Cold case comfort: Emotions,motivations,and identities of true crime fans

Abstract

Much of the literature about true crime investigates the genre’s ideological underpinnings and the resulting impacts on audience members. Some research finds that true crime content can promote punitive attitudes toward people who commit crime and reinforce audience members’ faith in evidence and criminal legal processes. Still other work demonstrates how true crime content can engender sympathy toward people accused of crimes and influences audiences to distrust in traditional criminal justice institutions’ ability to achieve an unbiased measure of justice. These studies about true crime generally fall into two methodological categories: analyzing the media alone as text which eschews content creators’ intent and consumers’ understandings from analysis or analyzing the impact of true crime content through experimental designs with pre-selected dependent variables. There is only a burgeoning literature that centers individual audience members’ and content creators’ experiences as active, interpretative, and agentic participants in the genre. This study adds to this growing literature. Using data from in-depth interviews with true crime consumers and content creators, I describe how participants understood true crime as connected to their own identity, emotions, and sense of community membership. My data reaffirm findings about motivations for true crime consumption as related to therapeutic uses and justice- oriented concerns, and this article offers the conceptual framework of “repair work” as a way to unite these motivational categories. Some consumers and producers understand true crime as a conduit to engage in internal repair work, which is aimed at healing practices toward oneself, and external repair work, which is aimed at healing practices toward others and their greater community. This article contends that a sociological accounting of individual identity, social solidarity, and the pro-social aspects of crime and punishment contributes to criminological studies on the motivations, affective states, preferences, and understandings of true crime media consumption and creation.