I’ve been trying to work out, over the last while, why it is that I feel so very drawn to murder.
As a subject, not a pastime.  As a pastime I am mainly ambivalent toward it. 

Like many people, as we sunk into lockdown, I reached for objects and activities that would offer some comfort. Y’know, like murder. Mainly in podcast form. Anything that I could plug into my ears to shut out the sound of remote schooling and the racing, buzzing thoughts in my own brain, and keep me occupied while doing jigsaw puzzle after jigsaw puzzle after jigsaw puzzle, when not working. Cold cases, forensic things, any podcast that retold the sad story of a real person’s very sad demise at the hands of another, I was THERE FOR IT. 

Not JUST murder, of course. I also found great solace in con artists, cults, and tales of corporate malfeasance, because I know how to party. But more of that anon. Murder was the meat of it. As Morrissey didn’t quite say wayback-when but probably would say if talking about his pandemic podcasting habits. 

And it wasn’t just me. I’ve heard the same from others. But why? Why did true crime become such a grizzly little teddybear at that particular point? Or a tidy little grizzly bear? Whatever. SO!…It will be unsurprising to anyone who knows that I have been living in California for the last ten years that I have thoroughly unpacked this subject with my therapist, repeatedly. My therapist is not called “repeatedly”, that was just a badly-formed sentence. 

I think, and this is the most basic version — everything was out of my control. Our control. Everything was just… happening. There was no end date, there was no experience that could dictate how this was going to work or what we were meant to do or feel about it, and on top of that, I lived in the US when the pandy came along, and still had an utterly toxic dipshit as a president, which didn’t exactly inspire confidence in terms of hope for someone ELSE knowing what the fuck was going on and helping people know what to expect. 

The types of murder podcast I would listen to while everything around was at its most grim and foggy were very specific. Ones that ended. Ones in which something bad happened, yes, but then some people looked into it and some others helped them out and then in the end the thing was solved. And over (over apart from the ongoing pain of the families and the potential for miscarriages of justice obvs). And there were consequences. CONSEQUENCES! Can you imagine it!

[This blog post is very, very long, I feel like I should have put a few pictures in it to break it up but I can’t remember how. Can you imagine this is a picture please? Of, like, an interesting metaphorical object or something. Not a murder. Just a nice picture. Imagine it in your head. Thank you!]

In fact, now I think about it, I’d been lightly getting into the murder podcasts ever since 2016. I can quite specifically pinpoint that. Because it felt like we were living in a world where it didn’t matter what you had said, or done, what bad behaviour you had encouraged, or what you hate you put into the world, suddenly, it seemed like nothing would be done about it (and it could even propel you to greater success, or, say, presidency) because who’d have thunk it, there were no consequences in real life. None at all. 

But in murder podcasts, there were consequences. Bad things happened, and it was a mystery, but then people worked it out, and the perpetrators of the bad things were confronted with the fact that they had done bad things, and sometimes said “ok yes I did do bad things, sorry” and sometimes didn’t, but either way. damnit, there were consequences. 

So in 2016 it was comforting to think about consequences. In – 20…20? Whenever it was we got collectively whacked around the head with a shovel and buried alive in our houses — in 2020, I just needed to know that bad things happened, and that they got solved. There was a beginning, a middle, and an end. Not just an interminable middle. There was a formula. You knew what you were getting: a set up, a journey, a conclusion. A formula. A pattern. A routine. We needed them. OK – I am not speaking for anyone else, this is my experience:
I needed them. 

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Just like the body craves the things it needs to feed the things it’s lacking, the brain does too. My brain, anyway. And I’ve noticed it more and more with the types of content I gravitate toward. When I was getting to my burnedouttest (because there are many levels of burnout, and I have sampled a lot of them, AMA) and was trying to work out whether it was time to quit my job, knowing deep down that it really, really was time, past time, in fact… I started listening more to podcasts about cults. Cults. And how people escaped from them.

Not that my company was a cult. It wasn’t, it was delightful (and tough, and frustrating, and amazing, and rewarding and draining, and many other things) and definitely not a cult. But it was, however, something that I had fully bought into. It had become much more than a job. It had become an identity. And a lot of my value was tied up in who I was in that place and to the people in that place. It felt like I was woven into it, and it was woven into me. So … not a cult… but definitely something all hard to extricate myself from. 

And as I was unpicking the stitches that kept me fixed in that place, I had this strong need to listen to stories about ties being broken, things becoming clearer, scales falling from eyes — I moved from there to podcasts about con artists, and scams. Again, not because I had been targeted by or involved in one, but because something in me needed to understand how things can be true and not true at the same time. And how we fool ourselves into believing something rather than following instinct. 

Told you I’d done a lot of thinking about this. With my therapist, Repeatedly. 

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This is, of course, only my experience. I speak only for myself.

For some people, listening to — or reading, or watching — true crime stories might be about outsourcing their free-floating anxieties. Saying “ok yes, i’m not imagining it, the bad things that crowd my brain do happen, but they’re not happening to me, and they’re not happening right now”.

For some, it might be working through some part of their trauma by finding companionship or community or hearing spoken out loud stuff that reminds them of it.

Some people just like a mystery, and find the stakes of true crime higher than fiction. Or more interesting, or relatable, or whatever.

For others — and for me, all of these are also me to an extent — it can be a touch of nosiness. A raw view into the private lives of people we don’t know but might see on the street, or the train, or in the office. Getting to see what happens behind the closed doors, and somehow finding it reassuring that everyone else is fucked up, especially when we usually imagine everyone else to be more put-together and less messy than us.  

And some people are probably just weird and get off on hearing about people getting mutilated and thrown in rivers. (This one is not me. Just the other ones). 

Whatever the reason, there’s something in it that comforts us, or warns us, or reflects something in us.

In that way, they’re just like the folk tales and fairy tales that have been told for ever and always:
“Once upon a time, there was an innocent X, and a malevolent Y, and the X wasn’t careful, and the Y took advantage of that, but then there was a quest and something was overcome, and the Y was punished, and everyone lived happily ever after”

Or, like, sort of like that except that the X is dead after act one and doesn’t get to see the happily ever after. But other than that: very similar. Serves the same purpose, anyway. 

Feels like I may have undermined my point. 

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ANYWAY. That is me, and murder. It loomed large during lockdown, and ever since, when things have become too much, I have retreated into a little ball on the sofa and plugged in airpods and lost myself to a terrible tale of malice aforethought. 

When I’m reaching for is an audiobook about not-murder, I generally know I’m in a more balanced place. Or a lecture series about some complex random topic I didn’t study in university, then I’m pretty good. Or, like,  another podcast attempting to teach me spanish vocabulary, or about terrible diets or righting history or things that are in any way feeding something in me rather than trying to kill something off, that feels good.

And when I’m in a really good place, I don’t need a constant stream of content filling my ears and my brain at all. When I can just be alone with my thoughts, and/or music, then I know things are definitely different. That we’re definitely not in lockdown anymore. My brain, like me, is free to roam.  

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And then when it’s Christmas, I just get into the same type of formula-rut… but with terrible holiday movies instead.

Which is, honestly, the thing I intended to write about in the first place when I opened this post. Before I got led off.

But I’ll come back to that later. The holiday movies.
I’ve already kept you too long.
You’ve probably got murders to attend to.