True Crime Fantasies
What a popular genre tells us about women’s interest in murder
By Mikita Brottman
The first season of the podcast Serial investigates the case of Hae Min Lee, who was strangled in a Baltimore park. Illustration by Austin Hughes.
It’s been 30 years since child beauty-pageant star JonBenét Ramsey was killed in her Colorado home, yet, as the popularity of the recent Netflix docuseries (Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey?) testifies, this mystery continues to galvanize the public. Apparently, high-profile cold cases like the death of JonBenét Ramsey and the identity of the so-called Zodiac Killer, subject of another recent Netflix docuseries (This is the Zodiac Speaking) are never truly “cold.” These were only two of the numerous Netflix shows released in 2024 to revisit lurid crimes of the past: others include Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, about the two brothers who fatally shot their parents in their Beverly Hills home in 1989, and American Murder: Laci Peterson, a three-part docuseries is about the 2002 murder of Laci Peterson by her husband, Scott.
The rise in the true crime genre is usually traced back to the first series of the Serial podcast in 2014, in which reporter Sarah Koenig investigated the 1999 murder of 18-year-old Hae Min Lee. Since then, it’s become inordinately popular: We’ve seen a huge wave of podcasts, movies, TV mini-series, and books based, for the most part, on lurid murders. It’s been shown that the vast majority of this media is consumed by women, especially younger women with less education, who are twice as likely as men to be fans of the genre (some suggest the figure is as high as 80 percent). This seems ironic, because in the stories featured in true crime media almost always involve violence against women. What draws women to such dreadful stories, and how can psychoanalysis help us to understand this paradox?
Some female fans say watching true crime movies and listening to podcasts helps them feel safe, showing them how to protect themselves if approached by a threatening stranger. Other women say their empathy with female victims draws them into the story, and they share their families’ drive to track down and prosecute wrongdoers. It’s also been pointed out that true crime is primarily a women’s genre because it spotlights the emotional and intuitive, applauding family members, especially mothers, who follow their instincts and premonitions even when law enforcement has given up on the case. These things may all be true, but I believe they are too simplistic, and too comfortable. Psychoanalysis teaches us to look beneath the surface.
To begin with, we need to understand that most of these shows are not “true,” in the sense that they always focus on crimes that are rare, lurid, unusual, and attention-grabbing. These are stories that present a clear binary opposition between “innocent victims” like JonBenét Ramsey, and “evil fiends” like the Zodiac Killer. Even when the perpetrators are known to the victim, as with the Menendez brothers, the media makes them into “monsters”—the title of the docuseries on the case.
Psychoanalysis can help us to understand how, by focusing on aberrant psychopaths and evil killers “out there,” typical true crime indulges the unconscious need for denial. These stories allow us to retreat from the dullness and uncertainty of everyday life into a world where things are black-and-white, rather than nuanced and complicated. It’s a relief to hear a story whose morality is unambiguous—where there are evil perpetrators, innocent victims, and dedicated cops who work night and day to solve the crime.
Adam Dalgliesh, the fictional detective invented by crime writer P. D. James, says that all motives for murder are covered by the four Ls: Love, Lust, Lucre, and Loathing. He adds, “They’ll tell you that the most dangerous emotion is hatred. Don’t believe them. The most dangerous emotion is love.’” True crime is a sleight of hand, distracting its fans from the unpalatable truth: that only 6–10 percent of female murder victims are chosen at random; the rest are killed at home, by someone they love.
Courtesy Simon & Schuster
Root Problems
As a true crime writer, I understand the appeal of drama, intrigue and suspense, but as a psychoanalyst, I’m less interested in the graphic and sensational elements of the crimes I write about than in questioning and interrogating how they are transformed by the media in a way that panders to public appeal. When it comes to murder, people seem transfixed by the latest headlines, but rarely stop to think deeply about the complexities of the case, moving quickly to the latest shooting, slashing, or strangling.
My book Couple Found Slain (Henry Holt, 2021), tells the story of Brian Bechtold, a young man who killed his parents in a suburb of Washington D.C. in 1991. Brian was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia and ruled “not criminally responsible” for the murders on grounds of insanity. In my book, I ask the question, “After the graphic headlines have faded away, where do the ‘criminally insane’ go?” I wanted to explore Brian’s inner life leading up to the murder, as well as his complicated afterlife in a maximum-security psychiatric hospital, where he is neither imprisoned nor free.
By writing about Brian’s case, I wanted to illustrate that what lies at the root of most murders is not evil, but systemic problems like domestic violence, mental illness, racism, disinvestment, poverty, and a flawed criminal justice system. Moreover, in real life, criminal cases almost never come to court (Brian, for example, did not stand trial due to his mental illness), and when they do, the proceedings are long and dull, often stultifying even to those involved.
Mikita Brottman is a true crime writer, psychoanalyst, and professor of literature at the Maryland Institute College of Art, in Baltimore. Her most recent book is Guilty Creatures: Sex, God and Murder in Tallahassee, Florida (Simon & Schuster, 2024).
Published April 2025