True crime or true justice

Tardy Furniture, scene of the crime in Season 2 of the podcast In the Dark.

I’m sensing that the craze for true crime stories is entering a new phase. This is when a trend in popular culture becomes so saturated that a backlash begins against it. We have become so steeped in true crime – particularly in the podcast format – that the stories have started to lose all meaning.

But there is still immense value to be found in this trend, I think particularly in stories that are so well told that they change the course of future events. These are stories that are more about the justice system, and the consequences of crime, than they are about just the recounting of events.

I was reminded of this while listening to a Longform interview with the New Yorker writer David Grann. His 2009 piece on the convicted murderer Cameron Todd Willingham is an example of how a skilled reporter and talented writer can change accepted wisdom. Willingham was convicted of setting a house fire that killed his three daughters, and he was eventually executed on Texas’ death row for the crime. Grann digs into what turns out to be faulty science about arson and accelerants, and asks the question about whether an innocent man was put to death.

An investigation into junk science is also at the heart of Pamela Coloff’s New York Times series last year on the murder of Mickey Bryan (also in Texas), Blood Will Tell. Bryan’s husband Joe has spent more than 30 years in prison for her murder, convicted on the spurious foundation of blood spatter analysis. It’s literally impossible to read this story and think that justice was served for Joe Bryan.

The reporter Madeleine Baran and her team at the In the Dark podcast have pulled on similar threads in their two seasons, looking at faulty law enforcement investigations, and essentially re-investigating stalled cases and miscarriages of justice. In the first season, about the 1989 kidnapping of Jacob Wetterling, and in the second season, the multiple attempts to pin four murders on a man named Curtis Flowers.

In the Wetterling case, after the podcast was out (and after it revealed years of conclusive evidence that could have been tied together decades earlier), the local police apologized for their inept handling of the case. The Flowers case is currently in front of the Supreme Court, and it’s probably not an exaggeration to say that the podcast’s findings have strengthened Curtis Flowers’ position immensely.  

There is something immensely satisfying about following a good reporter in reinvestigating a case that might otherwise be forgotten. I will never get tired of this type of true crime, and will follow reporters like these wherever they want to go. Next up for me, this will include podcast series including Happy Valley and Finding Cleo, and Patrick Radden Keefe’s new book Say Nothing.