The Truth About True Crime

Like many listeners, I tune into murder podcasts to tune out politics. Maybe that's the problem.

Photo by Lacie Slezak on Unsplash

I’m about a week late to this extraordinary piece by Monica Hesse in the Washington Post, about the case of missing Washington, D.C. woman Unique Harris. Hesse covered Harris’s case a decade ago, and then followed the trial of the man accused of killing her. In the decade between her initial coverage and this story, Hesse’s own life shifts: She goes from being a 20-something to a mom in her 30s, and from being a general news reporter to a columnist covering gender. Her understanding of the foundational risks of being a woman change, along with her own theories on what happened to Harris — landing, as prosecutors also do, on a story that is pretty mundane, although deeply tragic. And she also looks at all of the ways in which Harris’s life was marked by risk: Her children’s father wouldn’t pay child support, leaving her financially vulnerable; the men she dated and came into contact with often had criminal records, or records of abusing women. There was not one extraordinary late-night incident that left her vulnerable; there was a lifetime of risk swirling around her, little of which she could control.

“True crime,” Hesse writes, “focuses on the extraordinary. But true crimes are ordinary and all too common.”

Like many women, I am a devotee to true crime podcasts (I do not, thank god, fancy myself any sort of “internet sleuth,” and I am more interested in solved cases than unsolved ones). I spend my day reading and writing about politics, so when it’s my off time — when I’m cooking dinner, or on a flight, or going on a long walk — I like to hit play on a murder podcast and disappear into the story. Many of these podcasts do focus on extraordinary and unique crimes: Serial killers, stranger murders, bizarre and long-unsolved mysteries.

Interestingly, though, the most popular true crime podcast, called Crime Junkie and hosted by two women in Indiana, does the opposite. I’m fascinated by Crime Junkie’s appeal for a bunch of reasons, not least among them the fact that the hosts seem totally lovely but are extremely and unapologetically #basic midwestern gals, not the aspirational urbane Cool Girls whose creations seem to dominate so much else in Millennial media. And that, to me, makes it all the more interesting (and powerful) that Crime Junkie and some of its related podcasts so often focus on true crime stories that are marginally more representative of violent crime itself — stories of missing or murdered women of color, of sex workers, of drug users, and of other people who are outside of the Missing White Girl phenomenon.

This is largely a good thing, as it brings attention to the many cases that don’t get the resources and attention they deserve. And if you’re a listener who is paying attention, it also says something important: That risk is not equally distributed.

The truth about true crime is that we are not all walking around like sitting ducks, equally likely to be taken out at any moment. Some people’s lives are much, much riskier than others — sometimes because of people’s choices, but often because of circumstances that are not entirely in their control. People (especially women) are generally murdered by people they know (usually men). And people who live in communities where poverty is endemic and violence is commonplace are a lot more likely to wind up the victims of a violent crime. There are simply a lot more people around who pose threats large and small, and many fewer resources to manage those threats.

But when listeners tune into true crime podcasts — even the ones that tell the stories of the marginalized — I’m not sure this is what they hear.