best answer: When you work on a murder story, you have to bust your ass getting all sorts of information from as many sources as possible because you never know what might turn out to be important. Then you go to write your story and sometimes you fail to resist the urge to include some of the extraneous, irrelevant stuff just because you worked so hard to get it all.
posted by CunningLinguist at 10:50 PM on October 27, 2006

CunningLinguist has it.

I don't think it's fair to call someone a "lazy ass journalist" who probably spent quite a few hours trying to dig up a lot of details. I also don't think it's fair to assume the reporter who wrote the story had a hidden motive or was trying to get across something specific about the victim. Odds are better that the journalist had spent a lot of time digging up information, and as deadline was nearing s/he had nowhere near as much time to spend on writing the article -- and thus put together something a little more slapdash than ideal.
posted by croutonsupafreak at 10:35 AM on October 28, 2006

"But really what's so hard about finding an apartment? What you do is, you read the obituary column. Yeah, you find out who died, and go to the building and then you tip the doorman. What they can do to make it easier is to combine the obituaries with the real estate section. Say, then you'd have Mr. Klein died today leaving a wife, two children, and a spacious three bedroom apartment with a wood burning fireplace."

-When Harry Met Sally
posted by craven_morhead at 3:33 PM on November 1, 2006 [1 favorite]