An Interview with Rachel Monroe

“A lot of people find  true crime relaxing—because it lets us off the hook: not only does it reaffirm that we’re safe, we’re not the ones who get hurt, but it also tells us we don’t need to do anything. If you say about these women, “Well, she was doomed, can’t you see the tragedy in her eyes?”—that completely lets us forget the fact that we, as a society, have often failed these women.”

Serial Killers are:
Not emotionally healthy
Promoted by the FBI as mythic, nightmare figures
In reality, often boring

“Part of the curriculum of growing up as a girl,” Rachel Monroe writes,“is to learn lessons about your vulnerability—if not from your parents, then from a culture that’s fascinated by wounded women.” Out today from Scribner, Monroe’s Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime and Obsession is about what happens when these girls grow up. 

Monroe is one of them. So am I. Millennials grew up in a media landscape saturated with stories of dead girls and “innocent victims”; the oldest millennials were just beginning to make sense of the world around us when the United States’ violent crime rate reached its all-time peak, in 1991. As we grew, we watched it shrink—unless we were watching the true crime media of the time. The 90s brought us Court TV, and in turn, Court TV brought many of us up. When I was six years old, I watched the O.J. Simpson trial alongside Sesame Street. About the only thing that seems as true now as it did then was the feeling that the grown-ups were not nearly as in control as they wanted us to believe.

True crime media is, allegedly, having “a moment.” (The genre has gone mainstream in more ways than one: the chart-topping podcasts that aren’t about missing and murdered white women are often about the crime saga—the longest, dishiest, most devastating of them all—playing out in the Oval Office.) The Internet has helped lone true crime obsessives realize that we aren’t alone at all. Today, amateur sleuths pool their insights in online communities dedicated to cracking cold cases, and fans of My Favorite Murder turn to the podcast not to ratchet up their anxiety about inhabiting this world, but to soothe it. It seems that, in a few short years, millennial women have transformed a solitary vice into a shared identity. But why?

None of this is exactly new: true crime has been with us for as long as narrative has. The first two stories in the Bible, following the creation of the Earth itself,...