Thoughts on True Crime Podcasts

Like everyone and their dog, I got into podcasts through the first season of Serial, a true crime investigation.

I’ve always been interested in true crime; at least 25% of my inability to fall asleep as a child was probably caused by a paperback volume of Unsolved Mysteries that made me worry that any slight food or drug packaging discrepancy was the work of a serial poisoner.

In addition to that, Serial was so compelling that I wanted to find more podcasts like it. So I did. Criminal, Sword and Scale, and CBC’s Someone Knows Something all seemed like good candidates.

But it’s that last that helped me put a finger on some of the things that trouble me about the genre.

I’m not the first person to criticize Serial for its approach, and definitely not the smartest or the most thorough. Nor am I the first to find true crime’s tension between sensationalism and compassion uncomfortable.

Which is why I liked the way Someone Knows Something‘s host and chief investigator, David Ridgen, approaches his topic, even though it’s that very approach that seems to frustrate or bore many of the comment-section reviews of his work.

In the first episode/prologue of this season, Ridgen addresses a very important question: is making a podcast or documentary like this a good idea, reviving and exploring cold cases? What effect will it have on the people connected to those cases? What outcomes can be expected from the investigation? What are the consequences, public and personal, of this project?

Most of the true crime podcasts I hear concentrate on the accused. The first few episodes of Sword and Scale follow serial killers from build-up to crime, mentioning their victims only as landmarks in the journey. Serial doesn’t spend much time on the effect of the core murder case on the victim’s friends, family, community. It’s concerned with finding out what “really happened” — who committed the crime and why. This narrative centres criminals as actors — people who do stuff — and victims as objects, people who have stuff done to them.

Contrariwise, in the first season of Someone Knows Something, the emotional and physical consequences of the case, the 1972 disappearance of a five-year-old boy on a fishing trip, are intimately connected with the narrative.

Ridgen emphasizes the family’s pain at losing a loved one and not knowing what happened to him. At each new development, the audience must wonder both, “Will this lead to new discoveries?” and also, “What effect will learning this have on the missing boy’s parents and siblings?” He proceeds only after obtaining the consent of the family, and they are involved at each step of the way.

Ridgen also documents his own trauma at exploring a potential violent crime or deadly accident. This isn’t his first rodeo: as he explains in the prologue episode, he’s investigated other cold cases, and, as one might expect, they take their toll on his psyche.

Reminding the listeners that this isn’t just a story, Ridgen asks us to feel empathy for people who have gone through one of the worst things a parent can. Instead of letting us experience the events from the arm’s length that lets us line everyone up as a suspect, he forces us to remember that, hey, these are people too. We can speculate from the comfort of our armchairs because we don’t have to live with the tragedy.

By concentrating on the victim(s) and survivors rather than the perpetrator, Someone Knows Something avoids glamorizing crime or investigation. Mysteries are fun, sure, but not when they hurt real people. Nobody deserves to be a bump in someone else’s road. Their lives were their own stories, not that of their killer’s or the mystery of their disappearance. They were always subjects, never objects.

Perhaps the difference in Someone Knows Something comes from another thing I like about it: Ridgen isn’t intruding on an unfamiliar community, the way Sarah Koenig does in Serial. His first season tackles a cold case in the small town where he grew up. He knows this environment intimately. He understands the social expectations, an insider describing for outsiders rather than an outsider describing for other outsiders.

That means Ridgen doesn’t get to pack up and move on to the next case when this one is over. This is his childhood too, and he’s aware of the consequences of what he’s doing.

Some might say he’s overly aware: I can see why tuning into true crime stories that concentrate on the pain of living with what happened is less appealing than cases that underplay the human consequences and focus on the how, who, why, and what. An objective fact can be held at arm’s length, kept at bay no matter how it struggles to get in. It’s safe to become fascinated. That’s why we listen to stories in the first place.

But by choosing to listen to true stories — whose suspense and titillation comes in part from their claim to describe events that happened outside the mind of a fiction writer — maybe we should give up our entitlement to closure and dispassion. Maybe we can be critical as we engage. Otherwise, we risk romanticizing others’ suffering, objectifying them a second time.