True crime stories seem to be having a bit of a moment in 2019 – a kind of cross-medium mass saturation. There are investigative and chatty podcasts; a seemingly endless stream of documentaries on Netflix, HBO, everywhere, illuminating implied miscarriages of justice or trying to reveal something about killers’ inner psyches; and even big budget movies about some of the 20th century’s most horrific crimes.
It’s been a long time coming – every year it feels like we reach another zenith. Last year The Australian’s podcast The Teacher’s Pet won the highest accolade in Aussie journalism, the Gold Walkley. The year before, the ABC released their first true crime podcast Trace. 2016 was the year FX dropped The People V OJ Simpson: American Crime Story, starring Cuba Gooding Jr and John Travolta, picking up nine Emmys. In 2015, Making A Murderer and The Jinx blew up. And it feels like the current wave started in 2014 when the object of our obsession was Serial.
Josie Rozenberg-Clarke is one half of PEDESTRIAN.TV’s All Aussie Mystery Hour, where she and her co-host Mel Mason chat about unsolved mysteries close to home – both gruesome crimes and the strange and fantastic, like the Lithgow Panther.
She disputes that the public’s interest in true crime is a new phenomenon at all, and instead points to a change in the way we consume those stories. She sees the cases of JonBenet Ramsey and OJ Simpson in the ‘90s as examples of true crime stories that generated huge amounts of media interest – it’s just that we only had newspapers and TV.
"It's like a history lesson and a humanity lesson all at the same time.”
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“Now there's different ways to watch TV, there's different ways to get movies… and podcasts are so easily available and I just think, yes there's a lot and it seems like it's a new trend, but kinda not really, it's just that it's available in more places.”
Well before Serial, in 2004, the original The Staircase documentary was released, before two follow-ups in 2013 and 2018. The complete 13-episode package landed on Netflix last year – and this month, the lawyer at its centre, David Rudolf, arrives in Australia to talk about the case and the man he represented, novelist Michael Peterson, who was tried and convicted in 2003 for the murder of his wife Kathleen. After years of ultimately successful attempts to have his conviction overturned, and with a retrial approaching, in 2017, Peterson entered an Alford plea – a guilty plea where the defendant acknowledges there’s enough evidence to convict him while still maintaining innocence.
Rudolf, along with Laura Nirider and Steven Drizin, two post-conviction lawyers for Making A Murderer’s Brendan Dassey, are speaking across the country as part of Inside Making A Murderer & The Staircase. Rudolf says the events will be an opportunity for people to have their questions answered “about things they might not understand or be confused about or just what to know which we’re not covering in the documentaries”.
But he also hopes he and his fellow speakers will be able to talk about the “deeper lessons” of the documentaries and “talk about the systems and what the problems are in the systems and how those problems could be addressed in some way going forward”.
There’s something interesting about the public’s interest not only in true crime, but in the people close to them – whether lawyers like Rudolf, or journalists like The Teacher’s Pet’s Hedley Thomas, or cops like Ron Iddles, the homicide detective who investigated the murder of Maria James, the subject of ABC’s Trace podcast. They’ve each been elevated almost to a level of celebrity, speaking at panel events, or in Iddles’ case starring in a new Foxtel series titled Ron Iddles: The Good Cop.
Rachael Brown, the journalist behind Trace, says that in the case of Iddles, it’s less about “celebrity” than finding “valuable education opportunities”: “Some policing organisations have become stuck in their ways. But [Iddles] recognises times have changed, audiences get their news in different ways, [and] so too must policing strategies change.”
She references Iddles speaking at a recent Melbourne conference about what podcasting offers investigators: “’Why wouldn’t you want to reach into 2.5 million houses? You might actually touch the killer, or you might touch someone who knows.’”
Generally, Rudolf says people have been “respectful” of him when they’ve recognised him in public, but admits that it’s been strange to be asked for autographs or selfies. Rozenberg-Clarke is reluctant to say that All Aussie Mystery Hour is generating a fandom around it, but acknowledges that much of their audience comes from people who “like us and like the way we present things. A lot of our reviews are like, 'These girls are like talking to friends'”.
It’s tempting to think that the public’s interest in these stories comes in some part from curiosity about their more grisly aspects. But when asked what it is about these stories that captures people’s attention, Rudolf, is more optimistic about viewers.
“I don't think it's the grisly part of this that really fascinates people – this is not like a horror film or a voyeuristic documentary, nor are any of these that have been popular. I think it has to do with people's desire for and expectation that justice is gonna be done in these kinds of cases.
“Really the driver here is getting this inside, behind-the-scenes view of a system that people thought they understood, and now found out that they really had a false view of. I think that's a real eye-opener.”
Brown too sees that an interest in true crime might provide a kind of learning opportunity – she notes that an ABC survey recently found true crime addicts crave ‘insight into the legal system’: “[Speaking tours] could help raise community awareness about the justice system, how to navigate it and where its weaknesses are.”
While Rozenberg-Clarke sees an interest in the “dark side of humanity” as definitely part of the cultural fascination in true crime, she also lands on ‘learning’ as something that piques people’s interest. “It's also that interest in learning more, especially when it's Australian, learning more about your own culture and things that you might not have known. It's like a history lesson and a humanity lesson all at the same time.”
Often at the core of these stories is a tragic loss of life – a loss that’s been turned into something to be binged, consumed, into a form of entertainment. Brown says that kind of “slippery slope” was at the forefront of her mind when making Trace. So to negate that possible impact, she made sure both to get the full blessing of Maria James’ sons and of Iddles, and to follow up all leads around potential ‘persons of interest’, “to give listeners/readers all the facts and let them make up their own minds”: “I wanted Trace to be both a forensic investigation and respectful of all those caught up in this case.”
Rudolf believes that people, for the most part, don’t see true crime as a form of entertainment in the same way as comedies or romantic movies: “This is entertaining because it illuminates things that people didn't realise.
“I think all of these documentaries are quite respectful of the people in them. Obviously there might be some people who are viewing it on a level of pure entertainment and don't really care about what they're learning or what the message is, but I think for the most part what people are getting out of this is the real purpose of the documentary, certainly The Staircase, was to shine a light on the criminal justice system.”
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT: Hannah Story has written for PEDESTRIAN.TV.
