The Four Hundred: Killers, Crooks and Cults, Oh My!
Arman Zhenikeyev
I popped the popcorn, she got the blankets. My girlfriend and I settled down on the couch for our weekly wind-down; it was movie night. We snuggle together and press play.
“. . .Police say he was armed with a heavy oak log. He clubbed and then strangled to death 20-year-old Lisa Levy and 21-year-old Margaret Bowman. At least one of them was raped. . .”
What a great night, just me, my girlfriend and Ted Bundy.
Serial killers, drug lords, and social work cases-gone wrong have been capturing people’s attention with every release of a new true-crime documentary debuting on streaming platforms such as Netflix, HBO Max, and Hulu.
The fascination with true crime media is not new as the genre began in the 16th century as independent British authors and printers documented crimes wrapped up in 20 to 30-page pamphlets, consumed by the most literate classes.
Crime journalism and sensationalism got pushed into the mainstream media at the beginning of the 19th century. Readers around the country were captivated by some of the grisly crimes described in papers and short novels.
Now, the interest in decade-defining crimes and notorious killers expands to digital media. In the Top 100 US Podcast list from Apple Podcasts, half of the top 10 are true crime shows including the highly-rated “Crime Junkies,” “Dateline” and “Morbid: A True Crime Podcast”.
And there will always be a true-crime documentary or docuseries featured on the main page of multiple streaming platforms. The most-watched include Abducted in Plain Sight detailing the disturbing kidnapping of Jan Broberg Felt in the ’70s by her neighbor, and Don’t F**k With Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer which documents the constant hunt for a cat killer who further escalates his monstrous crimes.
So why are people so fascinated by a genre that many would consider repulsive? There are a few reasons.
According to the justice studies department of Rasmussen University, humans are naturally interested in what drives people to do the unthinkable. True crime draws the public in because it triggers the adrenaline rush of fear.
“As a source of popular-culture entertainment, serial killers allow us to experience fear and horror in a controlled environment, where the threat is exciting, but not real,” sociology and criminology professor Scott Bonn told Psychology Today.
This also goes hand-in-hand with human nature’s drawn to the dark parts of humanity.
“The brain pays more attention to negative information than positive information,” clinical psychologist Krista Jordan told Health, “So finding out about the ins and outs of what makes someone a serial killer is more interesting than finding out the ins and outs of what makes someone altruistic because it’s the most negative thing you can think of.”
And while many could say they are avid watchers of true crime television and documentaries, they do not come close to the cyber sleuth community who put themselves in the story to uncover and solve ongoing cases.
Cyber sleuths are defined as people who, according to PC Mag, search the internet for information and conduct their own detective work regarding multiple situations, many times falling deeper and deeper into cases that could potentially be solved from the computer.
Websleuths.com is one of the several community forums that discuss cold cases and missing persons. Users are able to comment and inform other members concerning the cases that they inquire about and together, the number of clues grows with the community.
Todd Matthews is said to be the first cyber sleuth who successfully connected human remains to a missing woman case back in the late ’90s. His father-in-law discovered the body in a tent bag, and the Jane Doe was later nicknamed “Tent Girl.”
Matthews dug into cases upon cases until he stumbled upon a 1998 post from a woman who was looking for her missing sister, Barbara Ann Hackman Taylor. Through connecting the pieces of the “Tent Girl,” the years passed, and reaching out to the sister, he was able to positively identify the Jane Doe to be Barbara Taylor.
While her murder remains unsolved, the family was able to lay her to rest thanks to Matthews. He now works as the Director of Case Management and Communications with the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.
He pioneered the beginning of the cyber sleuthing community who delved into ongoing true crime cases, igniting a whole wave of citizen detectives eager to crack cases that law enforcement otherwise hadn’t solved yet.
Another notable cyber sleuth is Tricia Griffith, who left her radio career in her late 40s and decided to invest her time in being a full-time web sleuth.
She played a part in solving the murder case of Abraham Shakespeare, a man who had won $30 million in a Florida lottery in 2006 and disappeared three years later.
The critical suspect and Shakespeare’s business partner Dorice Moore, who many of the cyber sleuths became suspicious about, incriminated herself when she emailed Griffith trying to clear her name.
Griffith pieced together the IP address from the email and the posting of an anonymous person trying to clear their name on the web sleuth community website and realized it had been Moore. Soon after, it had been found that Shakespeare’s body was under a slab of cement in Moore’s boyfriend’s backyard. Moore was convicted and sentenced to life in prison in 2012.
“People want to be involved with something that touches them – that makes them feel. They want to help a hurting person whose son or daughter is missing. They want to help with a case where nobody knows why this massacre happened,” Griffith told The Guardian.
The web sleuth community brings together true-crime fanatics who can get involved and connect with others just as invested in discussing and sharing theories and information about unsolved cases. To Griffith, web sleuths don’t solve the crimes but rather offer up evidence that law enforcement could find valuable, despite them denying ever utilizing the web sleuth platforms.
But with the explosion of true crime documentaries such as Unsolved Mysteries and Cold Case Files, more and more true-crime fans fall deeper into the genre, going from simply docuseries bingers to dedicated online detectives.
Currently, Reddit’s board “Reddit Bureau of Investigations” has amassed a following of 444,000 members who go dig through forums and web archives to help solve crimes. Some of the Reddit posts found on this website mention suspicious content suggesting “Very creepy account on TikTok,” or provide information on active killers like “Cold Case: Little Rock Arkansas Serial Killer - The Little Rock Slasher.”
The population of true-crime lovers is growing, and while these documentaries could bring back sour memories for some, it could encourage many to understand the justice system, gather insights behind a crime, and potentially bring justice amid chaos.