True Crime Research Articles

True victims: men’s privilege, class, and violence against women in Making a Murderer and The Jinx

ABSTRACT Portrayals of accused men in the true crime television (TV) documentary series Making a Murderer (2015) and The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst (2015) mark a key historical moment for voiceless female murder victims. We mark this moment by considering how class politics plays out for Steven Avery and Robert Durst when it is part of the relative storytelling privilege they enjoy. Our study emphasises this privilege as an acute form of entitlement that is assured for men across the intersections of class, gender, and whiteness. To do this, we see Avery and Durst portrayed as underdogs in the American criminal justice system and observe their worlds-apart socioeconomic status coalescing with gendered justice. Our argument extends existing scholarship on the series, and true crime TV about men’s violence against women, by insisting that screen and social agency for accused men is a particular privilege afforded by mediated culture. Its creation of men as symbolic victims risks excusing violence against women by focusing on perpetrating men’s troubled lives as explanations for their crimes.

Real Ghosts: Trauma, True Crime, and Temporality in Sharp Objects

Real Ghosts: Trauma, True Crime, and Temporality in Sharp Objects

A Warning for Fair Women: Adultery and Murder in Shakespeare's Theater ed. by Ann C. Christensen

Reviewed by: A Warning for Fair Women: Adultery and Murder in Shakespeare's Theater ed. by Ann C. Christensen Francesca Bua Ann C. Christensen, ed., A Warning for Fair Women: Adultery and Murder in Shakespeare's Theater ( Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021), lix + 229 pp., 18 ills. Ann C. Christensen's edition of A Warning for Fair Women (1599) decidedly accomplishes its stated goal and successfully asserts the play's "many merits for students of Shakespeare as well as directors and dramaturgs" (xii). A Warning for Fair Women is a domestic tragedy based on a real Elizabethan murder trial in which George Sanders, a successful London merchant, is murdered by his wife's lover, George Browne. Christensen's edition, with its modernized spelling, thorough endnotes, and inclusion of similarly edited primary sources, will no doubt benefit students, teachers, and dramatists alike. This edition provides a wealth of accessible and contextual information in the generous front matter, including but not limited to the genre of domestic tragedy, the staging and performance aspects of the play, and the uniquely compelling aspects of A Warning that number it as a play deserving of its own place in the early modern literary canon. Underscoring her commitment to this aim, Christensen explicitly showcases the pedagogical possibilities of her edition and helpfully offers a number of relevant and topical avenues of engagement for students toward the end of the introduction (e.g., public and private; church and state; work and professional identity; place and space/setting), under which she likewise includes discussion and/or research questions for students about early modern social and domestic spheres, providing examples from the play that delve into these ideas. In her introduction, Christensen immediately delineates the play's genre as a domestic tragedy, providing a helpful review for those who may not be well versed in the nuances of genre on the early modern stage. After turning briefly to a review of the critical attention given to domestic tragedy since the 1980s, Christensen outlines what is at stake in her edition and maintains the necessity for historicizing A Warning for Fair Women: [End Page 238] When we consider the social and institutional contexts for the play's depiction of marriage, family, religion, and the law, as well as tragedy as a genre, we can better appreciate both A Warning's novelty and its participation in aesthetic and cultural traditions … because A Warning stages uneven power and affective relations within a household space that is permeable, while also dramatizing, for example, facets of the legal system and the commercial economy, it offers insights into older forms of everyday life that still concern us today. (xxii–xxiii) For Christensen, A Warning for Fair Women shows how the early modern quotidian not only is of the past but also stretches into the present. Playfully, the editor uses the play as referent to various pop culture phenomena, the O. J. Simpson trial for example, to highlight this compression of the past into the present and to help facilitate connections between the genre of early modern domestic tragedy and modern notions of domesticity. In this vein, Christensen gestures toward true crime and domestic tragedy in the introduction, but unfortunately does not meaningfully engage with these themes in relation to A Warning's commitment to spectacle. The invitation to take up Christensen's call to read "the play's engagements with the society and culture of its time on a deeper level" (xxii) and consider the ways in which these engagements apply today is especially seductive when thinking about the sustained and ever-rising popularity of true crime narratives and domesticity's central role in them. An allusion to the O. J. Simpson trial, coupled with the misleading paragraph title in the introduction, left me itching to read Christensen's thoughts on the explicit early modern/modern connection between these two highly popularized and nearly selfsame genres. The edition continues to address possible contextual lacunae in one's first encounter with an early modern, non-Shakespearean play. For example, Christensen gives a historical overview of early modern performance conventions—notably the play's dating, theater company, and authorship, as well as its structure and stagecraft...

