essays on true crime

Our Long-standing Obsession with True Crime

Until quite recently, when someone who actually knew what he or she was talking about took the trouble to correct it, the Wikipedia entry for “True Crime” claimed that the genre originated in 1966 with the publication of Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood.” This all-too-common misconception gets the starting date wrong by roughly 400 years.

No sooner had Gutenberg invented movable type than enterprising printers began churning out graphically violent murder ballads. Whenever a particularly ghastly killing occurred, it was promptly cast in doggerel, printed on a large sheet of paper known as a “broadside,” and peddled to the hard-working masses eager to brighten their dreary days with a little vicarious sadism. Throat-slittings, stranglings, bludgeonings and axe-murders were among the many grisly subjects of these crudely written verses, though few atrocities could match the morbid titillation of a really gruesome child-killing, as in the case of the British “monster mom” Emma Pitt:

                   This Emma Pitt was a schoolmistress,

                      Her child she killed we see,

                   Oh mothers, did you ever hear

                      Of such barbarity?

                   With a large flint stone she beat its head,

                      When such cruelty she’d done,

                   From the tender roof of the infant’s mouth

                      She cut away its tongue.

Murder ballads weren’t the only kind of crime literature available in the old days. In England, true crime books can be traced as far back as John Reynolds’ “The Triumphs of God’s Revenge Against the Crying and Execrable Sin of Murther,” an Elizabethan anthology that dished up juicy real-life stories of homicidal violence under the moralistic pretext of demonstrating that Crime Does Not Pay. Even more popular was “The Newgate Calendar: Or, Malefactors’ Bloody Register,” a constantly updated compendium of sordid true crime accounts, which, after the Bible and Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress,” was the most widely read book in Britain for more than a century.

Here in America, the public’s appetite for lurid entertainment was fed by volumes like the “The Record of Crimes in the United States” (a particular favorite of self-confessed true crime junkie, Nathaniel Hawthorne). Throughout the 19th century and into the early 20th, similar compilations were churned out on a regular basis. Perhaps the best known was the 1910 “Celebrated Criminal Cases of America,” by former San Francisco police captain Thomas S. Duke, a collection of criminal case histories covering a wide range of reprobates, from infamous outlaws like Jesse James and the Daltons to Victorian serial killers like Theodore Durrant (aka “The Demon of the Belfry”) and the Chicago “multi-murderer” Dr. H.H. Holmes. Dashiell Hammett was so addicted to Duke’s book that he kept a copy of it on his night table for bedtime reading (as does his surrogate, Sam Spade, in “The Maltese Falcon”).

Though first-rate pieces of American true crime writing appeared throughout the mid-20th century, by such writers as Damon Runyon, Herbert Asbury, Jim Thompson, Dorothy Kilgallen and especially Edmund Pearson (revered by aficionados as the dean of American true crime), a distinct air of disreputability still clung to the genre. Then came “In Cold Blood,” which elevated the book-length true crime narrative to the rarefied heights of serious literature. Unfortunately, its author also set an unfortunate precedent by indulging in the kind of novelistic embellishment (not to say rank fabrication) that has become endemic to the form. People who write true crime, of course, aren’t the only authors of creative nonfiction who have been known to improve on the truth. Given the promise of absolute veracity that is embedded in the very name of the true crime genre, however, I believe such writers have a particular obligation to stick to the facts.

Not that I’ve always done so myself. Early in my writing career, I occasionally allowed myself a bit of what I referred to as “extrapolation” (less euphemistically known as “making stuff up”). My unacknowledged credo (cribbed from the first chapter of Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”) was “It’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.” In my defense, I restricted my fabrications to fairly minor atmospheric details. For example, in my book “Deranged: The Shocking True Story of America’s Most Fiendish Killer,” there’s a scene in which the main character—the wizened cannibal-pedophile Albert Fish (using his pseudonym, Frank Howard)—dines with the family of his future child-victim, Grace Budd. Here’s how I describe the meal:

The men retired to the kitchen, a clean but dingy-looking room illuminated by a single bare bulb that tinged the whitewashed walls a sickly yellow. The long wooden table, covered with a plaid oilcloth, held a big cast-iron pot full of ham hocks and sauerkraut—the leftover remains of the previous night’s dinner. The sharp, briny odor of the cabbage filled the room. Arranged around the pot were platters of pickled beets and boiled carrots, a basket of hard rolls and two ceramic bowls into which Mrs. Budd had transferred Frank Howard’s pot cheese and strawberries.

This lunch really happened, but I took the artistic liberty of inventing the menu. I hasten to say I did some research into the kind of food a working-class family like the Budds might have served a guest for lunch in the late 1920s. Still, I didn’t actually know what they ate; I just wanted to make the moment seem real for the reader.

I no longer permit myself even such minor bits of imaginative re-creation. My field is historic true crime—I’ve written about cases from the Civil War era to the 1950s—and I’ve come to see the genre as a legitimate branch of American historical study. After all, the Leopold and Loeb case tells us as much about the Jazz Age as Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight does, just as the Manson murders shed as much light on the culture of late-1960s America as Woodstock does. To be taken as seriously as history, however, a true crime book must adhere strictly to documented fact. There’s no reason why a book-length narrative about a 19th-century serial murderer shouldn’t be held to the same rigorous standards as, for instance, a biography of Teddy Roosevelt.

My task as a writer, as I see it, is to produce a serious work of historical scholarship (my last few books have included copious endnotes) that stays true to the sensationalistic roots of the genre by providing “murder fanciers” (as Edmund Pearson called true crime lovers) with the primal pleasures they crave. In looking for a suitable subject, I try to find cases that possess some larger social or cultural significance. Shocking murders happen all the time, of course, but few of them have the ingredients to make much of an impression on the public beyond momentary shock. In the early 1920s, for example, a former showgirl named Clara Phillips—“The Tiger Woman,” the tabloids dubbed her—took a claw hammer to the skull of her husband’s mistress and bludgeoned her to death. Her crime provided the public with some fleeting titillation but quickly vanished into permanent obscurity. By contrast, the 1927 “Double Indemnity Murder” perpetrated by Queens housewife Ruth Snyder and her milquetoast lover, Judd Gray, became one of the signature crimes of the Jazz Age. What made it so riveting wasn’t the homicide per se (the victim, Ruth’s husband, Albert, suffered a death no more or less gruesome than the one inflicted on Mr. Phillip’s mistress) but the colorful cast of characters, the deliciously tawdry storyline and—most important of all—the way the crime seemed to crystalize the cultural anxieties of the day: the breakdown of traditional morality, the threatening freedoms embodied by the “New Woman” and so forth.

Of course, there will always be highbrows who cast a contemptuous eye at the true crime genre. In an essay on “In Cold Blood,” Renata Adler deplores both the original book and the 1968 movie for playing to the bloodlust of the audience by using “every technique of cheap fiction” to intensify the emotional impact of the killings. This criticism, however, seems deeply wrongheaded since, on some fundamental level, one purpose of true crime writing is precisely to provide decent law-abiding citizens with primal, sadistic thrills—to satisfy what William James called our “aboriginal capacity for murderous excitement.” The worst specimens of the genre may not rise above the quasi-pornographic level, but the best—like those exquisitely ornamented war clubs, broadswords and flintlocks displayed in museums—are a testimony to something worth celebrating: the human ability to take something rooted in our intrinsically bloodthirsty nature and turn it into craft of a very high order, sometimes even art.

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Robbery, Heists and Theft

The untold story of the world’s biggest diamond heist by joshua davis, the greatest heist in british history by mark seal, the art of the steal by joshua bearman, pipino: gentleman thief by joshua davis and david wolman, stealing mona lisa by dorothy and thomas hoobler, bike batman by christopher solomon, other true crime cases, coronado high by joshuah bearman, the crypto trap by andy greenberg, foot. loose. by christopher solomon, an unbelieveable story of rape by t. christian miller and ken armstrong, the dangers of stash by brendan i. koerner, uncatchable by michael finkel, the great paper caper by wells tower, the ultimate counterfeiter by david wolman, in cold blood by truman capote, midnight in the garden of good and evil by john berendt, the devil in the white city by erik larson.

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Why do we love true crime — and is it healthy for us?

Books, TV shows, movies, documentaries and now podcasts about real-life crime have been popular for years, but, as the “Saturday Night Live” skit “ Murder Show ” from earlier this season so cleverly highlighted, it was a guilty pleasure for many — slightly dirty and never discussed. Adweek , however, recently noted that there has been a dramatic increase in interest in the genre over the past 12 months. “Why Did You Kill Me,” “White Boy,” “This is a Robbery: The World’s Biggest Art Heist,” “Murder Among the Mormons” and “Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel” all “cracked the top 10 most-popular shows” on Netflix, for instance, while Forbes noted that the biographical documentary “The Sons of Sam: A Descent Into Darkness” was briefly the No. 1 show on Netflix when it premiered in May.

Still, some worry that consuming true crime stories is psychologically unhealthy, potentially retraumatizing survivors of violent crimes on the one hand and desensitizing viewers and readers to the real meanings of these behaviors on the other.

Opinion True crime fails when it treats trauma as entertainment. But there's a better way.

As a psychotherapist, I generally assume that something so popular must have some mental health implications. I started asking questions and discovered that many people I know are secret fans of the genre or could connect me to someone who is. I learned that while there can be some sense that you’re watching out of curiosity — like rubbernecking after a car accident — there’s also a lot of psychological “stuff” going on.

For example, Lauren Jacobsen, who has been watching true crime since she was a teenager, told me that it seems odd but she falls asleep better when she is listening to the podcast “My Favorite Murder.” Writer Kelly Sue DeConnick (“Captain Marvel,” “Bitch Planet”) similarly told me that true crime podcasts soothed her “around the start of the Trump administration and then ramped up at the start of the pandemic."

As a psychotherapist, I generally assume that something so popular must have some mental health implications.

Melinda Swahn, on the other hand, said, “These shows are fascinating because they show other real-life humans. They open the door to how others live.”

And a man I spoke with, who wished to remain anonymous, said, “It’s entertainment, which is horrible to say, but it’s also fascinating to see how an investigative journalist can dig beneath the surface and put pieces together to come up with a new answer to a crime that was unsolved or solved incorrectly.”

What could make media about violence feel so calming?

Opinion How 'Murder Among the Mormons' gets away with promoting stereotypes about our faith

A pervasive sense of helplessness, which many people have felt — some for years, some only for the past few months — can be modified or even lifted by seeing someone else speak about their pain and have it recognized.

Kathleen Check, a psychotherapist in Chicago with whom I spoke, said true crime media provided “a particular kind of escapism” during the pandemic. But, she added, “tuning in and following the specifics of a crime also creates a [false] sense being able to ‘see inside’ the mind of a criminal, thus creating a psychological protective barrier: ‘If I know how criminals operate, I can protect myself.’”

True crime may then help us manage our fears about the world.

Rick Nizzardini, a licensed clinical social worker in San Francisco, told me, “These shows touch on the hallmark elements of trauma: a sense of powerlessness, a shattering of our sense of safety in the world and the violation of attachments to family, friends and community.”

He added, “This can raise emotions to the surface that often feel dissociated or cut off from processing, but can be helpful for recovery in the right context.”

True crime may then help us manage our fears about the world. DeConnick's friend Neil Gaiman sent her an early draft of his children’s book "Coraline," which, she told me, “is a rather frightening book that often terrifies adults but children seem to universally adore.”

Opinion HBO's Golden State Killer doc examines what drove both Michelle McNamara and the killer

She added, “He says that kids already know dragons exist; what they crave is assurance that dragons can be defeated.”

Several fans of true crime also told me they feel both blessed and guilty knowing their lives are better than those of the people featured in true crime media.

Knowing your limits and setting boundaries is an important way of managing painful overstimulation.

Perhaps some of that guilt might be alleviated by knowing that studies show some survivors feel like true crime puts a voice to feelings and experiences that are not always widely heard in our society. For example, in a study of domestic violence survivors who listen to true crime podcasts, Kelli S. Boling, an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, found that survivors felt they had become part of “a collective identity and a virtual community where their voices are heard, their stories are normalized.”

Still, the disturbing nature of true crime can sometimes also create problems for those who consume it. Nizzardini, the clinical social worker in San Francisco, also told me, “A concern is if a viewer becomes overly triggered without having a support system to discuss and process these feelings, memories or somatic symptoms.”

Those of us in the mental health field know that speaking one’s pain out loud, having one’s voice heard and experiences validated, and seeing others conquer their “dragons” can be soothing and healing. But it is also important to protect oneself from being overwhelmed or overly distressed. And each of the fans with whom I spoke told me there were shows they did not watch because they “hit too close to home” or because they were too disturbing.

Like the women in Boling’s study, audiences can build a sense of community and support by sharing the experience of consuming true crime media. Many of the fans I spoke with bond with a sibling, a friend or even a romantic partner over the programs.

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And because most true crime media focuses on cases that have been solved, seeing the judicial system in action, or as a force for positive change in some cases, can also be empowering. Boling wrote in an email, “True crime podcasts are starting the conversation — often on a national level — and pushing society to make measurable changes to support victims of domestic violence.”

In the end, it seems that, despite the stereotypes about its fans, true crime is about much more than morbid fascination with other people’s pain. If people’s boundaries — including the individuals featured in the shows — are respected and triggering material avoided by those who are consuming, these programs can actually be beneficial to the emotional well-being of individuals, groups and communities.

F. Diane Barth, a licensed clinical social worker, is a psychotherapist in New York City. Her most recent book is " I Know How You Feel: The Joy and Heartbreak of Friendship in Women's Lives " (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018).

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Journalism and communication menu, journalism and communication, the true crime genre is popular, but is it ethical.

From podcasts to documentaries to long-running TV shows like “ Dateline ,” the true crime genre entertains and informs through gruesome and heart-wrenching stories.

But the popularity of the genre begs the questions: Why is such a violent topic ingested by so many, and how is this enjoyment affecting psyches and our culture? Eager to find answers, researchers are delving into the psychological motivation for true crime fans, the ways online participants can harm ongoing cases and whether it is wrong to enjoy this content.

One professor at the UO School of Journalism and Communication (SOJC) brings it all to the classroom, teaching students to examine the ethics of consuming true crime stories. Whitney Phillips , assistant professor of digital platforms and ethics, has written and researched extensively on internet trolling, malicious online activity and the ethical implications of popular culture subjects such as the true crime genre. She teaches J-397 Media Ethics with a focus on the cultural and historical impacts of true crime.

“It wasn’t that I set out to create a class about focusing on the harms of true crime,” said Phillips. “It was how do we use true crime to think about these really important ethical issues that everyone in the room is going to have to deal with in a professional capacity.”

Why the true crime genre is popular

Phillips defines true crime as content about violent, nonfictional events that have specific characteristics that make it popular as entertainment. She teaches three reasons why people are drawn to true crime as entertainment:

• Viewers enjoy the mystery element. Novels and movies centered around a mystery have always proved popular, but true crime allows audience members the chance to feel invested in a real mystery unfolding before them.
• Many enjoy watching a case getting solved while feeling that they’ve participated in it from the comfort of their couch.
• Studies of true crime have found that white women are the largest demographic that enjoys the true crime genre. The hypothesis is that because “women, in particular, have anxiety about potential threats,” they turn to true crime to feel better prepared if something violent were to happen to them. One piece of research that Phillips uses in Media Ethics confirms the theory through studies that examine women’s consumption of nonfiction violent media and why it is higher than men's.

Why ethics matter in the true crime genre

Phillips also teaches the ways true crime can be potentially harmful and unethical. For example, often the victims in the stories shared are white and female, likely because the target audience is white women, and they tend to prefer to listen to cases they can insert themselves into. Phillips argues that this creates the idea that there is “only one type of victim” and that they are the only people whose stories are worth paying attention to.

This is then reinforced in news media, with updates and stories about searches for white female victims filling airtime, while stories about marginalized groups like Indigenous women are rarely aired, if at all. This disparity is something Phillips says is a dangerous consequence of the true crime genre because it tells audiences that only one type of victim’s story matters.

“You have a certain kind of victim, a certain kind of story, a certain kind of perspective,” said Phillips. “And that’s the thing that gets repeated over and over. And because it gets repeated, that’s what people are familiar with.”

Phillips adds that many missing white women also don’t fit the criteria for coverage if they are not the “right” type of victim. For example, sex workers who are murdered or missing often are not considered a “good enough story” because the media’s perception is that they aren’t cared about as much as “innocent” white women.

Phillips also finds the idea of commoditizing true crime troubling. Podcasts like “ My Favorite Murder ” or “ Murder with My Husband ” create catchphrases and sell merchandise inspired by their shows and real-life cases. In doing this, they are reducing victims' lives and tragedies to marketable content. This branding of real violence and victims dehumanizes them by turning them into merchandise and memes.

According to Phillips, this casual conversation around true crime and its victims has also fostered the rise of citizen sleuths. These fans frequent online spaces like Reddit or TikTok to discuss ongoing cases and post about their own theories and opinions, which are often not backed up by fact. They can be harmful because they often promote poor leads that distract the investigation.

Even worse, some have named innocent people close to the victim as suspects in a case and sent their online following to harass a person who is still grieving a devastating loss. Phillips says it’s very easy for some people to fall into the trap of thinking it’s just a fun game to play, but they don’t have all the information and aren’t considering the ethical issues.

“My Favorite Murder” and “Murder with My Husband” are popular true crime podcasts discussed in Assistant Professor Whitney Phillips’ class, J-397 Media Ethics, which focuses on the ethical considerations of the true crime genre.

Why a class around the true crime genre matters

So why did Phillips choose such a gritty topic as the focus of the Media Ethics course? She said she wanted to find a topic that would prove beneficial to all budding communication professionals, no matter their individual major, within the tight timeframe of 10 weeks.  She also wanted to highlight three key topics: ethics of amplification, ethics of representation and ethics around the audience. She realized that by centering her class around true crime, she could dive into each of those topics and into how communication professionals should approach human stories, recognizing who is telling the story and whose stories are not being told.

Phillips emphasizes that her class does not declare all true crime to be “bad” or shame those who enjoy the genre. Instead, she sets out to explore the ways true crime can be important in discussing disparities in race and gender while examining how the genre has been made a staple of popular culture.

“True crime isn’t the problem,” Phillips said. “It’s how people approach it, who is telling the story and whose stories are not being told that’s the problem.”

