The New York Times has been coming for "true crime"
What do we talk about when we talk about true crime
This past week, the Times put a lot of energy into boosting an article that appeared in their Sunday magazine about a woman who was unjustly, to use a technical term, screwed by what the paper terms the “big business” of true crime. The piece (gift linked for you here, it is worth the read) was featured in the daily “Morning” newsletter, the “Today’s Headlines” email, and the “Great Read” email feature. And it is a disturbing story. Liz Flatt, whose sister, Debbie Williamson, was murdered in 1975, felt called to return to the unsolved case forty years later. She found herself at CrimeCon in 2021, where she met two podcasters, George Jared and Jennifer Bucholtz, who had used crowdsourcing to, as they claimed, solve a 2004 cold case. It just goes downhill from there.
As the article’s author Sarah Viren puts it, crowdsourcing an investigation operates under the assumption that “the more people involved in seeking justice the better, and that all of us should have stakes in murders’ being solved, not only the police or bereaved family members.” Sounds reasonable, and the hosts of the podcast argued to Flatt that crowdsourcing had the potential to bring more police attention and resources to a cold case. But Flatt’s experience demonstrates that the citizens of Al Gore’s internet have wildly different definitions of what it means to “seek justice.” Though there was some minimal forward movement in Debbie’s case, the article describes how Jared and Bucholtz used the case file in ways that made Flatt uncomfortable, namely sharing it with a large Zoom audience during a CrimeCon online subscription service event. When she refused to participate and distanced herself from the podcast and its Facebook group, the hosts turned on her savagely, saying she was attempting to “sabotage” the investigation, and wasn’t making her murdered sister “very happy.” Some of the “justice seeking” group members went even further, suggesting she was “protecting” the killer. Good Lord.
Did you just shudder at the thought of CrimeCon having a subscription service? I did too. The last major article the Times published on the state of the true crime industrial complex was a scathing account of a victim’s mother attending 2023’s CrimeCon. I wrote about it here:
These two articles together suggest that the paper of record is digging into what Viren calls “the increasingly monetized universe of true crime,” and not liking what it finds.
And who would? What happened to Flatt is heinous, and I blame Jared and Bucholtz entirely for exploiting her pain. But their behavior does not represent the entirety of longreads, books, docuseries, documentaries, and podcasts that also fall under the true crime umbrella. I would suggest not even the majority of it. If we’re going to talk about the “universe of true crime,” we have to acknowledge that it also includes planets like In the Dark, which arguably saved a man’s life, and Killers of the Flower Moon, the cinematic adaptation of which everyone is currently drooling over. Not to mention the galaxy of Serial productions, a property owned by the New York Times, that put out two excellent audio series this year alone.
However, Viren is not wrong that true crime content in new media is increasingly monetized. You need look no further than Spotify’s cancellation of the Pulitzer-winning podcast series Stolen, which focused on abuses at residential schools, to see how properties are expected to deliver a robust bottom line. Unfortunately, more clicks and downloads is a way to ensure survival, perhaps presenting a misleading picture of what true crime looks like, as the salacious will, in certain contexts, rise to the top.
However, the true crime universe is expansive, and just this past week Samantha Hodder at Bingeworthy devoted her newsletter to celebrating the complex and challenging podcast series In Her Defence.
You should give it a read. In the piece, Hodder queries,
“So then what about a series like In Her Defence that’s more about discussing a crime, rather than solving it? Where does this fit into the cannon?”
This is a crucial question, and one that I’ve been wrestling with as I work on my own true crime scholarship. I contend that alongside canonical works like In Cold Blood, The Excecutioner’s Song, and Helter Skelter (that are definitely about solving or prosecuting a crime), there is an equally robust tradition in American true crime that is more interested in the sociopolitical context of crimes, going back at least to 1968 with John Hersey’s The Algiers Motel Incident, and including James Baldwin’s The Evidence of Things Not Seen, and arguably Ann Rule’s The Stranger Beside Me. More contemporary writers like Maggie Nelson, Myriam Gurba, and Emma Copley Eisenberg are firmly in this tradition. Thinking about the different approaches, purposes, and audiences for texts is an essential way to complicate what we mean when we say “true crime.”1
Full disclosure: this is pretty much word for word a Note I posted earlier this week when restacking Bingeworthy’s newsletter. I am always banging this drum!