True Crime Brain and Conspiracies Online

 

 

 Yayyyyy! Murders!

 I generally do not like sharing openly about my interest in true crime stories and history- I don't want people to get the wrong idea, nor do I want to attract the wrong kind of audience to myself. That's because I feel like there's a handful of distinct outcomes for people who get deeply invested in learning about the material, and it ties into some serious issues we're experiencing in the digital age.

 If you're like me, your curiosity leads you to learn about how much of violent crime is connected to inherent societal injustice. Serial killers get to prey on people largely due to police incompetence and the fact that they often choose victims that "won't be missed". Victims are in impoverished areas, they're sex workers, drug addicts, gay, trans, people of color, Native Americans, homeless, etc (and any combination and intersection of these things). There's a term for this- The Less Dead, because they're not viewed as valuable or worth concerning oneself over. Police and polite society routinely have the attitude that the untimely deaths of at-risk people is inevitable, a moral consequence of their life-style, and "good riddance". There's also multiple instances of cops bringing bloodied and terrified victims back to the killer because they figured "it's a domestic dispute," and really, who wants to do all that extra paper work. Most famously I think about how one of Dahmer's victims, 14 year old Konerak Sinthasomphone, escaped and was brought right back to him by police, who did not care to listen to the two black women who'd found the boy and knew something was wrong.

You learn also, quite quickly, how problems escalate due to the way prison and psychiatric care do little or nothing to rehabilitate or mitigate issues. If you're like me, your interest in true crime makes you more steadfast in your beliefs about prison and police abolition (or at least measures of reform), drug decriminalization, robust social services that don't act like carceral systems, removal of means testing, etc etc. This is not me saying that crime or violence will stop overnight and we'll all hold hands in a beautiful socialist utopia, but there's certainly ways we can curtail a number of utterly vicious cycles. Also no joke, violent crime may have environmental factors- there's research connecting lead no longer being in gasoline and the decrease in violent crime since then (think about the violence of the Roman empire and how they had lead pipes too!) Turns out, caring for our environment and ensuring that people have clean water, safe homes and are protected from pollution is good. Wild, I know.

If you're not like me? Chances are, your true crime consumption is making you paranoid. Maybe you're just more on edge and you're not thinking about the way that consuming a constant stream of graphic information is darkening your world view. You look over your shoulder a bit more often.

Or more egregious, perhaps you want to be a cop, maybe you want to catch a killer, maybe your nextdoor neighbor is burying a body when you see her doing garden work at 6am on a Sunday. Maybe you're sitting at the ready with the Citizen app and next door, combing through your ring camera footage to see if anything looks wrong about the Amazon delivery driver who paused to look at his phone on your doorstep- is he casing the house?

Or worse, your investment in true crime is because you're in a serial killer or mass shooter "fandom". This is of course, not a new phenomenon. As long as there's been serial killers and highly visible trials there's been people sending fawning letters to their favorite murderers. The Fibonaccis wrote a totally chilling song in 1987 from the perspective of a serial killer fan girl writing a letter to Charles Manson but talking about her new love and discovery of Ed Gein. Social media of course, has amplified and enabled the existence of these kinds of communities (and amplified the "reward" of attention that mass shooters get beyond just the news cycle).

The Fibonaccis also did an amazing cover of Purple Haze focusing on cults and the Manson family, but that's for a whole other blog post

 

Social media really has been a bizarre game changer for the way people consume true crime content- whether it's documentaries, tv programs, podcasts, blogposts, youtube videos or tiktok videos. We're also at a point where people have pretty much unfettered access to surveillance equipment, means of taking photos and videos and access to sites like Nextdoor and the gamified vigilantism styled Citizen app where people can stay a little too tuned into any suspicious or criminal event in their neighborhood. Now your doorbell can record every stranger that comes to your door, you can share this online, and your neighborhood can gawk at anyone who looks a little too suspicious. When you're binging a constant stream of information about violent crime, it's easy to see how paranoia about home security grows, especially when a lot of very sensationalized media stokes fears about violent crime and strangers.

The role of media and news in fearmongering is of course, nothing new, and it's always had a hand in making people paranoid and hysterical. Satanic panic comes to mind as a prime example of the news cycle spinning a (not real) epidemic of terrifying ritual murders and child abuse out of thin air, based on absolutely zero credibility characters like noted evangelical grifter Mike Warnke, who fabricated elaborate tales of his time in Satanic cults that the news happily played as gospel truth. It's fake shit that got real people in trouble for things that never happened or for things they had no involvement in. Read about the case of alleged Satanic Ritual Abuse at the McMartin Preschool or about how three unrelated boys were blamed for a child's murder because they were "alleged satanists." Apologies for wikipedia links but they're good primers on the topic.

