It always starts with a woman—walking home alone, or driving at night, or out for a solo hike. 

The host’s voice is calm and practiced, the kind of tone used for bedtime stories. I can tell something awful is coming—the music shifts, a pause stretches too long—and then her name, spoken softly with a strange kind of reverence. 

The story continues between ads for online therapy and meal kits. I tell myself I’m listening out of empathy, but sometimes it feels like I’m just another spectator. 

There was a time when I devoured true crime podcasts, YouTube videos and documentaries without a second thought. I’d binge them on long drives or watch them after dark with the curtains pulled tight. 

There was a strange comfort in hearing about the worst possible things from a safe distance. The crimes were terrible, but they were also contained: narrated, structured, solved. Maybe that’s what drew so many of us in—the illusion of control in a world that feels increasingly senseless. 

But the more I listened, the more uneasy I became. I started to notice how neatly the violence was edited, how artfully the fear was arranged. The stories were addictive because they were crafted to be addictive. The suffering was real, but the presentation was cinematic—complete with cliffhangers and theme music. 

It wasn’t awareness; it was entertainment. And in the process, empathy became background noise. 

True crime, as a genre, tends to fall in love with its monsters. 

Documentaries linger on the killer’s face, narrators psychoanalyze his childhood, headlines name him over and over again until he becomes a dark celebrity. We memorize the perpetrators the way we memorize fictional villains. Their names and stories are retold with a kind of obsessive awe, as if their evil is something rare and fascinating instead of something ordinary and brutal. 

Meanwhile, the victims become blurry. Their names are mentioned once or twice, their photos shown for a few seconds, their lives reduced to the moment they ended. They exist only as context for someone else’s cruelty. 

The imbalance is striking—we remember who killed them, but not who they were. A young woman’s entire existence is whittled down to her final minutes. We study the criminal’s psyche, but rarely imagine the victim’s favorite color, their laugh, the person they might have become. 

I think about that sometimes when I scroll through TikTok and see so-called “true crime creators” dissecting cases like puzzles, complete with dramatic music and exaggerated facial reactions. 

The comments fill with amateur detectives and armchair psychologists, debating evidence like it’s a game. It’s easy to forget that real families read those threads, that real people lost someone. The screen keeps us safe from the truth of it. We can look at grief without feeling its weight. 

I don’t think most people who consume true crime content do it out of cruelty. Curiosity is human. We’re drawn to the darkness because we want to understand it. There’s a level of innate morbid curiosity in all of us—it’s part of being human. But there’s a difference between seeking understanding and seeking entertainment.  

Now, when I listen to this content, I pay attention differently. I listen to podcasts that seek to tell stories, not create spectacle—stories told with empathy and awareness in mind, not exploitation. 

I look for the victims’ names first. I think about what their mornings might have been like, what music they listened to, what they left behind. I turn off episodes that feel exploitative, that linger too long on the killer’s “charm” or “cleverness.” 

It’s not about moral superiority; it’s about discomfort—the kind that reminds you empathy isn’t supposed to feel like nothing. 

So yes, maybe we do need fewer stories, fewer sensational documentaries and Netflix limited series. But we also need better ones—stories that remember who they belong to. Stories that make us sit in the silence instead of filling it with suspense. 

Because every time we turn someone’s tragedy into content, we risk losing sight of what makes it tragic in the first place: that it was real, and it happened to someone who deserved so much more than to become a headline. 

It always starts with a woman. Walking home alone, or driving at night or out for a solo hike. Now, I hear her footsteps, and I know her name. And this time, I let her story exist on its own terms, not as a puzzle for me to solve, but as a life remembered.