Editor’s Notes: Rachel Monroe is a journalist and author of “Savage Appetites: True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession.” His work has appeared in Best American Travel Writing 2018, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and elsewhere. The opinions expressed here are his own. Read more opinions on CNN.
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For as long as humans have consumed media, we have been drawn to stories about the dark side of the human experience. Death songs and popular songs are about tragic deaths. In the 18th and 19th centuries, cheap publications describing scandalous crimes – “Cruel murders and murders” and promising “Disgusting revelations!” – widely distributed.
It’s similar to the kind of “true crime” you see on television, streaming services and podcast charts – stories that detail the criminal’s actions, the victim’s vulnerability and how they almost got away with it.
An unsolved case challenges our desire for certainty, answers and justice. It is tempting to examine the facts of the case again and again, hoping to find one clue that will open and close everything. This has certainly been the case with the brutal murders of four college students – Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Ethan Chapin and Xana Kernodle – who were stabbed in Moscow, Idaho.
Murder has always been a topic of interest to people. The mass murders involved, however, are not truly representative. This case had many signs of a patriotic murder.
The killing was brutal, and for weeks, the suspect was innocent. The victims were tragically young and killed in college, a place many of us like to think is safe. The co-killer, inexplicably, stabbed four roommates but left two alive.
Immersing ourselves in such a terrible story can be an attempt, in a twisted way, to make it less scary: If we understand what happened, maybe we can avoid falling into it ourselves. Some crime buffs I’ve talked to have told me that they are moved by compassion. They felt that staying up late, reading a certain story, was a way to connect with the victims, to forget them.
Then, of course, there are a few attractive incentives. For some people, consuming true crime provides an opportunity to satisfy their cravings for more depraved material. For others, it’s acting arrogantly: This happened to you because you were careless, or didn’t realize or deserve it. It wouldn’t happen to me.
True crime stories can bring out our best and worst emotions. Sadness can inhibit voyeurism; The desire for justice can cross the line and seek revenge.
After I wrote a book about women’s obsession with true crime, I pretty much left the genre. I thought I had done my homework, but the story of the four college students who were killed popped into my head. Before I go to sleep, I visit various subreddits dedicated to the case – Moscow Murders; Idaho Murders – to see if there is anything new.
I looked through the accounts of the victims, looking at the pictures of people so scared and full of life, that it was hard to see. I brought up guilt at the dinner party before I saw anyone else’s face and realized, too late, that murder didn’t make for good conversation at the table.
But the more time I spent reading about the case online, the more depressed I became. In their hunger for information, some people seemed to forget that we are talking about a real tragedy that happened to real people, not a TV story.
He discussed the matter with false interest and was angry that the police were not releasing more information. They only thought about the killer’s “target”, as if the story needed a bigger person. They pushed anyone who was lucky enough to be freed from the crimes – a troublesome neighbor, a man at a food truck at the same time as two of the victims, a random professor – to treat them as criminals.
The actors unleashed a sarcastic tale, as if expecting a killer and the deranged influence of a common man during the episode “Mind Minds.” They dissected the lives of the victims, scrutinized their interests and publicized the crimes of their relatives.
By late December, after police arrested a suspect at his parents’ home in Pennsylvania, national attention to the case had taken a turn for the worse. Since his arrest, the suspect has been extradited from Pennsylvania back to Idaho and is facing four counts of first-degree murder and one count of robbery.
So far, the biggest twist in the story surrounding the case is that the suspect was studying for his PhD in crime: He was someone who might have been expected, after his studies, to help catch criminals. Instead, he has been charged with four counts of murder.
Interest from the moment of his arrest turned to those who lived with him, especially the girl who, according to the police, saw a stranger leaving the house. Because of fear when he saw a criminal hiding his face in his house, he went back to his room and closed his door.
This girl has been treated very badly. It is impossible for any of us to know how we would have responded. But many people felt it was appropriate to judge a stranger, who a few hours earlier had lost four of his friends in the worst possible way.
Of course, being interested in Idaho’s gruesome murders is understandable. It was a crime that seemed to come out of a nightmare: a stranger comes into your house and kills you in your bed.
But the internet and true crime make for a dangerous mix. We are so used to having so much information at our fingertips that our curiosity can become rational, as if we owe a lot to our curiosity. Social media incentives to increase dating encourage users to think out of the blue.
But the friends, family, neighbors and schoolmates affected by this crime are not far away; for them, the story is real.
In our enthusiasm, it is sometimes easy to forget that what we write online can have real effects. One certainty is that many of the couch potatoes and Internet gamers will move on, but perhaps after the next terrorist starts making headlines.