We Were Kings by Court Stevens

Reviewed by: We Were Kings by Court Stevens Alaine Martaus Stevens , Court We Were Kings . Thomas Nelson , 2022 [ 400 p] Trade ed. ISBN 9780785238485 $19.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9780785238478 $9.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 9-12 One fact has defined eighteen-year-old Nyla's life: her mother's best friend Frankie killed Cora King twenty years ago. Frankie is set to be executed for it in mere weeks, but new facts have suddenly up-ended Nyla's world: the victim was her mother's own sister, her mom's been hiding connections to a wealthy, powerful Kentucky family, and Frankie may just be innocent. Now, in a possibly ill-advised attempt to understand the past and save Frankie, Nyla will dig up long buried secrets and expose rot at the core of a small, rural community that wants the past to stay gone. At her side is gorgeous local boy Sam, with his own connections to the crime, but as their online video coverage goes viral, they quickly learn some people might kill to keep truths hidden. Stevens deftly weaves multiple threads, including diamonds, meth, national politics, and human trafficking, into a riveting narrative of betrayed friendships and fraught family ties. Pairing old-fashioned amateur sleuthing with a decidedly on-trend, online true crime investigation, this taut mystery unspools with a chillingly calibrated pace, and the violent, stunning payoff is sure to surprise [End Page 203] even the most genre-familiar reader. The all-white cast is less well-developed than the plot, with many stock characters, but readers looking for their next addictive page-turner can mine this well-crafted whodunit for every worthy twist. Copyright © 2022 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Murder Among Friends: How Leopold and Loeb Tried to Commit the Perfect Crime by Candace Fleming

Reviewed by: Murder Among Friends: How Leopold and Loeb Tried to Commit the Perfect Crime by Candace Fleming Elizabeth Bush Fleming, Candace Murder Among Friends: How Leopold and Loeb Tried to Commit the Perfect Crime. Schwartz, 2022 [368p] illus. with photographs Library ed. ISBN 9780593177433 $22.99 Trade ed. ISBN 9780593177426 $19.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9780593177440 $11.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 10 + Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb grew up in a wealthy enclave on Chicago’s South Side—both precocious, both raised by domineering and troubled nannies, both clinging to problematic self-images, and both desperately dependent on each other. For Richard, who believed himself to be a master criminal, Nathan was his supportive and enabling partner in crime; for Nathan, who believed himself to be a Nietzschean superman, Richard was the source of erotic pleasure, whose crime-for-sex demands left his amoral perspective unperturbed. Together they plotted and executed what they intended to be the ideal crime—the kidnapping and murder of a randomly selected child. The child’s body was identified, however, and evidence began to accrue within a day of the killing, and soon a sensational trial began in 1924, involving star defense attorney Clarence Darrow and showcasing [End Page 217] ideas about differences between outright insanity and mitigating mental illness. A fleeting spoiler and an oddly intrusive discourse on contemporary psychology are small stumbles, but the tight chronological structure of Fleming’s account unreels the planning, aftermath, and trial with Hitchcockian chill. The gruesome murder is kept offstage, a haunting presence that hangs over the proceedings with both tragedy and menace, and Fleming avoids giving rhyme or reason to such a random, horrific act. An engrossing narrative, this has immediate appeal to true crime readers and could also spark discussion of how societies define criminal responsibility. Bibliography, notes, and photographs are included. Copyright © 2022 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

The Uncommon Case of Daniel Brown: How a White Police Officer Was Convicted of Killing a Black Citizen, Baltimore, 1875 by Gordon H. Shufelt