 It's very very easy to see how we got from the Satanic Panic to Qanon. Social media is just the new part of the whole ordeal, amplifying and spreading fear and conspiracy more vastly than ever before. I don't think we're equipped as a society to deal with the consequences. Satanic Panic never really went away, it's just back under new names and with newer generations- like the people who think that a satanic ritual was performed at a terribly mismanaged concert where people died and got injured, or those who believe the lies of a police officer who claimed that "people were being injected with drugs."

Part of my motivation for writing this post is one of the most recent incidents of true crime thinking and conspiracy theories coming together to smear an innocent person. Sabrina Prater, a transgender woman who went "viral" on tiktok for dancing in her partially renovated house, was the recent subject of a conspiracy suggesting that she's a "serial killer" who is "wearing her victim's clothes" because apparently teenagers on tiktok think that Silence of the Lambs was a fucking documentary and anything they see on tv is applicable to any person who looks a bit off. Unsurprising, considering that I'd written previously about art pieces that inspired similar theories about the creator, but still extremely disappointing to see. In the case of Prater, an older trans person who clearly doesn't have a lot of money, the motivations for a lot of this attention are transphobia and an outright distaste for anyone who's visibly poor. She's been asking for donations and help with her bills and is in the process of fixing her home in Flint Michigan (a city with a lot of financial hardship) and internet strangers have passed a moral judgement on her for that. There's also that old chestnut of "trans = predator" pushed by right wingers and radical feminists alike, so it's not hard to guess why conspiracy theorists determined that Prater's adult daughters who briefly appear in a video must be "victims" and "kidnapped" instead of just her family.

In fact, there's a connection between radical feminism, TΕRF ideology, true crime and conspiracy theories, in the same way that there's connections between satanic ritual abuse conspiracies and white supremacy. All of these things actually overlap in ways, the fringes touching in what has got to be the worst venn diagram imaginable. This feels like the spin off for a whole other essay, but I'll keep it short and sweet by just noting that a lot of TΕRF talking points are connected to and backed by the true crime media they consume. I was actually researching something about the serial killer Richard Speck, who was not trans but did recreationally do HRT because he enjoyed being a prison sex object with tits (and yes, there's photos and videos of him having a fun time in prison) and it led me to a TΕRF blog that catalogued Speck and a slew of other incidents as "evidence" of the inherently predatory trans woman- disregarding that in researching true crime you tend to find that trans women, especially ones who are people of color and/or survival sex workers tend to be victims of violent crime as opposed to perpetrators.

This is actually one of the first results when you go to read about Speck's time in prison. Nothing pathological going on with the women who run this website. Nope.

Isolation and our increasingly digital lives are certainly contributing factors as well in the potent cocktail that true crime and social media create. It's no longer common to know who your neighbors are in most places. I can't think of many times I was actually on a first name basis with my neighbors myself (though in my current home I know and talk to some of them). The nature of life and work in the current age has many of us renting apartments, moving around more, following jobs from city to city. Less time to know your community, put down roots. Jobs that keep us chained to the work place and to the commute and with little time to spare for yourself. Even before the pandemic had us more cooped up, urban and even more rural life has become increasingly more isolating. It's easier to be paranoid when you don't know who's around you, and it's easier to turn to social media or the police when you have no stake or practice in resolving conflicts with neighbors. I can't say I like all my neighbors, but it's infinitely more valuable to know you can knock on their door if there's an issue as opposed to recording them, calling the police, escalating ever minor issue unnecessarily.

I'm not saying I have answers for our current situation with social media, but I think I can at least suggest we be more mindful about the media we engage with, what we share on social media, how we talk to and treat people. We should be skeptical about who's sharing information and why. There's a lot of online spectatorship to be had and a lot of perceived "reward" from social media for joining in on the spectacle of a "weird" person online. I suppose it's human nature to seek patterns and to pick out people who don't belong- that's something we all need to actively work on and resist. Conspiracy theories are harmful and speculating wildly about strangers gets real people hurt. Stop filming strangers, learn to talk to your neighbors, and remember that every person online is a living being with feelings and a right to privacy. So much of "sussing out" a suspicious character really just ties into bigotry and stereotypes and people's usual targets- if you're poor, or fat, or autistic, or disabled, or you don't pass as cis, or you look gay, people will invent reasons to hate you so they don't have to quite admit the real reasons. Or online anonymously, people can boldly say how much they hate you specifically for all those exact reasons.

As a closing note, if you feel so inclined, maybe toss some money to Sabrina Prater on Cashapp to help her with bills and the ongoing costs of fixing up her house.