Episode 01: Why Are We So Drawn to True Crime?

Before diving into specific criminal cases, host Melissa Deadrich sets the stage by turning the lens on the true crime genre itself — examining why we're so drawn to these stories, how media framing shapes what we believe, and what biases we bring to every case we consume.

In this episode:

• Why true crime has become a cultural phenomenon — not just something we watch, but something we actively participate in
• The psychological roots of our fascination: threat detection, morbid curiosity, and the need for closure
• How the victim-villain-motive-resolution template can oversimplify real cases
• Who gets attention in true crime — and who gets left out
• How media framing shapes public belief before we even realize it
• A breakdown of key cognitive biases at play: confirmation bias, availability bias, attribution error, and hindsight bias
• Why these patterns matter beyond entertainment — and why Melissa created this show

Timestamps

• 0:00 — Introduction: What shapes the story of a criminal case?
• 0:20 — Welcome to Episode 1 / What this show is about
• 0:43 — True crime is part of the culture — and we're not just watching anymore
• 1:04 — What the genre can do at its best (Serial, Making a Murderer)
• 1:55 — Why the genre can also oversimplify
• 2:25 — The central question: Why are we drawn to true crime?
• 3:09 — Being drawn to true crime doesn't mean something's wrong with us
• 3:08 — The psychological draw: threat detection and brain wiring
• 3:31 — Morbid curiosity — and why it's not automatically unhealthy
• 4:22 — Uncertainty and the need for answers
• 5:07 — The moral dimension: right, wrong, empathy, and justice
• 5:59 — How media framing tells us how to understand what happened
• 6:26 — Obvious vs. subtle framing — and how it shapes interpretation
• 7:13 — The "perfect victim" problem and who true crime typically focuses on
• 8:20 — How offenders get labeled — and what those labels leave out
• 9:30 — Motive in true crime — the layers that don't make it into the story
• 10:08 — Resolution — and why justice is rarely that clean
• 10:39 — Bias and media framing working together
• 10:41 — Confirmation bias in true crime
• 11:32 — Availability bias — and the serial killer distortion
• 12:07 — Attribution error: "Only a monster could do that"
• 13:16 — Hindsight bias — and how it fuels victim blaming
• 14:12 — Why all of this matters beyond entertainment
• 15:05 — How true crime shapes beliefs about the justice system
• 15:25 — The genre's blind spots and real-world consequences
• 16:24 — What this show is here to do
• 17:12 — Closing: Crime stories are about more than what happened
• 18:26 — Follow the show + what's coming in Episode 2

Sources

• Slakoff, D. C., & Duran, D. (2025). A New Media Frontier, or More of the Same? A Descriptive Analysis of the

“Missing White Woman Syndrome” in Top True Crime Podcasts. Race and Justice.

• Boling, K. S., & Slakoff, D. C. (2025). “What an invasion, an immense invasion”: Examining the adverse effects of

true crime media on co-victims. Crime, Media, Culture.

• Scrivner, C. (2021). The Psychology of Morbid Curiosity: Development and Initial Validation of the Morbid

Curiosity Scale. Personality and Individual Differences.

• Sommers, Z. (2016). Missing White Woman Syndrome: An Empirical Analysis of Race and Gender Disparities in

Online News Coverage of Missing Persons. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 106(2), 275–314.

• Vicary, A. M., & Fraley, R. C. (2010). Captured by True Crime: Why Are Women Drawn to Tales of Rape, Murder,

and Serial Killers? Social Psychological and Personality Science, 1(1), 81–86.

• FBI National Crime Information Center (NCIC). 2024 Missing Person and Unidentified Person Statistics.

• FBI Uniform Crime Reporting / CJIS. 2024 Homicide Clearance Statistics.

• CDC MMWR (2024). Intimate Partner Homicide Among Women — United States, 2018–2021.

• U.S. Department of Justice. Tribal Justice and Safety: Missing or Murdered Indigenous Persons (MMIP) Data and

Research.

• Pew Research Center (2023). Who listens to true crime podcasts in the U.S.?