Reviewed by: The Uncommon Case of Daniel Brown: How a White Police Officer Was Convicted of Killing a Black Citizen, Baltimore, 1875 by Gordon H. Shufelt Lauren N. Henley The Uncommon Case of Daniel Brown: How a White Police Officer Was Convicted of Killing a Black Citizen, Baltimore, 1875. By Gordon H. Shufelt. True Crime History. ( Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2021. Pp. xii, 171. $24.95, ISBN 978-1-60635-412-4.) In The Uncommon Case of Daniel Brown: How a White Police Officer Was Convicted of Killing a Black Citizen, Baltimore, 1875, Gordon H. Shufelt examines the specific circumstances that led to Patrick McDonald, an Irish immigrant, being convicted of manslaughter in the death of Black Marylander Daniel Brown in post–Civil War Baltimore. In so doing, Shufelt offers a methodological framework "in which to examine the social, political, and cultural characteristics that [End Page 180] define the quality of justice in cases of police violence" (p. 6). This approach necessarily draws on what makes this case unique as opposed to representative, ultimately concluding that myriad factors at this particular place and time allowed Daniel Brown's death to be prosecuted in the manner Shufelt outlines. The Uncommon Case of Daniel Brown is organized around biographical sketches of the victim and perpetrator, with chapters on the role of the coroner's office, the politics of policing, and the trial itself. It ends with commentary on the post-trial proceedings and on the thread between this nineteenth-century case and the modern Black Lives Matter movement. The biographical chapters, "The Black Man in the Doorway" and "The Irish Policeman on the Doorstep," are solid examples of culling together individual people's lives from fragmentary evidence. Relying on census records, newspaper articles, city directories, published primary sources, and secondary literature, these chapters attempt to characterize Daniel Brown and Patrick McDonald. By the end of the first chapter, Brown is portrayed as a self-assured, literate homeowner who was "inclined to be outspoken about his rights" (p. 24). McDonald becomes an Irish immigrant who "was no stranger to street fighting" and "more willing than most men" to use "fists, clubs, and pistols" aggressively (p. 39). While these depictions are no doubt oversimplified, they provide texture and specificity to that fateful midsummer night in 1875. After convincingly arguing for the unique cultural setting of postwar Baltimore, where residential segregation was not as complete as in the Deep South and where Irish immigrants and Black freedpeople changed the city's demographics in a relatively short span of time, Shufelt turns toward another unique feature of nineteenth-century Maryland: discretionary coroner's juries. By reasoning that a lack of precedents and formalization in the state's coroner positions shaped how cases were adjudicated, Shufelt persuasively demonstrates the importance of coroner's juries in expressing a "community's social and political norms" (p. 54). This focus on the power of this particular component of pretrial proceedings—the coroners' inquests—contributes to the growing literature on race and crime in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Shufelt successfully demonstrates how pretrial records can provide robust insights into how criminality was adjudicated in the Jim Crow era. At times, Shufelt's balance between the specifics of the Daniel Brown case with the broader Baltimorean context seems disproportionate. Chapters 4 and 5 are about perceptions of the police in terms of racial and political biases, respectively. The former chapter's reliance on white newspapers, without explicitly mentioning the Black press, reads like an incomplete account of how Black citizens responded to the city's police. Chapter 5's deep dive into the history of policing and corrupt politics throughout the mid-nineteenth century is a fascinating political history of Baltimore but does not make a strong case for such in-depth background information related to the Daniel Brown case specifically. Given contemporary protests of the killings of Black men and women at the hands of the police, Shufelt's study provides a useful historical lens to understand how the convergence of nuanced factors makes each case unique. [End Page 181] Lauren N. Henley University of Richmond Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association

All the Best Liars by Amelia Kahaney

Reviewed by: All the Best Liars by Amelia Kahaney Kate Quealy-Gainer, Editor Kahaney, Amelia All the Best Liars. Flatiron, 2022 [336p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781250312709 $18.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781250312716 $10.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 8-12 Syd doesn’t remember much about the party last night, only that her brother dragged her home after she got into a drunken fight with her best friend Rain and former friend Brie in front of most of the senior class. This morning, however, she’s confronted with the news that Brie died in a housefire and Rain has gone missing. Flash back to a few months ago, and readers get a view of Syd and Rain’s deteriorating relationship, after Rain’s family wins the lotto and she leaves their poor neighborhood—and Syd—behind. Considering Syd is now a person of interest in the fire and Rain still hasn’t shown up, she must figure out what happened last night and what brought her friendship with Rain to the breaking point. Time jumps and shifting perspectives between Syd, Rain, and eventually Brie effectively disorient the reader in this taut and twisty thriller, and the three girls have enough depth to hold the emotional stakes without giving anything away too early. The [End Page 219] book’s commentary on class is subtle but compelling: both Rain and Brie go through life-changing financial gains, and they’re willing to do anything to keep their new circumstances if it means they won’t have to return to an impoverished life. No one is without fault here, and the combination of intrigue and ambiguity will appeal to fans of true crime podcasts. Copyright © 2022 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Complicit masculinity and the serialization of violence: notes from Australian Cinema

