Murder, They Wrote

The public has to some extent always seen crime as entertainment and justice as a spectator sport, whether the story is packaged in the taut sentences of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood or in the televised spectacle of O.J. Simpson’s trial. Anyone with an appetite for this kind of speculation could consume as much of it as they liked in tabloid newspapers, in book-length treatments, and on certain television channels that seem to air nothing but cold cases. What they couldn’t easily do was get close to the documentation and evidence, or collaborate on research with other would-be investigators across the country. With the explosion of interest in Serial in 2014—and subsequent serialized crime documentaries—all this changed.