Crime rates in America may be falling, but the appetite for true crime coverage? That's never been bigger.And this fall, there's plenty for fans of the topic to choose from, whether it's streaming (like Netflix's "Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story"), podcasts ("Crime Junkie"), popular broadcast series (CBS News' own "48 Hours"), the big screen ("By Any Means"), and even good old-fashioned Court TV, it's practically everywhere.
And the fixation isn't new.Many trace the genre's mass appeal back to the 1960s, when Truman Capote wrote "In Cold Blood" about the murder of the Clutter family in Kansas.
"I read Truman Capote's 'In Cold Blood' when I was probably 17, 18; it hit me as no other book has ever hit me," said Jean Murley, a professor at the Savanah College of Art and Design, who studies the true crime phenomenon."I just became more and more fascinated with it – the sort of drama, the fact that these stories were real, horrifying."One such real and horrifying story was the hatchet-deaths Lizzie Borden was accused of back in 1892, which took place in the very Massachusetts house where we sat for our interview."It was a very high-profile crime at its time, with a woman at the center of, you know, two acts of horrific violence," said Murley.
"And it has continued to be super-interesting, because she was never convicted.Nobody was ever convicted for those crimes."Yes, the murders of Andrew Borden and his wife, Abby (Lizzie's stepmother), are technically still unsolved.
"It's an open case, yes," said Murley."A very, very cold case." Murley says it's no wonder why we as humans are naturally drawn to these tales of murder, mayhem and mystery.
"For women in particular, of course, there are all of the reasons for anybody to be interested in true crime," she said."True crime deals with the biggest emotions within the human experience … The stakes are incredibly high.
We're talking about facing mortality.We're talking about violence."All of ...