DEATH BECOMES THEM
It starts as a voice in your ear, worming its way in with an addictive intimacy that thrills and terrifies.
Or maybe it floats through the air as you drive, cook, lift weights. Deflecting with black humor, sliding its barbed metal hook in so deftly you don’t even notice until it begins to stalk your nightmares.
The clues you ignored, the shady witnesses, the weak alibis and sloppy detective work. You turn it over like a Rubik’s Cube, obsessively reviewing what you know, what you don’t. But what you can say, with 100 percent certainty, is that this kind of evil could happen to you. You start to check the doors and windows before bed, look for warning signs on first dates, avoid parking structures at night. You may even submit your own leads, suggest databases to check or suspects that make your spidey sense tingle.
You are hooked on true-crime podcasts.
And you are not alone.
Podcasts now number more than one million, according to the tracking site Podcast Insights. True-crime series have blossomed with the medium, becoming a thriving corner of the podcast world. The intimacy of the platform makes it the perfect means to satisfy our innate human need to hear grisly stories. In 2016, Reddit fans compiled a list of 169 true-crime podcasts; today, there are almost 10,000.
True-crime podcasts range from a lone sleuth recording out of her basement to slick productions with staff and celebrity hosts. There are podcasts about cold cases and the wrongly convicted, about serial killers and grizzled detectives, about white-collar crime and small-town murders. Some podcasts crowdsource investigations from listeners. Some are formatted as scripted narratives;, which raked in $15 million last year and was the second-most-profitable podcast of 2019, right behind , according to . Launched in 2016, is hosted by Los Angeles–based actor-writer-comedians Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark and has spawned its own podcast network, a book, a dues-paying fan club ($39.99 a year), sold-out live shows, and hundreds of thousands of devoted fans who call themselves Murderinos.
