Nancy Guthrie had been missing for less than 48 hours when the game began. Not the investigation, which was already under way, with FBI agents crawling the Catalina Foothills and more than 30,000 tips flooding in from the public, but the thing building around her disappearance, the thing that one could generously call “journalism” in both its legacy and citizen varieties.
A few weeks ago, a friend asked if I had watched the Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew. That interview, yes — the one with all the sweating and the pizza in Woking, in which he definitely didn’t meet Virginia Roberts Giuffre but he did single-handedly crash his reputation, and Emily Maitlis, like the Medusa of journalism she has since become, just let him tie his own noose. Of course I’ve watched it. I’m a journalist. And a twenty-first-century citizen. Who hasn’t? My friend, for one, though she pointed out that she can just watch the three-part Amazon dramatization of the whole affair, A Very Royal Scandal, which is even juicier than the interview. (“I’m the son of the sovereign,” bellows the Duke of York, played by a soapy Michael Sheen.
The hashtag #truecrime has been viewed over 27 billion times on TikTok. I think I can probably claim a few thousand myself, scrolling endlessly through gruesome murder cases dictated by a spotty teenager until I’m frozen stiff with fear. It was only a matter of time before these TikTok detectives began to blur the line between their feeds and the real world, and between what really happened and what they wished had happened. More clicks means more exposure. More exposure means more money. Last week in England, Lancashire police officers investigating the disappearance of a woman called Nicola Bulley held a press conference where they slammed TikTokkers for “playing private detective,” claiming they had been “inundated with false information.
The murder trial of prominent South Carolina patriarch Alex Murdaugh has it all: two deaths, a lethal drunken boat accident, a suicide-for-hire plot, the mysterious death of the family's housekeeper and a suspicious hit-and-run. That's why the case has caught the attention of true crime fanatics and the national media — ABC News, Discovery, HBO, CNN and Netflix have all taken a stab at various documentaries and podcasts. Others still might find themselves lost in the schadenfreude of watching a powerful and wealthy family descend into tragedy. The Murdaugh family has long exercised a significant amount of legal influence in the Low Country region of South Carolina.
There are a lot of theories as to why we are living through a true crime boom. Is it white women fetishizing our pain and fear of men? Is it a psy-op to discredit leftist attempts to defund the police and abolish prisons? Or is it the collective psyche trying to metabolize a few decades of turmoil and violence now that murder rates are down from their Seventies and Eighties peak? I think it’s less complicated. It’s entertaining, it’s cathartic and it’s a way of externalizing anxiety. You listen to stories of bloody murder and grave injustice, and then you listen to the problem getting resolved as the murderer is revealed, the innocent person released, the mystery solved.
