SXSW
The rise of the true crime genre is nothing new. Now, it just has shiny new packaging that only grazes its brutal underbelly. What used to be reserved for nightly news rubberneckers and Dateline loyalists has exploded into a legitimate phenomenon, as popular and ubiquitous as dramas or comedies. True crime transcends medium. We see it in documentaries, television series, and podcasts alike. And because people can never get enough of the macabre details, new entries into the canon pop up incessantly.
The drawbacks of true crime saturation are on gruesome display in Citizen Sleuth, a new documentary premiering out of SXSW. The film is a rare peek inside the life of an amateur true-crime podcaster, Emily Nestor, whose podcast, Mile Marker 181, examined the 2011 death of Jaleayah Davis, who was in a grisly car crash on the border of Emily’s home state of West Virginia. Despite being ruled as an accident, Jaleayah’s death remained local lore over the next decade, with her family suspecting some form of foul play.
(Disclosure: Allegra Frank, a Daily Beast’s Obsessed editor, is a member of the SXSW documentary jury. She was not involved in coverage of any documentaries or editing of the story.)