Phillips also uses research on positive and negative sensationalism conducted by fellow SOJC professor and media studies department head Gretchen Soderlund to further explore these topics in her classroom while teaching students how to remain ethical as communications professionals.

Phillips stresses the importance of reflecting on the stories one consumes with an ethical lens, recognizing whose stories are being told the most and remembering that behind the memes and commoditization, there are still human victims and grieving families at the heart of every true crime case.

Students interested in learning more about the ethics around the true crime genre can check UO’s class schedule and search under Journalism for J-397 Media Ethics.

While this class is open to all majors, media studies is one of four SOJC majors. Visit the media studies page to learn more about the program .

—By Jillian Gray, class of ’25

Jillian Gray is majoring in public relations with a minor in digital humanities. She works as an intern for the SOJC Communication Office’s social media and editorial team. To connect with Gray, visit her LinkedIn profile .

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Book Reviews

Why do we find true crime fascinating 'savage appetites' looks for an answer.

Ilana Masad

Savage Appetites

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A few months ago, I watched a chilling film, My Friend Dahmer , based on a graphic memoir written by a high school friend(ish) of infamous serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.

While IMDB's logline for the film reads, "A young Jeffrey Dahmer struggles to belong in high school," I saw it more as an attempt to contextualize Dahmer. It showed his chaotic family life, the masculinity he was expected to perform yet couldn't, his social ineptness, and the disturbing ways his instincts were and weren't validated.

The film seemed to be asking the unanswerable question: What if? What if he had been able to come out to his family? What if someone had noticed his inability to connect with people and had tried to reach him? What if he was steered toward nurturing his anatomical interests? Could he have been a pathologist? A medical examiner?

The other unanswerable question — the one that might be going through many readers' minds — is: Who cares?! He deliberately preyed on a vulnerable population, mostly young gay men of color. He killed a bunch of people!

I was so disturbed by my empathy for him — for how he was portrayed in the film, anyway — that I brought it up to my therapist. Her take? That I might be drawn to his overt cruelty, his capacity for violence, because I am incapable of it myself.

In a new, necessary and brilliant book, Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession, journalist Rachel Monroe writes: "Most of the explanations I read for why women are drawn to true crime ended up feeling reductive and unsatisfying." The explanations she had seen were that the interest was voyeuristic or feminist or self-preserving and practical. "By presuming that women's dark thoughts were merely pragmatic, those thoughts were drained of their menace," she adds."A different, more alarming hypothesis was the one I tended to prefer: perhaps we liked creepy stories because something creepy was in us."

The stories that are well-known, that get rehashed over and over again, are largely about white male perpetrators and white, middle-class, female victims, even though, as Monroe reminds us, "the people who are disproportionately at risk of homicide" are actually "sex workers, the homeless, young men of color, trans women" and, in fact, "the people who [are] most likely to be harmed by violent crime [are] young black men from low-income neighborhoods."

So why do we find true crime fascinating? How are we relating to it? Who is telling what stories and why? Monroe doesn't have one distinct answer for us — nor, I suspect, does she believe there is one — but she showcases several women, each with a different relationship to the genre. Frances Glessner Lee, considered by some the "mother of forensic science," is the first; second is Alisa Statman who, whether in good faith or not, inserted herself into the lives and stories of Sharon Tate's family; third is Lorri Davis, who ended up marrying and helping to free Damien Echols, who spent years on death row after what is widely believed to be his wrongful conviction for the murder of three small boys in West Memphis; and, finally, Lindsay Souvannarath, sentenced to life in prison in Canada after she and another young adult she had met online planned to vaguely emulate the Columbine shooters by wreaking havoc in a mall in Halifax (they never got that far).

Monroe treats each individual narrative with nuance, empathy and transparency, allowing both the protagonists and their supporting cast to remain complex. She delves into the social and political ramifications of each narrative, making accessible and visible what so often gets overlooked in these stories because it's too complicated to put into a headline or summary.

Monroe's book is a pleasure to read because it is smart, well-researched and well-written — beautifully, really, as each of the four long chapters takes the form of a braided essay that links two and sometimes three distinct stories together, showcasing Monroe's own obsessions alongside those of the real-life characters she explores.

But more than that, Savage Appetites is important because it refuses to sit inside binaries of good vs. evil, victim vs. perpetrator, innocent victim vs. mastermind criminal. It doesn't give us easy answers for why women are the main consumers of true crime narratives, because there aren't any because women as a category are not monolith and because it's complicated and nuanced and different for everyone. The book is important also because I suspect there are more than a few of us who, like Monroe herself, feel conflicted about their desire to consume stories of murder and mayhem and wonder what it reflects about the world around us and ourselves.

While Monroe has the role of journalist here, probing the history, motives and psyches of her subjects, she also interrogates herself by weaving her stories into those of others. So it's not without doing the work herself that she urges us not to turn off our brains in the pursuit of true crime's anesthetizing effect: "We can use [sensational crime stories] as opportunities to be more honest about our appetites — and curious about them too."

Looking away from a problem doesn't make it go away, her narratives show us, and looking at the problem directly doesn't mean easily or quickly solving it. But looking and looking and continuing to look until the layers begin to peel back and reveal the issues at the core of such stories — the systemic inequalities, the co-option of certain stories for political gain, the rhetoric used to make some victims more real than others — that's the important work that we, and true crime, can do.

Ilana Masad is an Israeli-American fiction writer, critic, and founder/host of the podcast The Other Stories . Her debut novel, All My Mother's Lovers , is forthcoming from Dutton in 2020.

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Jane Coaston

True Crime, Keith Morrison and Me

By Jane Coaston

Host of “The Argument” podcast

“Dateline” started its 30th season on Friday. It’s the longest-running series on NBC prime time and one of the best-known true crime programs in America.

True crime is an extraordinarily popular genre with a long history. The English essayist Thomas De Quincey called the true-crime enthusiasts of the early 1800s “murder-fanciers,” writing in an 1827 satirical essay, “Every fresh atrocity of that class, which the police annals of Europe bring up, they meet and criticize as they would a picture, statue or other work of art.”

Today, true crime continues to be popular, especially among women . And, looking at the podcasts I’m subscribed to and the documentaries I watch, it appears that true crime is also especially popular with me.

I read Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” one of the most famous works of true crime writing, when I was a freshman in high school. If I am listening to a podcast, it is probably about crime. If I am reading a book, it is probably about crime. (Nazi Germany is another obsession of mine, but that’s another story for another time.) I am deeply, hopelessly fascinated by stories about crime and criminals.

But I also have guilt about being a “murder fancier.”

Keith Morrison seems to relate. I spoke to the well-known correspondent for “Dateline” — who became even better known after a “Saturday Night Live” sketch a decade ago that played up the voyeurism inherent to the genre — and told him that it felt weird to enjoy “Dateline” and the podcasts he’s hosted that focus on complex stories of betrayal, deceit and, yes, murder.

“It’s weird to say you love doing them,” he said. “They’re fascinating, and terrible at the same time.”

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How to Write Great True Crime

Hint: Branch out from serial killers coming through the window.

True crime is one of the most popular forms of entertainment. The genre grips audiences across mediums, in films and television, and—perhaps in its original form—literature.

Despite an arguably elevated cultural position, literary works can be as formulaic and mass-produced as anything onscreen. In the world of crime writing, that’s often the case. With demand high, creators can churn out whodunnits as fast as consumers can devour them.

Writing in  World Literature Today , mystery novelist J. Madison Davis tackles the subject of what separates the wheat from the chaff in the craft of crime writing. It’s far more than a grisly backstory, he explains; the market is flooded with blood-soaked paperbacks.  “ Judging the Edgar Allan Poe award for ‘best fact crime’ in 1992 was an incredibly depressing experience,” he writes. “Serial killers were popular as subjects, and their stories were monotonously consistent.”

In fact, Davis read so many books that used a similar structure that he produced a basic format in full (to the bemusement of anyone who has ever picked up a discounted crime novel).

The book opens with Joe Sicko sharpening his axe or climbing into the window of the victim’s house. About the time he reaches the top of the stairs, the author ends the chapter (often glorified by the title “Prologue”), suspending the gore and jumping all the way back to when Joe…began his life as a child. He doesn’t stand a chance, given his dysfunctional home. The book then follows the long progress of Joe to become the monster at the top of the stairs. If Joe’s unhappy development becomes too boring, the book may be interrupted with interludes portraying the indomitable avenger who will bring Joe down. After arriving back at the top of the stairs (so to speak), the book then fulfills its promise of carnage and unwinds with the detective work that brings Joe down.

So much for what makes a crime book formulaic. The more pertinent topic Davis discusses is what elevates a work into “the level of lasting literature.” While acknowledging that art is an intensely personal (and therefore subjective) experience, he also highlights that, in judging among hundreds of books submitted for an award annually, “writers of widely divergent backgrounds and locations create…similar lists of finalists,” suggesting a common understanding of what makes great crime writing.

“Writers know good writing, just as musicians know good music, and the elements of this seemingly intangible quality are much more specific than most people think,” Davis explains.

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In Davis’s view, a common misstep is thinking that true crime writing has to be equivalent to journalism: clinging closely to facts and dismissing artistry and interpretation, as though there is a sharp line between “nonfiction” and “fiction.” He points out two examples that reject this notion, to great success: Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood , arguably the germinal work of true crime and simultaneously recognized as a great work of literature, and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song , which won the Pulitzer Prize.

“In the end,” Davis explains, “it isn’t the oddity or excesses of the crime that allow true-crime books to earn the designation of literary excellence. That only comes from the writing.”

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101 Crime Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

Inside This Article

Crime is a prevalent issue in society and has been a topic of interest for many researchers, scholars, and students alike. Writing an essay on crime can be a thought-provoking and engaging task, allowing you to explore various aspects of criminal behavior, law enforcement, and the criminal justice system. To help you get started, here are 101 crime essay topic ideas and examples:

• The impact of social media on crime rates.
• Exploring the rise of cybercrime in the digital age.
• The relationship between poverty and crime.
• Analyzing the effectiveness of rehabilitation programs in reducing recidivism.
• The role of mental illness in criminal behavior.
• Examining the influence of media on public perception of crime.
• The effectiveness of community policing in crime prevention.
• The reasons behind the gender disparity in crime rates.
• The role of genetics in criminal behavior.
• The impact of drugs and substance abuse on crime rates.
• Exploring the connection between domestic violence and crime.
• The effectiveness of the death penalty in deterring crime.
• Analyzing the impact of racial profiling on crime rates.
• The psychological factors that contribute to criminal behavior.
• The relationship between unemployment and crime rates.
• The effectiveness of gun control policies in reducing crime.
• The role of technology in solving and preventing crimes.
• Analyzing the impact of organized crime on society.
• The reasons behind juvenile delinquency and how to address it.
• The relationship between education and crime rates.
• The impact of hate crimes on marginalized communities.
• Exploring the concept of white-collar crime and its consequences.
• The role of criminal profiling in solving crimes.
• The impact of the war on drugs on crime rates.
• Analyzing the connection between poverty and drug-related crimes.
• The role of restorative justice in the criminal justice system.
• The reasons behind the high incarceration rates in the United States.
• Examining the concept of vigilantism and its ethical implications.
• The impact of crime on tourism and local economies.
• The role of the media in shaping public perception of crime.
• Analyzing the causes and consequences of hate crimes.
• The relationship between mental health and criminal behavior.
• The effectiveness of community-based corrections programs.
• Exploring the impact of DNA evidence on solving crimes.
• The reasons behind the phenomenon of serial killers.
• The role of socioeconomic factors in shaping criminal behavior.
• The impact of criminal records on employment opportunities.
• Analyzing the causes of gang violence and potential solutions.
• The relationship between poverty and property crime rates.
• The effectiveness of surveillance technologies in preventing crime.
• The reasons behind the high rates of recidivism among ex-convicts.
• The impact of mandatory minimum sentences on the criminal justice system.
• The role of forensic science in solving crimes.
• Analyzing the causes and consequences of police brutality.
• The relationship between substance abuse and violent crimes.
• The effectiveness of community-based crime prevention programs.
• Exploring the concept of restorative justice and its application.
• The reasons behind the high rates of drug-related crimes in urban areas.
• The impact of human trafficking on global crime rates.
• The role of criminal justice policies in reducing crime rates.
• Analyzing the connection between poverty and juvenile delinquency.
• The effectiveness of rehabilitation versus punishment in the criminal justice system.
• The reasons behind the rise of terrorism in the modern world.
• The impact of drug legalization on crime rates.
• The role of forensic psychology in solving crimes.
• Exploring the causes and consequences of hate speech crimes.
• The relationship between addiction and criminal behavior.
• The effectiveness of drug treatment programs in reducing crime rates.
• The reasons behind the high rates of domestic violence.
• The impact of police discretion on the criminal justice system.
• Analyzing the connection between child abuse and future criminal behavior.
• The role of the media in perpetuating stereotypes about crime.
• The reasons behind the high rates of sexual assault on college campuses.
• The effectiveness of community outreach programs in preventing crime.
• The impact of race and ethnicity on sentencing disparities.
• The relationship between poverty and violent crime rates.
• The role of forensic anthropology in solving crimes.
• Exploring the causes and consequences of human rights violations.
• The reasons behind the high rates of identity theft in the digital era.
• The impact of mandatory drug testing on reducing workplace crime.
• The effectiveness of drug courts in addressing drug-related crimes.
• The role of environmental factors in shaping criminal behavior.
• Analyzing the connection between child neglect and future criminal behavior.
• The reasons behind the high rates of gun violence in the United States.
• The impact of community surveillance programs on crime prevention.
• The relationship between mental health treatment and recidivism rates.
• The role of forensic entomology in solving crimes.
• Exploring the causes and consequences of human smuggling.
• The reasons behind the high rates of cyberbullying and online harassment.
• The impact of restorative justice practices on reducing prison overcrowding.
• The effectiveness of drug education programs in preventing substance abuse.
• The role of social inequality in contributing to criminal behavior.
• Analyzing the connection between child exploitation and future criminal behavior.
• The reasons behind the high rates of hate crimes against LGBTQ+ individuals.
• The impact of community-oriented policing on crime rates.
• The relationship between mental health stigma and access to treatment for offenders.
• The role of forensic odontology in solving crimes.
• Exploring the causes and consequences of human organ trafficking.
• The reasons behind the high rates of cyberstalking and online harassment.
• The impact of restorative justice on the reintegration of ex-convicts into society.
• The effectiveness of education in preventing drug-related crimes.
• The role of social disorganization theory in understanding crime rates.
• Analyzing the connection between child maltreatment and future criminal behavior.
• The reasons behind the high rates of hate crimes against religious minorities.
• The impact of community-based rehabilitation programs on reducing recidivism.
• The relationship between mental health treatment and diversion programs.
• The role of forensic toxicology in solving crimes.
• Exploring the causes and consequences of human trafficking for labor exploitation.
• The reasons behind the high rates of online fraud and identity theft.
• The impact of alternative sentencing programs on reducing prison populations.
• The effectiveness of harm reduction strategies in addressing drug-related crimes.

These crime essay topic ideas provide a broad range of subjects to explore and analyze. Choose a topic that aligns with your interests and research the subject thoroughly to develop a well-informed and compelling essay. Remember to support your arguments with evidence, statistics, and relevant examples to strengthen your essay and provide a comprehensive understanding of the chosen crime topic.

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108 Serial Killer Essay Topics & Examples

🔝 top-10 serial killer research paper topics, 🏆 best serial killer topics & essay examples, 🎓 good serial killer research topics, ⭐ argumentative essay topics about serial killers, ❓ research questions about serial killers.

