Like most people in 2014, I became obsessed with Sarah Koenig’s podcast Serial as it traced the murky case of Adnan Syed, a once-beloved high-school football player accused and convicted of murdering his ex-girlfriend in 1999. Serial wasn’t just popular; it was a cultural touchstone that spawned obsessive fans spread out on Reddit and other corners of the internet intent on solving the case, pushing the genre of true crime into the stratosphere, and showing just how powerful an artistic form podcasts can be.
I have always felt a dark pull toward true crime — gorging myself on Ann Rule paperbacks, Unsolved Mysteries, and tales of classic Hollywood gone awry, like the Black Dahlia murder — with each story, no matter how intelligent or empathetic, building toward an understanding of how deeply misogyny runs in this world and how often women’s lives are curtailed by the anger and darkness of men. It is…
