I'm a Female Who's Obsessed with Murder

I don’t talk about true crime extensively on this blog, but I’d like to. It’s an important topic that can honestly say a lot more about the audience and fanbase than the crimes and criminals themselves. And I think this post about why I take interest in this unsavory topic in the first place is a good way to open the door for future conversation.

My knowledge and odd in-depth fascination with serial killers, child abductions, and cult mass suicides are enough to raise eyebrows in most of my social circles. I also would venture to say that the fact that I’m a female obsessed with these psychotic (mostly women-targeting) murderous men is weird, and seems ill-fitted to most people.

This concept of women liking true crime, however, is not uncommon. A majority of true crime consumers happen to be women. But there are certainly different strains of true crime fandom.

• You could be a Dateline viewer who enjoys the thrill of the dramatizations and the intense narrator’s voice giving the play-by-play.
• Maybe you enjoy documentaries like the Ted Bundy Tapes on Netflix.
• Maybe you like hearing actual recordings of criminals explaining what they did to someone in horrifically vivid detail.
• Or maybe you dabble in it and just listen to a podcast episode or two, because listening to people report about something keeps you somewhat at a distance.

As for me, I’m all of the above. But in order to understand my fascination, I have to sort of go back to the roots of it. That’s what inspired me to write this post.

Trigger warning: I’m going to be talking about true crime for the rest of this post and there may be crime details that you won’t like to read about. I’m not going to be graphic about it, but I just wanted to give a heads up.

How it all began

I first consumed true crime in the form of a story my mother told me when I was under 10 years old. She was explaining the dangers of children letting go of their mothers’ hands in public spaces—child abduction has always been alive and well.

It makes sense. Tell your child about a bad thing that happened in real life and your child will think twice about leaving your side in public and potentially getting lost. Indeed, I never left my mother’s side in public again (not that I did it much to begin with).

Enter my first true crime story: the story of Adam Walsh, a 6-year-old boy who did leave his mother’s side in a shopping mall, was abducted, abused, and decapitated.

As a child close to Adam Walsh’s abduction age, I was paralyzed with fear. I thought about that crime for the next six months, thinking about what that child must have gone through, the suffering of his parents, everything. It was a lot for little childhood me to process.

But, eventually, I did process it, and then—I wanted to know more.

My mother was an avid Dateline watcher, and she’d let me watch it with her. It became an activity upon which we did a lot of our bonding. To this day, if I’m at my mom’s house and Dateline is on, we will sit and watch it for hours, mesmerized over the details of the murders, how wives kill their husbands for money, how husbands kill their wives in a jealous rage, how children kill their parents, how children kill other children, how people just murder for no reason whatsoever. To me, every victim had a way of preventing their untimely deaths. I’d scan the show looking for where the victim messed up, where he or she could have been more careful, should have seen the signs.

(I know this is absolutely NOT fair to the victims. No one deserves to get murdered. Psychologically, this thought process of mine makes so much sense when I think about the hyper-aware person I’ve become over time.)

With every story after Adam Walsh, I’d feel that initial trauma of the horror that kept creating mini dramatized movies in my head as I tried to sleep at night.

However, with every story, this recovery time got shorter and shorter until, eventually, I didn’t feel the need to recover anymore. My imagination stopped running wild.

True crime stories ultimately just felt like facts, as if I were reading a history book.

Dateline started to feel boring, and I needed more Adam Walsh trauma feelings.

I watched Silence of the Lambs and I wanted to be Jodie Foster. I wanted to study forensic psychology so painfully much that I took a Criminal Justice 101 course in college. My research paper sought to answer whether serial killers could be rehabilitated and reintegrated into society, to which my answer was NOPE.

I became so absorbed in crime and I couldn’t find any more true crime to consume at the time, so I started reading Stephen King (a very detailed fright writer) and that sort of satiated my hunger for gory, descriptive, and semi-realistic horror stories. You all know my love for King books.

Time went by and I kept watching Forensic Files, documentaries on killers, movies like American Psycho and Zodiac, and even started diving into cults (a whole other fascination). The cult leaders especially piqued my interest because the psychology of entering a cult or being the leader of a cult is pretty nuts, but I feel like if I had been living in the 70s I would have probably felt compelled to join one.

That being said, Jim Jones started interesting me quite a bit—the way he could command that many people. I finally bit the bullet and bought his biography a few months ago. I also listened to the Heaven’s Gate podcast and wanted to just keep learning and learning about these freaky groups of people who would just commit mass suicide. There are so many modern-day cults it’s truly astonishing. If you’re willing to hear the revolting details, check out the Children of God cult documentary on Netflix. Truly disturbing stuff. Maybe I’ll do a post where I list out all the good docs to you guys if you’re interested.

Finally, in my grad program I discovered Sword and Scale, perhaps one of the most gruesome True Crime retelling podcasts, and the concept of hearing the vivid details of a criminal’s actions, straight from the criminal’s mouth, blew the door wide open for me. It brought back all the Adam Walsh feelings again, being scared to go anywhere alone because female abduction IS DEFINITELY abundant and common—and always has been.

I listened to horrifying stories, most of which I can’t relay back to others who don’t share in this fascination because most (I’d say normal) people are not accustomed to hearing these kinds of details.

BUT I WILL SAY THIS: THE AWFUL THINGS THAT HUMANS CAN DO TO OTHER HUMANS IS STAGGERING.

That being said, I think that this fear of being killed, always navigating the world with a hyper-awareness, is the reason I listen to these killers deliver their gruesome, cold, and heartless confessions. As a woman, I’m at risk when I’m out in public by myself. I just am. So every time I listen to a gruesome murder story, really parse out what that victim might have done differently to avoid their tragic end, I feel like I’m giving myself an immunity boost of awareness.

People are shocked by what psychotic killers do to their victims—I’m no longer surprised. In fact, it’s very rare that I hear a true crime and actually sit there with my jaw dropped anymore.

THE POWER KNOWLEDGE

Knowledge truly is power. If I know the horrible things that can befall a person in today’s world, I don’t have to be as afraid. If I spend my time studying and attempting to understand and analyze this evil topic, I don’t have space in my head to even BE afraid—if that makes sense.

Also, to be completely honest, when people think I’m cool or edgy for knowing so much about murder (because they think it’s atypical female stuff—incorrectly I might add), it makes me feel powerful. When I’m listening to something gruesome with someone and they’re wigged out and I don’t even flinch, it’s a powerful feeling.

Supplies a whole new definition to “Murderino,” am I right?

I plan on doing a sort of True Crime series in the coming weeks/months where I can provide some resources to you all. I think it’s so important to know what the real world is like, to know that it’s a scary place, and you have to be careful.

Of course I don’t think it’s good to be crippled by fear to the point where you never leave the house. But if my mother taught me anything with her scary true stories, it’s that you need to be aware of your surroundings—always. It doesn’t matter where you are, if the area is affluent or not, or if you’re in a place that’s never had an incident of crime.

I hope this post gave you some insight into my True Crime obsession. I really like diving into my psyche a bit and seeing why and how this all started. Also, the more that people know about what can happen to them, the more they can avoid bad situations. I know… not everything is 100 percent avoidable.

But a good deal of it is.