“Many of these families feel like no one has ever listened, and it is very empowering for them to feel heard,” Marissa Jones says. She hosts a US podcast called The Vanished, which centres the friends and families of missing people in its storytelling. It has been downloaded 51m times; 90% of its audience are women. Jones’s podcast focuses on victims who are traditionally ignored by the media. “True crime as a genre is too often focused on the offender,” Jones says – and there is a disturbing amount of killer-themed merchandise available online, from wrapping paper to tea towels.
Lili Pâquet, a writing lecturer at the University of New England (Australia), has studied how victims abandoned by formal justice systems can get “informal justice” through true-crime content. “One of the things I noticed with both Trace and The Teacher’s Pet was that the narrators had access to impressive community grapevines, something the police in both investigations clearly lacked,” Pâquet says. “The grapevines brought up new evidence and witnesses.”
Jones says that tips from her audience mean that multiple investigations have been reopened. In 2018, she interviewed the husband of a missing woman who had refused to speak with the police for decades, their conversation opening the door for detectives to try him again, which ultimately led to his murder conviction.
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