Our true crime obsession
When Serial, produced by public radio company This American Life, emerged in 2014, nobody had really heard anything quite like it. The podcast follows narrator Sarah Koenig and her team as they investigate the 2000 conviction of then teenager Adnan Syed for the murder of his former girlfriend, Hae Min Lee. Since its release, season 1 of the hit show has been downloaded approximately 175 million times (according to a 2017 figure). It affected not only the American and international public, but Syed himself, who, in the intervening years, has been in and out of court seeking re-trial, a request that was ultimately denied by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2019.
Serial may have been the first, but it’s certainly not the last. Netflix’s Making a Murderer took the world by storm upon its initial 2015 release and was followed by a season 2 in 2018. The series follows Steven Avery and his nephew Brendan Dassey, who were sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Teresa Halbach in 2007. Much like Syed, Avery and Dassey have continued in their efforts to be released, and Avery remains entangled in appeal proceedings to this day.
Both Serial and Making a Murderer have thrived primarily off of one thing: true crime addicts who are deeply invested in either the guilt or the innocence of the (alleged?) criminals in question. There are thousands of Reddit posts about these cases, and it is the ongoing presence of support from some and condemnation from others that keeps them in the public conscience. What’s more, highbrow true crime as a genre is showing no signs of decreasing in popularity. If anything, its garnering more and more success, with Netflix releasing a myriad of shows like The Disappearance of Madeline McCann, Abducted in Plain Sight, Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, and more recently, Unsolved Mysteries. And that’s to say nothing of the hundreds and hundreds of podcasts dedicated to true crime and cold case investigations.
But there are some important practical questions to consider here. Stephen Avery’s former lawyers, Jerry Buting and Dean Strang, have noted in an interview with Metro.co.uk that the success of Making a Murderer has undoubtedly influenced the general public’s positive perception of Avery. They also recognise that the centralisation of Avery within the case serves as a ‘double-edged sword’ because it privileges Avery’s version of events and minimises the State of Wisconsin’s version. This extends to the impact on potential jurors, because, while juries are no strangers to media influence, the widespread prevalence and accessibility to facts of cases like Avery’s (and Syed’s) could create some pretty powerful preconceptions as to guilt or innocence in jurors’ minds.
There’s also another aspect lingering beneath the surface. The people that we ‘bond’ with in these podcasts and documentaries are just that: people, not actors performing a role. Guilty or not, when the narrative twists and turns are at the expense of real-world subjects, we must ultimately consider whether our indulgence in true crime is useful, let alone ethical. This was recently highlighted in the wake of a breakthrough in the Madeline McCann case, when, after almost fifteen years, a suspect was identified, and Gerry and Kate McCann were informed of concrete evidence indicating that their daughter is most likely dead. The McCann story is tragic, but despite many a podcast and documentary series theorising that the parents were to blame, the recent revelations are a reminder that sometimes, if not most of the time, our theories are incomplete and misinformed.
So sure, get addicted, post on Reddit, discuss it with your friends, but let’s not forget that at the heart of these cases are real people with real, ongoing experiences, and we can’t ever presume to know the truth based on a 10-episode podcast or Netflix series.