Are We Too Into True Crime?
America’s obsession with true crime risks romanticizing serial killers and glorifying violence.
In the summer of 2018, I read former FBI Agent John Douglas’s Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit. If you haven’t heard of it or watched David Fincher’s Netflix adaptation, it’s about Douglas’s work of establishing a psychological profile of “serial killers”. Douglas’s team at the FBI’s Investigative Support Unit is the one that coined that term.
He explores the evolution of crime and murder; in the olden days, murder was personal. The unsub — unknown subject — was usually someone the victim knew. That evolved over time, and Douglas’s team at the ISU wanted to know why. What they ended up doing was meeting and interviewing serial killers themselves, such as Ed Kemper, nicknamed the Co-ed Killer who murdered ten people in California (including his grandparents and mother) or David Berkowitz, popularly known as the Son of Sam. Based on this information, Douglas had created the first serial killer profiles that have helped catch criminals over the years.
I found Douglas’s book fascinating, as does Hollywood: Douglas and his team have inspired The Silence of the Lambs and the show Criminal Minds, and, again, there is a Netflix show based on the book and his life. The serial killer triad has almost become common knowledge (wetting the bed, animal cruelty, and arson), and the nicknames of serial killers have entered our households (the Zodiac Killer, the Green River Killer, Jack the Ripper, the Golden State Killer). But when does fascination become admiration?
Since that summer, I have consumed my fair share of true crime related media, from reading Douglas’s other books to watching shows and documentaries about criminal profilers such as Hannibal or I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. The latter is about Michelle McNamara (the late wife of comedian Patton Oswalt) who worked as a citizen detective and ended up helping catch Joseph D’Angelo, a former California cop who was the Golden State Killer. Michelle’s work not only led to his capture, but ended up consuming her; she died of an accidental overdose while writing the book of the same name in 2016.
McNamara and Douglas both do an excellent job of highlighting the fact that these serial killers are horrible people that brutally ended the lives of many. They detail victims, explaining just how much each family lost, how many people had their lives changed forever because of the heinous act of a single individual. However, in many cases, media ends up portraying these criminals less like murderers and more like celebrities.
The fact that we even give serial killers nicknames — stage names, more like — cements them into our collective memory. If you’re not well known as Richard Ramirez, maybe you’ll be better remembered as the Night Stalker. In fact, many serial killers want, even need, fame. Why are we letting them have it?
Richard Ramirez raped and brutally murdered women in Los Angeles, but after he was arrested, women sent him naked pictures of themselves. Ted Bundy even has a posthumous fan following, and there is a TikTok trend of girls pretending to be his victims. It’s disturbing. It goes far beyond to each their own and well into what the hell is wrong with people?.
If you go to Brian Laundrie’s (the fiancée and suspected killer of Gabby Petito) Instagram page, you will find that he has 449,000 followers. His last post, uploaded on August 13th, a week and a half before Gabby’s final appearance, has 150,000+ comments. In terms of engagement, Laundrie has become a celebrity in his own right.
It’s important to cover stories about serial killers and other violent criminals to provide the public with information that is important to their safety. For example, the reason why Gabby Petito’s case started to become national news is because of people posting TikToks about her disappearance and some theories as to what may have happened. We’ll never know how the case might have turned out had this not occurred and been given coverage. However, do we really need multiple movies and documentaries about Ted Bundy? No.
Ted Bundy, and people like him, need validation and attention, and for some reason, we give it to them. Not only with one documentary, but an abundance of them. This does not even begin to cover how many podcasts are out there.
Hulu’s new show, Only Murders in the Building, pokes fun at true crime podcasters and recognizes the ethical minefield they walk through. Someone’s violent death should not be a source of entertainment, but it has become one. There are storytelling techniques that these podcasters utilize (to quote Martin Short’s character, “Every great Episode Two always makes you care deeply for the victim”) to keep listeners engaged and hooked on what they’re releasing.
Remembering victims by telling their story is one thing. Remembering victims by justifying the reasoning for why people become violent criminals, nicknaming killers, and giving the public their entire biography is a whole other. We don’t cover the life story of victims, so why should we know the lives of killers in detail? America’s obsession with celebrity has now gone past the Hollywood realm and fully into that of the violent criminal. If you are someone that needs fame or some form of validation to survive, you can almost guarantee you’ll get it through committing a heinous act upon another human being.
We, as humans, can’t help but be drawn to horrific things. I can’t sit here and write that criminal profiling is not interesting, as that would be a lie. However, we need to remember that real people are affected, and every second we spend consuming media about a killer, we risk neglecting the victims, the lives they lived, the people they loved, and their story.
