This is Your Brain on True Crime
Why are we so addicted to the darker side of life?
I’ve been addicted to true-crime from an early age. When I was around 12 years old, I remember gleefully sitting down with my family on weeknights to enjoy the latest episode of Forensic Files and 48 Hours. As I grew older, my love for true-crime only grew along with me. Soon, I was consuming one true-crime book after the other, spending my free time reading massively popular classics such as The Stranger Beside Me, Helter Skelter, and Mindhunter. I was widely known as the girl with “an unhealthy true-crime obsession” amongst friends.
When I reached my twenties, true crime podcasts became my latest vice. I listened to podcasts like My Favorite Murder and Morbid on a daily basis, quickly running through one episode after the other and always being just as excited for the next story as I was the last. I was always excited to find an episode detailing a true-crime case that I had never heard of because, after my years of obsessing over this type of thing, there were becoming fewer and fewer cases that I had never at least heard of.
The other day, as I was driving my girlfriend home from a weekend at my house, I put on an episode of the Morbid podcast centered around serial killer John Wayne Gacy. I thought I knew everything there was to know about the…