• What is the nature of serial killers?
• Criminal profiling of John Wayne Gacy.
• Popular culture: true crime documentaries.
• The mind of H.H. Holmes.
• Psychological research of serial killers.
• Nature vs. nurture: are serial killers born or made?
• Cold cases: The Zodiac Killer.
• The story of Ted Bundy.
• Serial killers and forensic science.
• Psychology and sociology of Jeffrey Dahmer.
• The Psychology of Serial Killers These are just a fraction of questions that require answers in order to have a complete understanding of the psychology of serial killers.
• Frankston Serial Killer: Background, Crimes, and Motives At the time, the police noted that Denyer was with his girlfriend. The letter claimed that Denyer knows his whereabouts, and that he was planning to break out of prison to kill him.
• Arthur Shawcross and His Serial Killer’s Behavior Although most of his victims were killed in the late 1980s, his case still evokes a lot of debate since he is considered to be one of the most demonstrative examples of prisoners who were […]
• Serial Killers: Tommy Lynn Sells It is believed that in October of the same year he killed a 13-year-old girl in Missouri and moved to Texas.
• Albert Fish – the Serial Killer Fish’s mother, forced to look for another source of livelihood due to her inability to take care of her son following the death of his father, took him to Saint John’s orphanage in Washington.
• Richard Angelo: A Serial Killer and His Ethical Dilemma The convicted claimed he made the injections to cause crises to be able to revive patients and become a hero in front of his colleagues.
• Aileen Wuornos: The Serial Killer After four years since the birth of Aileen, her mother abandoned the family, leaving the girl and her brother with their maternal grandparents, whom the girl considered her birth parents.
• J. Dahmer as a Sexually-Motivated Serial Killer The paper at hand is devoted to the investigation of the life, personality, and criminal behavior of one of the most notorious American serial killers of 1980s-1990s, Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer.
• Jeffrey Dahmer: Serial Killer At the center of the legal debate was the interpretation of insanity, and how it could be utilized to absolve a criminal. George Palermo, a psychiatrist, made the conclusion that Dahmer was not insane.Dr.
• Criminal Profiling of Serial Killers Ted Bundy was one of the most famous serial killers of the 20th century. These are the types of serial killers that will target gays, minorities, and prostitutes.
• Ted Bundy, a Serial Killer and Psychopath The same was said about Ted Bundy, one of the most notorious serial killers in the criminal history of the United States.
• Serial Killers: Law Enforcement Response to Serial Killing The law enforcement agencies such as the FBI maintain that there are several serial killers in the United States and they are expected to increase and hit an epidemic proportion with many people losing their […]
• Serial Killer Imagery: “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” by Joyce Carol Oates The present paper argues that whereas Arnold Friend is portrayed by Oates as a “superhuman” copy of Carl Schmid, the murderer, and the situation with Connie is partially sketched from the case of Alleen Rowe, […]
• Serial Killers and Their Social Construction Social construction of serial killers has become the subject of various studies, and it is recognized today that the social position, social interactions, and perceived social image may play a significant role in the process […]
• Serial Killer Psychology: Eileen Wuornos Eileen was a woman without remorse as she was not bothered by the death of her victims. It is said that her intention was to capture the attention of the man she was dating.
• The Crimes of Charles Manson, Serial Killer Even though his people did it himself, he was not involved in this, and the organization of a particular group of people is not in itself an immoral act but is prohibited in some places.
• Serial Killer Profiling Dimensions In order to better understand their practices and attempt to put a stop to their actions prematurely, there was a need for proper classification and consequent analysis.
• Ted Bundy, an American Serial Killer He was part of the team that worked in the campaign of the Republican governor of Washington, who later rewarded him with a recommendation letter.
• American Serial Killer Joseph Paul Franklin’s Crimes The reason for changing his name as because he wanted to join the Rhodesian Army and due to his criminal background, he was forced to change the name. The couple were killed and Franklin confessed […]
• Serial Killers in Modern American Society Based on the above-stated arguments, this paper forms research for evidence from some of the serial killers in modern American society and various tactics utilized by the investigative departments to determine and differentiate between serial […]
• Edmund Kemper: The Serial Killer Kemper committed most of the murders in one year and confessed to his crimes only after he killed his mother. However, in a short time, Kemper decides to stop and report on his crimes to […]
• Aileen Wuornos: Anatomy of a Female Serial Killer Moreover, feminist scholarship has recently begun to examine serial murder as “sexual terrorism” or as a perpetuation of gynocide, the systematic crippling, raping and/or killing of women by men.
• Serial Killers, Their Crimes, and Stereotypes The other serial killers presented in the killers list also conform to the stereotypes presented in Fox’s and Levin’s article. Most of the killers also rape, mutilate, and degrade their victims in order to feel […]
• Charles Manson: Serial Killer Profile One of the first crimes that he committed was connected to a stolen car that Manson took to have some fun and visit his relatives.
• A Study on Serial Killers: “Encounter and death: The Spatial Behavior of U.S. Serial Killers” From an analysis, of the article, it is evident that the research focuses on the geographical locations that surround the killings; the location of the first meeting between the serial killers and their victims, the […]
• Serial Killers: Women and Men Comparison Most of the time, crimes of men serial killers are heard regularly as they are more horrible than that of women serial killers. The physical counting of the men serial killers victims is very high […]
• Serial Killer “Theodore Robert “Ted” Bundy” As much as the psychiatrists related his problems to mental disturbances, this was not a major issue that determined the outcome of the cases.
• A Serial Killer: Typology and Abnormal Psychological Gratification
• Luis Garavito: The World’s Worst Serial Killer
• Existentialism: Serial Killer and Right Things
• Charles Cullen: Healthcare Serial Killer
• Israel Keyes: The Reluctant Serial Killer
• Countess Elizabeth Bathory: Serial Killer
• Arousal Theory and the Serial Killer Jeffery Dahmer
• The Dangerous Mind of a Serial Killer
• Clifford Olson: Canadian Serial Killer
• The Development of Serial Killers: A Grounded
• Exploring the Life and Possible Motives of Serial Killer
• How Edward Theodore Gain Became a Serial Killer
• Blood Loss, the Decline of the Serial Killer
• Sociological Theories: Rationalization and Motivation of the Serial Killer
• Serial Killer Era: So Many Murders in 1970 – 2000
• Famous Serial Killer: Jack the Ripper
• Defining the Factors That Contribute to Serial Killer’s Identity
• Deadly Motives: The Hedonistic Drive of Serial Murder
• Details of a Typical Female Serial Killer
• Profiling Art and Australian Serial Killer Ivan Milat
• Brilliant Serial Killer Jack the Ripper
• America’s First Serial Killer
• Serial Killer and Racism: African-Americans and Serial Killing in the Media
• Life and Death of a Serial Killer: Are Serial Killer Born or Created?
• Serial Killer: Erikson’s Theory-Based Analysis of the Behavior of Robert William Pickton
• Differential Association Theory and Serial Killer
• Aileen Wuornos America’s First Female Serial Killer
• Mary Bell Was Britain’s Youngest Serial Killer
• Criminal Shadows: Inside the Mind of a Serial Killer
• America’s Sweetest Serial Killer – Sugar
• Unique Characteristics of a Serial Killer
• American Serial Killer: Albert Fish
• Serial Killer: The Mechanism From Imagination to the Murder
• Critical Theories: Crime Ted Bundy Serial Killer
• The Uncatchable Serial Killer: No Motive, No Victim Profile
• Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture
• The Life of a Serial Killer: Edmund Emil Kemper Lii
• Criminal Justice: The Criminology Behind Serial Killers
• Canadian Serial Killer: Robert Pickton
• What Are Serial Killers?
• Are Serial Killers Born Psychopaths or Pushed to That Limit?
• What Causes Serial Killers to Kill?
• How Do Serial Killers Get Attention?
• What Makes Serial Killers Kill?
• Why Are the People Interested in Serial Killers?
• What Is the Nature of Serial Killers?
• How Do Juveniles Become Serial Killers?
• What Is in the Mind of Serial Killer?
• How to Cure a Serial Killer?
• What Steps Are Taken by the Country to Control Serial Killers?
• Where Did the Term “Serial Killer” Come From?
• What Are the Main Objectives of a Serial Killer?
• Is It Possible to Diagnose a Would-Be Serial Killer?
• What Are the Common Types of Serial Killers?
• How Does a Serial Killer Differ From a Maniac?
• What Lies Behind a Serial Killer’s Signature?
• Are There Naturally Born Serial Killers?
• What Makes a Serial Killer Tick?
• Are There Death Penalty Alternatives for Serial Killers?
• What Makes a Serial Killer Do What They Do?
• Are Humans Naturally Good or Evil?
• What Is the Difference Between a Mass Murderer and a Serial Killer in Modern Culture?
• Is There a Tendency to Increase or Decrease in Serial Killings in the Us in the XXI Century?
• Can Modern Therapies Available for Sociopathic and Psychopathic Disorder Set Serial Killers to Rights?
• What Are the Effects of Childhood Abuse on Serial Killing Behavior?
• How Are the Serial Killers Portrayed in Hollywood Compare to Real-Life Serial Killers?
• What Are Some of the Trademarks of Female Serial Killers?
• Do Serial Killer Partners Always Have a Dominant Personality and a Submissive Personality?
• How Has Modern Technology and Criminology Made It More Difficult for Serial Killers to Remain at Large?
• Domestic Violence Paper Topics
• Prison Paper Topics
• Psychopathology Paper Topics
• Corporal Punishment Questions
• Mental Disorder Essay Topics
• Torture Essay Ideas
• Death Penalty Questions
• Criminal Justice Essay Topics
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2024, February 29). 108 Serial Killer Essay Topics & Examples. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/serial-killer-essay-topics/

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50+ True Crime Stories That Will Shock You To Your Core

These true crime stories are so horrific, it’s difficult to believe they actually happened, or that human beings could be capable of committing such atrocities. And yet, these stories are indeed all true. Sometimes, real life is a lot grimmer than fiction. Sometimes, real life involves murder, abduction, betrayal, torture, and death…

12 True Creepy Crimes That Will Make You Lock Your Doors Tonight

1.  angela hammond.

“She was talking on the payphone with her fiance and saying how there is this suspicious truck that keeps driving around the block. Then, that truck parks near her where the payphone is, he gets out and starts looking around with his flashlight as if he lost something, then he confronts Angela and abducts her. Her fiance heard all of this on the other line and immediately got in his car to drive where Angela was. When doing so, he drove past the guy in the truck and Angela was apparently screaming his name for help, so he turns around and tries following the truck and his transmission fucks up and the guy got away. Angela has never been heard from again. And, she was pregnant.”

2. Annie Borjesson

“I find the case of Annie Borjesson really weird. She was a Swedish student studying in Edinburgh. She then went to Prestwick airport (literally the other side of the country, then down a bit), caught on CCTV at the airport for ten seconds, then left. She tried to take out money multiple times from different ATMs, but didn’t have the funds so was denied. She was seen wandering about Prestwick, and then was found dead on the beach. Her long hair had been cut off, and the post mortem (as far as I have read) concluded death by drowning.

She may have been victim to foul play, or it was suicide. I also found that her parents’ e-mails were allegedly hacked later on. It may be a case of self-inflicted violence/mental health issues, but I find Annie’s case just so bizarre and sad.”

3.  The Hinterkaifeck Murders

“The Hinterkaifeck murders . A family saw footprints in the snow leading to their farm, but no footprints out of the farm. A few days later, they were killed in their own home. There was evidence that the perpetrators were staying in their house or the farm before the killings.

It’s creepy because your house is supposed to be the safest place. It’s hard to feel secure when you think about the possibility that your killer may be living with you without you noticing.”

4. Dorothy Scott

“I was just reading about Dorothy Scott recently. Her story is the saddest, and the creepiest was the bones of the dead dog the killer left on top of her remains to throw scavenger dogs off of his trail. Also, how her watch was stopped to the exact moment she died. I just can’t believe that he called her family so often and they could never trace the calls…I know it was the times though. But the whole thing is so horrifying.”

5. Brandon Swanson

“For those who are not familiar with his story, Brandon was a 19 year old who lived in Marshall, MN. He was returning home from a party recently celebrating his graduation from a community college up in a town north of Marshall called Canby and was on his way home.

Along the way home he crashed in a ditch. For some reason he was taking gravel roads even though the highway between the two towns was a straight shot North to South. I am guessing he took this route as a joy ride type of thing since he loved his car and driving in general or maybe he had a little too much to drink at the party and didn’t want to deal with any state troopers on patrol. He called his dad for a ride and eventually got tired of waiting inside his crashed car and started to walk towards Marshall. He claimed to his dad to see ‘lights’ of something nearby then abruptly exclaimed “Oh shit!” to his dad while still on the phone and his call ended. To this day no one knows what happened to him. No body found, none of his belongings found, nothing. There’s more to the story but that’s my summary. If you want to learn more just dig around.

My guess on what happened to Brandon is either he slipped and fell in a river due to not being able to see in the darkness, got shot and buried somewhere by a belligerent farmer who hated people trespassing on his property and would rather shoot then ask questions or was abducted by aliens (which would explain the lights). This case just creeps me out because I too live in Southern MN and I’m semi familiar with the Marshall area. It’s mostly flat farmlands around here so I really do not understand how someone can just disappear into thin air in the middle of nowhere without a body or any remains being found.”

6. The Bennington Triangle Disappearances

“Beginning in November 1945 through October 1950, five people — ages 8- to 74-years-old — went missing in the area. One was an experienced hunting guide and another was a 53-year-old woman described as an experienced camper and hiker who knew the area like the back of her hand. I’ve hiked Vermont’s Long Trail myself and there are places where you get a feeling of being watched by someone or some “thing.” In 2008, an instructor at Bennington College and experienced hiker got lost on the mountain, later recounted his strange experiences and swore he would never again hike the trail alone.”

7. The Setagaya Family

“The killer stayed in the house for hours, eating their [the Setagaya family’s ] food, logging into the family computer and sleeping on their couch. It’s so creepy because rarely does a killer stick around for hours after they commit their crime making themselves at home.”

8. Brandon Lawson

“Ran out of gas in Middle of Nowhere, TX in 2013. Called the cops, much of it is inaudible but he implies he’s being chased into the woods, and says he needs the cops. When police arrived, they find his truck but nothing else. Not a trace of him since.”

9. Katarzyna Zowada (The “Skin case”)

“A young Polish student disappears in Krakow city.

Few months later a ship on the Vistula river stops because ‘something’ stuck into a propeller. What they have found surprised everyone.

They have gotten out a… skin of missing Katarzyna Zowada . To be more precise: A suit made of human skin. Someone had cut all the limbs and head then created a ‘body suit’ from remaining part which was probably worn by the murderer for some time.

Despite media attention and increased police interest every few years a perpetrator never had been found.”

10. Cassie Jo Stoddart

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZNFpZfMnew

“She [ Cassie Jo Stoddart ] was house-sitting for her aunt. She invited her boyfriend over and his two friends came over as well. His friends left and said they were going to the movies. They didn’t.

At some point before “leaving”, they unlocked a basement door, unbeknownst to her. They shut the power off to scare her. They sat there (hiding) until her boyfriend left and she was alone and proceeded to put masks on, come in the house and stab her. If that isn’t bad enough, a video was found where they planned to murder her ahead of time. There was footage of them right after they killed her as well.”

11. Kris Kremers and Lisanne Froon

“Another creepy mystery that resonates with me is the disappearance of Kris Kremers and Lisanne Froon . Long story short, two Dutch girls visiting Panama decide to go on a hike a day before they were scheduled to meet a guide for a tour and they go missing the same night. 10 weeks later their remains and possessions are found down stream from where the girls were hiking.

What creeps me out the most about this disappearance is the pictures that were found on Lisanne’s camera that turned up in the remains. The pictures go from the usual nice pictures of landscapes and of the girls posing with landmarks to cryptic pictures of the darkness as what many assume were attempts to use the flash of the camera to act as a signal for rescuers. Also there was a photo of back of Kris’s head with what possibly looks like blood by her temple. Just the fact that no one knows what happened to these two during their time in the jungle is what is most unsettling about this mystery.”

12. Daniel LaPlante’s Murders

“ Daniel LaPlante is a triple murderer . He killed a nursery school teacher & her 2 kids in 1987. After a massive man-hunt they still could not find him. The ultra creepy thing is what happened. He was eventually discovered-after being on the run-in the closet of a girl he’d dated. She opened her door one night to see him standing there, in her mother’s clothes, face smeared with makeup, holding a machete. He tied her & her family up , but the youngest narrowly escaped. As if this isn’t bad enough, they AGAIN could not find him, till 2 weeks later. The family, who’d moved out, came back home and SAW LAPLANTE IN THE WINDOW. The police were called and later found out why he’d been so hard to find. Daniel had been living in the walls of his former girlfriend’s house the entire time.”

7 Of The Most Brutal Murders Ever Committed In The History Of The Human Race (NSFL)

1. the toolbox killer.

The  transcript  of what happened to Shirley Ledford at the hands of Toolbox Killers Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris is the most disturbing thing you will ever come across.

An excerpt from the transcript:

“At this point, after Bittaker had forced Shirley to fellate him, repeated sounds of an administered beating, interspersed with loud screams can be heard as Bittaker savagely beat Shirley about the breasts and, to a lesser degree, head. Bittaker then extracted his pliers from the tool box. Shirley then emits several high-pitched, prolonged screams and cries of agony as Bittaker alternately squeezes and twists her labia, clitoris, nipples and breasts with the pliers. Bittaker then returns the pliers to the tool box. Banging sounds can also be heard throughout, which are believed to have been made as Shirley came into contact with the walls and inner contents of the van as she writhed and flailed.”

Ledford: My God! Please stop it! (Screams) Bittaker: Is the recorder going? Norris: Yeah! Bittaker: Scream baby !  Scream some, baby.

2. Kelly Anne Bates

Bates was horrifically tortured for days before her tormentor finally killed her. Below are a few examples of what she went through.

According to  Wikipedia , Kelly Anne Bates (18 May 1978 – 16 April 1996) was a British teenager murdered on 16 April 1996 at age 17 in Manchester after being tortured for four long weeks. Kelly’s eyes were gouged from their sockets up to three weeks before she actually died from drowning in a bathtub. These horrific crimes were committed by her partner, James Patterson Smith .

Below is a list from Wikipedia of the specific injuries Kelly Anne Bates endured through torture:

• Scalding to her buttocks and left leg
• Burns on her thigh caused by the application of a hot iron
• A fractured arm
• Multiple stab wounds caused by knives, forks and scissors
• Stab wounds inside her mouth
• Crush injuries to both hands
• Mutilation of her ears, nose, eyebrows, mouth, lips and genitalia
• Wounds caused by a spade and pruning shears
• Both eyes gouged out
• Later stab wounds to the empty eye sockets
• Partial scalping

3.  Junko Furuta

Furuta was a 17-year-old Japanese girl whose case became known as the “concrete-encased high school girl murder case.” Furuta was kidnapped by four teenage boys and, aside from the brutality of the assaults against her, the most disturbing thing is that she was held at one of the kidnapper’s houses and his parents were present the entire time, knew what was going on, and did nothing to stop it.

Also extremely disturbing is that Furuta turned 17 while she was in captivity and enduring these horrors. There’s something tremendously upsetting about that.

According to  Wikipedia :

To avoid concern over her abduction, the perpetrators forced Furuta to call her parents and tell them that she would be staying at a friend’s house for a while. Over the course of her confinement, Furuta was repeatedly raped, beaten, and tortured by her four captors until they killed her. The parents of Kamisaku were present in the home for at least a part of the time that Furuta was held captive, and though she pleaded with them for help, they did not intervene, later claiming that they feared their son too much to do so.

The killers hid her corpse in a 208-litre oil drum filled with concrete. They disposed of the drum in a tract of reclaimed land in Kōtō, Tokyo.

4. The Hi-Fi Murders

In 1974, two men robbing a Hi-Fi store in Odgen, Utah held captive and tormented five individuals. Only two of the captives would survive. Among the sadism levied on the captives were the following, according to Wikipedia :

Violence included a pen being kicked into an ear and the brutal rape of a teenage girl who was later shot in the head. Corrosive drain cleaner was also forcefully given to the hostages causing horrific burns to their mouths and throats.

Not only were they forced to drink drain cleaner but their mouths were then taped shut so they couldn’t spit it out or vomit it up.

One of the victims, Orren Walker, was shot several times, strangled and had a pen kicked into his ear but still survived.

5. The McStay Family

In 2010, in Fallbrook, California, the McStay family (including Joseph McStay, his wife Summer, and their two children), was brutally murdered. The four were then moved by the killer and buried in a shallow grave in the desert but their remains weren’t found until 2013. For three years they’d simply believed to have disappeared.

Forensic evidence showed that all had been beaten to death with a sledgehammer which was found near the family’s remains. Joseph McStay suffered four blows to the head and the family’s youngest child, only four years old, suffered seven. Investigators also believe the family was tortured prior to being killed.

Charles Merritt, McStay’s former business partner has been charged with the family’s murder.

6.  James Bulger

In 1993, in England, two-year-old James Bulger was abducted by two ten-year-olds at the mall while his mother was distracted.

