My true crime journey began with the story of Jacob Wetterling. Eleven-year-old Wetterling, a sandy-haired white boy with blue eyes, was kidnapped at gunpoint near his home in St. Joseph, Minnesota in front of his brother and three friends in October 1989.
He quickly became the specter who haunted all Minnesota children.
The score that played under my childhood was all warnings and admonitions. Don’t go anywhere without an adult, don’t talk to strangers: you could disappear like Wetterling.
Talk to any kid from Minnesota and they can tell you where they were standing when they heard the news that after nearly three decades of anguish, Wetterling’s body was finally found.
But they won’t know the name Layla Bajinka.
Bajinka, age 12, and her older sister Legacy, age 14, are both Black. They both disappeared on Sept. 5 in Edina, Minnesota. Though Layla and Legacy remain missing and are listed by
Missing Persons Center as “endangered,” their stories have received little local attention and no national press.
The Missing Persons Center is the worldwide reporting center for missing persons.
With the recent disappearance and death of white 22-year-old Gabby Petito, the true crime community once again faces the glaring disparity in coverage of missing white people versus missing people of color.
While Petito made national news and the top suspect in her homicide, boyfriend Brian Laundrie, dominated news cycles for days, the disappearances of Black men and women including Jelani Day and Daniel Robinson barely register with law enforcement.
Day was an Illinois State graduate student who was reported missing on Aug. 25. While massive searches for Petito combed the Wyoming desert for any sign of her, Day’s mother struggled to get police to put together enough resources and officers to search for her son. Day was later found dead in the Illinois river.
Robinson is still missing and his father insists that the search for his son is not being taken seriously because law enforcement continues to operate under the assumption that Robinson is missing of his own volition, even though his car, wallet and keys were found in a ravine in Buckeye, Arizona.
In a phenomenon referred to as “missing white woman syndrome,” cases like Petito’s are covered extensively while people of color are excluded from mainstream true crime coverage.
Disappearances and murders often depend on information from the public to be solved, and this phenomenon sets a dangerous criteria for whose cases matter enough to get closure, according to a Friday The New Yorker article.
While true crime began with shows including "America’s Most Wanted" and "Dateline," independent content creators and podcasters including Candice Gaines of "Crime Noir" are changing the landscape of the obsession.
“As most people know, there's a race issue within our country,” Gaines said in a Zoom call. “A lot of times people have a hard time empathizing and sympathizing with people that don't look like them. And I think that is one of the issues in the disparity of coverage between Black and white missing people or white missing women, specifically. I don't think the audience relates to a Black woman disappearing.”
The Crime Noir podcasting and social media content focuses on the disappearances and unsolved murders of Black victims including Day, Robinson and Kier Soloman, a Black transgender woman who was found shot to death in her car in Arlington, Texas on Sept. 30.
“I think the focus needs to be on everybody receiving the same amount of coverage. If I go missing today, I would love the same energy that Gabby Petito has received," Gaines said. "If my brother went missing, I would want him to have the same energy, coverage, sleuthing that she received as well.”
Gaines added while some argue Petito’s case doesn’t deserve the attention it has received, she feels Petito’s case warranted the intense coverage it garnered. However, she also believes everyone of all races, genders and levels of ability or disability deserve the same amount of care and attention.
This is a sentiment shared by Petito’s father.
“If you don’t do that for other people that are missing, that’s a shame because it’s not just Gabby that deserves that. So look to yourselves on why that’s not being done,” Joe Petito said at a Sept. 28 news conference.
Andre Matthews of podcast “Bruh, Issa Murder” said he first noticed the lack of media coverage for Black victims when he was 12 years old and his cousin, Amara Atkins, was murdered in Philadelphia in 2008.
“I noticed that the media in our local area of Philly wasn't talking about it, it wasn't picked up,” Matthews said in a Zoom call.
Matthews said cases including the 1996 murder of JonBenet Ramsey, a six-year-old American child beauty queen, still get national attention because media outlets know the public is fascinated by her case and any documentary made about her will certainly be watched, and will therefore make money.
“Bigger media, the news stations, they know what is going to get attention,” Matthews said.
“It goes back to the ‘less dead’ aspect when you have people of color, sex workers and the houseless. People look over those people.”
The “less dead” are marginalized people who are devalued and dehumanized even while living, according to forensic psychology consultant Eric Hickey’s “Encyclopedia of Murder and Violent Crime.”
Thanks to podcasts, a genre typically thought of as being about and for white women is turning its gaze on the cases of people who’re as ignored and neglected in death as they are in life.
Podcasts aren’t like billion dollar media conglomerates. They’re easy and cheap to produce and can reach a massive audience through social media in a small span of time.
Podcasting has become a leveling mechanism, creating a more even playing field and desaturating the media stories about missing white women, turning people’s attention to cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women and people who are referred to as the “less dead.”
Investigative podcasts have even assisted in solving cases. Season 2 of the podcast "Missing and Murdered" solved the disappearance of Plains Cree First Nation child, Cleo Semaganis Nicotine.
Semaganis Nicotine and her siblings were taken into foster care and adopted out to different white families in part of what is now known as the “ ’60s Scoop,” during which thousands of First Nations children were removed from their homes by the Canadian government and placed with white families in Canada and the U.S. in an effort to “assimilate” them, according to episode 1 of the podcast.
In “Murdered and Missing: Finding Cleo,” Cree journalist and podcaster Connie Walker discovered that after being adopted to a white family in America, Semaganis Nicotine died by suicide after shooting herself at the age of 13.
She was desperate to go home to Saskatchewan and for decades her scattered siblings thought she had been murdered while trying to hitchhike home.
They finally received answers when Walker discovered Semaganis Nicotine’s grave.
Certainly, the true crime genre is still dominated by white content creators including Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark of "My Favorite Murder," which receives 35 million downloads per month.
However, even huge platforms like My Favorite Murder have turned attention to the unsolved disappearances and murders of people of color, and have given attention to other podcasts centered around missing and murdered Black and Indigenous women and children including The Fall Line, which was part of My Favorite Murder’s Exactly Right network for three and a half years.
Yes, the true crime genre and mainstream media have a long way to go before coverage of missing and murdered people of color reaches the level of coverage instantly gained by missing white women like Gabby Petito. However, the true crime genre is far from being a genre for and about white women.
True crime has always intrigued the most vulnerable people who might be written off by the media and law enforcement because of their race, occupation and socioeconomic status.
Racially diverse true crime content creators are forcing the larger true crime community to focus on the murders of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, transgender and disabled people in growing podcast channels and social media platforms.
True crime fanatics and content creators are making the U.S. face the systemic injustices that allow their disappearances and murders to go unnoticed.
