True Crime and Its Potential for Good

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True crime has come to dominate our thoughts—for better or for worse. Whether by news notifications pushed to your phone, suggestions to stream on your platform of choice, or videos that pop into your social media feed thanks to the Algorithms That Be, we are fed true crime stories that capture the public consciousness. Often times, we select that favorite meal ourselves. My newly released thriller The Family Bones follows the Eriksens, a family of psychopaths known in True Crime circles, as they gather for a reunion at a mountain resort in eastern Oregon.

Although a relatively recent phenomenon, True Crime has been around in one form or another for as long as there has been literature—before, even, when traveling minstrels would sing the most salacious verses they could rhyme together. Peddlers would then sell printed versions of the popular ballads, sensationalizing the worst crimes of the day. Edgar Allan Poe, for his part, was inspired by a shocking murder that occurred in 1840 to write “The Tell-Tale Heart,” long before Truman Capote ever put the gruesome murders of the Clutter family to page in his non-fiction novel In Cold Blood. Titillated yet horrified, readers were ravenous in their consumption of these tales.

Today, however, consumers of the genre have been asking themselves tougher questions, fueled by conversations around ethical and moral blowback from this social appetite for tragedy. Namely, what does that say about the average True Crime fan? Is there something wrong with them that a “normal” person, who pays their taxes and volunteers at the local animal shelter, can name each member of O.J. Simpson’s legal team and recite the number of times Bundy escaped custody? (Answer: twice.) 

Introspection of this kind has boomed alongside the rise of the True Crime catalyst of the twenty-first century: podcasts. Back when most of us were still using the new form of entertainment—or “audioblogs” as they were known at the very beginning—to catch up on sports, general entertainment, or comedy, Serial broke the mold. This podcast, created by Sarah Koenig, highlights the troubling story of Hae Min Lee’s murder and Adnan Syed’s incarceration. Instead of further sensationalizing the details of the young woman’s death, Koenig offered up her own disturbing observations of the case’s inconsistencies: the lack of physical evidence against Syed, the shady police practices, and the ever-changing witness accounts. As Serial’s popularity rocketed the case and the podcast to the top of the charts and into the public eye , it popularized the role of the armchair detective. 

To many observers’ surprise, this preoccupation with True Crime has led to a capacity for Good. Podcasts that were originally promoted as “amateur chatfests” have become places of amateur sleuthing, with self-appointed armchair detectives sniffing out inconsistencies in case files using Google Earth images or zooming in on blurry, faded text of decades-old police reports via their phones and computer screens. Fueled by the bottomless energy of a hive-mind network of online forums willing to pursue leads after finishing the nine-to-five, or once the kids are tucked into bed, civilian investigations have begun banding together, seeking out answers long since written off as lost.

Michelle McNamara, author of the captivating non-fiction analysis of the Golden State Killer’s criminal history, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, may be the best example of this new kind of sleuth. Her speculation on cold cases featured on her blog, True Crime Diary, led to enough foot traffic of like-minded readers that she landed a book deal to further frame her thoughts. McNamara jumpstarted interest in the long-forgotten case of the East Area Rapist, or as she came to call him, The Golden State Killer—wondering aloud, why has he never been caught, despite significant DNA evidence? Although law enforcement officials who ultimately arrested the killer in 2018, two years after McNamara herself passed away, have acknowledged how helpful the renewed interest in the case was, I would argue that her efforts were foundational to the modern case analysis and to the capture of the Golden State Killer four decades after his first attack. Without McNamara, we can’t know how much longer the 72-year-old serial rapist and murderer would have continued to enjoy his freedom, or whether he would have quietly passed away, truly ‘going into the dark’ without ever answering for his crimes.

Another, more recent example would be freelance journalist and podcaster Chris Lambert. In May 2018, a faded billboard from decades prior led him to Google the investigation of the 1996 murder of Kristin Smart, a nineteen-year-old college student. Lambert realized there hadn’t been any mention online of Smart or of the ongoing investigation for years. Though the case had long ago fallen out of the public eye, Lambert sensed that there was an opportunity to generate attention for it again through his first podcast—to maybe help the family in some small way and to quiet the nagging pull toward Smart that Lambert felt. He went on to create Your Own Backyard in 2019, sourcing witnesses who were ready to speak after two decades, with the approval and friendship of the Smart family themselves. By the end of the first day the first episode of the podcast was published, Your Own Backyard had over 75,000 downloads. The sheriff’s department of San Luis Obispo were among the listeners, and representatives reached out to Lambert shortly after the final episode was published in November 2019. In April 2021, thanks in part to Lambert’s research, the original chief suspect in the case was arrested.

While True Crime has been both lauded as a fresh vehicle for change and vilified for encouraging untrained rubberneckers to muddy the waters of investigations, it has become much more than a form of entertainment limited to fiction. It is a phenomenon found in pop hits, TV series, film, and social media. It’s beginning to take the witness stand as Chris Lambert did in the trial of Kristin Smart’s murderer, and infiltrate case files as Michelle McNamara did with the blessing of Golden State Killer criminologist Paul Holes. Thanks to the thoughtful efforts of Sarah Koenig in her podcast, Serial, it’s galvanized previously passive listeners and creators into asking new questions that would otherwise fade into the past. 

Modern True Crime, in all its streaming glory, is causing more of the thing it prizes most highly to come to light: the facts.  

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