The crime we consume and the victims we forget

The true crime genre of entertainment is hugely popular and lucrative. Forensic scientist Ruben Miller shares a reminder of the families still living those stories.

The other day I came across a playlist called “True Crime for Sleep”. I had to read it twice to make sure I hadn’t misunderstood.

Apparently, stories about murder are now considered soothing enough to help people drift off at night. Somewhere, presumably, somebody decided there was a market for calming narrations of homicide, and somebody else agreed. It is difficult to imagine the meeting where that idea was approved.

“What should we call it?”

“True Crime for Sleep.”

“Perfect.”

It is ridiculous. It is also completely normal.

I don’t think many of us would describe ourselves as people who find crime entertaining. We don’t see ourselves that way. Yet somewhere along the way, crime stopped being something we simply heard about on the news. It became something we consume.

We have favourite documentaries, recommend podcasts to friends, and binge an entire series over a rainy weekend. We tell people not to spoil the ending because we haven’t reached the final episode yet.

Sometimes we say things that would have sounded extraordinary not all that long ago. “I’m halfway through a murder.”

“Don’t tell me who did it”.

I’m hardly immune to it. I’ve watched clips about cases I’d never encountered professionally. I’ve listened to podcasts while walking the dog. Netflix has become remarkably confident that it understands me – I watched one documentary about an old murder case, it now seems convinced homicide is my primary hobby. Like most people, I’m curious about crime because it asks some big questions: What happened? Why? Could it have been prevented? Could it happen to me?

I guess those are worthwhile questions. And I think the problem isn’t our curiosity. It’s that when something becomes part of everyday life, we stop noticing how unusual it really is.

I spent more than two decades attending homicide scenes. People often assume that the hardest part of the job must have been the blood or the violence. Sometimes they ask what the worst scene was, as though there must be one that stands apart from all the others. I’ve always found that a difficult question to answer. Not because there weren’t horrific scenes (there certainly were). But what has stayed with me over the years isn’t a particular injury or a particularly confronting room, it’s how ordinary almost every place looked.

Crime scenes are rarely cinematic. They’re kitchens where somebody forgot to rinse their coffee cup before leaving for work. They’re children’s bedrooms with school bags still packed for the next morning. They’re lounge rooms where the television is still on. They’re farm tracks, suburban footpaths and driveways that look exactly like thousands of others across the country.

Television has taught us to think of crime scenes as dramatic places. Most of the ones I attended looked like somewhere you or I might have been yesterday. Perhaps that’s why they stay with me. Because they were ordinary until, suddenly, they weren’t.

The other thing that television rarely captures is what happens once the forensic work is finished. Eventually the photographs are taken, the exhibits are collected and the measurements are complete. The police leave, the forensic scientists leave and the pathologist finishes their examination. Journalists move on to another story because something else has happened overnight.

Life carries on. Except not for the people who have just lost someone.

One of the stories that has returned to the news recently is the appeal involving the murder of Taranaki farm worker Jacob Ramsay. When one of the men convicted of his murder successfully appealed his life sentence and sought to challenge his conviction, the story appeared across news websites, radio bulletins and social media. It generated thousands of comments, many of them thoughtful, many of them angry.

For most of us, it became another story in the news cycle. For Jacob’s family, it meant reading once again about the night he was beaten, chained to a vehicle, dragged along a farm track and left in a rubbish pit.

There is an enormous difference between consuming a story and living inside one. I don’t think we mean to forget that. I just think we’ve become remarkably good at changing the channel.

Crime stories now arrive with a structure we’ve learned to recognise. There will be an investigation, a suspect and a revelation somewhere around the middle. Eventually, someone will explain what happened. Real life is rarely that tidy.

One of the things I found most frustrating about television wasn’t that it exaggerated forensic science, it was that it compressed time. A DNA result arrives before the next ad break; the detective has a breakthrough just as the episode begins to lose momentum. Every question is answered by the closing credits. Real investigations don’t unfold like that. Some answers take months. Some take years. Some never come.

That’s difficult for the people investigating them, but I wonder whether it’s become difficult for the rest of us as well. We’ve become so used to crime being packaged into a satisfying narrative that when reality refuses to cooperate, it feels as though somebody must have failed. Why haven’t the police arrested anyone? Why won’t they release more evidence? Why is the trial taking so long? Why is there an appeal?

I remember one investigation where, long before the forensic examinations had been completed, there was a strong feeling that everyone knew who was responsible. Circumstantially, it made sense. The relationships, the opportunity and the behaviour afterwards all seemed to point in the same direction. If you had asked almost anyone involved where the investigation was heading, I suspect you would have received much the same answer.

Then the forensic results came back. They didn’t identify somebody else; they simply didn’t support the conclusion everyone hoped they would. The science neither implicated nor excluded the suspect. It was neutral.

I remember looking at the results and feeling almost disappointed. Not because I wanted one outcome rather than another, but because I knew how desperately people wanted certainty, and the evidence couldn’t give it to them.

Evidence doesn’t change to meet our expectations. It doesn’t become more persuasive because the victim’s family deserves answers. It doesn’t become clearer because detectives have invested years trying to understand what happened. It simply is what it is.

True crime offers us something real investigations often can’t: completion. Every episode ends. Every series has a conclusion. Even when the offender is never identified, the narrator explains why. Loose ends are tied together as neatly as they can be. We close the laptop believing we understand what happened.

Real crime, on the other hand, leaves families living with birthdays that become anniversaries, bedrooms that remain untouched for months, phones that are no longer answered and questions that continue long after everyone else has left.

None of this is an argument against documentaries, podcasts or books. I wrote one myself. I understand the fascination because I’ve spent a big part of my adult life trying to understand why impossible things happen to ordinary people. Curiosity isn’t the problem, and neither is storytelling. If crime teaches us anything, it is usually about ourselves: how we respond under pressure, how communities heal, how fragile life can be, and how much we rely on one another when the unthinkable happens.

Those stories should be told. Perhaps they simply deserve to be told with a little more awareness that they belong to someone. Every case we binge over a weekend was once the worst phone call somebody ever received. Every documentary that asks us to guess who did it begins with a family trying to comprehend that someone they love isn’t coming home. Every appeal, every anniversary, every fresh headline means there are people somewhere in New Zealand reading details of a day they have spent years trying to survive.

Most of us will finish this article, make a coffee and get on with whatever the afternoon has in store. Somebody else will still be living inside the story.

More Reading ...