• YouGov (2022, 2024). True Crime: How does the genre affect Americans?

• Edison Research / audiochuck. True Crime Consumer Report.

• Council on Criminal Justice (2025). When Crime Statistics Diverge.

• Murder Accountability Project (2025). National homicide clearance trend data.

• Black and Missing Foundation. Missing Persons Statistics 2023.

Transcript

Speaker 0:03

What shapes the story of a criminal case? The evidence? The courtroom? The media? Every criminal case generates two stories: the story the evidence actually supports, and the story that gets told. I'm Melissa Deadrich, and this is Mind Motive Media. Welcome to the very first episode. I'm so excited to be here with you. This is essentially the first episode and the pilot all wrapped into one. Because before we jump into looking at cases and concepts within the true crime genre, I wanna set the stage and point the lens at the genre itself. Because true crime is not just something we watch or listen to anymore. It's become part of the culture. Crime stories are everywhere. They're in podcasts, documentaries, streaming series, network specials, social media threads, and entire channels are built around trials and investigations. And we're not just passively watching either. We're analyzing evidence, we're debating suspects, we're forming theories. We're talking about motive, guilt, innocence, and whether the system got it right. That's a big part of what makes true crime stories so powerful. At its best, the genre can raise awareness, bring attention to overlooked victims, expose failures in the justice system, and help the public understand cases that might otherwise disappear. Shows like Serial and Making a Murderer, they helped bring wrongful conviction conversations into the mainstream. Other cases have forced the public to look more closely at police work, forensic evidence, interrogation tactics, media coverage, and even trial fairness. So the genre can do real work, but it can also tell a very simplified story by giving us a victim, a villain, a motive, and a resolution. That structure's easy to follow. It gives us a beginning, a middle, and an end, and it helps us make sense of something frightening. But real criminal cases are rarely that clean. They're messy. They involve incomplete evidence, human error, trauma, legal strategy, media pressure, bias, and uncertainty. And when those pieces get flattened into a neat story, something important can get lost. So I thought it was important to, before we look at specific cases, ask the bigger question: Why are we drawn to true crime in the first place? What is it about danger, violence, and human behavior that captures our attention so strongly? And once the media gives us a version of a story, how does that shape what we believe? First, let's be clear, though. Being interested in true crime does not mean there's something wrong with us, and asking why we're interested, it's not about judging anyone, definitely not anyone's podcast cue. Mine literally terrifies my family. It's about understanding what happens when we press play. Part of the draw is psychological. Human beings are wired to notice danger. Our brains evolved in environments where detecting threats quickly could mean the difference between safety and survival. Unpredictable behavior, aggression, violence, and unfamiliar danger all get our attention because our brains are designed to ask, "What happened? Could it happen again? Could it happen to me?" True crime activates that threat detection system, so even when we're sitting in our car safely or walking the dog, folding laundry, or just listening with headphones in, the story still signals danger, and our brain pays attention because it wants information That's part of what psychologists sometimes call morbid curiosity. But morbid curiosity is not automatically unhealthy. In a basic sense, it's an interest in understanding threatening or disturbing situations. We wanna know how harm happens because knowledge can feel protective If we understand the warning signs, the motive, the method, or the pattern, we feel a little more prepared. And that brings us to another reason that true crime pulls us in, uncertainty. The human brain does not like unanswered questions, especially when something violent or disturbing happens. We wanna know who did it, why they did it, what they were thinking, whether they could do it again, and whether justice was served. That need for answers can give us a sense of control, even if the control is only emotional. This is also why unsolved cases are so hard to sit with. They leave us inside this uncertainty we were trying to escape. True crime often gives us what real life doesn't always provide, a storyline with closure. But real life is not always solved. Many cases remain open. Many convictions are later challenged. Many families never get the clean ending that documentaries and podcasts often imply And there's also a moral piece to this. True crime makes us think about right and wrong, responsibility, justice, punishment, and empathy. It asks us to look at human behavior under extreme circumstances: fear, rage, control, trauma, desperation, manipulation, survival, and that can be meaningful. The problem is not that we're drawn to these stories. The problem is what happens when those stories are packaged in a way that gives us drama instead of context Because the media