ABSTRACT This article argues for a revised understanding of 'complicity' as a undertheorised position and relationship within the social organisation of gender. The concept of ‘hegemonic masculinity’, developed by R.W. Connell and others, has been influential for understanding masculinities as shared ideals embedded within gender power relations, but scholars have paid less attention to Connell’s attendant concept of ‘complicity’, which does not require a shared ideal to be honoured or emulated. To develop a critical account of complicity, this article draws on Iris Marion Young’s distinction between series and groups and considers ways that persons with diverse relationships to masculinities may nevertheless contribute to collective forms of domination. Young’s approach is placed in dialogue with studies of mateship and violence in contemporary Australian cinema, noting the ways that complicity and coercion can be masked through the language of mateship. As key examples, the article considers two Australian true crime films that explore the complicity of adolescent boys with the collective violences of men: David Michôd’s Animal Kingdom (2010) and Justin Kurzel’s Snowtown (2011).

The Alert Collector: Scams and Flimflam: The Other True Crime

This list covers nonfiction on specific famous hoaxes and scams as well as overviews of the topic. Many of the books gathered here began as long-form news articles that were developed into a book. A short section of media items rounds out the column along with great podcast suggestions for gathering background information on what is undoubtedly a scintillating topic for users of all types of libraries.—Editor

The Terrorist and the Girl Next Door: Love Jihad in French Femonationalist Nonfiction

This paper explores the theme of Love Jihad in “true sex crime” novels, French mass-market paperbacks where a journalist or author recounts the temoignage of women who suffered sexual violence at the hands of Muslim men. Semiotic analysis of visual and textual representations shows a melodramatic triangle of female victims, Muslim male perpetrators, and heroic readers. These stories reflect, dramatize, and sexualize broader social constructions of the monstrous Muslim; from Far-Right conspiracies of The Great Replacement to femonationalist debates about veils and republican values. In the final section, the paper explores how visual and verbal tropes from these popular discourses reappear in political speech and media from the National Rally.

A guarantee of safety, a cautionary tale or a celebration? Popularity of true crime narratives through the lens of Mary Douglas’s concepts of pollution and defilement

The fascination with crime, hastily described by some as a symptom of moral degradation of Western culture, seems to be a defence mechanism used by individuals to deal with social transgressions and anomalies represented by serious crimes. The aim of this article is to analyse the growing popularity of true crime through the lens of Mary Douglas’s theory of purity and pollution, with a particular emphasis on the methods of dealing with anomalies appearing within conceptual schemata of a given culture. For this purpose, the text has been divided into four parts: the first part briefly presents the history of true crime; the second part analyses the idea of murder through the lens of Douglas’s theory; the third part discusses the reasons behind the popularity of true crime narratives; and the fourth part showcases how individuals use true crime stories as tools to deal with anomalies.

The cultural scope and criminological potential of the “hardman story”

The true crime genre has become synonymous with the serial killer. As such, other narratives dealing with different types of violent criminal subjects have been overlooked in academic and media analyses. The following article explores a subgenre of true crime which has been overlooked—the life story of the violent criminal or “hardman biography.” However, in acknowledging the hardman, the discussion also reveals his presence across fact/fiction boundaries and a range of cultural terrain. Following a discussion of the cultural space this figure occupies, I turn my attention to hardman stories which exist predominantly in the local imaginary and focus on one such text which tells the story of a violent protagonist and cultures of crime and violence in the North of England in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In so doing, I focus on how this text animates cultures of violence and marginality left in the wake of deindustrialization and economic decline, combining this with relevant theoretical and ethnographic work. I conclude by arguing that the text is a further example of the way in which popular criminology can complement and advance academic criminological understandings of crime and violence.

<em>The Serpent</em> (2021)

<em>The Serpent</em> (2021)

Monster

Monster

True Crime Podcasts in Australia: Examining Listening Patterns and Listener Perceptions

True crime podcasts (TCPs) are increasingly saturating the Australian media landscape. The most downloaded podcast in the country is the TCP, Casefile and overall true crime is a popular podcast genre. Despite this, there is limited Australian research exploring the perspectives of TCP listeners. Using data from a survey of 124 university students, this article identifies popular subject matter, listening patterns and stylistic attributes of TCPs. Additionally, listener motivations and perceptions are identified. This paper highlights the importance of critically examining Australian TCPs as contemporary sites of information and pleasure that the public may regard as authoritative resources on crime.