After taking him from the mall, the two boys took Bulger on a two and a half mile walk. At one point they picked Bulger up and dropped him on his head which caused him to have a bump on his head and, according to bystanders, cry.

The two then took him up an embankment and onto a set of railroad tracks where they began torturing him.

More details of the murder according to Wikipedia :

At the trial it was established that at this location, one of the boys threw blue Humbrol modelling paint, which they had shoplifted earlier, into Bulger’s left eye. They kicked and stomped on him, and threw bricks and stones at him. Batteries were placed in Bulger’s mouth. Police believed some batteries may have been inserted into his anus, although none were found there. Finally, a 22-pound (10.0 kg) iron bar, described in court as a railway fishplate, was dropped on him. Bulger suffered ten skull fractures as a result of the iron bar striking his head. Dr. Alan Williams, the case’s pathologist, stated that Bulger suffered so many injuries—42 in total—that none could be isolated as the fatal blow.

Police suspected that there was a sexual element to the crime, since Bulger’s shoes, socks, trousers and underpants had been removed. The pathologist’s report read out in court stated that Bulger’s foreskin had been forcibly retracted.

Before they left him, the boys laid Bulger across the railway tracks and weighted his head down with rubble, in the hope that a train would hit him and make his death appear to be an accident.

After Bulger’s killers left the scene, his body was cut in half by a train. Bulger’s severed body was discovered two days later on 14 February.

7.  Amora Bain Carson

Amora Bain Carson, the 13-month-old baby who was tortured to death by her mother’s boyfriend during an “exorcism.” I’ll tell the story by copying some things from each of their appeals. Jesseca Carson was the baby’s mother, and the boyfriend was Blaine Milam. Jessica Carson was sentenced to life, while Blaien Milam was sentenced to death.

WARNING: Graphic Content

“Carson concluded that the child was like ‘Chucky’ or ‘Pet Sematary’ (horror movies) when the “boy dies and comes back to life all evil and stuff” because the child was “biting Blaine to where it was drawing blood on his hands.” After Milam returned to the child, he took a picture of her and gave it to Carson. One of the child’s eyes was stretched and ‘like warped down.’ Carson heard horrible cries from the child as Milam was attempting the exorcism.”

“During the hours involved, Milam had taken the child to a back bedroom in their small dwelling and wedged the door shut. The evidence would allow a jury to conclude that Carson was necessarily aware of what was happening to the child, because she admitted hearing the screams that accompanied such torture and because she saw the child’s deformed head after some time had passed and heard the sounds caused by the blows.”

“They found blood-spatter stains, consistent with blunt force trauma, near the south bedroom. Among the items collected from the south bedroom were: blood-stained bedding and baby clothes; blood-stained baby diapers and wipes; a tube of Astroglide lubricant; and a pair of jeans with blood stains on the lap. DNA testing later showed that Amora’s blood was on these items.”

“As a result of the ‘exorcism’ conducted by Milam, Amora suffered innumerable injuries that led to her death. Forensic evidence showed the child was beaten so severely that the multitude of fractures to her skull connected with each other like a jigsaw puzzle, and her brain was torn and severely damaged. An arm and leg had spiral fractures indicating they were twisted in two, her torso was either struck by a blunt object or squeezed until the ribs and sternum broke, and her body (neck, chest, abdomen, buttocks, both elbows, both forearms, both feet, right arm, left shoulder, left upper arm, left hand, right thigh, and left knee) was riddled with no less than twenty-four distinct bite marks. Her head and face were so scraped and bruised that all the discrete injuries combined into “one giant injury.” Her liver was torn, and her vaginal and anal orifices were so torn that the vagina and rectum were actually connected, an injury the forensic examiner had never seen before. The underside of her tongue was lacerated from blunt force trauma. She was also strangled. Because of all the injuries she sustained, it was not possible to determine which one was the final injury, and no specific, singular cause of death was determinable. Forensic testimony reflected that several of the injuries standing alone would have each been fatal. Police were called several hours later; when they arrived, the child was entirely stiff and in rigor.”

“On December 13th, appellant’s sister, Teresa, went to see appellant in jail. That night, she told her aunt that she ‘was needing to find a way to get back out to the trailer in Tatum’ because “Blaine had told her that she needed to go out there to the trailer to get some evidence out from underneath of it.” The aunt called Sgt. Rogers and told her that “she needed to get out to the trailer immediately, that Teresa was wanting to go out there to get some evidence out from underneath the trailer.”

“Sgt. Rogers immediately obtained a search warrant, crawled under the trailer, and discovered a pipe wrench inside a clear plastic bag. The pipe wrench had been shoved down ‘a hole in the floor of the master bathroom.’ Forensic analysis revealed components of Astroglide on the pipe wrench, the diaper Amora had been wearing, and the diaper and wipes collected from the south bedroom.”

Werner Herzog did an episode of  On Death Row  about Blaine Milam and the full episode is on  YouTube . It has security footage from the pawn shop where they were supposedly pawning a chainsaw to get money for an exorcism (after Amora was already dead) and a gas station, the 911 call, crime scenes photos (not of Amora’s body, of course, just the trailer) and interviews with pretty much everyone involved (except Jesseca Carson). It doesn’t make it any easier… but this case raises a lot of questions and searching online for these kinds of cases can take you horrible places that use Amora for shock value or misrepresent autopsy photos of other unfortunate victims as her (no post-mortem photos of Amora have been released and her autopsy was sealed). Especially since Amora’s case hasn’t been in the MSM very much due to the graphic nature of her death. With Herzog you’re getting quality information on the case coming straight from those involved.

Bonus: 36 Locals Share The Most Horrific True Crimes That Happened In Their Home Towns

1.   “ Stacey Castor poisoned her husband and then poisoned her daughter on the daughter’s first day of college. She wrote a fake suicide note for her daughter saying that she had killed her father and was committing suicide because of the guilt. The daughter almost died but recovered from the poison and testified against her mother. They also found out she had poisoned her first husband.”

2.   “When I was in 3rd grade I saw a kid get into a police car while I was in chess club. Turns out his father murdered his younger twin sisters by stabbing them to death. Apparently he told them to play hide and seek and murdered them when he found them. When he finally returned to school he got bullied by the shitbag kids at our school, making fun of his dead sisters. He was placed in the custody of his aunt who later committed suicide and he was left in the care of the state after that. That boy’s  life was horrible .”

3.  “Around 3 years ago, my friend’s father went berserk and killed my friend, his younger brother and his mother, and then proceeded to hang himself. I remember talking to him the week before about a project we had in lit class. His extended family took the project because it was the last thing he worked on before the incident. I had grief counselors talk to me for every class I had with him (Which was almost all of them). Our school still has a Tree and a memorial dedicated to him.”

4. “Probably David Meirhofer’s murders. Among other things he snatched a seven year old girl out of her tent while her family was camping, molested her, then strangled her to death. They caught him because he called her mother to taunt her a year later.”

5.  “Neighbors that lived across the road from me were having domestic issues. The wife brings over a box of stuff for us to stash because she is afraid he will steal/burn it. We stash it for her no problem. A week later she is missing, the following week they found her dead, stuffed in a box in his storage unit. He got life. We gave the box of stuff to her daughter.”

6.   “Guy beat his pregnant girlfriend to death in front of her kids, then beat her 8 and 6 year old to death. Couldn’t bring himself to beat the 2 year old to death so he threw him in the dryer and turned it on.”

7.   “When I was a kid one of my neighbors and his sister murdered their mom by bashing her head in with a real heavy frying pan and then strangled her with the phone cord. (Back when phones had cords) because the mother told the son that he couldn’t take his underage sister out with him to a party. So they killed her and left her body in the closet and then went to the party like nothing happened.”

8.  “I live in a (relatively) rural county in England, so we normally don’t have many crimes that you could consider too bad.

About three years ago a 17 year girl I’d met once or twice went missing, she was popular and the community really pulled together in trying to find her. She was also the daughter of a detective who works in our town.

Turns out she was murdered by another lad I’d also met a few times. He was a bit older (22 I think) He seemed okay when I met him, a little cocky but nothing too unusual. He was a photographer who once staged a picture with one of my friends where she was hanging by the neck with a bag on her head. Pretty strange stuff, but I assumed it was all in the name of art.

He’d been rejected by this girl so he lured her to his house on the pretense of taking modelling photos. He strangled her to death when she got there and dumped her body miles away.

Apparently the cops found essays he’d been writing obsessively about her. He’d also taken pictures labelled “before-during-after” of her murder, so it was obviously pre-meditated.

He was given a whole-life sentence (which are very rare in the UK) so chances are he’ll never get to see the light of day again.”

9.   “My neighbor that became our family’s friend had a nice step dad. He used to give me rides sometimes. We lived in a bad part of Miami (think inner city, not South Beach) and my nickname there was “smart girl” because I’m the only one in “the hood” that went to college.

Anyway, I moved away and apparently one day my friend’s mom told his step dad she wanted to leave him. He went insane. He grabbed his gun and told her she’s going to die before she leaves or something like that. My friend’s little sister was there too and was crying the whole time (she was like 16). My friend stepped between his step dad and his mom. His step dad told him if he didn’t move he’d kill him too.

He didn’t move. He killed my friend, then the mom. He turned to the little girl and said he couldn’t kill her and that he was so sorry. Then he killed himself.”

10.   “The murder of Maddie Clifton. An 8 year old girl went missing in Jacksonville, FL and it became a huge national story in 1998. There was a massive hunt to find her by law enforcement and local residents. Everyone was looking. It’s all anyone talked about. A week into the search, a mother went into her son’s room while he was at school to clean it after the stench coming from it became overwhelming. His waterbed seemed to be leaking. When she looked more closely, she discovered Maddie’s body stuffed inside the pedestal of the bed.

The woman’s son was only 14 years old. He said him and Maddie were playing baseball, and when he hit the ball, it hit Maddie in the eye causing her to bleed. He says he panicked when she wouldn’t stop screaming, and said his father was abusive and was afraid what would happen to him if he she told on him. So, he dragged Maddie inside, stabbed her 11 times and beat her to death with the baseball bat.

Horrible, tragic story.”

11.  “A woman murdered an expectant mother and cut the baby out, drove off, then called 911 in an attempt to pass the baby off as her own. I was just off work around that time that night and definitely drove by that exact spot before they found the body. It’s right off the highway.  Creepy shit …”

12.  “Our neighbor on our street was having an affair and decided it was a good idea to kill her husband then burn the house down so she could be with her pilot boyfriend.

Stupid thing was her boyfriend used to come into one local bar, said he was never that serious about her and that she was clingy, even went so far as to try and get him to be her alibi. All this happened while we were on vacation, weirdest trip home ever.”

13.  “If you guys aren’t aware what’s going on in the Philippines. Most drug users/dealers are now being killed by unknown assailants. Just last week we have 2 people dumped near where I live with their heads fully wrapped with tape and hands as well with a cardboard sign saying “I’m a drug dealer. Don’t be like me” (translated from our native language).”

14.  “Grew up in a small town north of the bay area, while watching a documentary about Jim Jones my teacher started crying. Found out for several years Jones’s church was in our town (2miles from my house) and after everyone committed ‘suicide’ in Guyana they ran a list of names on the local news. A large number of previous students and their parents were on the list. The shit didn’t go down in my town but a whole generation where I grew up lost friends and family to that guy and the church (with a guard tower) still stands to this day but with a different denomination.”

15.  “When I was a baby there was this nice couple that lived down the street from me. No kids, middle aged, average couple. The wife and my mom would talk sometimes – casual pleasant neighborly chatter. Apparently this lady was a total sweetheart and was loved around town.

So one day my mom is driving home, and the couple’s house is surrounded by police cruisers. Turns out the wife commit suicide by shotgun. The problem was – she shot herself twice.

For months they were investigating the husband…they were so close to having the evidence that they needed to nail him for the murder.

One day, my mom and grandma were going to the store. When they left, he was sitting in his driveway in his car. He waved at them as they left. When they get home, there are police and an ambulance outside his house – he was slumped over dead in his car – suicide by carbon monoxide.

They literally saw him as he was killing himself after he killed his wife. Yikes.”

16. “ Andrea Yates  drowning her five kids. Happened five minutes away and our family still sees her ex husband and his new family on occasion. They’re very nice.”

17.  “Let’s see… Where to start? This list doesn’t even include the stuff related to the meth epidemic.

(1990’s) A guy cut another dude into pieces with a carving knife and stashed the body in the deep freezer in his apartment. The police only found them a week later.

(2000’s) A guy got into an argument with their cousin at the club, drove to their house and chucked a firebomb inside. The fire killed all five of their kids, who were home at the time.

(2000’s again) Another guy heard that his estranged parents had a huge life insurance policy in their name. One night, he left home, drove to his parents’ place in Iowa, and killed almost everyone (6 people) with a shotgun, then drove home to eat dinner, while awaiting the news. He was only caught because his 7 year old niece hid in the closet the whole time and she was able to tell who did it.

(2015-now) Several fatal shootings and beatings that have killed a few people. Heroin epidemic.

Oh also, Michael Swango AKA “Dr. Death”, a serial killer known for poisoning victims (4-60; true number unknown), worked as an EMT around the area here in the 80’s.

So, yeah, Central Illinois is just low-key slang for ‘Trevor Philips country’.”

18.  “Just happened this month, a mother of a one month old punched her baby to death because she was tired of feeding it. She then blamed the father. Fucked up.”

19.   “Whitey here. I live in a small south east town. Back in the 80’s the town was still pretty segregated school wise. Where the railroad tracks once ran through town, was the diving line. South side of the railroad was probably 99.9% black. My backyard fence was part of that dividing line. When I was 10, my parents fostered a black boy my age. He lived in my neighborhood, played on my baseball team. His dad went to prison up in NY and the boy lived with us for 4 years. He moved back when his dad got out. But 30 years later, we still tell people we are brothers.

‘D’ taught me a lot about black community. Especially about times when crimes are committed and the whole black community knows who did it. But don’t tell because “fuck the police” or retaliation from the criminal.

we lived 2 blocks from the closest convenience store/arcade. People walking to the store from the south side of the tracks, walked by my house. It wasn’t the wild west or anything. We may not have gone to the same school sometimes, but we only had 1 recreation department so we played sports together. So we always saw people we knew at the store.

But there was this one guy. For the late 80’s this dude was pretty out and flamboyant when it came to being gay. Remember those 70’s and 80’s short shorts with the stripe. If you hung em just right, your balls were exposed.

Anyway, dude used to walk up and down the street, short short, flip flops, tank top t shirt, medium size afro, and usually sucking on a sucker. He was very friendly. He would stop and talk. He acted like he was a girl. He was alright. My sister and her friend were nice to him. He stopped and talked to them if they were ever about.

Fast Forward. So the dude is found in the bathroom at the ballfield. He had been murdered. Just fucked up big time. Beat to hell and back. And the story every one has head as an urban legend before. They had cut his dick off and put it in his mouth. His balls were in his hand and a broom stick had been shoved in his ass.

No suspects.

Year later, out in the county, a white sherriff’s deputy off duty from another county happens to be in our jurisdiction, checking on his parents’ house. Happens to catch 2 black guys robbing the house. He shoots and kills both after a scuffle.

Oddly enough, under routine drug test, because of the shooting, cocaine shows up on his system. This story is really fishy. Investigation goes on for a long time. The cops finally drop the case, declare it self defense or what have.

This is where my foster brother ‘D’ comes into play. Years later. We’re in our 20’s, shooting the shit and somehow bring up the murder of the gay dude. I was like, ‘I can’t believe they never solved that case.’

D was like what you talking about? Everybody knew who did it. What? He asked, ‘remember the 2 black dudes the off duty cop killed breaking into his parents house?’

Yea I remember that.

Well those were the dudes that did it. Everybody in the “hood” knew it was them. They were always terrorizing everybody. And the house they were breaking into and got caught? Drug deal. Those 2 dudes were dealing drugs, and that white guy, off duty sheriff deputy from another county. Shot em in the middle of the deal.

So two drug dealers/murderers are murdered by a crooked cop, but in the end, I don’t really consider that justice for our friendly neighborhood gay boy that probably never hurt a flea in his 20 years of life.

You may not have any love for ‘the man’ or ‘the police’ but how can a community be silent when innocent people are hurt?”

20.  “Second week in my new apartment and my neighbor gets robbed and stabbed. I heard the whole encounter and was the one that called the cops.”

21.   “I was emancipated really young. I just moved into emergency housing commission and had to sleep in the lounge room because it had the only light bulb and I’m scared of the dark.

For anyone not in Australia Housing Commission is cheap units or houses owned by the government and rented to disadvantaged people. Mostly junkies and welfare bludgers.

Anyway I was sleeping in the lounge room which had the front door attached when I hear the most blood curling screams.

One junkie had poured boiling water over another chick, stabbed her repeatedly and cut off one of her tits.

I was laying maybe 10 meters away.”

22.   “A child was raped and murdered. Guy was arrested and he was killed within 24 hours of being arrested and in a community cell of like 6 inmates instead of segregation he died and no one in the cell seen it.”

23.  “I only remember some of the details as I was on holidays at the time and only heard second hand what happened. So a guy who lived around the corner had an argument with his wife over something, got pissed off and then shot her. People heard the gunshot and called the police, which prompted him to run away in his car down the main road about 2km to his parents house where he got into their gun locker, killed his parents and then had a standoff with the police that lasted a couple of hours and ending in him shooting himself.”

24.  “We had a group of people who would pretend to be the cops, dressed in all black and wore ski masks and stuff, knock on your door, say they had a warrant, and if you opened it up, they would force their way in and rob you.

This went on for months, like, month after month after month. They decided they were above the law, so their crimes kept getting worse and worse, one of their later houses they beat an old man until he had jaw, facial, and skull fractures so bad he had to have a life flight to a major trauma center where he had emergency surgery. The next old couple they killed.

They were sure the local police couldn’t do anything, the newspaper even said the police had nothing to go on, and it just kept getting worse. One of their last home invasions, they just killed the homeowner as he opened the door for absolutely no reason.

I realized that if someone had defended themselves earlier in the chain of criminality, things never would have reached this point. I ended up getting a Ring Video Doorbell and a Strikemaster II door reinforcements for each external door. I keep firearms in electronic safes ready to use at any moment. Nothing like that is going to happen to my family.”

25.  “There was a family in the area I used to live in and I played soccer with the middle daughter. It was three girls — two were adults and one was still in high school — and the parents. The parents were very religious, the mother especially, and they had a lot of beliefs that I (and many people) found…strange.

