How true crime took over media with victims being dehumanised in the search for the killer

You might have missed last week’s release of The Coldest Case in Laramie, the latest true-crime podcast from the people who brought you the groundbreaking Serial in 2014. That’s not necessarily because it’s not any good – reviews have generally been positive. It’s more likely because in the nine years since Serial first cast doubt on the murder conviction of Baltimore high school student Adnan Syed, the true-crime entertainment industry has extended its tentacles like knotweed across the entire media landscape. We are currently sinking beneath a fatberg of audio and video content about terrible real acts perpetrated by real people on other real people.

Netflix, which had its own genre-defining moment with Making a Murderer in 2015, is now crammed with one-off documentaries and series about serial killers, fraudsters, crimes of passion, crimes of greed, cover-ups and miscarriages of justice.

That true crime pays is hardly news. Since the days of Jack the Ripper, publishers, film-makers, broadcasters and now online content creators have profited from the public’s fascination. Very few of us can claim to never have been drawn into these stories, which speak to our most primal there-but-for the-grace-of-God fears. The genre is most associated with the supposedly less respectable ends of the business – pulpy paperbacks, shouty tabloids, trashy cable channels – but the so-called quality press is only too happy to dine at the table when the right class, race and gender buttons are being pushed, as The New York Times proved when it bought Serial Productions in 2020. and as was the case this week in the UK with the pursuit, arrest and charging of Constance Marten and Mark Gordon.

But the genre has been transformed by the advent of digital media, which generates vast quantities of audio and video, turning everyone into a potential creator with access to a huge audience. The unpleasant consequences were evident in the treatment last month of the family of Nicola Bulley, whose body was found in a river following a three-week search and endless online speculation about what might have happened to her. The village of St Michael’s on Wyre was overrun with amateur “TikTok sleuths” who broke into buildings in search of clues, getting in the way of police and causing huge distress to Bulley’s family and neighbours.

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Writing in the Financial Times, criminal barrister and crime writer Victoria Dowd described these activities as “a search for the truth but also a call to armchair detectives for whom brutal reality becomes a form of entertainment”. The public feeding frenzy was further amplified by rolling news crews who were happy to repeat the wild theories being bandied about.

“The problem is that victims are dehumanised in the search for the killer, and the barbarity they suffered reduced to entertainment,” wrote Dowd. “As yet, there are no regulations for these self-appointed sleuths. There remains no accountability, no responsibility. And until there is, we must all learn to treat those affected by tragedy with some much-needed respect.”

What happened in St Michael’s was not an isolated incident. The quiet college town of Moscow, Idaho, was hit by an online frenzy last November when four students in their early 20s were stabbed to death by a masked man who broke into their house while they were sleeping. As weeks went by without any sign of an arrest, the hashtag “Idaho murders” racked up millions of views on TikTok, and a Facebook group dedicated to speculation about the crime attracted more than 200,000 members. You can find dozens of podcasts exploring every possible theory about what happened.

On YouTube, a video pointed to “red flags” which suggested an ex-boyfriend of one of the victims was a potential suspect. A history professor at the University of Idaho filed a defamation lawsuit against a TikTokker who, using tarot cards, made a series of videos for her 116,000 followers accusing the professor of both having a romantic relationship with one of the victims and being responsible for the students’ deaths; the suit states that the professor now fears for her life.

On December 30th, the police arrested Bryan Kohberger, a 28-year-old criminology student, at his parents’ house in rural Pennsylvania. He has since been charged with the murders. Even after the arrest, intense online debate continued about supposed discrepancies in the testimony of one witness, TikTok videos hashtagged with her full name received more than 57 million views; and the Daily Mail published photographs of her returning home after getting coffee at Starbucks.

The moral queasiness surrounding true-crime’s treatment of real victims has always been there, but now it’s turbocharged like never before. “It was painful to see people were just using this as a fun thing to talk about,” a friend of the murder victims told the London Times. “Everyone was trying to play Cluedo and that is not the reality of what it was like.”