In the early morning hours of Nov. 13, 2022, a killer broke into a home in Moscow, Idaho, and stabbed four college students as they slept in their beds. The brutal quadruple murder stunned the nation and the media. It also captivated true crime enthusiasts, like podcasters and TikTok sleuths who traveled to Moscow to analyze the case for their digital audiences. 

“I started to wonder if the podcasters and social media influencers there looking at this crime were negatively impacting the police investigation,” said Kyleigh McPeek, ’24. “I felt like there was this meta story here about the true crime industry and how it’s impacting the legal processes of the crimes they’re covering.” 

At Stanford, McPeek and journalist Grace Carroll, ’24, began researching the ethical, legal, and cultural impacts of the true crime podcast industry for a thesis project supported by Honors in Arts and the Bill Lane Center for the American West. Their findings are the subject of a new six-part podcast series called the True Crime Podcast Podcast, which debuted Sept. 8.

True crime crimes? 

True crime is an expansive media genre that’s popular among podcasters and social media influencers. When they cover real crimes, their followers will often help look for clues or brainstorm theories, creating an unofficial investigation. “What happens when you bring that kind of activity to these online platforms is that audiences can easily participate in the investigation. There isn’t the same barrier to entry that exists in traditional journalism,” McPeek said.

But such widespread and accessible media scrutiny can lead to misinformation or false accusations. For example, one popular TikTok user publicly claimed that a University of Idaho professor was involved in the Moscow murders, resulting in a defamation lawsuit. 

“Police would say that the more eyes on a case the better because it helps them solve crimes,” McPeek said. “But it can also redirect police resources to people trying to disrupt the scene of the crime.”

Because true crime media content is also usually created for entertainment, rather than out of concern for the public interest and safety, it can potentially make it difficult for courts to assemble unbiased juries, thereby threatening constitutional rights to a fair trial. 

“You need jurors who don’t have information about a case prior to coming into the courtroom because their decision-making process is supposed to be based only on the evidence presented in court,” McPeek said. 

Stanford sleuths 

McPeek and Carroll began investigating the influence of the true crime media industry, particularly podcasts, but due to the platform’s relatively new emergence, scholarship on the subject is limited. So, their senior year they spoke to dozens of sources, including media and legal scholars, journalists, a neuroscientist, and true crime podcasters. They spoke to relatives of victims, including Sarah Turney, whose true crime podcast about her sister’s unsolved murder led police to reopen the case. Turney has since expressed the value that digital media brings to such investigations.

The pair also interviewed sources who became the subject of major media scandals after being implicated in a real crime, including Amanda Knox, the American woman who, in the 2000s, was wrongly convicted and served four years in an Italian prison for the murder of her roommate. Knox was later cleared of the charges. 

Grace Carroll, ’24, and Kyleigh McPeek, ’24, created the “True Crime Podcast Podcast” during their senior year at Stanford. | Courtesy of Grace Carroll and Kyleigh McPeek

“She’s now a podcaster who talks about issues related to true crime and she was very generous in sharing her experience with this sort of media,” McPeek said. 

With a cache of recorded interviews, Carroll and McPeek decided that the best platform for sharing their findings was a podcast. “We had this rare opportunity where the ultimate medium for our research is the same as the medium that we’re researching,” Carroll said. “That was one of the most fun aspects of this project.” 

The True Crime Podcast Podcast utilizes various storytelling formats, from journalistic serial narrative styles to more casual and conversational ones. It also explores the tropes and subliminal production methods that true crime podcasters use, like sound effects, music, or a host’s vocal presentation. “We had the idea to play with that meta aspect by presenting some of our research findings very subliminally through the production and formatting of our own podcast episodes, which is really exciting, creatively,” Carroll said.

While the podcast does address real-life crimes, McPeek explained that they are not the focus of each episode. “It’s true crime podcasts that are the crime at the center of each story,” she said. 

Carroll and McPeek spent over a year on the project. In addition to the research, they also wrote, edited, and produced the entire series and recorded all six episodes at a studio at Stanford.

The verdict 

True crime podcasts often blur the line between journalism and entertainment. Carroll and McPeek said they followed journalistic codes of ethics when researching, conducting interviews, and producing their podcast.

“But the final product is entertainment,” Carroll said. “We wanted it to be fun for people to listen to. And we wanted it to be compelling, emotional, scary, and all the things that true crime podcasts are.” 

McPeek noted that the project was also unlike the quantitative research she conducted at Stanford. “Scrutinizing how true crime media interacts with the world culturally, economically, and legally, and how media constructs our conceptions of truth and justice is a very qualitative assessment,” she said. 

So, how do Carroll and McPeek define the true crime media industry’s influence on the world? And do they think it does more harm than good? 

“That’s our big reveal and the verdict waiting at the end of episode six,” Carroll said.