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Abstract: True Crime is a genre that's invasiveness and narrative-like structures have persisted for centuries. It is a genre that is historically fluid, adapting from different mediums, from print to play to podcast. Of course, its digital presence--marked by conspiracy theories, viral videos, and frame-by-frame analyses--has both beneficial and dire consequences. But regardless of consequence, its adaptability and the human fascination with violence and the sublime ensure there will “always be a market for murder”. 

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Keywords: Serial Podcast, seriality, Gabby Petito, Adnan Syed, true crime, Missing White Woman Syndrome, web sleuthing, internet culture, Durkheim and crime

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     In the weeks after Petito went missing, her name spread like wildfire on Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, and Tiktok as people circulated news stories, opinions, and analyses of her social media (and even police) footage. Petito’s name became so viral that a couple who was camping in a similar area as Petito saw the news and decided to look back at their own video footage. They happened to find a video with Petito’s van in the background--the location of which was eventually used to locate Petito’s body (Romano). An average couple, who would have otherwise likely never heard of the case, now contributed meaningful information to the investigation. Yet, of course, a lot of the resulting attention was also negative. After Petito was found dead, conspiracy theories flooded social media sites. People gained millions of Tiktok views for outlandish claims such as that her fiance, Brian Launderie, killed her because she was actually pregnant, or that Launderie lied about his age when they were together. Today, the subreddit r/gabbypetito has over 140 thousand members, as web sleuths (those who attempt to solve crimes on the internet) dissect every remnant of the last months of her life frame-by-frame. In fact, the seventy-seven-minute bodycam footage of police talking to Launderie and Petito after a domestic violence call during their road trip has over fifteen million views on YouTube. Although the media portrayal of her case has spurred discussions about domestic violence, and the virality has given some aid to the investigation, something that was utterly tragic has now become a spectacle, picked apart for entertainment and profitability. But how did we get here? How did we get to a point in which Average Joes can help police find dead bodies or where being murdered can spark a rise to fame? Although the internet has certainly made extensive true crime communities and access to the once-private lives of murderers and murder victims possible, the internet is only exacerbating ideas in our society about who we value and driving obsessions rooted in our culture--and potentially human nature. 

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Chapter 2: How did we get here? A Brief History of Missing White Woman Syndrome

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     These depictions of crime create boundaries between the acceptable and unacceptable and enforce familial and social norms by depicting those “outside” of these norms as extreme, violent, and criminal. Durkheim, in Is Crime Always Functional, uses the sociological theory of functionalism to understand crime’s purpose in society. He argues that under the theory of functionalism (the theory that all aspects of society have a role in shaping it), crime is necessary and if something is necessary for society, it must serve a purpose. He sees crime as necessary to develop culture, which, as a social construct, cannot exist without defining what is outside of it. Durkheim believes nothing is inherently criminal, stating that certain behaviors are labeled criminal by the public’s collective consciousness--such as in the case of murder--in which the majority of people would agree on the immorality of this. However, in many cases, what is criminal is decided by those in power in order to exclude people from the inside of society--such as the War on Drugs. And, by deciding and declaring criminal actions as unacceptable and “outside”, we simultaneously construct ideas of what is acceptable and “inside”. James Derrida, another sociologist, argues that the way we construct meaning is through binaries, so we cannot understand what something is without knowing what it is not (Namaste). This theory helps us understand the societal purpose of the types of crimes that are represented in media throughout history and their consequences on society. 

Nowadays, the crimes that are most heavily represented in mainstream media are not murders between family members or a married couple but are still those that threaten white, suburban, middle-class life. These crimes threaten perceptions of “normalcy,” often focusing on missing white women. As a white, petite, woman with a white, seemingly normal fiance, Gabby Petito is an archetype of normalcy and the epitome of the modern representation of true crime. It is no surprise that Gabby Petito’s case took the internet by storm, rather than one of a missing Black person or a missing Indigenous person because her case has an element of shock and sensationalism that comes with the death of someone who symbolizes stability and order. In fact, the representation of white women in true crime is so disproportionate that it has been dubbed as “Missing White Woman Syndrome” by multiple scholars. In a Journal of Law and Criminology piece entitled "Missing White Woman Syndrome: An Empirical Analysis of Race and Gender Disparities in Online News Coverage of Missing Persons", criminal and law researcher Zach Sommers analyzes media news coverage of missing people on racial and gendered lines. Sommers argues that white women are much more likely to be represented by the news when they go missing, describing case studies of two eerily similar cases with very different levels of coverage: one of a young Black man that receives close to no attention, versus one of a young white woman that is closely tracked on national media outlets. When analyzing internet media coverage of missing people, Sommers discovered that only 12.73% of media coverage represents Black people even though they make up 35.25% of FBI missing person cases. Instead, nearly 68% of media coverage is on white people, which is 8% more than their actual FBI representation. Larger disparities were found on gender lines, as 73.36% of cases in the media were about women, but women are only 48.48% of FBI missing person cases.