The eldest daughter (whose name I don’t recall) had a serious mental illness that she managed perfectly well when she lived out of home. She had a job, had a decent life and all was well. The relationship she was in fell apart and she had to move back home for financial reasons. One of the rules her parents had was that she wasn’t to take her meds anymore because they weren’t what they considered ‘godly.’

Things deteriorated over time and the parents continued to withhold her medications. Now, I have a chronic mental illness myself and without my meds things descend into chaos quite quickly so I can’t imagine what it would’ve been like for her with her illness being more serious than mine. Her parents were told by their church to pray over her and everything would be ok.

As I’m sure you can imagine things were  not  ok. She lost her tenuous grip on reality and became unstable. She attacked her family while doing battle with a series of hallucinations that were telling her awful things about her parents and sisters. She took a sharp kitchen knife and went after her youngest sister (the middle one that I knew wasn’t home at the time) and stabbed her to death in the kitchen. Her father kept trying to defend his youngest child while trying to settle the eldest and he sustained serious injuries. The eldest followed him when he ran from the house to get help and she caught him from behind and stabbed him multiple times in the neck. He died on the front lawn. The mother was injured as well but appeared not to be the target of the eldest daughter’s hallucinations and she managed to survive.

The girl was taken down by tasers when the police arrived — they were called by neighbours who heard the commotion — and she was sent to a high security facility where she still is now. She was very obviously not in control of herself at the time so she avoided criminal charges and the mother moved away from the area.

I feel for the mother most; she essentially lost her whole family. The youngest and her husband had been killed and the middle child moved away eventually too, changing her surname when she got married and chose to disconnect from her mother. I know she blames her mum for what happened because she was the one who withheld the medication. I can imagine that the mum blames herself too.

When that happened it helped my mum to put my illness into perspective — if I’m treated properly, everything will be alright. It was a “there, but for the grace of God, go we” moment.

That was the worst crime that happened in our area for quite a while. Years before that there was a massacre (the Milperra Masacre, if you want to google it) between rival biker gangs who had, and continue to have, a presence in that particular suburb. Since then there was a child drowned during an exorcism after parents were told by a priest (or something) that the kid had a demon inside him and trying to force it out was the only way to save him…he was going through puberty, that’s all.”

26.  “The kidnapping of Michael Dunahee. He is still just considered missing but its been 20+ years. You’d have to be pretty optimistic to believe he didn’t meet a horrible fate. He was just a small boy when taken and the incident absolutely ROCKED My small crime free city. It changed everything…parents kept a much more careful eye on us kids..many of our freedoms were taken away…I still feel sick when i think about what horrible things must’ve happened to that poor boy.”

27.   “Growing up two brothers murdered their parents and put them in bags in the Attic. They did this because their parents would not let them go to a party nor own a cell phone, this was when cell phone were just becoming affordable for the upper middle class.”

28.   “DEA bust next door, serial killers dumping ground five minutes from my house, and Sandy hook is within a 30 minutes drive.”

29.   “We sold our house when I was 9 and moved a few miles away. The couple we sold the house to was nice enough, but a little odd. I don’t even know what it was, but even  I  noticed they were weird, and I was a little kid.

Fast forward about 12 years. I’m in college and these people have a son themselves. One day the man cornered his wife in the dining room and blew her head off with a shotgun. They had been having marital trouble prior to that but I’m not sure what exactly set him off. Kind of creepy to know that happened in my old house.”

30.   “The girl who got stabbed by the two slenderman girls? My second cousin. My younger siblings actually played with her 2 weeks prior at a family gathering. Crazy.”

31.   “Some kid beat another to kid to death with a bat over an argument that had to do with something related to weed. Mind you the population in my town is like 8,000. This was crazy.”

32.  “Well, we’ve got a serial killer running around now – he’s killed seven people so far. (Referring to the  current serial killer loose in Phoenix, Arizona ).”

33.  “I live in Downtown Dallas. I was packing for an international trip the night of the police shooting. I took note of the crowds after work and just made a mental note to “stay inside for awhile” after I got home. It wasn’t until I walked downstairs to get some tacos at around 10pm and a couple cops with sniper rifles were posted up in our lobby and told me to “get the fuck back upstairs, we are on lockdown!” that I realized some shit went down. What I witnessed that night and the following day really changed my perspective on a lot. They didn’t show the majority of it on the news. I have always been very supportive and stood behind a lot of social movements…but there is zero excuse for a 14 year old to spit on a cop, tell me I was a “Mexican bitch” that he “ought to rape,” loot a 7-11, or do any of the insane things that I saw.”

34.   The Snowtown, Australia Murders

“In my city some guys went around torturing people to death and then dissolved their bodies in vats of acid. But they used the wrong type of acid (Not strong enough) and people complained of a foul smell, so the police investigated and found semi-liquified remains in barrels.”

35.   “Two people ordered a pizza and killed the teenage driver because they wanted to know what it was like to kill a man.”

36.   “The 10 mile radius around my childhood home is like catnip to serial killers and evil. BTK dumped one of his victims in a ditch a mile away from my house (before I was born,) the Carr Brothers murdered a group of 5 people in the soccer field 4-5 miles from my home (6th one survived because she wore a metal hair clip that caused the bullet to ricochet away from her head,) A man molested small children on the same street, the old lady that hated us kids ended up murdered by her own son (my mom was the one to find her since she started to smell the decomposing body and a family member asked her if she was willing to go in for her.)

Tons of crimes that never were recorded, gunshots going off in the dead of night, a scream that suddenly got cut short, we were just told to lay on the floor while my father paced the house with a shotgun until he felt it was safe.”

Read more Spooky .

About the author

January Nelson

January Nelson is a writer, editor, and dreamer. She writes about astrology, games, love, relationships, and entertainment. January graduated with an English and Literature degree from Columbia University.

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The Enduring, Pernicious Whiteness Of True Crime

White voices and victims dominate the genre, which can skew the perception of what constitutes a crime.

Even beyond the subject matter —a long-unsolved lynching of a Black man in Georgia— Wesley Lowery’s recent story in GQ was jarring. The July feature has the hallmarks of classic true crime: the ambitious investigator, the zealous prosecutor, the family that would not let the case be forgotten. It’s a great story, squarely in the vein of other cold case classics, including Pamela Colloff’s “ Unholy Act ,” Matthew McGough’s “ The Lazarus File ,” and Robert Kolker’s “ A Serial Killer in Common .” And yet it is, in one profound way, extremely unusual. Lowery, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is Black. And the true crime genre is very, very white.

True crime is, relatively speaking, small. None of the Big Five book publishers bothers with a dedicated imprint. But the genre wields outsize cultural sway far beyond publishing, especially since the success of 2014’s “Serial” podcast—about the highly contested homicide conviction of Adnan Syed in the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee in Baltimore County, Maryland—and HBO’s “The Jinx,” the 2015 docuseries about real estate heir Robert Durst and several homicides he is suspected of having committed. (Durst will stand trial for the December 2000 homicide of Susan Berman next year .) So it matters a great deal that most true crime focuses on white police officers and detectives, white victims, and white prosecutors working to avenge them — aimed, said Lowery, “at a presumed white audience.” He believes, rightly, that this is effectively a judgment about what constitutes a sympathetic victim.

I called Lowery not long ago to talk about that whiteness, which swamps the genre across books, magazines, newspapers, and podcasts—and how the color barrier has influenced Americans’ impression of crime itself.

Lowery noted that Samuel Little, perhaps one of the most prolific murderers in American history— he credits himself with 93 victims — remains relatively unknown. Serial killer-related content is extraordinarily popular among Americans; is it not unreasonable, Lowery wonders, to credit this ignorance to Little’s alleged victims — disproportionately Black women? Little’s confessions have been met with skepticism from some in law enforcement and journalism . Lowery said Little remaining under the cultural radar “speaks to the extent to which the subjective decisions that are made about what to portray in true crime is a financial decision, made based on what is presumed a white audience will care about.”

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, and has been for many years. The racial disparity is hard to quantify, but it’s surely been evident for the last two decades, before which true crime was regarded as trash. During each of those years, Mystery Writers of America bestowed its Edgar Awards. Among the categories: Best Fact Crime. Five or six books are nominated each year.

In the last 20 years, few nonwhite writers have been nominated in the category, and none have won. (In 2018, the organization rescinded an achievement award to disgraced Central Park Five prosecutor Linda Fairstein.)

Journalist Sarah Weinman’s latest anthology, “ Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit, and Obsession” — in which I have story — features only one nonwhite writer and no Black writers. Weinman is aware that this absence reflects the genre itself. “When pain and trauma is grist for the entertainment mill, certain stories are, still, valued over others,” she wrote in a July essay for BuzzFeed News.

The implications of that value judgment are staggering. Think about what it means to have white writers tell the world about crime that, most often, affects Black people — or that white editors get to choose what crime is worth a book, a feature, a podcast. Think about how this skews some people’s perception of what even constitutes a crime.

It’s hard to overstate how inaccurate and damaging the results and perceptions created by so much whiteness has been. Generations of readers have been led to believe that murder victims most often are women killed by men and that Black serial murderers are rare. Neither assertion is true. According to the FBI , the majority of homicide victims are men killed by other men, and the race of serial murderers is commensurate with the racial makeup of the U.S. as a whole.

The fallout extends beyond misperception into policy, and it has for decades. For example, as Rachel Monroe detailed in her 2019 book “Savage Appetites,” the rise of the victims’ rights movement, led by the mother of Sharon Tate —a white actress whose murder at the hands of Manson Family members has been documented ad nauseam—led directly to the rights of defendants being restricted. The severity of punishment is rarely even questioned. “[True crime] frames the justice system as inherently just, and it frames long prison sentences as something to aspire toward,” says journalist Rachelle Hampton . “It very much sets up a neat line between us —people who are not incarcerated—and them , people who are incarcerated.”

To this day, reporters enable law enforcement to spread misleading statistics—to suggest, with scant evidence, that major cities, including New York, are suffering through an unprecedented rise in crime. That, too, is false .

“We end up misrepresenting what the world actually looks like,” says Lowery.

Or as Jean Murley, author of “ The Rise of True Crime ,” puts it: “Modern true crime is almost a fantasy genre.”

How did this happen? And what, if anything, can we do about it?

Writers of color were excluded from the beginning.

American true crime began at the National Police Gazette, founded in 1845 . Alongside stories about horse races, boxing matches, and community goings-on, were accounts of murder. The magazine was exceedingly popular, and was quickly consumed by 150,000 subscribers . Its success led eventually to True Detective Mysteries , a magazine founded in 1924, and Official Detective Stories, a decade later.

These magazines often contained messages from law enforcement, including the ruthless FBI director J. Edgar Hoover—whose stewardship of the agency included sending a letter to Martin Luther King Jr. urging him to kill himself —and even accounts written by the police themselves. Although the origins of the crime stories are murky, most were handed to editors by the police. “The magazines had the imprimatur of officialdom and law enforcement,” says Murley. “The motivation of the police was not just to get people to understand murder within their communities, but more importantly, to side with them .”

These police were almost certainly white —in 1943, for instance, Black officers represented less than 1 percent of the NYPD . The reporters to whom they were leaking? Also white.

The lack of Black reporters in mainstream newspapers was so stark, it was noted by President Lyndon B. Johnson’s National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, better known as the Kerner Commission. “The news media must publish newspapers and produce programs that recognize the existence and activities of Negroes as a group within the community and as a part of the larger community,” the commission recommended in its 1968 report. “Recruit more Negroes into journalism and broadcasting and promote those who are qualified to positions of significant responsibility.”

For the most part, well into the 1960s, Black journalists wrote for the major Black newspapers: the Chicago Daily Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the Amsterdam News. They covered hundreds of lurid and ghastly crimes, particularly in the South. But those were, in essence, crimes with Black victims for a Black audience —deemed by white editors unworthy of mainstream papers or detective rags like Confidential or True Crime.

“The frequency with which Black men in particular were hung, and sometimes castrated and hung, in the South without any prosecution — and, if there was the rare prosecution, almost inevitable acquittal — indicated that crimes against people of color were not considered crimes by the larger society,” Walter Lowe Jr. told me recently.

Lowe was hired by the Chicago Sun-Times in 1971. There were four major newspapers in the city: the Sun-Times, the Daily News, the American, and the Tribune, with a combined reporting staff, according to Lowe, of nearly three-hundred. Lowe was the paper’s sole Black reporter.

“We were expected to cover the Black issues. We were not assigned, ever, to cover a lurid, sensationalist crime, or even a minor crime involving white people,” he recalls. Shut out of the white-cop-to-white-reporter-pipeline, Lowe would not write about the mysterious disappearance of Helen Brach or the Chicago mob. But Representative Ralph Metcalfe fighting the Mayor Richard Daley machine? Sure.

Even Black detectives, Lowe said, weren’t assigned crimes with flashy white victims. They were expected to solve crimes in their own community. “There was no Alex Cross,” he observed, referencing novelist James Patterson’s detective protagonist.

Professional segregation was in place, informally, at the New York Times as well. Mel Watkins, hired as a copy boy, became the first Black editor at the Times’s Sunday Book Review in 1966. When Watkins got to the paper, the only other Black employees he saw operated the elevator or worked in the cafeteria. An insidious edict was in place:  White writers frequently reviewed the work of Black authors, but the reverse was not permitted. This was, he says, “thought to be the natural order.” Even so, Watkins once suggested that James Baldwin review a book by Norman Mailer; the proposal was rejected. Mailer reviewing Baldwin, however, “would’ve been greeted with much less resistance.”

Back then, true crime, to the degree it existed, wasn’t taken seriously. Despite the serialization of “In Cold Blood” in 1965, and its publication in book form the next year, the Times Book Review treated this not as a burgeoning genre but a one-off. Even crime fiction, says Watkins, was considered “second level,” and was relegated to Anthony Boucher’s “Criminals at Large” column, which ran for nearly two decades.

Black writers were publishing nonfiction, however, in which, Watkins believed, criminals were often treated as heroes. “Being lawless was to be, in fact, defying the repressive societal laws,” he says, a point of view exemplified by the writing on Stack O’Lee , Shine , and the larger-than-life Jack Johnson . When the Times did review the nonfiction of Black writers, the subject matter tended to be the civil rights movement: Angela Davis, Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton. The focus of such work was indeed crime, Watkins felt, even if white readers did not recognize it as such. “Crime, from the Black perspective, is societal crime,” says Watkins. “You have this situation where society becomes the adversary .” The criminality to which Black Americans were routinely subjected was not lost on Watkins, whose father never put money in a bank because he’d seen Mississippi bankers claim it had vanished.

In his professional capacity, Watkins often dealt with book editors, and the lack of diversity was just as pronounced at the publishing houses. Decades later, he can name the three Black editors with whom he interacted: Erroll McDonald of Knopf, Charles Harris of Amistad Press, and Toni Morrison at Random House. (McDonald, who edited “ In the Belly of the Beast” by Jack Henry Abbott, who was twice convicted of manslaughter, said in a brief conversation that he knows very little about true crime. Other book editors I contacted either declined to comment or didn’t reply.)

Before we got off the phone, Watkins imparted a final thought: Black writers had published true crime, but it was sub rosa. Look, he said, at Richard Wright’s 1940 novel “Native Son,” about a 20-year-old Black man from the South Side of Chicago who killed a white woman and burned her body in a furnace. Watkins viewed this as “almost true crime.” He suspected the book was a fictionalized depiction of an actual crime. Which it was; Wright himself said it was based on murders committed by “The Brick Moron,” Robert Nixon, who was electrocuted in 1939 after allegedly killing several white women. Wright, said Watkins, “changed it into a novel in order to make his point.” This was out of necessity. “There was a reluctance to let Blacks write in an authoritative manner about realistic injustices.”

This reluctance endured for decades.

David Krajicek was police bureau chief at the New York Daily News from 1987 to 1992. It was a period of sky-high homicide rates in New York City, with 2,245 murders in 1990 alone. The NYPD public information office, he says, was the gatekeeper, and determined the extent to which journalists were notified about any of them. A cop in Queens would report a homicide to his sergeant, who in turn would tell a lieutenant, who talked to the precinct commander. The precinct commander contacted the Queens central command, who then passed the information up the chain. There were numerous filters before news of a crime would reach police headquarters and then, finally, the deputy commissioner for public information, who decided what was worth sharing with reporters.

Around the Daily News, reporters joked that, in order to be written about, a murder must contain all the elements —“ a white, attractive female killed in a horrible way, in an interesting place,” as Krajicek put it. Murders that didn’t fit the bill (say, a quadruple homicide in the Bronx ) simply didn’t get covered.

Daily News reporters did 18-month rotations on his crime desk. Success on the beat was largely contingent on maintaining a roster of cop sources, and not being perceived as adversarial. “Based on one story, you can lose all of your sources at the NYPD. If they decide that you’re a dick and you’ve done them wrong — done an individual cop wrong — the reputation spreads immediately,” Krajicek recalled. “If you show up with Black skin, their presumption’s already made about what your reputation is.” Natalie Byfield, a Black reporter who covered the Central Park Five case, had a particularly difficult time. She later wrote : “As a young African American female journalist watching and participating in the unfolding jogger coverage, I felt the sting and the heat of racism as I plotted my own course through the newsroom and the city.”

Socializing with the police wasn’t required, but it was useful. It was the favored practice of cop-friendly columnists, including Jimmy Breslin, who lamented , said a former Newsday editor, that “reporters don’t go out anymore to drink with police.”

Krajicek, early in his career, rode shotgun as cops took him on roundups of sex workers. “Ride-alongs,” as they’re known, are a long tradition on the beat. Understandably, not every reporter greets them with the same level of excitement.

In 2006, when Slate’s Joel Anderson was working for the Shreveport Times, he took over the night cops beat. His white, female predecessor was friendly with the police, who noted that Anderson wasn’t as pretty. As part of his orientation, he was pressured to do a ride-along. “I had no interest in doing any of that shit,” says Anderson. It would soon be clear to him that police have a version of events that sometimes conflicts with the victim’s and the accused’s versions. It wasn’t his job to figure out which party was most credible. Cops, Anderson was told, were “the guardians of the truth.” To approach the beat any other way was to do it wrong.

Anderson, who was soon reassigned to city government, realized incident reports were, at best, subjective post facto versions of events, and “not necessarily a reflection of what happened.” (In 2015, it should be noted, the district attorney overseeing Shreveport’s county, Caddo Parish, said Louisiana should “ kill more people .”)