doesn't just tell us what happened. It tells us how to understand what happened. Sometimes the framing's obvious, a headline using a certain word, a documentary opening with a certain image, a suspect's behavior described as cold or strange or calculated, a victim being described in a way that makes the audience feel protective, sympathetic, or afraid. Other times, the framing is a little more subtle. If the story focuses on one person, one theory, one moment, one version of events, before we realize it, that frame becomes the story. And that matters because once a case is framed a certain way, everything else tends to get interpreted through that lens. If someone's introduced as a monster, we look for monstrous behavior. If someone is introduced as suspicious, we notice everything that confirms it. If a victim is presented as innocent and ideal, we respond differently than we might if the victim's life were shown in a more complicated way. Now, this doesn't mean that the media is intentionally misleading people. Stories need structure. They need clarity, and the media needs to fit them into a timeframe or a space on a page. But criminal cases are not fiction. They involve real people, real evidence, real trauma, and real consequences. And the common true crime template, victim, villain, motive, resolution, can oversimplify all of that. The victim selected for public attention is not always the person most representative of victimization. Mainstream true crime often focuses heavily on young, white, conventionally attractive women. It doesn't mean those victims don't matter, but it does mean other victims are often ignored. Victims of color, male victims, older victims, poor victims, sex workers, people with addiction histories, people whose lives don't fit the perfect victim, air quotes, narrative. And that's an editorial choice, whether it's intentional or not. It affects who receives attention, empathy, pressure, and resources Then there's the villain. True crime often uses labels to make offenders easy to understand. Labels like monster, mastermind, narcissist, sociopath, psychopath. Those words are powerful because they make the behavior feel explained. But many of those terms have specific clinical meanings, and in true crime, they're often used really casually, and that use can flatten a person into a label instead of helping us really understand behavior. And let me make this really clear. Understanding behavior does not excuse it, and I am certainly not excusing any kind of criminal behavior. But if we skip straight to evil, we may miss the actual psychology, the patterns, warning signs, and system failures that could help us understand how violence developed in the first place. Then there's motive. True crime likes motives that are easy to narrate. Motives like jealousy, finances, control, obsession, revenge. All those motives can be real, and most of them are, but in many cases, those motives still involve layers. Layers like trauma history, coercive control, addiction, untreated mental illness, poverty, isolation, escalation, prior warning signs, failed interventions, and opportunities missed by institutions or communities. And those layers are harder to package, so the story becomes simpler Finally, true crime often wants a resolution, an arrest, a confession, a conviction, a final answer. But justice is rarely that neat. Cases can involve wrongful convictions, unreliable confessions, bad forensic work, appeals, exonerations, sentencing disparities, and families who never get answers at all. So when the genre forces a clean ending onto a messy case, it can make the world feel a little more certain than it actually is. And that's where media framing connects directly to biases. Because even when that media framing is not deliberate, our brains are still doing their own work underneath the surface. We bring bias to every story we hear. It doesn't make us bad people, it just makes us human. The issue is that media framing can amplify those biases before we even realize they're operating One of the biggest is confirmation bias, when we pay attention more so to information that supports what we already believe, and either downplay or ignore any information that challenges it. In true crime, this happens all the time. Once a suspect feels guilty to us, everything they do starts to look guilty, and we start to interpret it as guilt. If they cry too much, it seems performative. If they don't cry enough, they seem cold. If they cooperate, they're controlling the narrative. If they don't cooperate, they're hiding something. The conclusion comes first, and the evidence gets filtered through it Then there's availability bias, which is when something feels more common because examples come to mind easily. A good example is watching serial killer documentaries. If we watch enough, random stranger danger can start to feel like the biggest threat, even though many violent crimes involve people known to the victim. If we start to see enough dramatic trial coverage, we can start to believe that every case has hidden evidence, shocking twists, and one brilliant reveal waiting at the end, and that can distort how we understand crime in real life. Another common bias is attribution error. That's when we explain someone's behavior entirely through their personality and ignore the situation around them. And in true crime, this often shows up when