I have been a true crime girlie ever since I can remember. The curiosity never really left, but as I got older I started to notice that I wasn’t nearly as interested in the criminal himself. Historically, that was usually a man. I was watching the woman standing next to him. The wife, girlfriend, mom. There was almost always some woman somewhere in the background saying some version of, “He isn’t that kind of guy.” Sometimes there were facts sitting right in front of her and she was still fighting for the story she believed. I was fascinated by these women. Who are you? How could you not know? How could you live next to this and not see it?
And I asked those questions with all the judgment in the world, let’s be clear about that part. I spent a lot of years consuming true crime while also enjoying all the ways I was certain I would have done it differently. I would have noticed that. I would have left. I would have believed the evidence. I would never defend him after that. It’s pretty easy to be righteous when you’re sitting on your couch with the entire case laid out in front of you, including the ending.
Then I had my own baby and something shifted as there was just a little more room for curiosity about others. And when I came across cases involving mothers who harmed their children. I couldn’t wrap my head around those cases. What happens that gets a human being from here to there? I still had plenty of judgment available, but there was now something else sitting next to it.
It wasn’t until COVID, when I was at a complete loss for what to do with my own struggling teen, that I really began to understand the absolute limits of our bodies. There is only so much a body can take. There are limits to capacity whether we like those limits or not, and knowing more, loving someone more, trying harder or being a “good” person doesn’t somehow remove them. Once I could find the humanness underneath some of these stories, there was a lot less distance between me and the people I had spent years studying. We are more alike than different.
I dove headfirst from there and eventually found a way to bring true crime into the work I do. We look at cases very differently. We don’t spend our time trying to decide whether someone did it or not. We look at what we can actually see. We have the luxury of coming in afterward, when the words have been recorded, the decisions have already been made, the relationships are exposed and we can go back and look again. We know things the people living it in real time didn’t know yet. The words people actually used. The decisions that were made. Who someone trusted. What they explained away. What their body did. The moment something didn’t make sense and what happened next. The intuition that showed up and was ignored. The story someone continued to protect when the facts had already started changing.
We get to see it. Police body-camera footage, witness testimony, interrogation videos, courtroom testimony, sometimes footage of the crime itself. We can watch another human being move through the experience. We can pause. Go back. Look again. Listen to the exact words instead of what we thought we heard. Watch what the body does while the mouth says something else. Notice congruence and incongruence. Look at the relationships around the person. Look at language, behavior, nervous systems, protection, all the fun things.
Trauma work can get really overwhelming when we believe we are the thing that needs to be constantly studied and fixed. Sometimes another person’s story gives us enough distance to see something we couldn’t see while staring directly at ourselves. The woman standing next to him becomes a lot more interesting when the question changes from, “How could she not know?” to what did she know, when did she know it, what did knowing it feel like in her body, what did she do with that information, and what would have had to be true for the story she already had to remain safer than the facts sitting in front of her? I spent years looking at those women believing I was studying everything that separated me from them. What happens when we look for everything that doesn’t?