A way around the official version of events is to either decenter law enforcement or bypass it entirely.

The absence of that perspective is why, even 40 years later, James Baldwin’s coverage of the Atlanta child murders—now the subject of a five-part HBO docuseries —is so startling.

As Casey Cep chronicled in the New Yorker, Baldwin was lured to Atlanta by Lowe — who had moved to Playboy as an editor — after dozens of the city’s Black children were murdered between 1978 and 1981. The resulting essay, titled “The Evidence of Things Not Seen,” proudly defies true crime tropes. Baldwin’s focus was not the murders or the investigations, but systemic anti-Black violence. He did not see the murders as sui generis. The killings, he believed, “ did not so much alter the climate of Atlanta as reveal, or, as it were, epiphanize it. ”

Baldwin’s insistence on writing about the larger issues at play —that societal sickness was as much to blame for the dead children as any murderer— and his refusal to treat the events as a minute-by-minute account, confounded critics. “ There is far too much sermonizing here on the overall state of race relations in America and not enough digging into specific facts of the Atlanta murders,” clucked the New York Times.

Baldwin did talk to detectives, but he didn’t take them at their word and never had. “We did not feel that the cops were protecting us, for we knew too much about the reasons for the kinds of crimes committed in the ghetto,” he wrote of his childhood , “but we feared black cops even more than white cops, because the black cop had to work so much harder — on your head — to prove to himself and his colleagues that he was not like all the other niggers.” He was more interested, recalled Lowe, in how white Americans historically viewed Black men as killers and rapists of white women. On his two trips to Atlanta, he wrestled with the assumptions around what constitutes a criminal and what constitutes a victim. He believed that Wayne Williams, who eventually stood trial for the murder of two adults, was probably innocent. He was having difficulty, says Lowe, “with not only the idea that the murderer might be Black but that the murderer might have some sort of pedophile profile.”

Lowe, who considers Alex Haley’s “Roots” to be the greatest work of true crime, continued: “[Baldwin] was like a doctor diagnosing a complex disease. But at the time, everybody wanted him to be a much more accusatory voice.”

The genre has evolved, somewhat.

A highly regarded true crime story from recent years doesn’t have a single on-the-record quote from law enforcement. The word “detective” appears only once. These absences in Karen K. Ho’s 2015 Toronto Life feature, “ Jennifer Pan’s Revenge ,” are particularly striking because it is, at least superficially, an old-fashioned minute-by-minute account about the murder of a Vietnamese family.

“I did not know how to interview cops when I did my story,” says Ho, who had never before written anything investigative. During the two years of reporting and writing, she neither met with police nor talked to them by phone. The story, which lays out in great detail how the Canadian daughter of Vietnamese immigrants hired hitmen to kill her parents, was based on jailhouse interviews, sworn video statements, letters, court transcripts, and yearbooks. It is also partially a memoir, for which Ho interviewed her own family.

It didn’t occur to Ho that interviewing police would be useful, or that the story demanded their perspective. Ho had not been raised to treat them with reverence or as an unquestionable source of information, and she still felt that way. She couldn’t relate to stories, even great ones like The Marshall Project and ProPublica’s “ An Unbelievable Story of Rape ,” in which investigators played the hero. For her, Jay Caspian Kang’s 2013 New York Times Magazine story about a middle-aged Korean man who shot and killed seven people at a university in Oakland, California, was more of a touchstone. “[Kang] showed me why having a nonwhite perspective on a crime involving people of color was an asset, and not a detriment or hindrance to my reporting of it,” says Ho.

Ho expertly wrote about the overarching failures that led to the Pan murders. Just as Baldwin told readers about the anti-Black violence that made the killing of Atlanta’s children inevitable, Ho revealed the academic pressure brought to bear on children of Asian immigrants. Referring to her father and her own upbringing, she wrote: “I felt like a hamster on a wheel, sprinting to meet some sort of expectation, solely determined by him, that was always just out of reach.”

Talking to Ho sparked a reconsideration of what true crime ought to be. The genre is so white largely because the definition of crime is so narrow. Ho cited Andrea González-Ramírez’s Type Investigations feature on domestic violence in Puerto Rico . Isn’t that crime? she asked. What about the work of Adam Serwer, who writes with cutting poetry about systemic anti-Black brutality ? What about Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah’s story on Dylann Roof ? Aren’t these works of true crime, too? 

A few days later, I called Steven Thrasher, who, while not a true crime writer by trade, had written about Michael Bloomberg’s fondness for incarcerating the city’s Black men and a series of fine stories on the “ Tiger Mandingo ” case. He’s also been one of the more prominent voices warning against “copaganda” —sunny, kid-gloved portrayals of law enforcement. We talked about how true crime so often prizes the perceived oddity. “ Exceptionalism becomes the story,” he said. Oftentimes, true depravity is deadly repetition.

Thrasher pointed to a lecture delivered by former Guardian columnist Gary Younge in 2016 , in which Younge cited the tired maxim, attributed to a New York newspaper editor: When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news. But what if, asked Younge, we’ve got it backward? What if the thousand people shot and killed by police in the last year is the real story? Or what if the dog-bites-man story is quite literal? He cited a Department of Justice report on the Ferguson protests, which found that “in every canine bite incident for which racial information is available, the subject was African American.”

If a dog bites man again and again and again, that, too, is a story.

The genre of true crime should expand to the point where it is unrecognizable from what it is today. It should include the work of Wesley Lowery, Joel Anderson , and Albert Samaha , and also Aura Bogado, who writes horrifying dispatches on America’s ongoing crime against humanity : its immigration system. Bogado, doing excellent, humane work for Reveal on a beat that is often prominently populated by white men, has written about the federal government forcibly drugging children at a Texas residential treatment center. I expect Bogado would find the notion of her stories being classified with the likes of Truman Capote and Ann Rule more than a little laughable. The genre is, she told me, “a niche within the larger world of journalism, which is itself a segregated world, right?”

That must change, if it is to have continued relevance and value. Progress has been slow , but substantive; consider the peerless work of Cree reporter Connie Walker, and her CBC investigation into a vanished Native child. But it’s a notable exception. Pervasive whiteness is a decades-long problem that won’t be solved quickly, if ever.

After all, as Walter Lowe told me, you can’t sell a product for which there is no audience. To have more books, features, and podcasts by and about nonwhite people, there must be a demand for them. (There is.) In order for there to be sufficient, recognized demand, he said, nonwhite victims must be seen as people. That part, maddeningly, is not a given.

“The horse is what’s happening in the street; it’s the growing interest by white people in an accurate history of this country. The cart is whatever shifts in literary culture result from that,” continued Lowe, who cited Carter G. Woodson’s 1933 work “ The Mis-Education of the Negro.” “What has not been dealt with is the miseducation of the white person in America. What is happening right now, from grammar school up through college, is a serious re-examination of the way American history has been taught — a serious re-examination of the racist lens through which many white folks in America have been taught — and wanting to change the lens, to be more equitable to the points of view of people of color and Native Americans.”

Only after such a fundamental change will there be lasting demand for true crime, and a more sophisticated and inclusive sense of what “qualifies” for the genre, by and about people of color. That, Lowe concludes, “is the horse that is going to pull the cart.”

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Every Johnny Depp Movie Ranked From Worst to Best

Al pacino's best movies, ranked, disney pushed back against alien: romulus' new xenomorph form, director reveals debate.

• Lefty Ruggiero's real life differed from his portrayal in Donnie Brasco, showcasing only part of his criminal career.
• Lefty formed a close bond with undercover agent Donnie Brasco, with detailed interactions not fully shown in the movie.
• The impact of the Donnie Brasco movie on the Mafia, especially the Bonanno family, led to significant repercussions and trials.

Benjamin 'Lefty' Ruggiero is a key character in Donnie Brasco , but what happens to him at the end of the story differs from real life. Based on the true story of FBI Agent Joseph Pistone's six-year infiltration into the Mafia, the movie presents a riveting narrative set in New York City. Johnny Depp stars as Pistone and the story follows Pistone as he adopts the alias "Donnie Brasco" to gain the trust and respect of the members of the Bonanno family, one of the most important Mafia families in New York, especially 'Lefty' Ruggiero (Al Pacino).

Lefty, an aging Mafia hitman and enforcer for the Bonanno crime family, is depicted as a complex character who befriends Donnie Brasco. This relationship forms the core of Donnie Brasco 's narrative, which is what makes it a great gangster movie . However, while Lefty is shown as a key figure in the mob, the film only scratches the surface of his real-life counterpart. Additionally, some of the movie's events including Lefty are extremely dramatized. The character's portrayal in the film serves as a foundation for exploring the actual events and what happened to Lefty after Donnie Brasco .

From sailing the high seas to the misery of Mortdecai, here are Johnny Depp's films ranked from worst to best.

Lefty Was A Real-Life Gangster

The movie focuses on one aspect of lefty's long criminal career.

Benjamin "Lefty" Ruggiero, born on April 19, 1926, in Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan, led a life deeply entrenched in organized crime. His journey into the underworld began in Little Italy, where he grew up. As a young man, Lefty joined the Bonanno family organization , starting as a street soldier under caporegime Michael Sabella (via Donnie Brasco: Unfinished Business by Joe Pistone).

The movie version of Lefty, while capturing his essence as a mobster, glosses over certain details of his life.

His criminal activities included bookmaking, extortion, and loansharking. Ruggiero's life, markedly different in certain aspects from his cinematic portrayal, was one of a seasoned gangster who rose through the ranks. The movie version of Lefty, while capturing his essence as a mobster, glosses over certain details of his life.

The Bonanno crime family, one of the most significant Mafia families in New York, was where Lefty Ruggiero found his foothold in organized crime. His integration into the family was facilitated through his relationship with Anthony Mirra, a Bonanno soldier. Ruggiero's involvement in the family's bookmaking and extortion criminal activities played a crucial role in his rise within the organization.

Donnie Brasco simplifies Lefty's journey in the Bonanno family , focusing mainly on his connection with Donnie Brasco. However, in reality, Lefty's integration was a more complex process involving various criminal operations and relationships with key figures like Philip "Rusty" Rastelli, the future family boss.

Lefty & Donnie Brasco Really Did Form A Close Bond

The fake donnie brasco was left's best man.

The relationship between Lefty and Donnie Brasco (undercover agent Joseph Pistone) was indeed close in real life, mirroring their portrayal in the film, according to Pistone's autobiography, Donnie Brasco: Unfinished Business . Introduced by Anthony Mirra, Lefty and Donnie developed a bond through their work together in Ruggiero's bookmaking operation.

This closeness was further cemented by personal events, such as Brasco serving as the best man at Ruggiero's wedding and advising him on his son's heroin addiction. Their relationship exemplifies the emotional and psychological challenges faced by undercover agents, who often form genuine connections with their targets regardless of the latter's criminal background.

The Real Donnie Brasco Went To School To Learn About Diamonds

Brasco's cover was that he was a former jewel thief.

Joe Pistone, the real Donnie Brasco, undertook substantial preparation for his undercover role, including education on precious gems and diamonds. This training was critical for Pistone to convincingly pose as an expert jewel thief . His connections with jewelers further supplemented his knowledge and credibility in this area.

In an interview with Jonesville Station , Pistone emphasized the importance of authenticity in his undercover work. He mentioned that if he was unsure about something, instead of fabricating a lie, he would admit his lack of knowledge, reasoning that no one is expected to know everything in their profession. This approach helped maintain his cover and build trust within the mob.

Did Lefty Really Cut Up Dead Bodies?

The movie shows the brutal violence of the mob world.

In Donnie Brasco , there are dramatic depictions of mob violence, including a disturbing scene where Lefty is involved in dismembering bodies. While the film portrays this as part of his role in the Mafia, the reality of Lefty's involvement in such activities is more nuanced. The real Joe Pistone revealed that there was one specific time when a dead body was dismembered (via Las Vegas Review-Journal ), but that was simply because the victim was so big.

Even then, Pistone's comments don't make it clear if Lefty was even involved. Additionally, Pistone mentioned that the dismemberment was achieved using a chainsaw, not a hacksaw as seen in the film. Crime movies like Donnie Brasco do often lean into the violence of the lawless life so it is not surprising the movie added some gruesome details.

Did The Real Donnie Brasco Ever Actually Kill Anyone?

The fbi had a plan to cover for any murders.

Joe Pistone, as Donnie Brasco, never actually killed anyone during his undercover operation. This is a significant departure from some cinematic portrayals of undercover agents where they are often shown engaging in violence, including murder, to maintain their cover. Pistone revealed that if there was a situation where he was asked to kill someone, which did happen, he would collaborate with the FBI to stage a murder and place the intended victim into witness protection (via Penn ). This approach was used four times during his undercover work in the Bonanno family.

Between The Godfather, Scarface, and Dog Day Afternoon, Al Pacino has tons of iconic characters and classic movies in his endless filmography.

How The Mafia Responded To The Donnie Brasco Movie

Figures depicted in the movie actually spoke out.

The release of the Donnie Brasco movie triggered a unique response from the Mafia, particularly affecting the Bonanno crime family. Notably, mobster John (Boobie) Cerasani, associated with the Bonanno family and having had dealings with Donnie Brasco (Joseph Pistone), took legal action against the makers of the film. Cerasani filed a libel suit against Sony Corporation , TriStar Pictures, and others involved in the production, alleging that the gangster movie defamed him. This claim stemmed from his acquittal in 1982 on racketeering charges that were part of Pistone's investigation.

However, Manhattan Federal Judge Denny Chin dismissed Cerasani's claims as baseless, asserting that his acquittal was not a declaration of innocence but rather a failure to prove absolute guilt (via RCFP ). Judge Chin further highlighted Cerasani's criminal history , listing various convictions from 1985 to 1994, reinforcing the view that the film's portrayal did not constitute defamation. This legal battle exemplifies the real-world impact of the film on the individuals portrayed and their attempts to control their narrative outside the cinematic world.

What Happened To Lefty After The Events Of Donnie Brasco?

Lefty died before the movie was released.

The fallout from the Donnie Brasco operation had significant consequences for Lefty Ruggiero. However, while the ending of Donnie Brasco hints at Lefty getting murdered, that wasn't the case whatsoever. Ruggiero himself was arrested on August 29, 1981 , and later convicted of racketeering conspiracy, receiving a 15-year prison sentence. Lefty's life post-Brasco was marked by a refusal to believe in Brasco's true identity and a vow for revenge. He served almost 11 years in prison before being released in April 1993 due to his deteriorating health from lung and testicular cancer. Ruggiero died on November 24, 1994.

What Happened To The Real Donnie Brasco?

The mob sought revenge on pistone.

After the conclusion of Operation Donnie Brasco, the real Joe Pistone's life took a dramatic turn. Due to his successful infiltration into the Mafia, which led to over 200 indictments and more than 100 convictions, the Mafia placed a $500,000 contract on Pistone's life (via Global News ).

This threat was so significant that the FBI had to intervene, advising Mafia bosses in New York not to murder Pistone. Eventually, the contract was dropped, considering the high risk and attention it would attract. Despite this danger, Pistone did not shy away from the public eye, testifying in various trials and continuing his work against organized crime.

The real Joe Pistone's true crime podcast, Deep Cover: The Real Donnie Brasco , is available on Spotify and Apple.

Post-FBI, Pistone's life remained shrouded in secrecy for safety reasons. He lives under an assumed name with his family in an undisclosed location. Despite these precautions, Pistone has remained active, authoring books and serving as a consultant to law enforcement agencies globally.

His expertise in organized crime is so renowned that he has been called upon to testify before the United States Senate (via The Daily Record ). In May 2020, embracing the digital age, Pistone started a podcast titled Deep Cover: The Real Donnie Brasco , offering insights into his unique experiences in the criminal underworld​​.

What Happened To The Bonanno Family After Donnie Brasco?

Donnie brasco's infiltration severely damaged the crime family.

The impact of the Donnie Brasco movie on the Mafia was profound. The film's release brought to light the depth of Pistone's infiltration into the Mafia, emphasizing the vulnerability of these criminal organizations to law enforcement penetration. The Bonanno Family, in particular, faced significant repercussions for their inadvertent role in allowing Pistone to penetrate their ranks. As depicted in the film, Pistone's close brush with becoming a 'made man' within the Bonanno Family highlighted a significant breach of security within the Mafia.

This exposure led to the Mafia Commission Trial, where significant figures in organized crime were convicted.

The repercussions of Pistone's infiltration, as dramatized in the film, resonated throughout the Mafia structure. It confirmed the existence of "The Commission," a secretive body governing the Mafia, causing a public embarrassment. This exposure led to the Mafia Commission Trial, where significant figures in organized crime were convicted. The Bonanno Family, once a respected part of the Commission, was temporarily removed from the Five Family ruling hierarchy (via NY Times ), demonstrating the severe consequences they faced due to the events that unfolded in Donnie Brasco .

How Accurate Donnie Brasco Is Compared To Other Mafia Movies

Donnie brasco achieves an authentic look into this world.

Donnie Brasco fits into the long legacy of gangster movies, many of which draw from real life. While the movie does make changes to aspects of the story, including Lefty's role, Donnie Brasco is more effective at retelling a true story than other mafia movies . There are some examples in the genre that are based on true stories but seem to have no intention of telling what really happened. Another one of Johnny Depp's mob movies, Public Enemies, changes a lot in its story of John Dillinger, while The Untouchables wildly embellishes the story of Al Capone's downfall.

There are also mob movies that are only loosely based on true stories, using them as inspiration to tell largely fictionalized tales. Marlon Brando's classic On the Waterfront is said to be based on the story of a prizefighter who stood up to the mob. Likewise, Martin Scorsese's Best Picture winner, The Departed , is inspired by Boston criminal Whitey Bulger, though only small details are recognizable in the finished product.

Donnie Brasco fits more along the lines of Scorsese's other gangster movies, like Goodfellas and Casino . While Goodfellas ' true story certainly has differences from what is shown in the movie, Scorsese achieves an authentic mob movie by capturing the feeling of this world. Likewise in Donnie Brasco , the film might not get every detail correct, but the audience understands these characters in this world and believes that they are real. It is that approach that makes this stranger-than-fiction story all the more impactful.

