Back in the autumn of 2014, true crime enthusiasts began to listen to a podcast called Serial. An offshoot of the popular US radio documentary This American Life, Serial focused a whole 12-episode season on one case. That case was the 1999 murder of Baltimore high school student Hae Min Lee and the conviction of her former boyfriend, Adnan Syed, for that crime.
Syed had always maintained his innocence and the podcast explored the case against him. Serial became a phenomenal success as the first podcast on iTunes to reach 5 million downloads. People anxiously awaited the next episode, told their friends about it and flocked to online spaces like Reddit to discuss their theories of the case.
Following the success of Serial, other podcasts emerged, taking a similar approach in exploring a single case over one season.
As a criminologist, I’m well aware of the fact that most of what people know about crime comes via mainstream media. We are unlikely to have direct experience of homicide ourselves, so our knowledge is often based on portrayals of it on the news, in the papers, in true crime documentaries, crime drama – and now, true crime podcasts.
Media representations of crime are a well-established area of study in criminology – but Serial and its successors represented something new. Alongside my colleagues Emma Kelly and Shona Robinson-Edwards, I embarked upon a study to make better sense of not just what they were, but what they were doing. We explored six serialised true crime podcasts – Serial, In the Dark, Stranglers, Accused, Missing and Murdered and Bowraville – all of which focused upon homicide.
We discovered some interesting findings relating to what criminologists, as Greer says, refer to as hierarchies of victimization. When some people become the victims of crime – for example law-abiding and ‘respectable’ white middle-class women and children - we are more likely to sympathise with them and see them as wholly blameless innocent victims. For others who don’t fit this mould, we are less understanding. True crime, as Christie says, has had a tendency to reproduce this pecking order of ideal victimhood.
The podcasts we listened to did tend to echo this – placing a heavy emphasis on victim innocence, vulnerability and deservingness of sympathy. Serial described Hae Min Lee as smart and beautiful, cheerful and a great athlete. Accused had the following to say about murder victim Elizabeth Andes -
There are some people in your life who, if you’re honest with yourself, you’d have to admit seem a likelier target for something bad, something violent, to happen to than the rest of your friends. It’s not PC to say it, and it certainly doesn’t mean anyone ever deserves being targeted, but there are risk factors: selling drugs, being a hothead, prone to fistfights. Beth was none of those things. (Amber Hunt, Accused, Ep 1)
However, the podcasts also posed some critical questions about the nature of victimhood. They reframed the criminal other, recognising that the same person can be both a victim and an offender within their lifetime. For example, In The Dark raised the possibility that Danny Heinrich – the killer of 11 year-old Jacob Wetterling – may have been abused by a local sex offender when he was a child.
The podcasts also featured the narrative of the accused and convicted – for example Serial considered the possibility that Syed might be a victim of a miscarriage of justice and Accused explored the stigma experienced by Bob Young, who had faced trial for the murder of Elizabeth Andes. As such, the podcasts took a perspective not often seen in the true crime genre – rather than focusing on the victim narrative presenting the role of victim and offender as wholly separate, they drew attention to a blurring of the lines.
The podcasts also evoked questions of harm in transcending the immediate impact of violent crime on victims and offenders to encompass broader social harms inflicted by institutions and ideologies. This included the neoliberal performance management culture within the police and cultures of abuse and neglect in organisations charged with the care of the vulnerable – for instance the clear up rates for violent crime explored by In The Dark and institutional abuse within Indian residential schools covered by Missing and Murdered. As such, the podcasts invited questions about the social and cultural conditions in which violent crime occurs and forced us to look beyond the offender and to the wider social context.
The podcasts were not characterised by the neat endings and conclusions that are traditionally prevalent in the true crime genre. The usual stories end when the police catch the offender, the offender is convicted and we can all sleep safe and sound in our beds. The podcasts we listened to were about the unsolved and the unresolved. In cases where there was a criminal justice resolution, this was presented as being inherently unsatisfactory. They emphasized the uncertain, the unfinished and the untrusted. For example, Stranglers cast doubt on the view that Albert De Salvo was responsible for all 13 of the homicides attributed to the Boston Strangler and Bowraville focused on a case in which the same man had been found not guilty on two occasions. As such, they prompted questions about the general feeling of vertigo, referred to by Young, that characterises late capitalism. The only certainty is uncertainty in contemporary society. We gather around the concept of the precarious and these podcasts were no exception to this phenomenon. This was evident in the online forums that emerged around the podcasts. In these places, dissatisfied listeners sought out answers that the podcasts didn’t provide.
A strong emotional thread ran throughout the podcasts. A whole host of emotions were expressed by a range of different people – which was not limited to victims, their families and offenders. Presenters were compassionate participants rather than just objective messengers of the ‘facts’, subjective, immersed and affected. Julie Snyder’s shame at having door stepped a witness was evident in Serial. Bowraville’s Dan Box expressed fear, anticipation and a distinct sense of unease whilst waiting in his car outside the home of a suspect. It wasn’t just that these emotions were there for us to hear – for us, it was what they did that was interesting.
Emotion appeared alongside the cold hard ‘objective’ facts, presenters didn’t just tell the story but they appeared to feel it too. This served to both blur and sharpen our focus on the broader social structures that formed the backdrop to violent crime. It can be argued that emotion on the part of the presenter reinforces control over the narrative and – as one scholar, Ahmed, notes -
…to be moved by the suffering of some others (the ‘deserving’ poor, the innocent child, the injured hero), is also to be elevated to a place that remains untouched by other others (whose suffering cannot be converted in my sympathy or admiration).
Serialised true crime podcasts appear to embody changing sensibilities towards crime. The critical voices and new perspectives presented within these podcasts are symbolic of the wider context and point in history in which they have emerged. A time when our faith in the state to control crime is at an all time low. A time of uncertainty and precariousness. But are serialised true crime podcasts the vehicles for change and justice that they are sometimes made out to be?
We would argue no – sadly not. They pay lip service to the idea of action and change by revealing inequalities and injustices to their listeners. They offer glimpses of traumatic social realities, they expose us to the misery of others and encourage us to feel their pain. However, serialised podcasts end unfinished and incomplete, leaving listeners in a state of vertigo. The void is soon filled with another podcast, a new trauma to become temporarily obsessed with.
Seltzer argued that we now inhabit a wound culture in which we feed off the trauma of others. The consumption of harm, violence and the pathological is one the few things that brings people together in late capitalist society – where instant gratification, selfish individualism and success via the demise of others have permeated our value systems. Serialised true crime podcasts are the very embodiment of wound culture. It doesn’t matter whose trauma it is – the people whose stories we consume become interchangeable and blur into a homogenous mass. As one podcast ends without a satisfactory conclusion, we find another one to fill the void. Our desire for more signifies the lack and absence that characterizes consumer capitalism – we are never really satisfied but as long as we have a ready supply of trauma to consume we will never linger on one case long enough to call for any action about the broader harms that serialised true crime podcasts allow us to glimpse.
