The True Nature of True Crime

Joanne Freeman:
We’re going to finish the show by returning to my conversation with Rachel Monroe. She says it might seem like true crime is particularly popular right now but we’ve been here before.

Rachel Monroe:
Yeah, well it’s funny when people always talk about the true crime boom that’s happening right now and there is a part of me that wants to say, “Well aren’t we constantly in a true crime boom?” I do kind of feel like as long as we’ve had mass media these stories of crimes of investigation, of bad deeds, have always been really popular among humans so our fascination with them is a pretty long standing thing but what does seem to change is what kinds of stories are popular, how those stories are told, the medium. I tend to think that when a new form comes out, the crime stories adapt themselves to the new form. I mean, they’re just a great …

Rachel Monroe:
Right now you’ll see in these podcasts or on these TV shows they’re recapitulating stories that have been told many times before. I mean, how much content can be produced about Ted Bundy, right? It’s a story that maybe you think, “This has been told over and over and over again,” but when you have a new format like the podcast or these limited series, the change in medium offers a kind of new way to package the story or to frame it and it reaches a new audience. I think there are a lot of reasons that true crime has preoccupied people recently but I think that these new forms is definitely one reason.

Joanne Freeman:
Now you just mentioned that a lot of these stories like Ted Bundy, they get told again and again and again. What generally speaking would you say some of these true crime narratives obscure or omit about the realities of certain kinds of things that they focus on and other kinds of things that they just leave out?

Rachel Monroe:
Definitely, yeah. The vast majority of violent crime in the United States doesn’t look anything like the stories that we get in these true crime programs. In that way I think it can be a stretch to refer to it as true crime. I mean, first of all something that I always tell people that shocks them is that if you look at the crime statistics in the United States, the murder statistics, the percentage of murders where a woman is murdered by a man is only like a quarter of the murders in the United States but those crimes make up such an overwhelming proportion of the crimes that we see on TV that are covered in the paperback books and in the podcasts and overwhelmingly and disproportionately the crimes, the victims that we see depicted in these stories tend to be attractive, young, middle class white women when we know that that’s typically not who is most at risk of being a victim of violent crime in our culture. That’s definitely one thing. Like whose stories count? What kind of victims are we granting attention and granting the spotlight to?

Rachel Monroe:
Something that you don’t hear a lot about in these true crime programs is that violent crime is actually way, way, way down in the US. Peaked in the early ’90s and since then it’s about half what it was then but there are some very interesting studies done by Pew that ask people, “Do you feel like crime is going up or going down?” And almost every single year, while violent crime is going down, people report the feeling that it’s going up and I think that that can partly be attributed to the fact that there’s just so much attention to these violent stories in our media so it can really skew our perception of how dangerous the world is and who is at risk. It does affect you.

Joanne Freeman:
Let me ask one last question. You found that women are the biggest consumers of true crime. Why do you think that is? Why are women in particular drawn to those kinds of stories?

Rachel Monroe:
Well I think there are a number of reasons and that was one of the reasons I wanted to write a whole book about it because I think sometimes there can be reductive answers to that question, right? The one you hear a lot is women want to avoid being a victim and so they read these stories to get tips for how to avoid a serial killer and to me, that seems really reductive. I think the motivations are really complex and layered but I think the thing that I hear a lot and that seems to be really primary is that these stories can often be a way to think about and metabolize trauma and so people who have been victims of violent crime or have somebody close to them who’ve been victims of violent crime might turn to these stories to kind of work through feelings.

Rachel Monroe:
Even if you haven’t been the victim of a violent crime, even if you’re just sort of living life in a society where misogyny is a problem, where you deal with sexism, maybe you haven’t been assaulted but you’ve feared being assaulted, these things, the threat of violence is something that’s present in your mind in a daily life then these stories are a way to acknowledge that fear and to deal with it in a way and sometimes it can deal with the fear by kind of stoking and alarming it and sometime it deals with it in a more nuanced way but I do think that’s something that a lot of women have told me what draws them into these stories.

Joanne Freeman:
So in a way, though, books and TV shows that are true crime, they’re framing it and kind of almost suggesting that it’s controllable because there’s a beginning and a middle and I guess some of the time an end. So it’s interesting, it sounds like what you’re suggesting is that process of seeing these stories put in that form might be part of what draws women in.

Rachel Monroe:
Exactly, I think that you hear a lot of people paradoxically refer to true crime as soothing or relaxing, which on its surface sounds kind of hard to understand but then the more that you watch it you realize yes, these stories are often told in a formulaic way, the threat is embodied in one bad guy usually, often he meets justice, right? These books and podcasts and stories often end with a trial with the doors to the jail slamming closed and so there is this feeling at least within the confines of the story that justice has been served.

Joanne Freeman:
It makes me think of the endless, countless iterations of Law and Order.

Rachel Monroe:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Joanne Freeman:
The TV show, which are so formulaic, right? There’s a crime at the beginning and then there’s the two members with the police department hunting it down and then there’s the trial at the end and then something happens and it’s resolved and there’s a happy, quirky little comment or a dark comment at the end and it’s over. I can’t say I’m hugely invested in true crime but there was a period when I watched a heck of a lot of Law and Order and I think that precisely what we’re talking about here is what drew me in. They were predictable and despite the fact that they were dark, the predictability of it was comforting.

Rachel Monroe:
Yeah, definitely, and I’ve found in my … I definitely had periods of my life when I’ve turned to a lot of Law and Order, particularly Law and Order SVU and it’s been at times of my life when there’s a certain amount of chaos or instability in my own life and I think there is something about these shows where they acknowledge that. They don’t pretend that the world is a rosy and happy place but at the same time you have these dogged investigators who won’t stop until they get justice and so it kind of stokes your fear and anxiety and then assuages it and that is a really powerful formula.

Joanne Freeman:
Rachel Monroe is the author of Savage Appetites, Four True Stories of Women, Crime and Obsession.

Ed Ayers:
That’s going to do it for us today but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about history. You’ll find us at Backstoryradio.org or send an email to Backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter, @Backstoryradio. Backstory’s produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by anonymous donor, The National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the Johns Hopkins University and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities and the environment.

Speaker 1:
Brian Balogh is professor of history at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is professor of the humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is professor of history and American studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams associate professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University. Backstory was created by Andrew Windham for Virginia Humanities.