True crime

The murder ballad

Murder ballads are simply that: songs about murder (or other grisly crimes). Many argue that true crime originated in folk murder ballads, popularized in the 1500s. Educator Lex Leigh points specifically to “The Gosport Tragedy; or, the Perjured Ship-Carpenter,” which was widespread, has many versions, and tells the story of

a carpenter [who] gets a woman pregnant, spends an evening digging her grave, then murders her under the guise of a meeting to plan their wedding. Her ghost then haunts him in order to get justice for her death. [5]

While murder ballads were generally sensational, they also conveyed news. Acting as the social media of the day, murder ballads—more specifically, execution ballads—told gruesome tales to inform the citizenry that someone unscrupulous had committed a crime and had been duly punished, thus warning the population both of what happens when people (most often women) misbehave (they are murdered) and of the penalties of committing crimes (criminals are executed, often in gruesome ways, and then immortalized in song). [6] [7] [8]

The tradition of murder ballads changed little over the years. Consider the echoes of “The Gosport Tragedy” found in the 19th-century ballad “Omi Wise,” based on the real murder of Naomi Wise in North Carolina, in which

a guy named John gets Omi pregnant out of wedlock. He lures her into the woods, promising to elope, and instead drowns her in the river. Toward the end of the song, the whole town goes out to look for her body and bring John to justice. [10] [11]

While murder ballads have often been relegated to folk music traditions, true crime in the 20th century infiltrated popular rock music, especially the grunge and alternative music of the 1990s and early 2000s, including Tori Amos’s cover of the Boomtown Rats’ “I Don’t Like Mondays” (2001), Blind Melon’s “Skinned” (1995), and Nirvana’s “Polly” (1991). “It’s a true story,” bassist Krist Novoselic said about “Polly”:

It’s about a young girl who was abducted. The guy drove her around in his van. Tortured her, raped her. The only chance she had of getting away was to come on to him and persuade him to untie her. That’s what she did, and she got away. Can you imagine how much strength that took? [12] [13] [14] [15] [103]

The execution sermon

Execution sermons served the same basic purpose as murder ballads but with added religiosity and moral themes. Puritan religious leaders included “morbid details and fictionalized dialogue to create vivid character portraits of the condemned” in their sermons, says scholar Lauren Jones. The sermons were often disseminated with extraordinarily detailed titles, such as the following, delivered by Increase Mather:

A sermon occasioned by the execution of a man found guilty of murder preached at Boston in N.E. March 11th 1685[/]6. (Together with the confession, last expressions & solemn warning of that murderer to all persons; especially to young men, to beware of those sins which brought him to his miserable end.) [16] [17] [18]

Execution sermons were exceptionally popular. English professor Daniel E. Williams explains that at a time when the population of Boston was only about 6,700 residents,

nearly five thousand people turned up to hear Increase Mather, Cotton Mather and Joshua Moody deliver execution sermons in the presence of a condemned murderer. So many crowded inside the church that the upper gallery cracked, and the church had to be evacuated. Another time Cotton Mather complained that so many people came to hear his sermon to a condemned criminal that he could only reach the pulpit by “climbing over pues and heads.” [18] [19]

Early ballads and sermons, however, were less concerned with the “true” (the real facts of the case) than with the “crime” (the shocking immorality). Thanks to the traditionally oral nature of both formats, the facts of the crimes changed easily while central themes often remained intact, largely boiling down to a simple message: Don’t commit crimes or sins. [16]

The printing press

The sensationalism of crimes was not tamped down when the stories were put into print, and true crime exploded in popularity with the invention and spread of the printing press. The first known mechanized printing press in Europe was designed and built by Johannes Gutenberg, who first used it to print the Gutenberg Bible (completed by 1455). The initial use of the press was to more easily distribute Bibles, psalters, and other religious texts, which, in turn, spawned greater literacy. Execution sermons, with their riveting mix of crime and religion, proved immensely popular in printed form. Before long true crimes were being publicized widely in printed form, published in large quantities through pamphlets and broadsides (large pages printed on one side). [20] [21]

The audience for these stories, however, was limited to the artisan class (skilled craftspeople) and above—those who were literate and had the means to purchase such pamphlets. Hundreds of true-crime pamphlets circulated, adorned with woodcuts depicting horrific acts of dismemberment, torture, and witchcraft. Journalist and author Lizzie Pook explains,

The broadsides were churned out quickly and sequentially whenever a crime caught public interest. First, they covered the particulars of the crime; then the trial; and, finally and “most profitably,”…the “sorrowful lamentation” or “last confession” of the criminal, often including a vivid description of the execution (even if it hadn’t yet taken place). Such intensive coverage transformed killers into celebrities. [4] [21]

As evidence of their extraordinary popularity, Pook notes that about 2.5 million broadsides were bought at the 1849 hanging of married couple Frederick and Maria Manning (“who murdered Maria’s lover and stashed his body beneath their flagstone floor” and about whose execution Charles Dickens wrote to The Times of London)—that’s more than 30 times the number of copies that Illustrated London News sold in all of 1848. [4] [22]

