“There's something about the missing young, beautiful, white woman that has a lot of symbolic weight in America,” the true-crime scholar Jean Murley says. “This has a long historical trajectory.”
A memorial for the twenty-two-year-old Gabby Petito. “True crime seems to want to tell itself, and us, stories about white people,” the scholar Jean Murley says.Last month, the disappearance of the twenty-two-year-old Gabby Petito became a sensation, attracting play-by-play coverage in the news and avid amateur sleuthing on social media. At the same time, the national fascination with Petito’s case sparked a debate about the nature of the fascination itself.
That’s not to mention the harm that’s done to the survivors, the family, the friends, the people who knew her and loved her. I’ve been reading, and watching, and listening to, and talking about, and studying true crime as a genre for many, many years, and one of the things that I have discovered is that survivors—usually victims’ family members, if we’re talking about a murder case—have differing opinions about their case being picked up by the media.
It seems, at least right now, with the rise of true-crime podcasts and their legions of white-women fans, that these stories are the realm of white women as consumers, not just subjects. Is that true? Is that going to help shed light on this problem? My hope is that coverage and resources can be more equitably distributed. I know that, when a Black man goes missing, he wouldn’t get the same law-enforcement response that Gabby Petito gets, but the media can definitely help change that.
There’s also been a really interesting move toward wrongful-conviction narratives, and toward interrogating the failures of the criminal-justice system itself. Things like “Making a Murderer,” or “Serial,” the podcast, and the series “O.J.: Made in America”—they give such a rich, detailed understanding of how the systems have consequences, that these aren’t just individual actors making choices or having a flawed personality.
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