The murder mystery and crime genre has been popular for quite some time. TV shows and movies from the perspective of victims, assailants, and investigators have roped people into each step of the criminal world. Fictional programs like True Detective and Law and Order as well as movies like The Silence of the Lambs, allow people to immerse themselves in tense investigations and weave through the mind of a killer.
Over recent years, true crime has skyrocketed in popularity, so much so that today we see dramatizations of horrific crimes and the perpetrators behind them. Dahmer; Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile; The Staircase; The Assassination of Gianni Versace; and more, have become hit TV shows, attracting high viewership for some of the most tragic and violent real-life criminal cases. With the rise of social media and relatively easy access to information, true crime has taken on a new format, one that seems to have some social media users treating horrific cases like mysteries to solve.
The Idaho Murders last November took the news by storm, given the gruesome nature of the murder of four university students in their home. As the days went on and the crime remained unsolved, there seemed to be a phenomenon of social media users reporting on the case with their personal accounts. Not only would updates about the status of the ongoing investigation be shared, but select users took it upon themselves to give their own opinion on who the murderer was. Despite being strangers to the victims, people online would publicly speculate and accuse the surviving roommates, friends, family, and even passers-by in CCTV footage of being suspicious and guilty of something.
As the discourse online expanded its reach, more and more people weighed in, demonstrating what I interpreted as a desensitization to this kind of murder. Behind a screen, in the comments of a true crime TikTok account or the depths of a subreddit, users would speculate and theorize about the case, much like what is commonly done for fictional TV series. Thinking back to when Pretty Little Liars was in its prime, there was a whole community of people theorizing and building a case for who they thought could be the character, A. The difference here lies in the fact that Pretty Little Liars is a fictional story and viewers weren’t accusing real people of having committed heinous crimes.
Treating real people like fictional characters has resulted in a disturbing lack of empathy among online ‘detectives’ who claim that they are seeing something that investigators are not. Forgetting the importance of confidentiality, online users were quick to point out what they considered gaps in the two surviving roommates’ stories, implausibilities, and evidence that they thought was being overlooked. This ignores the fact that investigators cannot release all pertinent information while a case is ongoing. Releasing every finding to the public allows people to falsely confess and means that there are no details that only the assailant knows.
Perhaps the transition from fictional crime to true crime has left some people unable to differentiate the two. Treating the lives and deaths of real people like entertainment has led to the re-traumatization of victims that have already lived through a terrifying event. To say the two surviving roommates are suspicious because they didn’t react in the face of trauma as someone else might have, or ‘should’ have, completely minimizes the state of terror and stress the body is under in traumatic situations. With the power of hindsight, it’s easy to say that “x should have done y, and because they didn’t, they must be hiding something,” but this disregards that people are unique individuals with their own ways of coping with shock and stress.
It’s important not to forget when engaging with true crime that it’s exactly that, true crime. Of course, when cases like the Idaho Murders make the news, we often feel compelled to know what happened, to understand how something like that could occur, and to know that whoever committed such a crime is caught. But understanding why and how someone could commit such atrocities is not the same as levelling accusations online that could very well get back to the traumatized victims themselves. Empathy should be extended to the victims and their loved ones, not accusations based on incomplete and untrustworthy evidence. True crime tells the stories of victims—not of characters for our entertainment.