Sources: Donnie Brasco: Unfinished Business, Jonesville Station , Las Vegas Review-Journal , Penn , RCFP , Donnie Brasco , Globalnews , The Daily Record , NY Times

Donnie Brasco

Not available

Donnie Brasco is a crime drama film directed by Mike Newell, featuring Johnny Depp as an undercover FBI agent who infiltrates the mafia. Al Pacino co-stars as a seasoned mobster who mentors him. Based on true events, the movie explores the agent's struggle to balance his professional duties and personal identity.

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288 Crime Essay Topics & True Crime Research Topics

Looking for an exciting topic about crime? This article is for you! Here, you will find the most unique crime topics for your compare-and-contrast essay or problem solution paper. We’ve also included true crime research topics for you to check out!

🔝 Top 10 Crime Essay Topics for 2024

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• Crime Rate: the Recidivism Rate The rate at which an act is done repeatedly by a given person is termed the recidivism rate. This act is usually preceded by corrective or discouraging attempts on the individual.
• Racism, Crime and Justice and Growing-Up Bad Disproportionate discrimination of the black and Asian youths by justice and law enforcement agencies in Britain is a product of a multiplicity of factors.
• Crime Rates: Hawaii Crime measurements are critical indicators for accepting or declining potential legislations, and these statistics help to build the correct course among law enforcement agencies.
• White Collar Crime – Madoff Affair Madoff knew how to play, but more importantly, it was due to the many loopholes in the regulatory framework. Madoff exploited these loopholes to run his illegal activities.
• The Effects of Hate Crime Law on Democracy
• Crime Theory Regarding Rape Laws
• Crime and Class Relations Analysis
• Property Crime Rates in Fayetteville, North Carolina
• Uniform Crime Reports: Crime Trends and Repeat Victimization
• Crime and Causation: Robbery
• Crime Statistics Comparison Between Two Universities
• Current Corrections in the Criminal Justice System and Crime Control
• The Case of Shooting at Planned Parenthood: Understanding the Causes of the Crime
• Media and Crime: Shaping of Public Opinion
• The Profiling of Crime Victims
• The Psychological Underpinning of True Crime Obsession
• The Theory Deviance and Crime
• The Crime Control Model: Due Process Values
• White Collar Crime, Corporate Crime and Substance Abuse
• Confidential Informants and Crime
• Property Crime and Sociological Typologies: Law Study
• Terrorism as a Transnational Organized Crime
• Crime Among the Juveniles: Causes
• Homeland Security, Race and Crime in the US
• The Relationship Between Drugs and Addiction to Crime
• Crime Situation in Bankstown-Australia
• Drugs and Society Violent Crime: Public Drunkenness
• Should We Rely on Eye-Witness Testimonies to Identify Crime-Suspects?
• Drug Abuse and Crime Correlation
• Presidential Powers: Official Pardon for Crime Granting
• Families, Delinquency and Crime
• Crime and Justice by Curie
• Feasibility of Modifying Crime Map
• Biological, Biosocial and Classical Theories of Crime
• Fiction Versus Reality: Crime as a Social Phenomenon
• Criminal Justice and Crime Control in the US
• Organized Crime: Forming of the Definition
• Juvenile and Crime: The Reasons and Today’s Situation
• “White-Collar Crime” Definition and Qualification
• Internationalism: The Issue of Transitional Crime
• Assessing Role of Technology in Police Crime Mapping
• Juvenile Crime Concepts Review
• Criminological Theory: Context and Consequences. The Notion of Criminality and Crime
• Crime Rates in the United States over 20 Years
• Crime Theories. “Can’t Catch a Break” by Sered & Norton-Hawk
• “Goodfellas” Crime Drama Film by Martin Scorsese
• Sex Trafficking by Organized Crime Groups
• Organized Crime and Drug Trafficking Offenders
• The Crime of Challenging Moral Settings
• Recidivism of Juvenile Crime
• Capital Punishment for Crime Deterrence
• Childhood Crime at School in the State of Texas
• Organized and Transnational Crime in Southeast Asia
• Crime Scene Safety and Security in the United States
• Crime and Delinquency Theories
• Sociological Diversity and Its Impact on Crime Rate
• How Local Television News Viewing Relates to Fear of Crime?
• Capital Punishment as Ineffective Crime Deterrence
• Race and Crime Among Minorities in the US
• Organized Business Crime Prosecution and Investigation
• Crime Types and Their Harm to Society
• Crime Scene Investigation Effect in Justice System
• Repression and Crime Control
• The Teens, Crime, and Community Project in the US
• White-Collar Crime and Negligence
• Crime Scene Investigation in Media and Real Life
• “Crime in Post-Katrina Houston” Study by Settles and Lindsay
• Is There Such Thing as a Victimless Crime?
• Nortel Networks Company’s Corporate Crime
• Nurse Robaczynski’s Case: Crime or Mercy Killing?
• US Gun Control Measures and Crime Rates Reduction
• Psychological Help as the Prevent From Possible Crime
• Generali Group: Developments in Financial Crime
• Youth Crime Prevention and Needs Assessment
• Illegal Immigrants and Its Effects on Crime
• The Racilisation of Crime and Cultural Panics
• Criminality Development in the Documentary A Life of Crime
• How Can Criminology Theories Help in Preventing or Solving Crimes?
• Should Children Who Commit Crime Be Tried as Adults?
• Are Crime Control and Social Welfare Becoming More Punitive?
• How Can Social Science Theory Help Reduce Crime?
• Can Criminological Theories Help Manage Crime in the Workplace?
• Should Government Implement Laws for Cyber Crime?
• Does Imprisoning Drug Offenders Reduce Crime Rates?
• How Does the Holocaust Explodes the Concept of Mass Crime?
• Are Hate Crime Laws Effective?
• What Is the Link Between Drugs and Crime and What Can Be Done Towards Drug-Related Crimes?
• How Does Criminology Help Our Understanding of Crime and Criminals?
• Does Social Deprivation Relate to Crime?
• What Impact Does the Changing Nature of Crime Have on Criminology?
• Are Homeless People More Likely to Become Involved or Be Victims of Crime?
• How Can Technology Help Police and Government Officials Solve Crime?
• Should Crime Victims Have Rights During Criminal Investigations?
• Can Public Works Programs Reduce Youth Crime?
• How Were Crime and Punishment Handled in the Roman Era?
• Are Non-custodial Sentences Soft on Crime?
• How Do Crime Scene Investigations Aid in Prosecution?
• Can Death Penalty Prevent the Rise in Crime Rate?
• Does Longer Incarceration Deter or Incapacitate Crime?
• How Does Corporate Crime Challenge Conventional Definitions of Crime?
• Can Punitive Measures Curtail Crime?
• How Does the Media Use an Ideal Victim in Portrayals of Crime?

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StudyCorgi . 2021. "288 Crime Essay Topics & True Crime Research Topics." September 9, 2021. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/crime-essay-topics/.

These essay examples and topics on Crime were carefully selected by the StudyCorgi editorial team. They meet our highest standards in terms of grammar, punctuation, style, and fact accuracy. Please ensure you properly reference the materials if you’re using them to write your assignment.

This essay topic collection was updated on June 21, 2024 .

The 10 Best Movies Based on True Crimes, Ranked

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If there's one thing that's been persistent throughout human history, it's crime. Since the dawn of law itself, there have always been people who have intentionally sought ways to break those laws for their own personal benefit, with the belief that rules are made to be broken. Most people who break the law do it on a relatively small scale, and maybe only once or twice. But there are some out there who have built an entire criminal empire off of their schemes.

Movies, and biopics in particular, have taken a huge interest in some of the most famous criminals throughout history . Their criminal operations range from the more light-hearted cons and frauds to sinister series of killings, and everything in between. There's a lot of variety in the genre, but among the most well-known, there is one constant: they are known for being some of the best films of all time.

10 'Memories of Murder' (2003)

Based on lee choonjae.

Memories of Murder comes from South Korean film director Bong Joon-ho , who has become famous for his iconic 2019 thriller, Parasite . Bong's Memories of Murder follows two investigators as they track down Lee Choonjae , South Korea's first documented serial killer. Lee confessed to murdering 14 people in and around the Hwaseong area. The movie not only paints a grisly picture of Lee, but also of the local police department, who are pictured as arrogant and way too relaxed about it, given they'd never dealt with a case like this before.

While not Bong Joon-ho's best film, it comes as a chilling reminder that killers could be anywhere, and are often very inconspicuous. But there's also a lot of strangely comedic moments in the film, mainly poking fun at the police in a tongue-in-cheek manner. Critically, Memories of Murder was a huge success, with many reviewers commending its narrative for its multiple twists and turns, which leaves every minute more exciting than the last .

Memories of Murder

Not available

9 'Dog Day Afternoon' (1975)

Based on the chase manhattan heist & hostage crisis.

Dog Day Afternoon stars the legendary Al Pacino as Sonny, a bank robber who is based on a real criminal named John Wojtowicz . It tells the story of Wojtowicz's first (and last) heist, in which he and a few others attempted to rob a bank, only to have their plans spiral out of control in hilarious fashion. First, one of the crew members gets cold feet and leaves in a panic. Next, the robbers are treated to some bad news: the daily cash pickup has already come for the day, so there are only about a thousand dollars in the register. Then, when Sonny burns the register in anger, the smoke prompts police to surround the building. Panicked, the crew takes everyone inside the bank hostage.

The movie is a bit over-the-top, but that didn't stop it from winning an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. On top of that, the chaos of the attempted robbery gives the characters so much personality , and the actors playing them work so well together. It's pretty violent, but it can also be really hilarious at times. Admittedly, it is pretty funny watching a routine bank robbery fall apart at the seams, especially when it was supposed to be so simple. It's the perfect storm of bad luck, but it makes for a brilliant story, all the same.

Dog Day Afternoon

8 'zodiac' (2007), based on the zodiac killer.

Zodiac is centered around one of the most baffling unsolved mysteries in history: that of the rampage of the Zodiac Killer, who killed several victims across California during the 60s and 70s. To this day, the identity of the Zodiac killer is still unknown. The film comes with a lot of big names, including Mark Ruffalo , Robert Downey Jr ., and Jake Gyllenhaal , all three of whom are determined to figure out who the enigmatic killer is.

Like many good mystery movies, the crimes are never solved at the end , though it's pretty clear which of the real-life suspects the movie points the finger at. The movie itself matches the vibe of the times perfectly: the Zodiac terrified young couples in California at the time, and there was no telling where or when he would strike. Zodiac shows this in horrifying detail, painting the killer as the monster he really was. Aside from that, it's a brilliant slow-burn movie with excellent performances from experienced actors .

7 'Catch Me if You Can' (2002)

Based on frank abagnale jr..

Catch Me if You Can has a lot of well-established names in it, including Leonardo DiCaprio , Tom Hanks , Amy Adams , Martin Sheen , Christopher Walken , and many others. It also comes from the creative mind of Steven Spielberg and is one of his finest movies. DiCaprio takes the reins as Frank Abagnale Jr. , a security consultant who engaged in multiple fraudulent practices, mainly targeting small businesses and isolated individuals.

Hanks plays a fictitious FBI agent named Carl, who is constantly pursuing the young con artist, who happens to be very good at evading the law, hence the title. Catch Me if You Can was nominated, but ultimately snubbed of two Oscars, but that's okay because it won a whole slew of other awards from different organizations. Critically, it was a major success, with the movie being deemed to actually be an easy, sweet watch, and not at all as heavy as other crime films , which makes it more palatable to even the most averse to the genre.

Catch Me If You Can

6 'all the president's men' (1976), based on the watergate scandal.

All the President's Men follows the Watergate Scandal, one of the most famous political scandals in recent memory. The scandal involved then-president Richard Nixon , who was involved in espionage against his rival political party hoping to get leverage against them, and tried to cover it up when it received media attention. Nixon does not make an appearance in the film, but several other journalists and political figures do, all played by actors, of course.

The movie came out in 1976 , just a few years after the scandal itself, so this was an extremely hot-button issue to tackle at the time with it being a fresh wound, and all. And yet, it does so with grace and tact, painting a vivid picture of the struggle of the press at a time of political turmoil. It also has a brilliant screenplay, which it won an Oscar for. It also won three more Oscars for Best Sound, Best Art Direction, and Best Supporting Actor on behalf of Jason Robards . All in all, it is a brilliant film, even in retrospect, that depicts the dishonesty of those involved with, well, honesty .

All the President's Men

5 'the wolf of wall street' (2013), based on jordan belfort.

Not everyone realizes this, but Martin Scorsese 's film The Wolf of Wall Street is indeed based on a true story, primarily taking inspiration from a memoir of the same name by Jordan Belfort . Belfort was a Wall Street stockbroker who was convicted on charges of fraud, involving manipulating the stock market and running a "boiler room" call center as part of a penny-stock scam. In the film, Belfort is played by Leonardo DiCaprio , who brings an electrifying performance that makes what would otherwise be a standard role so much more interesting.

It's not just a crime-drama though, it's also a dark comedy, with a lot of admittedly bizarre, yet hilarious moments mixed in as Jordan earns piles and piles of ill-gotten money. While not the best work Scorsese has released, it's a really good film nonetheless and is definitely a must-watch for a more light-hearted approach to crime. Wild and fun, The Wolf of Wall Street oozes with all of the classic Scorses tropes and was received well by critics and casual viewers alike.

The Wolf of Wall Street

4 'can you ever forgive me' (2018), based on lee israel.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? follows reclusive author Lee Israel ( Melissa McCarthy ), whose writing career is stalling, and failing to pay the bills. Desperate for cash, Israel cooked up a fraudulent scheme forging letters from other deceased writers, and selling them to collectors and bookstore owners, none of whom knew that they were actively being scammed. In 2008, Israel published her memoir, confessing to her various crimes, which was met with both vitriol and sympathy, both from disgruntled victims of the scam and from those who understand the plight of financial struggles.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? was nominated for and won over 70 awards from over a dozen organizations, including three Oscar nominations and two Golden Globe nominations. Much of the praise was in regards to its screenplay, as well as the performances of its actors, with McCarthy receiving particular attention. It's a movie brimming with morbid wit and paints a harrowing picture of a struggling artist , one that is equal parts funny and disheartening, making this the best movie based on a real crime, hands down.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018)

3 'butch cassidy and the sundance kid' (1969), based on butch cassidy and sundance kid.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid tells the story of two notorious Old West outlaws, who are played by Paul Newman and Robert Redford , respectively. The two criminals were bandits, known for either robbing banks or plundering trains before making off with their loot. The two are known for going down in a blaze of glory in Bolivia, after a lengthy pursuit from various law enforcement agencies that stretched across both of the Americas.

In real life, they were horrible people, but that didn't stop their story from being lionized. Their violent deaths are absolutely iconic in cinema, with both Cassidy and the Sundance Kid going down swinging... or rather, shooting. The film takes place over the course of six years, detailing their various exploits before their gruesome deaths, and is one of the most brilliant Western films ever created .

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

Rent on Apple TV

2 'Bonnie and Clyde' (1967)

Based on bonnie and clyde.

Bonnie and Clyde tells the story of the world's most famous crime duo, Bonnie Parker ( Faye Dunaway ), and Clyde Barrow ( Warren Beatty ). The two formed a romantic relationship like no other, with date night consisting of stealing and killing in the Central United States during the Great Depression. They eventually gathered a large following of gang members, and quickly became the most prolific bandits of their era.

The two are also famous for meeting a gruesome end at the hands of law enforcement, with their car being shot to ribbons with them inside, and the movie makes sure to portray this with startling accuracy. The movie is not only an excellent neo-noir film, but it also marks the film debut of Gene Wilder , who plays the hostage Eugene Grizzard. Today, it is widely considered one of the most influential crime films, marking a new era for Hollywood and bringing a famous true story to life in a way like no other.

Bonnie and Clyde

1 'goodfellas' (1990), based on henry hill.

Goodfellas seems like a standard mob movie, starring a lot of popular actors like Joe Pesci , Robert de Niro , and Ray Liotta , but it differs in its brilliant screenplay, and in the fact that it's based on a true story. Right off the bat, the movie gets good, with a lengthy opening monologue from its main character, who expresses his desire to become a mobster, even when he was a child, because the mob provides a sense of family and belonging that not many other jobs can mimic. Immediately, it lets viewers know why people may seek a life in the mob, as this is a common reason that some people flock to them.

The main man in question is Henry Hill (Liotta), an American mafioso who was eventually caught by the FBI before testifying against his former associates and becoming a police informant. The movie is based off of the non-fiction book Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family by crime journalist Nicholas Pileggi . With its outstanding dialogue and familiar faces, Goodfellas is a brilliant mobster film, but also one that stands apart from the rest as it chronicles the life of one of the most famous mafia members in history.

NEXT: The Best Movies About Real-Life Serial Killers, Ranked

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Crime Essay Topics: 25+ Interesting Ideas for Your Next Paper

by  Antony W

June 27, 2024

Your next crime essay has to be on point. You have to prove to your professor that you understand themes of individual restraint, social behavior control, crime deterioration, criminal law, or anything related to crime. The first step is to choose a compelling topic to explore.

In this post, we give you a list of crime essay topics and ideas that you can explore. Whether you’ve started brainstorming or you feeling hopeless because you’re running late, these ideas can save you a lot of time.

Remember, how well and easy you write a crime essay depends on topic selection. So you should be careful to choose an idea that you can explore within the scope of the assignment. Read the assignment brief to determine which essay to write and how long it should be. Everything else builds on the topic you choose. 

Key Takeaways

• Look at different theories, contemporary issues, and sub-disciplines linked to crime to understand the different areas you can explore.
• Determine what fascinates you about crime in relation to law essays , coursework, and assignments.
• Write down the aspects of crime and social justice that most appeal to you and then narrow down your option to one area.
• Choose a specific topic that fits within your interest.

