Why can’t I stop watching true crime?

On Tuesday, Jan. 18th at 11:53 p.m., a 20-year-old University of Michigan student was walking down Tappan Avenue back to her house. You could see the 5-foot-6-inch woman on the street through security cameras in the Martha Cook Residence Hall or the Law Quad and Munger Graduate Residences. Frequently, she turns her head, as if checking on someone following her, though no one else can be seen in the security camera footage, likely because nobody is there at all. 

Being that girl, I know this. And yet, I can’t stop the headline “Young Woman Found BRUTALLY MURDERED on U-M Campus” from ringing in my ears, an echo of the hours of true crime I’ve consumed and internalized over the years.

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Over winter break, my mom and I took to watching “Very Scary People,” a documentary show about the worst side of humanity. What John Wayne Gacy or Charles Manson did, theories on why they did what they did and interviews from relatives of murderers and their victims were overlaid with courtroom footage and pictures from the crime scenes, forcing the viewers to confront each heinous crime committed by these serial killers and cult leaders.

What really ignited my anxiety was learning about the Co-Ed killer, who murdered or kidnapped women from street names I recognize in Washtenaw County. Learning that Ted Bundy mostly targeted women with a scarily similar description to my own and that the women who committed the murders for Charles Manson were my age only worsened it. I felt, and still feel like, as a woman, there’s a target on my back. It’s just a matter of time before my turn to step forward comes and this evil that lurks in the shadows finds me.

True crime truly makes me paranoid. I make my friends call me whenever I walk in the dark; I would never hitch-hike and I don’t go on runs at all because I’ve heard of crimes happening in the daylight too. And yet, I keep consuming this media, and I don’t understand why.

My wake-up call came when I was walking to work early one morning before campus had woken up. I heard what I thought was a branch snapping and whipped my head around so fast my earmuffs fell off from the whiplash. Finding nothing but an empty street was humbling to say the least. I never used to be that jumpy. I can’t quite tell if it’s the true crime podcasts and the creepy YouTube stories that have put me on edge, but I can’t seem to cut them out of my life either.

This fascination of mine is prevalent in other aspects of true crime too. It’s not just that people are fascinated with putting themselves in the victim’s position; many are obsessed with the murderers and victims themselves. I won’t claim to know the complexities of cases like the Menendez brothers, but Netflix does. “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” tells the story of their parents’ murder from the brothers’ perspective. After the show was released, people went on to make TikTok edits of the characters, who in actuality, are just people whose lives were put on display. 

Not to mention, Erik Menendez himself does not approve of the show, as don’t many of the families of other victims in true crime media their respective loved ones’ depictions. The mother of one of Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims spoke out against the Netflix show “DAHMER” and she was far from the only one. Legally, there is no obligation for a family member to approve the broadcast of their kin’s brutal and violent murder. There is zero need to ask the friends and family if they can turn their loved one’s personality and life into a sensationalized character in order to make the most money from viewers. Especially because these TV shows and podcasts need drama to make a profit, they could exaggerate a person’s character without consequence and make more money for it.

An example of this defamation was a lawsuit filed by Rachel DeLoache Williams against Netflix for the portrayal of her in “Inventing Anna.” Williams was a friend of Anna Sorokin, also known as Anna Delvey, and was scammed out of thousands of dollars by Sorokin. However, in “Inventing Anna,” she’s portrayed pretty negatively. The show uses her real name, real places of employment and many other real personal details without having Williams approve the character before it was accessible to millions of viewers. The show took liberties with how it portrayed real people and events, stretching the situation into falsehoods.

True crime already has immoral implications. People are profiting from the brutal murder of someone else. At the very least, they’re profiting from harm done to others. I just find it disgusting that someone could take someone’s pain and twist it to make the victim the villain, using their real name.

Praise for the criminal doesn’t stop there, and it didn’t just start with “DAHMER” and “Monsters” either; people have been glorifying criminals for years. The public has been calling Ted Bundy attractive or making edits of the Columbine shooters as if the families of victims aren’t alive and grieving. This praise causes copycat killings and encourages others to consider crime as a different avenue to claim fame. 

Most of the time, true crime fans don’t watch it to glorify heinous criminals nor to copy them. In fact, according to Psychology Today, 80% of the audience for true crime podcasts and TV shows is female. This made the fact that, in most podcasts and TV shows I’ve watched, the violence is against women stand out to me even more. 

My sister and I listen to the podcast “Morbid” and, on a drive up to northern Michigan, we listened to an episode about the Gilgo Beach Killer. The summer before, I had spent some time in New York, coincidentally living on the street this murderer had apparently frequented to pluck his victims off of. I eventually learned that I had been there before he was arrested and that I might have even walked by him.

We lost signal and the podcast stopped loading, leaving us in silence. I felt intensely afraid, like something was going to jump out of trees beside our car, like he was there. I realized I was giving myself anxiety over something so completely out of my control. I could’ve been murdered and there was nothing I could’ve done about it. What used to be an interesting pastime was now just too real. 

True crime, at least for a few months, became much less fun and much more tangible for me. I wanted to learn everything about him, the Co-ed Killer and any murderer who might one day snatch me off the street. I paid attention to what victims were doing, where they were going, who they were with, searching for some pattern that made one young woman more susceptible to violence than another.

In half the true crime media I’ve consumed, it feels like they imply the female victims shouldn’t have gotten in the car with the man or should have taken a different route home. She should have locked the windows, or had alarms, or brought a phone or disconnected her cell or bought a new landline. She should’ve taken her picture off the internet, taken her account down or blocked all unfamiliar social media accounts. She should’ve moved houses, or cities, or states or jobs. She should’ve disappeared before a man could make her disappear. 

In reality, there was nothing they could do. If that early morning I walked to work there had actually been some evil lurking around the corner, how would I have known? How do I know when safety crosses over into paranoia? Would it have really helped, to simply walk around the block instead?

Facing the violence so many women have experienced feels inevitable. One day, I will be caught unaware and I don’t want to have to hear someone in a podcast say that it’s just so unfortunate I didn’t think to walk five minutes out of my way before a Clorox sponsor audio. But, I also don’t want to stay home my whole life. I don’t want to disappear for a hypothetical.

The last resort when preparing to face what seems inevitable is to know and understand the threat. True crime fills that need. It gives tips to be safe, discloses the killer’s motivation and delivers a story with a finite ending all in one. True crime undoubtedly has immoral reasoning, and while it’s questionable that this business thrives on the fear of women, I will keep listening nonetheless, hoping that the stories hold the key to my safe escape from what feels like my destiny.

Statement Columnist Meghan Dwan can be reached at mkdwan@umich.edu.

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