Since the election, I have been spending a lot of time horizontal in my soft pants watching true crime — nonfiction television about a variety of illegal activity, mostly murder. My husband thinks it is pretty demented that I find comfort by turning away from breaking news and watching a show called “Accident, Suicide, or Murder,” but I often watch or listen to true crime as a way to calm down.
That I am a woman who enjoys this lurid pastime does not make me remotely unique. Women are twice as likely as men to listen to true crime podcasts, and younger women with less formal education are particularly likely to listen. Some have estimated that the audience for true crime shows is 80 percent female. In fact, women loving true crime is such a cliché that “Saturday Night Live” made a song about it in 2021. I half sing it to myself every time I turn on “Dateline”: “I’m gonna watch a murder show, murder show/ I’m gonna watch a murder show…late night true crime, this is my relaxing time.”
I have seen many theories — in academic papers and Reddit forums and talking to other crime junkies — about why women are more drawn to the genre. The explanation I see most frequently is that women watch true crime to protect themselves: We are usually less physically powerful than men are, and we think that by understanding the psychology of criminals we can better avoid them.
That interpretation may be true for some women, but it never quite resonated with me. It wasn’t until I was processing my anger about America electing a man who was found liable for sexual abuse and nominating people who were accused of sex trafficking to run the Justice Department that I could finally explain to myself why I find the genre so irresistible.
Most of the true crime I watch reflects a black and white moral universe where victims ultimately get justice, even if it is delayed. In this closed world, modern law enforcement is competent and empathetic, and evidence from medical examiners and forensic scientists is taken seriously. I don’t like “Unsolved Mysteries” because there’s no real resolution for the victim’s family, I find it devastating. But my favorite true crime does not just show good people doing their jobs. It also celebrates the emotional and intuitive; victims, including their families, often have hunches about perpetrators that elude law enforcement and defy norms.
An excellent recent example of the moral universe I enjoy returning to, one that felt particularly poignant, is the two-part Netflix documentary “Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter.” It centers on Cathy Terkanian, who in 1974, at 16, had a daughter she named Alexis. Her mother pressured her to give Alexis up for adoption so that the little girl could have a better life.
Terkanian never forgot Alexis, and in 2010 she discovered Alexis — who was renamed Aundria Bowman by her adoptive parents — had gone missing in 1989 under suspicious circumstances in Michigan. Her adoptive father claimed she had run away, but she never resurfaced.
In the first few moments of the documentary Terkanian says: “My daughter’s case wasn’t unsolved. It was uninvestigated and that enraged me. But anger is a motivator.”
Terkanian created a Facebook page to drum up information about Alexis/Aundria and found several friends of her daughter’s, who told her disturbing stories about her child’s adoptive parents. These friends had witnessed Aundria’s adoptive father, Dennis Bowman, physically abusing her, and Aundria told them that Bowman sexually abused her as well. Her friends tried their best to get her help and let her stay with them for periods of time. Her adoptive mother, Brenda, didn’t believe her, and neither did her school or church. “All these people just turned a blind eye,” Terkanian says in the documentary. “I mean, the kids did more than the adults did.”
But her birth mother never gave up. She partnered with true crime sleuths on the internet, and she submitted Freedom of Information Act requests on Dennis Bowman’s record. She discovered that when Aundria was a child, he had been convicted of “assault with intent to commit criminal sexual conduct and sentenced to five to 10 years in prison,” according to a 2021 feature on the case by Nile Cappello in The Atavist. “When I got his F.O.I.A. records I said, ‘Oh, this man killed my daughter.’” Terkanian told Cappello.
Without completely spoiling the documentary for you — the extent of Bowman’s criminal history is revealed in a way that literally caused my jaw to drop — by the end of the second and final episode, Terkanian’s suspicions about her daughter’s death are totally vindicated. She even had a hunch into where her daughter was buried that turned out to be true.
“That was her mother’s instinct,” one of the policemen who helped solve the case says toward the end of the second episode. “Did it sound crazy at the time? Yeah, it surely did,” said another. “But she was right.”
Terkanian describes her feelings on her way to Bowman’s sentencing for the murder of the daughter she was pressured to give away. “It’s a different kind of rage. And maybe it’s some peacefulness I’m feeling for Alexis, you know? Maybe it’s that,” she said. But it seems that her anger never really goes away for all the injustices her daughter had to experience in her life, and for all the other victims of this man who was enabled by so many people for so many years. She’s also still angry at herself, for bowing to pressure to give up her child in the first place.
It’s a mirror of what the viewer feels, too. We know that Alexis did get justice thanks to the mother she never knew, who fought for her — not the woman who adopted her, who it seems was complicit in her abuse. But once we turn off the TV, we’re back in the real world, outside of the tidy confines of a story with a satisfying ending.
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