A missing person case appears on a podcast. A decades-old murder becomes the subject of a documentary. A stranger's carefully reconstructed crime fills an evening that could have been spent watching almost anything else. For millions of people, true crime has become a strangely compelling form of entertainment. But what exactly keeps people coming back to stories about murder, deception, kidnapping and other real-world crimes?
It may not simply be an appetite for violence. A 2025 study published in the British Journal of Psychology offers one of the clearest recent examinations of the question. In “Out of the dark – Psychological perspectives on people's fascination with true crime,” psychologists Corinna Perchtold-Stefan and colleagues examined true-crime consumption and the psychological characteristics associated with it.