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     Of course, just as historical true crime cases about familial and marital murders were about exerting social control, the over-representation of missing white women could arguably be about the same. True crime inflicts social order because people feel that stable, heteronormative, white suburban American life is endangered by outside “criminals” and they must protect their “inside”. Thus, when white suburban women like Gabby Petito go missing, it inspires hysteria. Petito’s body was eventually found (with the help of large search parties, a helicopter, dogs, and drones) in Wyoming, a state where 710 indigenous people were reported missing from 2011-2020--many of them unreported by news outlets and never found.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

According to Lynette Grey Bull, founder of the non-profit Not Our Native Daughters, when indigenous people go missing, people often label them as “drug addicts” or assume it was their own fault they went missing or were murdered. These types of cases are not covered because they do not have a shock factor to the public, and because these types of people are historically and sociologically not valued by our society. 

White women, on the other hand, are free from these “drug addict” labels, as they are often seen as vulnerable and in need of saving--a result of their femininity and the patriarchy. Femininity is associated with whiteness, and women of color--particularly Black women--have historically been separated from ideas of femininity in order to justify their enslavement, exploitation, and abuse (Eversley).

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In the post-Civil War era, anti-Black white politicians utilized their desire to protect white femininity in order to justify violence and white supremacy. In Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party Politics from the Civil War to the Progressive Era by Rebecca Edwards, she recounts how James Vardaman, a Mississippian governor in the early 1900s, stated that a “vote for Vardaman is a vote for white supremacy...a vote for the safety of the home and the protection of our women…” (140). He references the patriarchal duty to protect the “home” and “our women” as justification for white supremacy--as he feared Black men would endanger white women. This need to protect white women has been pushed to extreme levels throughout history, as even the Tulsa Race massacre--which resulted in around three hundred deaths--began because a Black man stepped on a white woman’s toe (Oklahoma Historical Society). Now, when a white woman goes missing, it can culminate in a 140 thousand member subreddit group and a hashtag with billions of views, something that is largely attributed to our America’s long racist and gendered history of portraying white women as a population to be protected from outside threats. 

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     The very public reaction to Gabby Petito’s murder is a consequence of this endangerment of white femininity. Gabby Petito is not seen as a person, but rather as a cultural object--a perfect archetype for normalcy that is reinforced by her digital presence. Her existence is blasted on public display as vacation moments with her fiancee are dissectable Instagram posts and her day-to-day life is a fifteen-minute Youtube vlog. This ease of access to Petito’s cookie-cutter, digestible life makes her seem like an object of analysis for web sleuthing. She does not seem like a real person because she doesn’t seem whole; her online self is only smiley, photogenic, and relatively one-dimensional. It lacks nuance, reality. Petito and Launderie have a very curated presence on social media, and this characterizes them as a normal, picture-perfect couple that went horribly, shockingly wrong. Petito became a picture-perfect character in a story, and was treated as such. And it is this blurriness of fiction and fact, public and private, that hooks others into conspiracy, breaches of privacy, analytics, and web sleuthing. 

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Chapter 3: Serial and Seriality

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     Although the podcast’s virality might be partially due to a similar sense of threat to normalcy--as Hae and Adnan seemed like any other high school relationship, Hae lacked the whiteness common in many victims of viral true crime cases like Gabby Petito or those killed by Ted Bundy. So, part of this normalcy--this whiteness--had to be constructed in a fictional manner. Similar to Petito, Lee was petite, young, and female, and while she did immigrate from South Korea as a pre-teen, these details were left undiscussed by the podcast’s narrator Sarah Koenig (IE Staff). Instead, Lee is presented in a generic way that “compresses Hae’s personality into a racelesss, ‘typical American teenager’ narrative” (Sorren). In the first Serial episode, Lee is described as “smart, beautiful, cheerful, and a great athlete”, and her personality or family background is hardly discussed or given nuance throughout the twelve-episode installment. So, a first-generation Korean immigrant is cast as raceless, better fitting this narrative of violence disrupting normalcy, which arguably fuels entertainment and virality. Furthermore, because Lee is seen as this typical American teenager, her victimization has a degree of generalization, meaning that Lee could be a representation of nearly anyone. Criminologist Zach Sommers believes that whiteness has this effect, as it is “very easy for us to see a young white woman and say that used to be my cousin or that person I used to babysit for or my neighbor” (Eversley). Lee’s lack of racial characterization gives her this relatable, “girl-next-door” quality as well. Because of these “fictionalized” characterizations, Serial can be considered entertainment instead of pure journalism. Koenig’s narrative style gives this tragic nonfiction case a character of fiction, and her presentation of both Syed and Lee as unsuspecting and normal elicits fear, confusion, and obsession from the public.

