Our true crime fetish has nothing to do with the search for justice | Fiona Sturges
The entire genre has been built primarily on the abuse and murder of women. It’s time to move on
In A Very Fatal Murder, the New York journalist David Pascall investigated the killing of Hayley Price, a 17-year-old prom queen from small-town Nebraska with “big dreams and clear skin”. The unsolved case was the fruit of a lengthy search by Pascall and his production team for the ideal killing. They wanted, he said, “a murder that [was] engrossing and mysterious, a murder that perfectly reflects our nation’s current economic and social conditions … a murder in which a really hot white girl dies.”
A Very Fatal Murder was the creation of the satirical organ the Onion, a magnificent sendup of the tropes of the true-crime podcast, from the tinkling soundtrack and the questing, Pulitzer-hungry host, to the big-city production crew crashing through provincial communities where “no one has HBO”. It should have killed the genre stone dead, but no such luck. For producers looking to score a Serial-sized hit, there is little more irresistible than the discovery of dust-smothered case files yielding tales of corrupt cops, compromised witnesses and lashings of lady corpses.