The True Crime Genre Has Made Armchair Detectives Of Us All

Read most mainstream media coverage of the Lindsay Clancy trial and you’d understand it as the tragic case of three children killed by a mother allegedly suffering from severe postpartum psychosis. Peruse social media, however, and you might conclude that it is, in fact, Clancy’s husband who bears responsibility for the killings, thanks to increasingly outlandish conspiracy theories that have proliferated online.

Fuelled by the popularity of true crime as a genre, when a high profile crime makes the news these days, an ecosystem of armchair detectives and online commentators is rarely far behind. Ongoing criminal proceedings or missing people cases have become a new, macabre form of mass entertainment, in which ordinary people’s lives become a whodunnit everyone feels qualified to weigh in on.

When US news anchor Savannah Guthrie’s mother was abducted from her home earlier this year, the internet was aflame with speculation that members of the Guthrie family were responsible for her disappearance, while the Arizona suburb she lived in was inundated with YouTube and TikTok creators determined to ‘investigate’ the crime themselves – and, of course, broadcast it online.

Similarly, the 2023 disappearance of Nicola Bulley in Lancashire prompted amateur sleuths to cast suspicion on her devastated partner, prior to the eventual reveal of Bulley’s tragic accidental drowning. When 19-year-old Jay Slater died in an accidental fall while on holiday in Tenerife in 2024, cruel online speculation alternately theorising he’d faked his own death, been murdered by drug dealers or even his own mother swirled online. Invariably, these internet sleuths have little evidence to go on, instead overanalysing witnesses’ body language or police activity for hidden clues.

In the most generous possible reading, their motivations stem from those rare instances where public scrutiny into criminal cases does influence the outcome. Years after his conviction for the murder of his girlfriend Hae Min Lee, Adnan Syed had his sentence reduced and was freed from jail, essentially because the huge popularity of OG true crime podcast Serial and the ensuing public outpouring prompted a judicial review. One suspects the internet has been chasing the high of that tangible impact ever since – even though the more likely impact is merely to inflict emotional distress on victims’ family and friends, and potentially even prejudice legal proceedings.

This desire to true crime-ify real life events means that even where a case is fairly open and closed (as with Clancy – there really is no mystery, merely the question of criminal responsibility), the internet invents B-plots and chases red herrings to add drama to already incredible events. As the boundaries between real life, scripted TV, reality TV and true crime become increasingly thin, crime stories have become an entertainment category of their own – and when reality fails to answer all our questions or provide a satisfying enough plot, the internet is only too happy to invent one.