How Making A Murderer & Serial Gave Birth To The (Relatively) Useful Fanatic
Fuck the police. That’s pretty much what I got out of my recent blood-boiling binge of true crime stories. Oh yeah, and fuck the prosecutors, fuck the media, fuck the system. And Ken Kratz. Seriously. Fuck. That. Guy. That unnervingly high voice is enough to make you vomit a little in your mouth. And the fact he sexted a domestic violence victim. That too.
It’s this shared outrage that has fuelled a growing phenomenon. The useful fanatic.
Making a Murderer’s Steven Avery has now joined the likes of Serial’s Adnan Syed as real crime celebrities and victims of gross systematic injustices, despite remaining doubts as to their innocence.
Regardless of whether it was the shocking injustice of the whole damn thing, or the intense urge to violently wipe the smile off Len Kachinsky’s face, something has clearly clicked with global audiences.
The formula is a potent one. Scores of people audibly groaned when beautiful, kind, journalist demi-god Sarah Koenig revealed she didn’t conclusively know whether Adnan was guilty or not. But the suspense sticks. Every book or series has its crew of obsessive fanatics. The difference is, once Harry finally got the monkey off his back and polished off Voldemort, obsessed fans had little left to wring out of the series’ other than reminiscing over the completed series (see also: keeping track of JK Rowling’s most recent spin-off and occasional awkward foray into politics).
In contrast, Serial and Making a Murderer have each spawned masses of amateur sleuths bent on exposing the truth. The fact that the protagonists are real and the story unsolved means that fans can legitimately change the outcome of the plot and help influence its ending — ultimately becoming a part of the story they obsess over. Imagine for a moment that Harry Potter was killed under suspicious circumstances in real life. Imagine the extreme lengths Potter fans would go to uncover the truth.
Instead of mildly disturbing fan fiction, fans of real crime dramas instead devote themselves to plausible theories grounded in reality, any one of which could result in liberating an innocent man on the other side of the world.
Fans have been quick to accept the challenge. Earlier this month, an Australian woman parted with $6000 for a copy of the entire court transcript of Steven Avery’s trial, totalling 4800 pages. Meanwhile, Reddit is teeming with explanations and theories, as well as compiling in-depth timelines and profiles of alternative suspects.
There have already been breakthroughs. Keen-eyed Redditors have unpicked a seemingly standard photo of Teresa Halbach to potentially reveal further evidence of the police tampering with her keys.
Can Making a Murderer match Serial’s legal progress?
How useful is this fan frenzy? Will Making a Murderer’s fans really unearth something substantial enough to use in court? Fan theories can be shared, accepted and validated by millions of internet users, but unless they can be linked with tangible evidence, they are effectively useless. Ultimately, as much as we deride it and rally for its reform, the justice system still holds their lives in its deeply flawed grasp.
The justice system might also not understand how GIFs work, rendering all that hard work obsolete.
Luckily for us, we already have a case study to analyse. A year on from Serial’s first season and Adnan’s trial has been reopened “in the interests of justice” and new evidence has been permitted into court long after Sarah Koenig threw in the towel. Specifically, the defence will be allowed to call the alibi witness of Asia McClain and raise questions about the validity of the phone records used to place Adnan at the scene of the crime.
It isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of the incredible power of crowdsourced investigations, though. The Asia alibi was dealt with in the very first episode of Serial and the fact that incoming phone calls are not reliable to map location was discovered by the kick-ass spin-off podcast Undisclosed and their team of crack lawyers. It wasn’t the work of obsessed fanatics, but a renowned investigative journalist and a team of trained law attorneys from a podcast started by the same woman who contacted Sarah to review the case in the first place.
But it only takes a single dedicated fan to change the course of the case. For Serial, the obsessive fan who uncovered the phone evidence happened to be a lawyer that could analyse court documents with a trained eye, but an obsessive fan nonetheless.
Jerry Buting and Dean Strang (part-time lawyer, full-time sex symbol) have said it themselves.
“Dean [Strang] and I [are] only two minds. What I’m discovering is that a million minds are better than two.”
A New Suspect?
We can’t yet know whether the success of Making a Murderer will translate into the discovery of exonerating evidence or any real legal progress for Steven Avery or the soul crushing figure of Brendan Dassey. The prospects are already far more modest considering Steven’s case has been denied by several appeals courts already.
Personally, we’re hoping that evidence is uncovered to tie the whole nasty thing to the dynamically awful duo of Ken and Len. The fact that it rhymes makes it all the more suspicious…
Until Klen is behind bars, we have to place hope in the extraordinary bank of internet detectives and hope they can unearth new and compelling evidence for Steven and Brendan. While it might be the lawyers in the end who possess the ability to free them, anyone can hand them the tools to do so.
Originally posted at The Vocal by Cameron Nicholls
