I vividly remember being a child, sitting on the edge of my parents’ bed late in the evening, and watching Crimewatch. Reconstructions of violent crimes I didn’t understand, usually against women, played out on screen. I remember sombre presenters such as Nick Ross and Kirsty Young pleading for information as grainy CCTV footage showed victims being followed through the streets at night, and dour police detectives talking through timelines of the hours before someone was killed.
This fascination with the morbid flowed easily into horror movies. After finishing school, I had my first major depressive episode, involving a hospital stay. It took a while for me to get back to myself; I didn’t really leave the house apart from to go to therapy, and I soon became a strange nocturnal hermit. During the day I would sleep, and at night I would lie in bed and watch scary movies where horrible things happened to female actors, fake-slaughtered in buckets of corn syrup.
It kind of made sense, then, that in the big true crime boom of 2014 – when Serial, the podcast that reinvigorated the genre, was released – I climbed wholly on board. Documentaries, podcasts, long reads, YouTubers – I couldn’t stop consuming content about horrible, grotesque crimes.
I am loth to start a sentence with “as a woman”, but since puberty I, along with most of my peers, have experienced quite a few unpleasant things at the hands of other people. It’s highly likely that most of us know at least one woman who has been the victim of sexual assault, domestic abuse or other gendered violence – and the true crime genre has thrived on this.
The more I processed some of the things I’d been through, the more I took refuge, weirdly, in true crime content. I found it oddly comforting to listen to some of the grimmer stories of murdered women. I’d spend afternoons lying in bed catching up on my favourite crime podcasts as a twisted form of self-care, with overly eager presenters trying to toe the line of respectfully sharing the tragic circumstances of someone’s untimely death while not seeming too playful.
If Netflix had a new documentary out, I would be on it, bingeing episodes in quick succession. My sick little mind would scroll endlessly through Reddit threads, unpicking the great mysteries of the true crime world, like the murders of JonBenét Ramsey and Meredith Kercher. True crime had become my hobby.
For years, I used true crime as a crutch to position some of the worst things I’d been through in a wider context. But it was never enough – I was always searching for more: more podcasts, more news, more documentaries. A few years ago I tried a new podcast. It had the usual premise – two peppy American women covering the story of a murdered or missing woman for about an hour. I enjoyed it for a while and then, part of the way through, when they would usually play an ad for a completely unrelated item that they would try to make relevant (“Does hearing the topics covered in this podcast keep you awake at night? You should try this new mattress, for a perfect night’s sleep”, etc), they started gleefully plugging their own merch. T-shirts and jumpers for their fellow crime junkies. Like me.
I was disgusted. It’s slightly shameful that this, of all things, was what turned me off true crime, but my stomach was turned by the idea of these two women monetising the content I had been so hungry for. From then on, I went pretty much cold turkey. Podcast episodes that automatically downloaded on to the app went unlistened to. I no longer wanted to hear it. I wish I could say I had taken a principled stance in no longer listening – but it was more like a trigger word in the ad had lifted a spell I’d been under for so many years. Suddenly, I no longer found an uncomfortable comfort in digesting other people’s horror stories.
Many months later, the domino effect of the highly publicised murders of Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry, Sarah Everard and Sabina Nessa made me feel and think about things I’d gone through differently. I felt ashamed of the way I’d been sucked in by the cult of true crime, which uses painful events such as these as fodder. I had relied on the painful experiences of others as a sort of numbing cream, a buffer I could put between me and my experiences. Letting go of true crime allowed me to let go of my own things – and finally find some peace.
Mollie Goodfellow is a freelance journalist and comedy writer
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