Netflix Originals: The Evolution of True Crime Television

Netflix has emerged at the forefront of a modern craze: the serialized true crime docuseries, a phenomenon emblematized by the platform’s hit series Making a Murderer (2015–2018). This article contextualizes the true crime docuseries trend within the tradition of true crime television, a long-popular genre frequently dismissed as sensationalism. The article traces the genre’s ideology and format to situate the true crime docuseries not as an elevation but as a reconfiguration that operates with a similar purpose, as evidenced by Netflix’s docuseries reboot of the classic true crime vehicle Unsolved Mysteries.

Reconsidering television true crime and gendered authority in Allen v. Farrow

ABSTRACT This essay examines how the 2021 HBO docu-series Allen v. Farrowdestabilizes a “he said/she said” framing of historic child sex abuse accusations against Hollywood auteur Woody Allen. Joining a number of other recent docu-series on celebrity sexual abuse cases, Allen v. Farrow repurposes the long-form true crime structure to focus sustained investigative attention on sexual violence as a crime that demands social justice. Refuting charges that the piece is “biased” against Allen, the essay argues that Kirby Dick’s and Amy Ziering’s four-part true crime investigative series is in fact designed to interrogate the notion of “communicative injustice”. In its support of Dylan and Mia Farrow’s voices, the docu-series challenges the cultural logics of “bothsidesism” and reveals how a misogynistic media culture enabled a gendered cultural narrative that silenced Dylan and painted her mother as a scorned and vengeful woman. As part of a wider cultural turn toward re-evaluating gender roles of the 1990s, Allen v. Farrow invites reflection on the gendered cultural logic that saw a child-exploiting midlife female vendetta as a more intelligible cultural script than male child sexual abuse.

The psychology of morbid curiosity: Development and initial validation of the morbid curiosity scale

The success of horror films, popularity of true crime, and prevalence of violence in the news implies that morbid curiosity is a common psychological trait. However, research on morbid curiosity is largely absent from the psychological literature. In this paper, I present a psychometric tool for assessing morbid curiosity, defined as a motivation to seek out information about dangerous phenomena, and use it to investigate the psychological nature of morbid curiosity. In studies 1 and 2 (ntotal = 1370), the Morbid Curiosity Scale was developed and its relationship to personality was assessed. Morbidly curious individuals were rebellious, socially curious, and low in animal reminder disgust. Study 3 (n = 317) demonstrated that trait morbid curiosity is stable over 4–6 weeks and that morbidly curious individuals prefer movies where threat is a central theme. In Study 4 (n = 137), participants were presented with a choice between morbid information and non-morbid information (image and text). Morbid curiosity predicted over half the variance (r2 = 0.53) in decisions to further investigate morbid information. These four studies provide evidence that morbid curiosity is a normally occurring psychological trait that can be assessed using the new 24-item Morbid Curiosity Scale.

The Kim Wall Murder Serialized: Ethics & Aesthetics in High-Profile True Crime

This article investigates the dramaturgical, aesthetical and ethical implications of making television on the back of a high-profile, internationally appealing and very recent murder case: the Kim Wall murder. During a trip in his self-made submarine, Peter Madsen, a known amateur space rocket and submarine builder, abused and murdered Kim Wall, a young Swedish journalist, who was supposed to do an interview with him. Less than three years later, a range of true crime productions had been made about the case, and this article analyses three of them. Preliminary findings suggest that meta-communication is highly important in high-profile true crime productions such as these, and that creators have to walk a thin line.

True Crime Consumption as Defensive Vigilance: Psychological Mechanisms of a Rape Avoidance System.

The circumvention of female reproductive choice via rape is a costly and evolutionarily persistent threat to women's reproductive fitness. This is argued to have generated selection pressure for a precautionary threat management system for rape avoidance among women. Such a system would regulate women's fear of rape as a functional emotional response to inputs providing information about the current risk and reproductive cost of rape. Fear of rape is expected to subsequently motivate adaptive behavior to avoid threats to one's reproductive choice. The current research tested key tenets of this proposed system and found that women report greater fear of rape as a function of characteristics that alter the likelihood of being victimized, including being younger, living in a neighborhood perceived as dangerous, living in close proximity to family, and having been the victim of a sexual assault in the past. We also discuss mixed and null results with respect to the role of relationship status and mate value. In turn, fear of rape was associated with behavior expected to reduce one's risk of being victimized. Specifically, women who were more fearful of rape reported consuming true crime media with greater frequency and indicated that this consumption was specifically motivated by the desire to learn strategies to prevent or escape an attack. Overall, results were fairly consistent with a threat management system approach and may help to explain why fear of rape is a powerful feature of women's psychology.