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“I remember the times when my days and nights were consumed by Adnan and Hae. I would spend all day, and night listening to serial, reading court transcripts, reading old Reddit posts about this case, coming up with different theories, telling everything about Serial, and debating whether Adnan was guilty or not. My life was 89.9% serial at one point, and I miss it…”.

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     In a collection of essays about the podcast, The Serial Podcast and Storytelling in the Digital Age, the authors document the history of the “serial” narrative form--tracing it back to the late eighteenth century. The proliferation of print materials, such as newspapers, periodicals, etc allowed crimes to be documented serially as the investigations played out. Wolfgang Iser, a twentieth-century literary critic, suggests that this delay of presentation of materials leads to a “deeper imaginative engagement”, meaning that those who engage with these materials are forced to spend time speculating and imagining rather than finding out answers right away. Without this deeper engagement, a lot of these discussion forums and theories would not be as necessary. One of the authors, Ellen McCracken, compares Serial’s form to that of an 1823 murder case committed by John Thurtell. Thurtell murdered a successful gambler named William Weare who notoriously kept his lavish savings on hand. As the Thurtell crime became retold serially through multiple mediums, including newspaper stories and a collection of plays, the crime became reinvented as a story, something that happened with Adnan Syed’s case in Serial. Fiction intertwined with nonfiction as the format of the Thurtell plays fictionalized dialogue, character, and the timeline of the murder. According to McCracken, the seriality of the recounts on the Thurtell murder fostered a sense of intimacy with the “characters” in the story because they kept reappearing in the audience’s lives week after week. 

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     And, of course, this serialization expanded greatly with the development of technology. After the development of DVR, stand-alone soap opera episodes became week-to-week action storylines (Auerbach). One of the first major serialized television shows was the 1990s show Twin Peaks, which told a story of a murdered “innocent” high school girl (who happened to be white, feminine, and conventionally attractive). The true crime genre fits serialized formats quite well, as clues and leads can be unraveled episode-by-episode. Soon, serialized television shows evolved into serialized podcasts, serialized Youtube series, and even Tiktok videos that end in “come back for part 2”. This serialization incorporates narrative techniques to create an intimacy with characters that is often only seen as a feature of fiction or fantasy, and thus, fans treat real criminals and victims like characters. Petito’s case was told serially as well. Her case became viral when she went missing, and the public tweeted updates and made Tiktoks debriefing news as it came out. This serialization encouraged random people to investigate the murder, come up with theories, and discuss on online forums such as Reddit. The way in which those involved in real crimes become characters--cultural objects for us to pick apart, stalk, and over-analyze--is due to the sense of normalcy they represent as well as the ways in which technology (and serialization) tailor these narratives for consumption. It is such a transformative method of narration that on the Serial subreddit, people even compare Serial to fictional pieces such as Law and Order and CSI. The notion that a real person’s murder was altered so significantly by this narrative medium that it became comparable to popular television shows is quite telling to the power of serialization.

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Chapter 4: Does this make us Disturbed?

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Are we wrong--maybe even disturbed--to have made a spectacle of murder? 

     Historically speaking, true crime has had a growing place in our culture since the development of the printing press. Arguably, it would not have had the same popularity if the crimes featured were simply factual or void of songs, characterizations, and captivating visuals. The genre also would have lacked its popularity had it represented crimes of underrepresented communities. It owes its success to histories of white supremacy and patriarchy that have formulated our concepts of American-ness over time as an ideal worth protecting (and agonizing over on a subreddit). The missing white woman trope represents something deeper about enforcing social order, relatability, and an eerie illustration of who our society has valued throughout history. Gabby Petito is not just another girl who went missing and happened to go viral. Her whiteness, femininity, middle-class identity, and petite figure made her an archetype of typical American life. When we see our socially constructed notion of normalcy upended by something so unfathomable and incomprehensible as murder, it is difficult not to get attached. Maybe we are not disturbed; maybe we are just victims of societal structures of power that tell us to fear and fret when whiteness, white femininity, and order are disrupted. 

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