Several San Jose State community members spoke about the effects literary genre “true crime” consumption can have on individuals and society.
True crime is the use of media to tell stories about real crimes, according to the Cambridge Dictionary.
Forensic biology senior Samantha Boman said she’s been interested in true crime cases since she was 12 years old but has recently become more interested because of her classes.
“Within the past four years I’ve gotten more interested in following case studies and real cases and everything and listening to podcasts, and just reading the news on different cases and of course we run through different case studies in my forensics classes as well,” Boman said in a Zoom call.
Psychology professor Gregory Feist said people enjoy watching true crime because it’s human nature to be curious about such obscene cases.
“I think a lot of us are kind of like me to some extent,” Feist said in a phone call.
“Even though I’m a psychologist, we are fascinated by this extreme behavior and how that comes to be.”
He said this “extreme behavior” is that of killers, sociopaths and psychopaths.
Sociopath and psychopath are unofficial psychology terms for what’s called antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) in psychiatry and aren’t well-defined in research literature, according to a Mental Health America Psychopathy vs Sociology webpage.
According to the National Health Service ASPD webpage, someone with ASPD typically has three or more traits: regularly breaks or flouts the law, constantly lies and deceives others, is impulsive and doesn’t plan ahead, can be prone to fighting and aggressiveness, has little regard for the safety of others, is irresponsible, can’t meet financial obligations and doesn’t feel remorse or guilt.
Both sociopathy, which is more commonly used as an unofficial ASPD moniker, and psychopathy can occur because of genetic and environmental or upbringing factors, according to the same Mental Health America webpage.
They are similar and highly comorbid with each other, however, they aren’t synonymous, according to 2015 PubMed Central journal.
Psychopathy is almost exclusively investigated within criminal populations so that its prevalence has been inferred by psychopathic traits rather than disorder, according to the same journal.
Feist, who has studied psychopathy, said a psychopath’s main qualities are lack of empathy and no sense of right and wrong morals.
“If [someone has] experienced extreme trauma and abuse in childhood, it messes up their brain,” Feist said. “They don’t have the same brain that a person who doesn’t experience that has.”
Boman said as she’s gotten more interested in following case studies within the past four years, she’s closely followed 22-year-old Gabby Petito’s case.
Petito’s body was found in Bridger-Teton National Forest in Wyoming and her death was ruled a homicide after she was missing for weeks, according to a Sept. 21 FBI Twitter post.
YouTube creator Petito was first reported missing on Sept. 11 while she was on a cross-country roadtrip with her fiance Brian Laundrie, since July, according to a Sept. 20 MSNBC News article.
Her family said she stopped responding to their messages at the end of August, according to the same MSNBC News article.
Laundrie returned to him and Petito’s North Port home on Sept. 1 and refused to speak to the police when Petito was missing, according to an Oct. 5 CNN article.
His family told CNN in its article that they haven’t seen Laundrie since Sept. 14.
Petito’s case became popular on social media platforms especially TikTok and received more news media coverage than many other cases that happen throughout the year.
More than 600,000 persons of all ages go missing every year and about 4,400 unidentified bodies are recovered every year, according to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons (NamUS) database, which is funded by the U.S. Department of Justice.
California leads the nation in the number of missing persons, typically reporting more than 2,000 every year, according to the NamUS database.
Boman said she did her own “research” and watched the publicly available body camera footage from when Petito and Laundrie were pulled over by Moab Police Department officers in Moab, Utah on Aug. 12.
She said she also listened to the podcast “Real Crime Profile- Gabby Petito: Deconstructing the Body Cam Footage.”
In the podcast, former FBI profiler Jim Clemente and criminal behavioral analyst Laura Richards evaluated the behavior of Petito, Laundrie and officers in the one hour, 17 minute tape.
Clemente and Richards discussed the police interaction and other intervention opportunities and strategies that should’ve been considered.
Boman said she was surprised the Petito case was getting so much attention in the media because stories of young women and suspected domestic violence aren’t uncommon.
