I Am Running out of Colorful Murders!
Like most folks, when I want to relax and forget about the worries and hassles of the day I listen to podcasts about people who are brutally murdered in colorful and surprising ways.
I love podcasts about bad movies and funny podcasts but when you REALLY need to be distracted from life’s awfulness, nothing does the trick quite like listening to people discuss the seemingly infinite variety of horrific crimes humanity is capable of.
I started listening to true crime podcasts because the sins chronicled are full of twists and turns, not unlike the films of frightmaster M. Night Shyamalan.
In order to be good fodder for the True Crime industry a murder has to be more than just real; it has to be crazy, and entertaining, and shocking to boot.
We true crime freaks get off on surprises. I don’t want to know what will happen in a true crime podcast. I don’t want to be able to predict all of the twists. I want to be shocked over and over and over again by developments that seem far too preposterous and unlikely to be true but are real all the same.
That has not been a problem in the past because the field of true crime is so impossibly vast. For example, I am currently in the midst of an unfathomably vast deep dive into the Dateline podcast.
That means that I am currently more familiar with the cadences of Keith Morrison than I am with many members of my own family.
Speaking of Morrison, what is that guy’s deal? Why does he always sound so inappropriately amused by the horrors he’s describing? From his weirdly playful tone, you’d think he was describing a salacious anecdote he heard about the boss to his wife, not talking about how a mother of three was set on fire by meth-addicted hobos.
There are something like four hundred episodes of Dateline to binge and a lot of them are well over an hour long. That means that I’ll be listening to episodes of Dateline that are new to me for weeks, even months, to come.
My obsessive exploration of Dateline’s back catalog made me realize that I have turned a corner and am now distressingly familiar with many, if not most, of the true crimes chronicled on true crime podcasts, true crime documentaries and true crime docudramas.
That’s inevitable. I have, after all, been listening to hours and hours of true crime podcasts pretty much every day for a period of years and while the field of true crime is huge, it is not infinite.
That means that I am hearing a lot of stories on Dateline and other podcasts that I am already familiar with. This makes them inherently less compelling to me because they’re not surprising.
It’s interesting hearing how different podcasts cover the same stories but on the whole I would much rather discover a crazy case I was wholly unfamiliar with than compare and contrast between different podcasts devoted to the great American pastime of deriving sick enjoyment from horrible crimes.
There’s only one way to ensure that I never fully run out of new crimes to discover via podcasts. That’s to begin committing true crimes myself. I need to make these crimes VERY COLORFUL to ensure that they appeal to jaded true crime podcasters. But I also need to commit enough of these crimes to ensure that we don’t run out any time soon.
I would tell you more but that would ruin the surprise, wouldn’t it? Just bear in mind going forward that when you hear about a REALLY wild murder being committed in the American South there’s a pretty good chance that I committed it, but only for the sake of true crime podcasts.
If you’re a true crime junkie, then you’re welcome. If you’re the victim of one of my upcoming true crimes, however, I am deeply sorry. The needs of the many outweigh those of the few and the many true crime fans in our great land are crying out for blood and I sincerely intend to answer that call.
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