Meet Maz*, a 26-year-old woman who consumes true crime voraciously. Aware of the taboo that lingers around calling yourself a ‘fan’ of grisly stories, she asked to remain anonymous for this article, but continues to devour Netflix documentaries, specials on Alibi (Sky’s dedicated crime channel), podcasts and books in their scores.

A true connoisseur, she shies away from #CrimeTok – the growing community discussing cases on TikTok – finding it too simplistic and speculative. She delves deep into past cases online, conducting her own research and piecing clues together. Maz and her partner love to catch up on their findings together, doing additional research online.  

She isn’t the only one. In the years since BBC’s Crimewatch was axed in 2017 (in large part due to competition), our appetite for true crime stories and the opportunity to be a part of them has surged. 

Tune into Sky Atlantic’s hit show-of-the-moment Yellowjackets and you’ll find a doe-eyed character named Misty spending her evenings obsessively working to solve crimes with her online community of “citizen detectives”. While podcasts about cold cases and grim tales continue to soar – 2021’s runaway hit Sweet Bobby is just one of the 2,800 true crime podcasts now streaming, and women make up almost 75% of their listeners. 

Channel 4 recently launched an entire platform dedicated to the genre and, in October, aired reality TV show Murder Island, in which contestants raced to solve a mystery set by crime writer Ian Rankin. Netflix is primed to release another slate of docuseries this year to keep up with demand, including The Tinder Swindler, about a dangerous conman who targets women. Even the obsession itself has become TV fodder, with Hulu drama Only Murders In The Building following three true-crime fanatics who find themselves embroiled in a murder case.

Though our fascination has gone into overdrive, it’s always been there. Dr Lili Pâquet is a lecturer who studies crime novels, the women who read them and the “informal justice” that women can access via crime content. She acknowledges that consuming true crime has always been popular, from The Newgate Calendar’s tales of famous criminals in the 18th century to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. “Even the Nuremberg Trials were broadcast on radio,” she says. But she believes that civilian interest in solving these crimes has flourished thanks to social media platforms and forums like Reddit, which allow like-minded people to connect.

There’s also the fact that the internet has made it easier than ever to keep investing in a real-life story, digging for leads and sharing information that authorities might have missed. We saw this recently with the case of Gabby Petito, a 22-year-old woman who went missing on a US roadtrip with her fiancé Brian Laundrie. The #GabbyPetito hashtag on TikTok is a testament to the huge public interest in her case, with videos discussing it racking up 1.9 billion views. One of them, made by YouTubers Jenn and Kyle Bethune, was critical: they spotted Petito and Laundrie’s van in footage they’d filmed while driving through a national park, ultimately leading police to the location of Petito’s body. 

For Maz, the crimes that fascinate her are global, but the ones she gets really invested in are close to home in the north of England: those of the Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe or serial sex offender Matthew Falder, from Cheshire. 

But what drives people to become personally invested in these stories in the first place? Nina Innsted is a missing persons advocate and the host of Already Gone, a podcast exploring unsolved cases. She had her first breakthrough when she recorded an episode on the 1985 disappearance of Cindy Moore from Troy, Michigan, which prompted the Oakland County Sheriff’s Cold Case team to reopen the case. The team asked Innsted to come in for an interview as the information she’d uncovered for the podcast had saved them investigative legwork. It’s this feeling of achievement, of really helping, that keeps her coming back.    

“People like to be part of things and the true crime community is no different,” Innsted says. “The opportunity to help in a case is very tempting. We all know someone who has been a victim of or impacted by a serious crime and have seen how crime resonates through a community. I understand the urge to be part of the solution.”   

Emma Kenny is a true crime expert, presenter and host of YouTube channel True Crime With Emma Kenny. When she covered the Sarah Everard case in the summer of 2021, she received an influx of calls from sex workers who wanted to share information about the way Wayne Couzens had allegedly behaved with them. Kenny says people are driven to get involved in true crime cases because we build a parasocial relationship with victims, identifying with them or feeling we know them thanks to hours spent poring over their stories. She believes that our inclination towards armchair sleuthing is a good thing, proof that true crime makes us feel a sense of social responsibility.

