Rose Bialk/The Mossy Log
According to a study led by Edison Research and podcasting company Audiochuck, 84% of the U.S. population consumes true crime content in some form. The true crime industry has dedicated space in podcasts, Reddit communities and streaming services, with dozens of documentaries populating Netflix’s home page and creating online debate surrounding their subjects. Not all true crime content is based on fact, though. Fictional retellings of true crime cases have become increasingly popular, with some notable examples sparking controversy and prompting examination of how we interact with true crime stories.
The third season of Ryan Murphy’s Netflix anthology series “Monster” garnered 90.6 million hours viewed in its first week on the platform, putting it on track to surpass the viewership of both previous seasons. Some reviewers have criticized lead actor Charlie Hunnam’s portrayal of the season’s subject, Ed Gein, an American murderer infamous for his habit of digging up corpses of women from the local cemetery and constructing clothing and furniture from their bones and skin, as a gentle giant incapable of understanding the crimes he was committing.
I think that the fascination with the details of crimes highlights a larger problem with how we engage with true crime content. We focus on the gory aspects, on the horrors that keep us up at night, but we rarely remember the people who suffered and endured horrific trauma — all at the hands of perpetrators who go on to be lionized in the press. If we do remember them, it is for all the wrong reasons.
It is not a wild claim to say that true crime is a tantalizing subject nationwide. In tabloids, on the radio and in our lives, we discuss the crazy criminals who mystify us. In many ways, I have been a true crime consumer for much of my life. Some of that is because stories that scare us become so widespread that everybody discusses them, and some of that is because of my genuine interest in criminology and forensic science.
But instead of an exaggerated narrative meant to sell merch or Patreon subscriptions (as much true crime content is), I was lucky enough to discover a well-researched podcast with stories told in a respectful way that centered the victim. That podcast was “Crime Junkie,” and because of the narrative technique they use that centers the victim rather than the perpetrator, my taste in true crime content was influenced in what I believe is a more ethical direction.
Juxtaposed with more sensational true crime content, this type of podcast stands out to me as an example of a community being cultivated for good. There are many types of true crime content that leave a sour taste in my mouth: podcasts with titles like “My Favorite Murder” or “Wine and Crime” imply the consumption of true crime content as a pastime or a way to relax. The era of YouTube “makeup and murders” style content stands out to me as a particularly insidious example of this, with the way that it puts a form of lighthearted artistic expression in the same breath as details of a human being’s torturous final moments. To tell a story as anything other than victim-based serves only to alienate and to devalue human life.
It is also important to notice the kinds of crime stories that get told most often. When we see stories discussed ad nauseam on social media, what kinds of faces do we see? Conventionally attractive, young white women and girls. In the past few years, cases of women like Gabby Petito, Eliza Fletcher and Ana Walshe received substantial media coverage in a way that their poorer, less advantaged counterparts never have. This phenomenon is a noticeable enough trend to have earned the name “Missing White Woman Syndrome,” a term outlining the fact that women of color or lower social status do not receive coverage in the same way.
This is not to say that the stories of these women and the violence that they face are not worth telling. Every story is worth telling, and every victim deserves justice. But when we focus solely on the stories of people our larger systems of oppression treat as pure or worthy of our grief, we further perpetuate these systems by treating other victims as unworthy of justice. Missing and murdered white women, who we perceive as innocent, receive four times as much coverage than missing Black women, according to a study analyzing empirical data for the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. This is a larger reflection of a society that remains strangely puritanical in the way it thinks about sex and innocence in relation to race, gender and class. When we treat these women as fragile flowers in the press, we tend to forget the realness of their humanity. It seems that the media and the public want the “perfect victim” to follow, someone who was not poor or promiscuous, who did not commit crimes or do anything other than smile and look pretty. Even the women we do talk about in the press are robbed of their humanity, and when their killers are caught I believe that they often get a more well-rounded examination than their victims.
I think of people like Gabby Petito and Chris Watts as examples of how we treat victims and perpetrators. Petito, a young white van-life influencer from Long Island, New York was mentioned by news outlets hundreds of times in a one-week period when she went missing and was eventually found dead. The same handful of pictures of her smiling in national parks were plastered on magazines and television, and most stories focused on the timeline of her death rather than the person she was in life. Googling her name today brings up more stories about documentaries on her death than about Petito’s life and interests.
There is a similar pattern of coverage with Chris Watts, the man who pleaded on local television for his missing wife and children to come home before police determined that he had killed them. Up until the point of Watts’ guilt being announced, this story was largely local. It was not until the larger headline of “man murders wife and children” that the nation began to pay attention. Watts became a celebrity in his own right, with high-profile documentaries being made about him and hordes of women sending fan mail to his jail cell. But who among us can remember the names of the people he killed? Who remembers Shanann, Bella and Celeste?
The kind of press we give certain victims and perpetrators reflects larger systems of oppression in our society. We continue to see whiteness as a marker of purity, to see women as delicate and incapable of making their own decisions. This way, we can focus on “perfect victims,” and let everyone else fall by the wayside. The less coverage a case gets, the less people try to help find justice for victims. One reason that the murders of sex workers, women of color, queer women and poor women go unsolved is because few people care about these women in life or death. We give more agency to the men who kill than to those who die at their hands.
Returning to “Monster,” there is a reason the series focuses on the stories of men who perpetrated violence rather than the victims they perpetrated it against. Few want to watch a story of a young woman’s life, flaws and all, up until she is victimized by someone with more power than her. We want to be titillated and scandalized by the stories of murderers, not to remember the people who were harmed by them. If we want to tell victims’ stories truthfully and respectfully, we must remember their hopes, dreams and flaws. And until we place more weight in the many real human beings who befall violence rather than the few who perpetrate it, we do not deserve our sick and twisted content.
About the Author
