Is true crime turning victims into entertainment?

The recent guilty verdict in the Erin Patterson Trial along with other high profile cases in Australia and overseas has prompted Erica Cervini to offer the following reflection on the grief that such high profile public cases impacts the lives of victims through social media speculation and the proliferation of ‘True Crime’ podcasts. The article appeared in a recent edition of Eureka Street and is reprinted here with permission. 

It only took a few hours after the jury found Erin Patterson guilty of murder and attempted murder for us to learn that a cascade of books and TV shows would be written and made about the crimes that took place in a small Victorian town in 2023.

Erin Patterson murdered Gail Patterson, 70, Heather Wilkinson, 66, and Don Patterson, 70, and attempted to kill Ian Wilkinson, then 69, by feeding them death cap mushrooms.

The court case generated headlines around the world and then the entertainment frenzy began. Text Publishing announced that Helen Garner will collaborate with Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein to write The Mushroom Tapes: Conversations about a Triple Murder Trial. Allen & Unwin will publish Greg Haddrick’s book, The Mushroom Murders: A Family Lunch, Three Deaths, What Really Happened? and Hachette will publish writer and former detective Duncan McNab’s Recipe for Murder.

And, that’s just for starters. There are podcasts about the case, realms of articles written about it, including an Age story by a psychologist, who had never met Erin Patterson, providing her analysis on Patterson’s ‘narcissistic’ tendencies. ABC TV has announced a drama series Toxic, which will focus on Erin Patterson.

The ABC has also revealed on its website that a new comedy true crime panel show will examine real life famous cases. Comedian Julia Zemiro will host the show Crime Night! which airs later this year.

It remains to be seen if the Erin Patterson case will be fodder for the show that will ‘examine the fascinating real-life cases we’re all obsessed with in the funniest possible way’. True crime is a wildly popular genre, and some people are obsessed with it. There are academic studies why this is the case and why women are drawn to true crime.

But given the true crime frenzy about the Erin Patterson case, I’m drawn to the question of when true crime crosses the line and becomes puerile entertainment at the expense of the victims.

This has forced me to question why I have listened to some true crime podcasts. The discussion of true crime cases also raises legal questions for our court system. Mumbrella, an Australian news website that examines media and marketing, has pointed out that the Erin Patterson case unleashed an ‘unprecedented wave of legal rule breaking in both established and informal media’.

An episode of Media Watch details these media breaches. Organisations, including the ABC’s podcast about the court case, are accused of breaching suppression orders.

One of the first things journalism students learn when covering a court case is that they can only report on what is said in court. They also must abide by suppression orders and not comment on whether someone is guilty or not.

But when true crime morphs into a media and public frenzy – as in the Erin Patterson case – there’s a risk it undermines the tenet of a fair trial, muddies evidence with narrative, and places undue pressure on those tasked with delivering justice.

When I read the blurbs for the true crime books about the Erin Patterson case, I immediately felt uneasy. Two of the blurbs use breathless language to advertise the books and promise the reader ‘details not previously published’ and a ‘gripping’ read. The victims are merely characters in the books; not human beings and I suspect their feelings will be ignored.

When reading about the ABC’s TV drama Toxic I began thinking that the relatives and friends of the murdered trio Gail Patterson, Heather Wilkinson and Don Patterson, and Ian Wilkinson himself, won’t be able to distance themselves from the case. What effect would this have on their grief?

This question was laid bare after the recent death of Bradley John Murdoch who died in jail after spending more than 20 years there for the murder of Peter Falconio. ABC News Breakfast interviewed true crime author Robin Bowles, who wrote the 2020 book Dead Centre about the case in which she maintained that Murdoch was innocent.

I thought about Falconio’s family and friends and Joanne Lees, who was with Peter at the time of his murder. I can’t imagine what they were going through, particularly with Bowles once again casting doubt on the evidence Joanne gave to the police.

But it’s not just authors, podcasters, and TV and film makers who speculate what may have happened in true crime cases. With the advent of chat groups and sites dedicated to true crime the emergence of citizen sleuths is now a phenomenon. Many are having a detrimental impact on cases.

Take the Idaho murders in the US. In 2022, four university students, Ethan Chapin, Kaylee Goncalves, Xana Kernodle, and Madison Mogen, were found stabbed to death in a house. People set up Facebook pages and other online pages to speculate on who killed them. This caused a lot of pain according to a 2023 piece in The Atlantic: ‘The baseless – at times fanciful – speculation continued despite investigators’ repeated attempts to quell it. The rumours were adding chaos to their investigation, they said. They were bringing more trauma to people in mourning.’

Citizen sleuths are still at it trying to identify Jack the Ripper, who murdered five women in 1888 in Whitechapel in London. This case is a prime example of how a true crime commodifies the violent deaths of women and reduces them to a footnote in the story. Besides the books and films made about the case, tour guides are making money out of doing ‘death tours’ in the Spitalfields streets where the women were killed.

Hallie Rubenhold, a British historian and writer, wanted to counter the misinformation about the women murdered in her book, The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper.

In the introduction, she says she wrote the book because she wanted to restore the women’s dignity that was taken away by the murderer, and to debunk assumptions the media has made about their lives, just because they lived in some of the poorest areas in the Spitalfields.

‘The courses their lives took mirrored that of so many other women of the Victorian age and yet were so singular
in the way they ended.’ Rubenhold’s book is focused on the victims, not the murderer. There are some notable Australian podcasts that have done the same and have the consent of the victims’ families to broadcast information.

The Australian’s ‘Teacher’s Pet’ podcast, hosted by journalist Hedley Thomas, is an example. Thomas investigated the 1982 disappearance of Lynette Dawson, a mother of two, from her home in Sydney. It can be argued that the podcast, which won the 2018 Gold Walkley, played a role in raising the profile of the case that led to Lynette’s husband, Chris Dawson, being found guilty of her murder in 2022. After the court case, Lynette’s brother Greg Simms thanked Thomas for ‘giving his sister a voice and helping clear her name’.

The true crime genre has a role to play when there is a reason to focus on the victims. However, so much of what passes as true crime underplays or even ignores the suffering of the victims and intrudes on their families and friends’ grief. It can encourage feverish speculation even after court verdicts and turn notorious murderers into cult personalities. Do you wrestle with your own ethics when you consume true crime?

Dr Erica Cervini is a freelance journalist and sessional academi.