A murder ballad from a band that trades in murder ballads tells you nothing. The interesting cases are the ones where the song sits at an angle to everything else the act recorded.
The Beach Boys are the extreme case, and the song is not about a murder at all. It is by one. In 1968 Dennis Wilson picked up two hitchhikers in Malibu who turned out to be Patricia Krenwinkel and Ella Jo Bailey, and through them he met Charles Manson, who at that point wanted a recording contract rather than a reckoning. Manson had written a bluesy number called Cease to Exist. Wilson bought it, on Manson's condition that it not be altered, then altered it: new lyrics, a fuller arrangement, and a new title, Never Learn Not to Love. It went out in December 1968 as the B-side to Bluebirds Over the Mountain and turned up again on the album 20/20 in February 1969, credited to Dennis Wilson alone. Mike Love later said the band had not been told where it came from.
Manson did not mind the musical changes. He minded the lyrics and the credit, and he left a bullet on Wilson's bed. Accounts of why he was not credited differ: Wilson said Manson had traded the credit for cash and a motorcycle, while the band's engineer said the omission was retribution for theft. The Tate and LaBianca murders followed in August 1969. A Beach Boys record carrying a Manson composition, released seven months earlier under someone else's name, is the single strangest artefact in this whole subject.
The Smiths put the Moors murders on their first album. Suffer Little Children was the third song Morrissey and Johnny Marr wrote together, recorded in October 1983 and released on The Smiths in February 1984, and again as a B-side that May. Morrissey wrote it after reading Emlyn Williams's account of the case, Beyond Belief. He was born in 1959 and grew up in Manchester, a few years younger than most of the children Brady and Hindley killed on Saddleworth Moor between 1963 and 1965. The song names them. That is what made it explosive: it is not a song about a killer, it is a song addressed to a city that had buried the thing.
Sufjan Stevens is the least likely name on this list. John Wayne Gacy, Jr. sits on Illinois, from 2005, and it is fingerpicked, whispered, and about four minutes long. It gives Gacy a childhood first, the drinking father and the swing set, before it gets to the twenty-seven bodies under the house. Then it turns the accusation on the singer. Whatever else that manoeuvre is, it is not the standard true-crime posture, and the prettiness of the arrangement is precisely what makes it hard to sit through.
Bruce Springsteen is the borderline case, and worth including for what it shows. Nebraska, the title track of the 1982 album, is sung in the voice of Charles Starkweather, who killed eleven people across Nebraska and Wyoming in 1957 and 1958 with fourteen-year-old Caril Ann Fugate beside him, and who was executed in 1959 at twenty. The album is now considered his best work, which means the song is no longer surprising. It was in 1982, arriving from the man who had just made Born to Run, recorded alone on a four-track.
Four different solutions to the same problem. Springsteen took the killer's voice and made the listener sit inside it. Morrissey took the victims' names and made a city hear them. Stevens took the biography and turned it back on himself. The Beach Boys took the song and took the credit, and got a bullet on a bed for it.