This desire to ‘catch the bad guys’ is innate, according to Dr Ruth Tully, a consultant forensic psychologist who works on cases involving serious crimes. As humans, she says, we are naturally inquisitive. “There is an evolutionary element to an interest in true crime. We have always needed to protect ourselves, and understanding crime involves us empathising with the victim and trying to understand the criminal, which might make us better equipped to protect ourselves and others in future.”

Understandably, this impulse applies disproportionately to women, particularly at times when we feel most under threat. “We know true crime podcasts are listened to overwhelmingly by women, and there are a lot of different ideas in academia about why,” says Pâquet. It’s been cited as a way to process our deepest anxieties, to try and arm ourselves against harm, to understand why and how these things happen. “When it comes to actually getting involved, though, there’s an interest in using the genre to help find justice for women in ways we haven’t found through the formal system.”

In short, many of us don’t feel adequately served by our institutions. Take, for example, the fact that fewer than 1 in 60 rape cases end in convictions in England, and that’s when they make it through the courts at all – and so there’s a comfort in trying to take matters into our own hands.

Those who get involved in ongoing criminal cases are often painted as busybodies who should leave it to the professionals, but ‘citizen sleuths’ would argue that the detectives working to solve crimes are often seriously overwhelmed. They have intense caseloads, full days and rarely the time to focus on every lead. But when the public gets invested in the details of an individual case, they’re sometimes able to spot things that exhausted officials did not.

Innsted highlights that, particularly in missing persons’ cases, the ongoing visibility of the story is crucial. She cites the heavily covered Oxford High School shooter case in Michigan – when a civilian found his fleeing parents’ car and tipped off police to their whereabouts – as a time when this vigilantism has had a positive impact. Tully also mentions the Netflix documentary Don’t Fuck With Cats, in which a group of amateur sleuths tracked down Luka Magnotta after he killed two kittens and posted gruesome videos online.

On the flipside, though, people can get hurt. “Vigilante justice, especially in the case of paedophiles, has a huge opportunity for error,” stresses Kenny. A prime example was the case of Bijan Ebrahimi, an Iranian refugee living in Bristol who became the subject of a vigilante obsession when he was falsely accused of paedophilia by his neighbour. In 2013, after much persecution, he was beaten to death. “It’s very easy to plant ideas in people’s minds,” says Kenny. “For some, it doesn’t matter what they know, you can’t make them think otherwise once they’re decided. It’s hard to let go of an underlying idea.”     

Mob psychology has always existed, but the internet catalyses and enables it. In the recent murder case of Cassidy Rainwater in Missouri, false theories snowballed so much that they muddied investigations, leading the police chief to address online sleuths directly, asking them to stop commenting on the case. “While I understand the impatience and curiosity of the people, I’m going to give you a piece of advice,” he said. “It is not a good idea to listen to ‘crime bloggers’ or TikTok videos.”

Tully has seen firsthand how members of the public becoming involved in a case can have serious negative repercussions. Online, it’s easy to spread rumours, post accusatory or identifying information and even harass suspects without thinking much of it. “But such actions can undermine an active police investigation and the court process, and could result in justice not being served,” Tully says.

Pâquet adds that there is the danger that some sleuths get involved not to seek justice at all, but simply for entertainment’s sake. She cites the first season of the hit podcast Serial, which reignited discussion surrounding the death of Hae Min Lee but caused unnecessary hurt to her family by opening old psychological wounds – suddenly, millions of people around the world were discussing their late daughter in excruciating detail. 

Similarly, The Teacher’s Pet podcast about the disappearance of Lynette Dawson and the investigation into her husband, who was having an affair with his student, became such a phenomenon that the police reopened the case, but there were fears that Chris Dawson could no longer receive a fair trial. These are the real-world implications of something often thought of as harmless entertainment.     

Whether the impulse comes from a desire for justice or just the thrill of a chase, it’s not inherently negative – nor is it likely to go anywhere. The boom in true crime content was bound to bring with it a rise in people investing heavily in stories that could have happened to any one of us. 

Like many women, Maz’s fascination stems from wanting to understand the mindsets of those who hurt others. “I love looking at why people behave the way they do and what causes someone to go against society, it makes me feel safer somehow,” she says. An extreme hobby at first glance, maybe, but a very human one.  

* Name has been changed 

Images: Getty