Best Crime Essay Topics

The following is a list of the best crime essay topic that you might find interesting for your next assignment:

Society and Justice Topics

• Rehabilitation and moralities
• The key characteristics of employment and crime
• Delinquency cases in children
• Community service and criminals
• Crime prevention in children
• Social ecology and abandoned peoples
• White-collar crimes and their consequences
• Is moral panic a new danger or an ordinary issue?
• Socio-economic background and crime
• Bad parenting and juvenile delinquencies
• Social changes in the United States is a problematic issue
• The pros and cons of background criminal checks
• Are new prisons necessary in the United States of America?
• Write an essay on rehabilitation and recidivism
• Social institutions and criminal justice
• Causes of victimization
• Justice as a norm in today’s society
• Criminal justice, sociology & psychology
• Social cohesion and criminal justice
• The prosecution of children as an adult in the United States of America
• Criminalizing homelessness in the United States of America and the world
• Cyber-bullying and cyber-stalking
• The role of education in keeping a safe society
• How to help abused children
• Children and online offenders

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Police and Policing Topics

• Ethical dimensions of policing and criminal justice: an analytical study
• Unpacking contemporary instances of police corruption: case analyses
• Militarization of law enforcement in the United States
• Examining instances of police brutality
• Police-public interactions and controversial issues in the United States
• Police as catalysts for societal change in the United States
• Critiquing crisis intervention training in policing
• Exploring systemic police abuse in the United States’ criminal justice framework
• Assessing the efficacy of predictive policing in law enforcement practices
• Tracing the historical trajectory of American policing from a contextual perspectives
• Advantages and dilemma of community support for policing in neighborhoods

Capital Punishment Essay Topics

• Understanding racial disparities in the criminal justice system and their societal ramifications
• Examining solitary confinement’s psychological impact on prisoners
• Critical assessment of mandatory minimum sentences in drug offense cases
• Ethical quandaries surrounding the employment of informants in criminal investigations
• Evaluating bias and discrimination in predictive policing algorithms
• Private prisons’ influence on the structure and functioning of the justice system
• Assessing rehabilitation programs’ efficacy in reducing recidivism
• Ethical considerations and data usage of technological surveillance in law enforcement:
• Decriminalization versus legalization perspectives over drug criminalization:
• Policy implications of mandatory drug testing for welfare recipients
• Impacts of bail reforms pretrial detention and systemic equity
• An assessment of efficacy of poverty, crime, and programmatic interventions

Criminal Law Essay Topics

• Intersecting legal and ethical dimensions of the death penalty
• Examining plea bargains: Implications and functionality in justice systems
• Evaluating the impact of mandatory minimum sentences on crime reduction
• Race, ethnicity, and the dynamics of the criminal justice system
• The role, reliability, and significance of forensic science in criminal investigations
• Unpacking the relationship between poverty and crime rates
• The contribution of forensic psychology to profiling in criminal investigations
• Evaluating its effectiveness of community policing in crime prevention and resolution
• Protecting victims’ rights within the criminal justice framework
• Ethical concerns and algorithmic biases in predictive policing applications
• Understanding mental health’s interplay with criminal behavior
• Exploring drug decriminalization or legalization: impacts on crime
• Surveillance ethics: Legitimacy and considerations in public spaces
• Media influence and its role in shaping public perception in criminal trials
• Implications and rectification of sentencing disparities based on socioeconomic status
• Assessing hate crime legislation’s efficacy in prosecution and prevention
• Restorative justice’s role in recidivism mitigation
• Emerging technologies in criminal law: AI, facial recognition, and privacy concerns
• Technology’s influence on criminal investigations and privacy rights
• Effectiveness of rehabilitation programs in recidivism prevention

Criminal Justice Essay Topics

• Regulatory frameworks and security protocols
• Understanding eligibility and protection in witness security programs
• Patterns and profiles of abduction, ransom, and recurring behaviors
• Contemporary challenges and priorities for law enforcement
• Forensic science’s role and evolution in modern criminal justice
• Evaluating the effectiveness of community corrections programs
• Identity theft in today’s context: Risks and impactful consequences
• Forgery incidents: Prevalence in workplaces, government, and academia
• Addressing issues and improvement strategies of prison living conditions:
• Real-world application of prosecution laws
• Anatomy of a criminal trial: The processes and key components explained
• Navigating ethical challenges in law enforcement from a critical perspective
• Exploring historical insights and lessons from the evolution of criminal courts
• Religious motive crimes: Understanding sentencing and punitive measures
• The impact and ethical considerations of the media’s role in crime narratives
• Problem-solving courts: Resolving foundational issues in justice systems
• Distributive justice’s significance in the framework of criminal justice
• Mechanisms and taxonomies in categorization of crimes
• Looking at the methodologies and considerations for jury selection processes:
• The role of crime mapping in modern criminal justice dynamics

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Law and Crime

True crimes, false confessions, helping jurors understand why innocent people confess..

Posted August 19, 2024 | Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer

• False confessions continue to plague the criminal justice system and contribute to wrongful convictions.
• Jurors wrestle with the idea that anyone who is innocent would confess to a crime.
• Specific jury instructions and expert witness testimony can undo much of the damage.

On June 14, 2024, Sandra Hemme's 1980 murder conviction was finally overturned. The only evidence that ever connected Sandra to the crime was her own unreliable and false confessions made while she was being treated at a state psychiatric hospital. There were no witnesses or physical/forensic evidence linking Sandra to the murder, the victim, or the crime scene. She had no motive to harm the victim; in fact, there was no evidence the two had ever met. At the time of her release after forty-three years behind bars, she was the longest-known wrongly incarcerated woman in the United States.

Giving a false confession is like ringing a bell. It can’t be unrung. When defense attorneys claim their client falsely confessed, jurors struggle. How do they make sense of the seemingly senseless? Why would an innocent person confess to a crime they didn't commit? They also convict; studies of proven false confessors have shown that even in cases involving confessions later proven to be false, juries convict in 73-81% of the cases.

As a forensic psychologist , I’ve studied the complex psychology behind these often-baffling admissions of guilt . We’ve come a long way in understanding the conditions under which false confessions arise. But what can be done once a false confession has already been given? How do you explain it to your skeptical courtroom audience? Here’s what we know.

Explaining the Mechanics of False Confessions

False confessions typically arise from a complex interplay of psychological factors (situational vulnerability, demographic or personality variables) and interrogation techniques (coercive questioning, harsh or lengthy interrogations). Ideally, the interrogation that led to the confession is videotaped so jurors can see what happened for themselves. If not, educating jurors on the psychology of false confessions is your best shot. This can be done through specialized jury instructions and expert testimony.

Specialized Jury Instructions

Specialized jury instructions about confession evidence aim to educate jurors about factors that can contribute to false confessions. Research by Henderson and Levett (2020) found that mock jurors who received specialized confession instructions were 27% less likely to convict in cases involving coerced confessions compared to those who received standard instructions.

These instructions typically cover:

a) The possibility of false confessions: Explicitly stating that innocent people sometimes confess to crimes they didn't commit. "The law recognizes that, in some circumstances, an innocent person may falsely confess to a crime they did not commit."

b) Factors contributing to false confessions : Listing elements like lengthy interrogations, sleep deprivation, or intellectual disabilities. "Factors that may increase the risk of a false confession include, but are not limited to, extreme fatigue, prolonged questioning, threats or promises made by interrogators, and a suspect's young age or cognitive limitations."

c) Confessional evaluation criteria: Suggesting ways to assess the reliability of a confession. "In evaluating the reliability of a confession, you may consider the length of the interrogation, the suspect's age, and mental capacity, whether the confession contains details that were not made public, and whether the confession is consistent with other evidence in the case."

d) The need to consider the totality of the circumstances: Encouraging jurors to look for evidence beyond the confession itself. "A confession alone is not sufficient to convict. You must also find corroborating evidence that tends to establish the defendant's guilt independently of the confession."

The Role of Expert Testimony

Expert witnesses can also play a crucial role in educating jurors about the psychology of false confessions. Here are some ways experts can be effectively utilized, along with real-world examples:

• Educating about Interrogation Techniques: Experts can explain how specific interrogation methods might lead to false confessions. In State v. Lawson (2020) , Dr. Richard Leo testified about how the Reid Technique interrogation methods used in the case could lead to false confessions. He explained how accusatory questioning and false evidence ploys might have influenced the defendant's statements. The jury ultimately acquitted the defendant.
• Explaining Vulnerabilities: Experts can discuss how certain personal characteristics increase the risk of false confessions. In re Elias V. (2021), Dr. Gisli Gudjonsson testified about adolescents' increased susceptibility to suggestive questioning. He described how the 14-year-old defendant's age, combined with lengthy questioning and sleep deprivation, created a high-risk situation for a false confession. This testimony contributed to the court's decision to suppress the confession.
• Addressing Cognitive Limitations: Experts can illuminate how intellectual disabilities or mental health issues impact interrogation responses. In People v. Sanchez (2022) , Dr. Saul Kassin testified about how the defendant's intellectual disability increased his vulnerability to interrogation pressure. Kassin explained research showing that individuals with cognitive limitations are more likely to comply with authority figures and may have difficulty understanding the long-term consequences of confessing. This testimony helped contextualize the defendant's behavior for the jury.
• Illuminating Confession Contamination : Experts can explain how accurate crime details can appear in false confessions. In Commonwealth v. Wright (2023), Dr. Julia Shaw testified about memory malleability and how interrogators can inadvertently implant false memories . She explained how the defendant's confession, which initially lacked key details, gradually incorporated crime scene information over multiple interrogations. This testimony helped the jury understand why the presence of accurate details didn't necessarily indicate a true confession.
• Explaining Subtle Coercion : Experts can highlight how seemingly benign interrogation tactics can be psychologically coercive. In United States v. Martinez (2022), Dr. Christian Meissner testified about how minimization techniques can implicitly promise leniency without making direct offers. He described research showing how statements like "I'm sure you didn't mean for this to happen" can be interpreted by suspects as promises of reduced punishment if they confess. This testimony helped jurors understand why an apparently "voluntary" confession might not be reliable.

The Bottom Line

An action taken in a single moment can change a life. There are too many cases in which the choice made – to falsely claim responsibility for a crime out of fear , stress , or fatigue – prematurely ended an investigation and resulted in a miscarriage of justice.

False confessions remain a significant challenge in the criminal justice system. By understanding the psychological mechanisms behind false confessions and implementing evidence-based safeguards such as recorded interrogations, specialized jury instructions, and expert testimony, we can work to prevent wrongful convictions. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

Joni E. Johnston , Psy.D , is a clinical/forensic psychologist, private investigator, author, and host of the YouTube channel and podcast "Unmasking a Murderer."

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The 21 Best True Crime TV Shows

Tired of true crime podcasts? Check out our picks for the best ripped-from-the-headlines shows.

Every item on this page was chosen by a Town & Country editor. We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy.

"People are interested in true crime in general because they love to see a mystery unfold from beginning to end. We all have the curiosity," Dateline correspondent Andrea Canning told T&C . "So many families look perfect from the outside, but there’s so many secrets behind those walls. Like, what is your neighbor really doing? Because so many of these stories just seem like normal people, right? And everyone always says the same thing: 'This does not happen around here.' It’s always the same story. No one’s ever like, 'Oh yeah, we just had a murder down the street.'"

True crime has taken over the streaming landscape. As Matthew Jacobs wrote in T&C , "Much of true crime's ubiquity can be explained in simple business terms. Sometime in the mid-2010s, as the streaming boom crystallized, TV executives realized that transgressions—true and otherwise (see: True Detective, Ozark )—were a surefire way to keep customers engaged . A few hits begat many, many more." Here, the 20 best true crime shows to watch in 2024:

Under the Bridge

Starring Lily Gladstone and Riley Keough , Under the Bridge —based on the book of the same name by Rebecca Godfrey —tells the story of the murder of 14-year-old Reena Virk, who was killed in 1997.

Read the book

The Dropout

The Dropout dramatizes the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes, played by Amanda Seyfried, who founded Theranos, a biotech company that failed spectacularly.

Watch on Hulu

Under the Banner of Heaven

In Under the Banner of Heaven , based on the 2003 book by Jon Krauker, detectives (played by Andrew Garfield and Gil Birmingham) investigate the brutal murder of a Mormon woman, Brenda Lafferty, and her baby daughter .

Love & Death

Love & Death stars Elizabeth Olsen as Candy Montgomery, a Texas housewife accused of murdering her lover's wife.

Watch on Max

Read more: Haven't We Seen This Murder Before?

Unbelievable

In Unbelievable , Marie (Kaitlyn Dever), a rape survivor, was charged with a crime for reporting her assault. It's based on the true story of the Washington and Colorado serial rape cases (2008-2011). Notably, Toni Collette and Merritt Wever play the detectives in this retelling.

Watch on Netflix

Read the original story

In the late 1970s, two FBI agents (Jonathan Groff and Holt McCallany) start to interview imprisoned serial killers to understand the psychology of murder. The second season is based on the Atlanta murders of 1979 to 1981, allegedly committed by serial killer Wayne Williams.

True Detective: Night Country

The fourth installment of the popular True Detective series is set in the fictional Ennis, Alaska, but is based on two true stories: the case of Mary Celeste , an American ship that went missing in 1872, and the Dyatlov Pass incident of 1959, when nine hikers died in the Ural Mountains under suspicious circumstances.

Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story

Dahmer is based on the true story of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer (played by Evan Peters). Dahmer killed seventeen people btween 1978 and 1991.

Inventing Anna

Julia Garner stars as Anna Delvey in Inventing Anna , which chronicles the scams of the fake heiress.

Baby Reindeer

One of the surprise hits of 2024 was Baby Reindeer, which centers around Richard Gadd's real life experiences of being stalked by a woman named Martha (played by Jessica Gunning).

The Staircase

In The Staircase , adapted from a 2004 documentary of the same name, novelist Michael Peterson (Colin Firth) is charged with the murder of his wife, Kathleen (Toni Collette). The show follows the trial.

Read more: A Complete Timeline of The Staircase 's Michael Peterson Murder Case

Candy is another true crime series that details the case of Candy Montgomery, accused of murdering her lover's wife. This version aired on Hulu and stars Jessica Biel as Candy.

The Girl From Plainville

The Girl From Plainville dramatizes the 2014 death of Conrad Roy by suicide and the 2017 conviction of his girlfriend, Michelle Carter, for involuntary manslaughter. In the series, Elle Fanning plays Michelle, and Colton Ryan plays Conrad.

When They See Us

Ava DuVernay's When They See Us tells the story of the 1989 Central Park jogger case, where five young Black and Latino teens were falsely accused of assaulting a white woman in Central Park.

Dopesick is based on Beth Macy's nonfiction book, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America , and explores the American opioid crisis and the involvement of the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma.

Yes, Narcos counts as a true crime series: Seasons one and two follow drug lord Pablo Escobar and the Medellín Cartel, and season three tracks the Cali Cartel.

A Friend of the Family

A Friend of the Family is the true story of Robert Berchtold (played by Jake Lacy ) who abused and kidnapped his neighbor, Jan Brobert, twice: in 1974, when she was 12, and again in 1976, when she was 14. The show is based on Jan's mother Mary Ann Broberg's memoir, Stolen Innocence .

Watch on Peacock

Five Days at Memorial

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005, the doctors and nurses at Memorial Medical Center were trapped with their patients without power for five days. It was later alleged that some of the medical professionals decided to euthanasia patients while they waited to get evacuated, as reported by Sheri Fink in Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital . The show—more disaster than true crime, but still harrowing—is based on this book, and stars Vera Farminga, Cherry Jones, and Cornelius Smith Jr.

Watch on Apple TV+

The Watcher

In this Netflix series, Bobby Cannavale and Naomi Watts star as Dean and Ellie Brannock, a couple who move into their dream home—only to be harassed by creepy letters signed by the titular "Watcher."

The Thing About Pam

Renée Zellweger stars as Pam Hupp in this true crime miniseries about the murder of Betsy Faria in Missouri in December 2011. When the case is covered on Dateline , new details are revealed about Betsy's murder–making Pam, one of Betsy's friends, a suspect.

Emily Burack (she/her) is the Senior News Editor for Town & Country, where she covers entertainment, culture, the royals, and a range of other subjects. Before joining T&C, she was the deputy managing editor at Hey Alma , a Jewish culture site. Follow her @emburack on Twitter and Instagram .

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Apple Podcasts

Apple is launching its own true-crime podcast, scamtown, next week.

Apple has created its own true-crime podcast, Scamtown , and it’s debuting next week on August 26. Here are all the details for this new show, how it fits into Apple’s podcasting strategy, and the special perk coming for Apple TV+ subscribers.

New original podcast series debuts August 26

Today Apple announced that Scamtown will be its next original podcast series. From the team behind documentaries like The Big Conn and McMillion$, the new true-crime series will be an 11-part anthology.

Scamtown premieres on Monday, August 26 , and a trailer is available to listen to now .

Here’s the show’s summary:

Each episode of “Scamtown” highlights a different scheme, featuring a mix of wild hustles, surprising heists, forbidden love and explosive moments, with stories told by both the creators and the individuals who lived through them. From an ingenious telemarketing bust and an arsonist setting fire to the city of Boston, to an Italian Mafia Don’s arrest over olive oil and the escapades of a rare book thief, the true crime stories in “Scamtown” are stranger than fiction, and filled with quirks, moral ambiguity and unforgettable tales.

Scamtown’s launch includes bonus for Apple TV+ subscribers

When Scamtown arrives, its first two episodes will be available to all listeners, with weekly releases thereafter.

However, if you’re an Apple TV+ subscriber, you’ll gain access to all 11 episodes right from the start. All you have to do is connect Apple TV+ to the Apple Podcasts app, and you’ll see the full Scamtown season available at launch.

Apple first employed this release pattern with its ‘ My Divo ’ podcast earlier this summer. It’s an interesting strategic move that seeks to provide additional value to TV+ subscribers. However, it remains to be seen whether Apple’s original podcasts are a compelling draw for users. Apple doesn’t release listener numbers.

Apple’s podcasting strategy and TV+ branding

Apple’s podcasting strategy has been a little all over the place up until now.

For starters, the company brands its original shows as ‘Apple TV+’ podcasts. That made sense in the early days of Apple originals, when the company was focused on companion podcasts for TV+ series like For All Mankind and Foundation.

Today though, using Apple TV+ as the branding for shows like Scamtown and My Divo is a lot more confusing.

I’d argue this is yet another reason why Apple TV+ should rebrand . If the service had a more generic name along the lines of Netflix or Max, without using ‘TV’ in it, then using that brand for original podcasts would be fine. But a TV+ podcast that has nothing to do with TV? It’s a strange move.

Are you interested in listening to Scamtown? Have thoughts on Apple’s podcasting strategy? Let us know in the comments.

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Apple Podcasts is Apple's podcast app that is bu…

Ryan got his start in journalism as an Editor at MacStories, where he worked for four years covering Apple news, writing app reviews, and more. For two years he co-hosted the Adapt podcast on Relay FM, which focused entirely on the iPad. As a result, it should come as no surprise that his favorite Apple device is the iPad Pro.

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