Rachel Monroe, contributing writer at the New Yorker and book author discussed true crime stories on Thursday during a webinar hosted by the Center on Ethics and the Department of Philosophy.
Monroe, who is the author of the book “Savage Appetites: True Stories of Women, Crime and Obsession,” addressed the ethical attraction that people have for the true crime genre.
In her book, she explores the thesis of why women are big consumers of true crime stories.
She said as long as the genre has existed, it has always drawn in a female audience, which is often said by people who make true crime podcasts or books.
“It can be a way of engaging with [coping,] kind of wrestling with maybe trauma or victimization in their own background in some ways, just a way of working through what happened to you through the prism of somebody else’s story,” Monroe said.
She said, when working as a journalist, she encounters people who have had terrible experiences, and they are drawn to true crime.
Monroe said women can consume something as scary as true crime from a safe place.
“I think there’s certainly maybe an aspect of that is the desire to kind of master fear through information or knowledge,” she said. “I mean, this is certainly a big thing for me. Like, this is how I deal with everything that scares me as I’ve tried to intellectualize it or read a bunch of books about it.”
Monroe said the genre is a marketing category that dehumanizes perpetrators and makes them out to be superhuman.
She said Ted Bundy’s representation is an example that explains the concept.
“[Ted Bundy] gets described as this incredibly brilliant charismatic,” Monroe said. “You know, just like a strategic figure . . . the more you look at him, how he actually was, [he] was not that good looking. Certainly not that smart, you know, like malicious, deeply harmful, but not some sort of like, super or subhuman.”
Monroe mentioned in her book how a Tumblr fandom rose up around the Columbine killers and they called themselves “Columbiners.”
In 1999, seniors Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris shot and killed 13 people at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo. before killing themselves according to an April 20, 2004 Slate article.
Monroe said it’s interesting that the “Columbiners” were made up of young girls.
“If you look at the more famous serial killer groupies up there, [serial killers] are often sort of looked at as these objects [where] people kind of gawk at them as these curiosities but they often have backgrounds of like being victimized themselves,” Monroe said. “You know, this is some sort of trauma response.”
Monroe said there is a part of human life that finds pleasure in exploring something scary, especially when the bad guy gets locked up as a villain.
“I think it’s pleasurable,” she said. “I think there is something that there’s like a dark pleasure to the human psyche that wants to know about deviance and taboo.”
Monroe said guilt can come out of getting pleasure from somebody else’s pain but it’s okay that there is discomfort.
She said the downside of true crime communities is that they forget the real people who are involved and talk about cases as if it’s a television show.
“They just spin out these theories or accuse people or intervene in kind of shocking ways, as if they don’t recognize that this is happening to real people,” she said.
Monroe said some people treat real cases like an episode of “Law and Order” where people meet all of the suspects and decide who the bad guy is.
She said the Delphi murders were two young girls, Abigail Williams and Libby German, who were murdered in Delphi, Ind. in 2017.
The case was relevant on social media because the killer was captured in a photo on the girls’ Snapchat story and there was an audio recording of him speaking.
Monroe said people get identified by the internet as suspects and picked apart, and then, when the investigation ends, it’s someone the internet has never heard of before.
“These people who have kind of been seized on as suspects have really gone through it and [true crime consumers] will often focus on like, often completely irrationally based on no evidence at all,” she said.
Monroe said it’s dangerous to interact with true crime as entertainment because it’s heavily consumed.
She said it shapes what a lot of people think is true and people’s attitudes about crime.
“There are some indications that people who watch more crime programming tend to assume that crime is going up in their area, even when that is not actually true,” she said.
