Emily Sander was an 18-year-old student attending Butler Community College in El Dorado, KS. The weekend after Thanksgiving, she left the Retreat bar with a 24-year-old legal immigrant and Italian restaurant waiter named Israel Mireles. Although copious amounts of blood were found in his motel room later and linens from his bed were missing, Mireles and Victoria Martens, his 16-year-old pregnant girlfriend have not been seen or heard from since. Their rental car has been found, though – abandoned. Likewise, Sander’s dead body has been found – also abandoned. Sounds like a saucy murder case to me; perfect for late night cable viewing. A labret-pierced Mexican lothario with a penchant for barely and not-yet legal girls, at least one minor in an establishment that sells alcohol, a pregnant juvenile, a blood-soaked motel bed and carpet, a broken motel window, a possibly cut motel phone line, an abandoned rental vehicle, and a likely dash for the hoped-for safety of Mexico, friends, and family. Scandalous, salacious, full of intrigue and sleaze – perfect fodder for the sensation-loving mass media machine we have for decades so laughingly referred to as the “news.”
But wait! There’s more!
As if the story weren’t racy enough, the super sleuths that sit behind the press desks of America have uncovered the fact that murder victim Emily Sander lived what people who meddle in other people’s business like to call a “secret life.” A life that the well-financed and allegedly respectable mainstream media machine simply can not turn its prurient eyes and flapping mouths away from.
As has been affirmed by friends and family, Emily Sander was also known as sologirl Zoey Zane on a website of the same name, as well as on YourDailyGirls.com, a site that peppers its front page with hardcore pix instead of a disclaimer. With this bit of information, what passes for “news” took a sociologically fascinating turn. Instead of the blood and corpse serving as the focus of all media coverage, the dead girl’s 2.5 months as an erotic model become transformed into a career as a “porn star” and the heart and soul of every story.
Comfortably able to chatter endlessly about Sander’s supposed sex life once she was both more and less than yet another innocent victim of a yet another violent crime, the press has rolled the least important elements of her last days around on its collective tongue and used them to capture eyeballs, subscribers, and advertising dollars, all the while subtly reminding Americans that bad girls get murdered. Who says that the Hayes Code is dead?
While her body lay cooling alongside a freeway 50 miles away from El Dorado, the country couldn’t stop talking about Emily Sander – or at least her “secret life.”
Thanks to the internet, everyone knows Emily’s so-called secret now. No one, of course, has explained why it needed to be everybody’s business or why being discreet about something means one is leading “a secret life.” All that needed to be said were the words “porn star” and a nation of uniformed readers and writers filled with opinions about things they know little about, and the ability to do a prurient Google search, were able to cluck their tongues in fascinated disapproval and opine about the invariably calamitous road that Emily had surely stumbled down. After all, everybody knows what sleazy people work in the adult entertainment industry, right? Surely one of them killed the girl. After all, that’s what porn people do, right?
Ironically, it’s not church groups, feminist organizations, or responsible mainstream journalists who are crying foul about how Sander’s story is being told. No, it’s the evil doers in the porn industry, the same people who supposedly make a living dehumanizing and degrading women by turning them into sex objects and ignoring their fundamental value as human beings.
In addition to my own bit of soap boxery, the owner of YourDailyGirls.com has noticed that the media has been more than happy to indulge in a rather amazing amount of what he and I both call “irresponsible journalism” in its coverage of the tragedy. In the hopes of bringing suspected killer Mireles to justice, the ZoeyZane.com site has been re-launched, complete with photos of the man, the under-age mother of his child-to-be, and a plea to either donate to a reward fund or contact the authorities with information about the crime.
As the site text regretfully observes, “It truly saddens us to see, in this day and age, that we live in a society that ridicules a woman for doing something that is completely legal.” It then goes on to state that a David Thomas has supposedly helped whip up the media “feeding frenzy” by spreading misinformation about the extent of Sander’s supposed “’porn career.’” According to the site, “Emily was a solo nude model whose site went live September 25, 2007.” Thanks to the rush to sensationalize her short time in adult, the media has apparently sent “more traffic to Emily’s adult site in 2 hours than the site has received in 2 months…”
Back in the ancient days of my college journalism studies, things like checking facts were considered important. Word has it, and my own experience supports the contention, that mainstream journalists today don’t even bother to use tape recorders during interviews. I guess if you want the truth about some things, you really need to turn to the pornographic media. Some may consider this to be ironic, but I consider it to be natural. After all, one of the biggest reasons that sex is such a controversial subject is because it’s so relentlessly honest and real; two things that polite society traditionally eschews.
Perhaps someday the mainstream media, with its powerful and far-reaching voice, will lose interest in the supposedly “secret” sex lives of pretty girls who fall victim to wicked men. Perhaps someday the truly secret, double lives of these abusers, murderers, and statutory rapists will be more interesting than the fact an attractive young woman chose to make money in a non-traditional way.
Perhaps someday the press will find a young woman working within the adult entertainment industry as newsworthy as finding a young man working within the military industrial complex. But until that day, writers and reporters desperate to earn valuable editorial space will continue to tantalize their editors by mixing genuine news with mental images of naked breasts, firm bellies, round bottoms, and smoothly shaved pubic areas.
Sadly, but not surprisingly, the media has fallen silent about Emily Sander ever since her body was found, her autopsy results kept secret, and police chief Tom Boren concluded that “At this point, we have no reason to think her role in the adult Web site was a factor.” I guess that without suggestions of sexual impropriety to keep the story lively, she’s just another murdered teenager found in a Midwestern ditch.
Those with any information about the murder of Emily Sander are urged to call investigators at 316-321-9120 or the Kansas Bureau of Investigation at 1-800-KS-CRIME.
