True crime: a disturbing blend of fact and fiction

The true crime genre has exploded in popularity in the last few years. The BBC’s hit television series The Serpent told the story of the 1970s conman and murderer Charles Sobhraj, Zac Efron played Ted Bundy in Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile and if you type in “true crime” on YouTube or a podcast app you will be inundated with re-tellings of gruesome stories exploring the worst of humanity.

Whilst the genre is popular amongst many age groups, it seems to particularly pique the interest of the younger generation. On YouTube, a surprising number of young women have found fame through posting true crime videos with a strange twist; the presenter performs a make-up tutorial whilst they retell the horrific story of a crime or murder. 

Bailey Sarian is an American YouTuber who shot to fame doing just that. Her channel has amassed over 5.63 million subscribers who come to watch her “murder mystery & makeup” content, covering stories such as the Jonestown massacre in 1978. Danielle Kirsty a British YouTuber with 261,000 subscribers, posts videos with much the same structure. In her latest video, she tells the story of “The Happiest Prisoner on Death Row”, as she applies a smokey eye and shimmering lipstick. These are just two of many similar accounts.

As is often the case, this trend has spilt out into TikTok, the Gen-Z video-sharing app. In clips varying from one to three minutes in length, young people collate CCTV footage, pictures, videos and headlines about criminal cases, either playing out the videos with captions and eerie music or speaking over the footage to explain the case themselves. The hashtag #truecrime has 5.7 billion views on the app and #makeuptruecrime has 3.8 million views, a condensed version of the YouTube trend. 

The online world of true crime came colliding with the real world this month following the disappearance of the aspiring vlogger Gabrielle Petito. The 22-year-old had been travelling cross-country on a road trip with her 23-year-old fiancé Brian Laundrie, documenting the journey to her followers on Instagram and on a joint “van life” YouTube channel. On 1 September, Petito’s fiancé returned home alone and ten days later her family reported her missing. 

As soon as the true crime channels heard this story, there was a scramble to tell it in real-time as self-styled “internet vigilantes”. Word of Petito’s disappearance spread across TikTok and Instagram and her account shot to hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram. The follower count currently sits at 929,000.

On 14 September, Laundrie left his family home for a hike and has since been reported missing; the police have labelled him a “person of interest”. Five days later, remains matching Petito’s description were found in Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park. The results of a full autopsy are yet to be confirmed. 

The hashtag #gabbypetitoupdate has 97.1 million views on TikTok, with hundreds of videos sharing theories and supposed “clues” extracted from social media over the last week. Meanwhile, on Instagram, an account with a bio reading “Justice for Gabby” has been avidly posting updates on the case. The account posts “instagrammable” tiles with pastel coloured backgrounds and a swirling aesthetic font for phrases like “Cops know more than they’re saying!” and “He is not missing he is hiding”. On Monday, a Crime Junkie podcast episode discussing the case was the most popular podcast in America, according to Apple Podcasts.

When someone goes missing social media can be a powerful tool to create awareness and bring witnesses forward. But when this becomes an active investigation, then spreading conspiracy, risking perverting the course of justice or flooding local authorities with incorrect information turns a tragedy into some sort of internet detective game. 

The zeitgeist obsession with true crime has been previously explained as a result of the media romanticising certain true crime figures (like Bundy and Sobhraj) and the adoption of true crime into pop culture reference (such as the phrase “drinking the kool-aid” coming from the Jonestown massacre). Others suggest it stems from growing up in a world where images of terror, war and shootings are constantly fed to us through television and the news. 

Either way, there is a dangerous line that has been crossed in the case of Gabby Petito. Whilst social media users no doubt had altruistic intentions, the life and death of a 22-year-old girl is not a thriller-writing-itself or clickbait way to gain followers. The social media obsession with true crime has blurred the line between real life and fiction, desensitising a generation in the process.