people say, "Only a monster could do that." And sometimes people do commit monstrous acts, but behavior's still behavior. It has a context. It can contain escalation, definitely contains choices. Patterns, pressures, and warning signs can all be a part of that. But if we only focus on the label, we could miss the process My favorite though is hindsight bias, and I hear this at home a lot. After we know the outcome, everything seems obvious. We say, "I knew that was gonna happen," or, "The signs were all there." But were they really obvious at the time? Or do they only look obvious because we're looking backward with the answer already in hand? That matters a lot in criminal cases, 'cause hindsight can make investigators, witnesses, jurors, and audiences overconfident, and victim blaming often grows out of that same backward-looking logic. Why did they go there? Why did they trust him? Why didn't they leave? Why didn't they report it sooner? Why didn't they act differently? Those questions can sound like analysis, but they often shift responsibility away from the person who caused the harm and onto the person who experienced it. The media framing can make that worse. If coverage highlights a victim's choices more than an offender's actions, the audience may start evaluating the victim instead of the crime. That's one of the clearest examples of how bias and framing work together. The media gives us a lens. Our brain, we fill in the blank. And if we're not careful, we mistake that constructed story for the full truth So why does any of this matter? Because true crime is not just entertainment that happens to involve crime. For many people, it's one of the main ways they learn about the criminal justice system, how investigations work, what evidence means, what guilt looks like, how victims behave, how offenders think, what a confession is, what a trial is supposed to prove. And those beliefs, they don't stay inside a podcast app or a Netflix queue. They shape public opinion. They affect how people talk about real cases. They affect how potential jurors understand evidence, how communities respond to victims, how people think about policing, punishment, reform, and safety And that's why the genre's blind spots matter. Because if true crime repeatedly tells us that certain victims matter more, we absorb that. If it repeatedly turns offenders into monsters or celebrities, we absorb that too And if it teaches us that justice always comes from one dramatic confession, one brilliant detective, or one shocking piece of evidence, we absorb that, ...and all those ideas can create real consequences. Investigations can be distorted by early public pressure. Jury pools can be influenced before a trial even begins. Victims and families can get pulled into a media circus they never asked for. People can be harassed online because audiences mistake speculation for evidence. And survivors can be re-traumatized by coverage that claims to honor them while turning their worst experience into content. And I wanna be clear here again, understanding crime is not the same as excusing crime. I am not here to excuse violence, minimize harm, or turn offenders into misunderstood anti-heroes. But if we don't understand behavior, we're not likely to get the prevention right. If we don't understand evidence, we're not likely to get justice right. And if we don't understand the media framing, we're not gonna understand how public belief is shaped. And if we don't understand victims as full human beings, not just symbols or plot devices or perfect characters, then we don't get victim support right either. That's why this show exists. Not to treat violence as entertainment while calling it education. I'm not here to solve crimes. I'm not here to pass judgment from a microphone. I'm here to examine what the coverage of crime does, what it adds, what it leaves out, and how it shapes the story the public comes to believe. Every episode, I'll be asking, what does a psychologically and forensically honest account of this case look like? What did the media coverage emphasize? What did it distort? And what did it miss? Because true crime is built from real events, real violence, fear, grief, real families, and real consequences, and that's the tension at the center of the genre. The same case can be handled as a human story with evidence, context, and care, or it can be packaged as entertainment built from somebody else's worst day. That doesn't mean we have to stop listening. It just means we should listen more carefully because crime stories are never just about what happened. They're also about how we explain what happened, who gets believed, who gets blamed, who gets remembered, who gets forgotten, and what the story leaves behind. That may matter more than we think That's a wrap on episode one of Mind Motive Media. If this is the kind of analysis you've been looking for in the true crime space, I'd love for you to follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're willing to leave a review, it helps other people find the show, and I really appreciate it. You can also find me on the socials, primarily, Instagram, Facebook, and X if you wanna continue the conversation. The next episode, we're gonna get into our first case. It's a doozy, and it's exactly the kinda case where media framing, legal differences, and public perception all collide. I'll see you then