Women make up about 75% of true-crime podcast listeners, according to an April 24, 2020 Time Magazine article.
Women are more likely to watch true crime because they’re disproportionately likely to be crime victims, according to a July 9 Cleveland Clinic article.
By consuming true crime, women can learn how to avoid being a victim, according to the same Cleveland Clinic article.
More than a quarter of women aged 15 to 49 years who’ve been in a relationship have been subjected to physical and/or sexual violence by their intimate partners at least once in their lifetimes since age 15, according to a 2018 World Health Organization (WHO) data analysis.
About 30% of women globally have been subjected to physical and/or sexual intimate-partner violence or non-partner sexual violence in their lifetimes.
Boman said some cases including Petito’s get an abundance of attention while other cases, especially those of people of color, go unnoticed.
“There’s definitely a big disproportion there in the media representation across those different ethnic and cultural groups,” Boman said.
Black children account for about 35% of missing children’s cases but they were only mentioned 7% of the time in media coverage regarding missing children, according to a 2015 study done by the William and Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice.
The William and Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice began in 1993 to provide a forum of scholarly debate on gender-related legal issues, according to its website.
Forensic science freshman Arianna Orsua said it was interesting how Petito’s body was found so quickly when some women of color go missing and are never found.
“I read a lot about missing Indigenous women and how they go missing but no one does anything,” Orsua said. “I thought it was really interesting to see how Petito’s remains were found within a month or two after they got publicized when Indigenous women will be missing forever.”
In 2016, 5,712 cases of missing and murdered Indigenous females were reported but only 16 were logged into the Department of Justice database, according to the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls 2017 study done by the Urban Indian Health Institute, a tribal epidemiology center.
Murder is the third leading cause of death among American Indian/Alaska Native women, according to the same Urban Indian Health Institute study.
Boman said because she’s a forensic biology student, she has a higher tolerance for these crime stories than some of her friends who aren’t in the field.
However, she said the cases can still sometimes affect her mental health.
“I definitely will lose faith in humanity sometimes just seeing the high amounts of crime that we have and the nature of [true crime cases],” Boman said.
Chivonna Childs, a psychologist who explores the psychological effects of watching true crime, told the Cleveland Clinic in its July 9 article that true crime-watchers can experience negative effects including feeling unsafe at home.
It can also lead to people becoming more anxious and signs of that include a rapid heartbeat and trouble sleeping, according to the Cleveland Clinic article.
True crime can also have poor effects on victims’ families as many TV shows and movies profit from victims’ stories, according to the April 24, 2020 Time Magazine article.
Orsua said while she hasn’t closely followed the Petito case, she’s witnessed several people on social media platforms trying to solve the case themselves.
“I don’t necessarily think that people should be going out and solving cases just on their own because it can be dangerous,” Orsua said. “Also it can distract, kind of, from the case itself.”
Feist said watching true crime isn’t a problem unless it interferes with everyday life.
“If [a true crime fan] really gets[s] sucked into it, it interferes with their regular, everyday relationships and, you know, that’s when it can become destructive,” Feist said. “But that’s kind of extreme, that doesn’t happen very often.”
He said if someone watches a lot of true crime, they can develop an “availability heuristic,” which Feist described as what happens when someone overestimates how likely something is because they have personal experience with it or it’s very dramatic.
“If you watch a lot of true crime, you can start to think, ‘wow, people are really messed up’ but that’s a bias,” Feist said.
Boman said it’s important to have an emotional outlet for those who work in the crime field to prevent negative effects including compassion fatigue.
Compassion fatigue is especially present in those who work in high-stress environments including those where graphic evidence or reports of trauma are experienced regularly, according to a Nov. 17, 2020 WebMD article.
WebMD is an organization that provides online medical information and news, according to its website.
“If you were just listening to these stories, I think you could probably just cap how many you listened to and feel okay,” Boman said. “If you are working in the field of true crime, I think having a therapist or having another friend who’s interested in it that you can talk to would be beneficial.”
