Opinion: The rise of the ‘citizen detective’ and our obsession with ‘true crime’ - Kilkenny Live

Monday night, prime-time television viewing on Irish channels, this week, had a choice between the case histories of a former state pathologist and an interview with a convicted drug trafficker and reputed gangland boss.

The gruesome details of Dr Marie Cassidy’s work following the murder of Irish women was broadcast on RTE while, across the channels, on Virgin Media there was an in-depth interview with ‘crime boss’ John Gilligan.

It’s not Irish television’s first foray into the broadcast equivalent of ‘dark tourism.’
Dark tourism has been defined as tourism involving travel to places historically associated with death and tragedy - think walking tours of the reputed murder sites of Jack the Ripper in London.
On television the description ‘dark’ becomes ‘reality’ and ‘true crime.’

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The Irish broadcasts are just the most recent in a very long history of crime as entertainment. These days there are whole channels dedicated to it - ‘how I caught the killer,’ ‘detective files,’ ‘famous criminal finally unmasked’.

The Jack the Ripper franchise has become a business all of its own, with books, documentaries and movies spawned by the tragic murders of five women, who are often forgotten in the gorey drama.
It’s not just television. The relatively new world of podcasting has both offered a scaffold and fuel for the recorded true crime medium.

It offers a more immediate channel for telling stories and reacting to real-life developments. Take, for example, the massive hit, true crime podcast from almost 10 years ago, Serial. The American podcast told the story of a young man convicted of the murder of his high school girlfriend. It was reinvestigated, on the podcast, and questions asked about the man’s innocence and who the ‘real killer’ might have been.

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At a time when we were getting used to recording tv shows and binge watching them, the weekly podcast ‘drop’ saw fans racing to listen to each weekly episode.
Fast forward to 2022 and a legal campaign saw the man released from prison. There were podcast reactions and analyses uploaded on the same day.

Everyone has an opinion on true criminal cases. And this is encouraged as the television and podcast audience is invited to consider the evidence in cases. It’s drip fed, story-tale fashion, for drama. Every audience member is a quasi-media jury. Some take it very seriously, with online ‘citizen detectives’ delving into the world of unsolved crimes, or ‘miscarriages of justice.’ And in some cases in the USA, with actual results.

Modern media is now used to flood entertainment channels with true crime, but it’s not a new obsession. In the early 1800s the equivalent of a broadsheet newspaper page would be printed to share the details of murder trials, and then read out in pubs or to groups, for entertainment.

Going even further back, any history will tell stories of public executions as entertainment, from the Roman Colosseum to the French guillotine. The last public hanging in Ireland was in 1868.
Human interest in the gruesome and cruel seems to have existed as long as there have been humans. We are fascinated.

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Real life, however, is very different to the media world of ‘true crime.’ Especially in an Irish context where most of the entertainment true crime we consume is from an American context.
In Ireland we don’t have television cameras in courtrooms. We’ve never had a Judy Judy or a Court TV channel.

Here most of our court reporting remains firmly in the realm of serious and fact-sharing. Rules for Irish court reports are significantly different to those for American courts.
However, and this is what gives the wide access to information to the true crime genre, across the world there is an adage that justice must be carried out in public. ‘Justice must be done and seen to be done.’

This is why the Kilkenny People covers our local courts. The Irish Constitution provides that justice shall be administered in public in all courts in Ireland, from the lowest District Court level right up to Supreme Court hearings. This is why, in this week’s paper, you’ll read about the cases that came before Kilkenny District Court lately.

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In the local context there is of course the parish gossip element to reading cases in a newspaper. But reporting on a local court is something that is taken very seriously by court reporters.

There are strict, legal rules that must be considered, for example we can not identify a person under the age of 16 and we cannot identify the parties in a domestic violence case. There are other cases where there are rules about identity, including some sexual assault cases where a person who may be before the court can not be identified.

And this is where the readers of court reports can be confused. When a person in such cases is not named it’s because the victim can not be identified. The online ‘name and shame’ brigade can forget this in their demand for the information they are used to in the entertainment world of true crime.

The world of crime and punishment has never not attracted an audience in search of entertainment, but it’s important to remember that when we’re watching Dr Cassidy’s Casebook it’s not ‘CSI: Dublin.’ The dead people she examines are our neighbours and friends. The families involved won’t drop their sad faces when filming finishes.
We shouldn’t forget that in the entertaining world of true crime the ‘true’ is just as important as the ‘crime.’