True crime for the masses

Soon the penny press and railways (which increased the speed of news that was previously spread by horse-drawn vehicles) were on the rise, and literacy rates skyrocketed. Once most of the working class was able to read well enough to consume a newspaper, true crime shifted into the hands of the masses. [23]

These changes birthed the “penny dreadful,” which was “serialised, short, printed on flimsy paper, cheap and luridly illustrated,” according to Leslie McMurtry and Adam Fowler of the University of Salford. The weekly publications focused primarily on real crimes, though like their predecessors, they blurred the line between entertainment and truth. Penny dreadfuls, as McMurtry and Fowler note, were

developed to cater to a specific youth audience. They generated a moral panic and were held responsible for inspiring real acts of violence as juveniles exposed to such “trash” were thought to be morally corrupted. For example, in 1895, Robert and Nattie Coombes, aged 13 and 12, admitted to stabbing their mother to death. The police discovered a collection of penny dreadfuls in the house, which the coroner argued had led the boys to commit the heinous act. [23]

These developments would spawn the still-unstoppable speculation about one of the most notorious and long-running true-crime mysteries: the identity of Jack the Ripper, who in 1888 gruesomely mutilated and murdered at least five women in the Whitechapel district of London. Widespread true-crime media coverage, largely in penny dreadfuls, led to ongoing obsession with the Ripper murders. [3] [24]

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Other murders were also sensationalized by the mass media of the day. The case of Lizzie Borden—who was immortalized in rhyme (“Lizzie Borden took an ax / And gave her mother forty whacks, / And when she saw what she had done, / She gave her father forty-one.”) for the killings of her father and stepmother in 1892 but acquitted of the crimes the following year—appeared in thousands of newspaper articles, logged by the Library of Congress. Also sensational and popular were the 1905 assassination of Idaho Gov. Frank Steunenberg by Albert Horsley (also known as Harry Orchard), with “Big Bill” Haywood tried as a co-conspirator; the 1921–22 trials of silent film star Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle on charges of manslaughter; and the 1935 trial of German immigrant Bruno Hauptmann for the kidnapping and murder of the 20-month-old son of aviation legend Charles Lindbergh. [25] [100]

This obsession with true crime continued throughout the century across all media—print, radio, and TV—with a special focus, later in the century, on serial killers. About 79 percent of 20th-century American serial killers were active between 1970 and 1999, and many of them were given lurid nicknames, popularized by the press, that only furthered their notoriety among the public, such as the Boston Strangler (who murdered at least 11 women between 1962 and 1964), the Zodiac killer (likely responsible for at least five murders in 1968–69), and the Golden State Killer (Joseph James DeAngelo, responsible for about 50 rapes and at least 13 murders between 1974 and 1986). Even killers without such monikers received widespread press coverage, including Ed Gein (murderer and grave robber who made household items from human body parts and whose crimes inspired the films Psycho and The Silence of the Lambs), Charles Manson (involved in nine murders in 1969), John Wayne Gacy (who committed at least 33 murders in the 1970s), and Ted Bundy (who confessed to 30 murders but was believed to have killed many more in the mid-to-late 1970s). [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31]

The murders—and perhaps even more so, the murderers—captivated the country and resulted in a surge of true-crime texts. “There’s been 11 hardback books on me,” John Wayne Gacy boasted on the eve of his execution in 1994. “Thirty-one paperbacks, two screenplays, one movie, one off-Broadway play, five songs and over 5,000 articles. What can I say about it?” The fascination with Gacy did not end with his death, as evidenced by the 2025–26 podcast BURIED: Inside the John Wayne Gacy Investigation and the 2025 TV miniseries Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy. [4] [32] [33]

Sensationalist true-crime TV shows that implored the public to call in to help solve crimes (Unsolved Mysteries, 1987–2010; America’s Most Wanted, 1988–2021), caught criminals red-handed (To Catch a Predator, 2004–07), or otherwise examined the criminal justice system flooded television schedules in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Similarly, documentary true-crime shows such as Cops (1989–2025) and Lockup (2005–17), which offer a look inside police arrests and prisons, gained popularity. [14] [34] [35] [36] [37] [38]

The rise of podcasts in the 21st century brought new blood, so to speak, to the true-crime genre. A portmanteau of iPod and broadcast coined by British journalist Ben Hammersley in 2004, the podcast was at first solely audio, though the medium evolved quickly to include video and other supplementary media. The first successful true-crime podcast was Serial, which debuted in 2014. Produced by journalist Sarah Koenig and downloaded over 100 million times in its first year, the series examined the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee, for which Adnan Syed was convicted in 2000 and was then serving a life sentence. The legitimacy of Syed’s conviction was questioned by the podcast, contributing to his release from prison in 2022. [39] [40] [41] [42]