That true crime is having a moment should not come as news to anybody. The current trend seems to have started with the astounding success of Serial, Sarah Koenig’s hit investigative podcast that premiered in the fall of 2014. But while true crime has been a popular genre for movies, TV series, documentaries, and books for decades, this time is different. For the first time, audiences, be they for podcasts, documentaries, scripted series, or books, are active participants. They are conjuring up their own theories in online message boards, sleuthing out new information, and, in rare cases, changing the course of investigations and unearthing new suspects.
Before the 1980s, true-crime memoirs hardly existed. Even after the popularity of Ann Rule’s 1980 memoir, The Stranger Beside Me, in which she chronicles her friendship with Ted Bundy before he became the best-known serial killer of the 70s, those types of books were still rare.
