Photo courtesy of Mollie Walton Corbet/Variety
Why are people so fascinated with stories about other people suffering in horrible ways? According to a study conducted by the Pew Research Center, 24% of the top-ranked podcasts in the US are true crime podcasts, with politics and government podcasts coming in second with 10%.
Jean King of Psychology Today suggests a few reasons: true crime presents a compelling narrative story, reminds audiences of their good fortune, gives people the chance to explore a dark side of their personality and allows them to participate in a forbidden part of society.
So this raises the question: when does this morbid fascination with the macabre turn from innocent curiosity into making an unethical spectacle out of death?
The problem with many true crime stories boils down to a lack of respect for the victims and their families.
One of the most recent failures was from Netflix. For the show “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story,” the company neglected to obtain permission from the sister of one of Dahmer’s victims to feature a depiction of her testimony.
In an essay for Insider, Rita Isbell, the sister of Errol Lindsey, wrote that she felt as though she were “reliving it all over again,” and that the depiction “brought back all the emotions [she] was feeling back then.” Isbell also states that she was never contacted about the show’s production, and her consent was never granted on using herself and her late brother in the portrayal .
To avoid re-inviting trauma like this, a victim or their family members should have every authority to say “no” to coverage of the case. If the family wants to be involved, that’s their choice – such as in the recent University of Idaho case, where four college students were killed in their off-campus apartment. Family members of two of the victims agreed to be interviewed in a CBS documentary about the killings.
Some popular true crime podcasts omit the names of victims or witnesses altogether to protect their identity. Other YouTube channels censor photos of children and feature crime scene photos that don’t make a spectacle of the actual death itself.
Even with these precautions, is there a true “good” way to consume true crime content? Is it better to leave these stories untold out of respect for the dead? Though the easier, more obvious moral answer is yes, there’s still some value to studying and consuming information about true crime cases.
Season 1 of the podcast “Serial” covered the 1999 death of Hae Min Lee and the arrest of her ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed, who was charged with first-degree murder. According to a New York Times article, the podcast revealed that there was a witness who could provide an alibi for Syed who had not been called to testify at the original trial. The podcast also called into question cell phone records and a lack of DNA evidence testing. Though Syed’s sentence was not overturned and his request for a new trial was rejected by the United States Supreme Court, the podcast served a key role in creating a possibility for the re-examination of evidence.
It is in stories where flaws in the original case investigation and trial help free someone who could have been wrongfully convicted that true crime content serves its true purpose: to shed light on cases that deserve more attention.
The next time you consume a true crime podcast or documentary, you don’t have to consistently ask yourself whether it’s ethical or not, but you should be critical of its presentation, just as you would every other piece of media. Is it respectful? Does it have diverse perspectives? Is it well-researched? Why are you really interested?
