On how the internet influences cases and coverage
Gunning: I stay off social media, because I don't want to see what's in the subreddit. For the millions of people that this show touches, I don't care about the 10 people that have criticism because I know who we're helping, and I know who needs this, and that's all that matters to me. If people are going to come for certain decisions that these families are going to make, I just don't have time for it because they haven't walked in their shoes.
Dawson: I read a great article where the journalist, when talking to experts, said, "Where can sleuths actually be helpful?" And they said, "The cold cases that people are ignoring." But that's not what people want. They want, especially if they're with TikTok or YouTube, they want the big cases that we hear about, the Idaho cases. And I care to not work with live people is what I usually say. It makes me very uncomfortable unless we have a full buy-in from the family. I want to make sure that I get everything right. I did a story where it was essentially a family feud that ended up in terrible murders in a courthouse in the 1800s. And I wanted to talk to one member of the family—and this is 200 years ago this was happening—and one of the family members said, "We were always told, don't talk about it, so we're not going to talk about it." It's still embedded in the fabric of what their family represents. It's amazing the way people connect even with older cases, but more modern cases, I'd have to have a 100% full buy-in from the family.
Holes: This has always been the debate in this true crime genre: How do you take people who have suffered horrific losses, and there's a consumption as entertainment? Even though I very much am in the true crime genre, I came out of real crime. I know what real crime is and the actual suffering of people. This is where it's understanding. You have to put the victim first. You have to understand that there is a bad guy that you cannot glamorize. But it is also the ultimate human drama. People want to hear the story, just as long as they're listening to it in the right way.
Bowlin: I would say the human mind, just the hardware aspect of it, is not prepared for social media nor the age of ubiquitous information. It's bad times.
Brown: This is about perpetrating hoaxes. Is it easier to do that now with all of the dilution of facts and the fact that you can barely believe your eyes most of the time? Or was it easier to do it back in the days before the internet? We landed somewhere in the middle. And not to mention all that stuff that's using all these crazy resources and technology just to make a dumb video to get clicks, like Stephen Hawking on a half pipe doing tricks. It normalizes it to the point where, when the real bad stuff starts happening, you're already used to it kind of because we think it's delightful. We're not sponsored by them, but a resource that we all really like is called Ground News and it gives you a gauge of left-, right-leaning, mixed factuality or whatever. We use that a decent amount when we're looking for strange news stories.
Frederick: It doesn't matter if you're using DuckDuckGo or Google or whatever search you're using. If you go and try and find as much as you can about a subject, it is incredibly difficult now to find verified sources, sources that are going to have great information that are cited. And it is so hard. You have to scroll through pages and pages.
On the learning that has stayed with them
Gunning, on covering the case of the Borega family: We learned a lot about resign in advance [in police departments], and if you do that, you don't have to disclose the misconduct. And then those individuals can go to any other police department and work. The resign in advance is a really tough thing to learn, and it's all coming from the top. The culture is really rough, and the lack of accountability continues the behavior internally. You're expecting your cops to be on the clock, paying attention, being there for their other police officers, but if they're off gallivanting doing whatever, that's a public interest. You should be knowing what your department is spending its money on. So that was surprising to me.
Holes: I have one case [of] a 15-year-old girl who went missing after she got off her school bus, and this is back in 1970. Her mostly skeletal remains were found about a year later dumped in a creek, and her clothing had been found and the clothing had been cut off of her. I could see, based on how the clothing was cut, what the offender was doing to remove her clothing and thinking about how horrifying it would've been for her. I reached out to the family and the sister ended up sending me—her name was Cosette—sent me pictures of Cosette from birth up until a few weeks [before her murder]. I saw her alive, and it's just something that stuck with me.
Dawson: One of the cases that I'm so fascinated by is the Texarkana Phantom murders, which Paul and I had talked about. That was a series of lovers lanes murders that happened in '46. The person wore a mask. It's sort of the birth of the creepy guy running after women in the woods. And this guy slaughtered three or four, a couple of couples, and then a couple of women separately. There's speculation online about that case.
Bowlin: We continually return to extra terrestrials. We continually return to ideas of secret technology and the hidden history has been good to us.
On the case they want solved
Gunning: We're currently working on season 5, and it's a story out of Maryland, and it's about intimate partner violence. We're going to tackle a really tough topic, sexual assault between a man and his wife, and really explore marital exemption laws that exist in this country. A lot of my focus from now until mid-January is going to be working on that story, which I think is really important. And tackling the idea of what the perfect victim is. There are no perfect victims, especially when it comes to sexual assault.
Holes, on the Black Dahlia murder: LAPD historically is a tough nut to crack. I don't see them opening up on this particular case. I've had success consulting on cases where I've identified probative DNA evidence that has been missed in the past. And it's just a matter of, with LAPD, what do they have? What can we use today to identify who this offender is? Or how we talked about the San Diego series [murders that occurred around the same time as Elizabeth Short's]: Is there material down in San Diego I could take a look at and say, yes, I am seeing the same type of behaviors? I think this could be the same guy. And maybe San Diego has DNA evidence in one of those cases that could identify their offender, and then he could be investigated for the Elizabeth Short homicide.
Dawson: The case I would've solved would've been the yogurt shop murders. I grew up in Austin, and they were my exact age and we had mutual friends. And then we have a series that we think could be a serial killer that we reported on in Nashville in the '60s, and I think they probably have evidence. And so we're trying to get into the Nashville PD to see if they have their cold case squad, if they have any physical evidence from a horrible series of murders of young girls.
Brown: The idea of who buys all the glitter. It is unknown who the largest client for glitter purchasing is, and it's one or two, and we think it's the U.S. Navy, quite possibly because they use it to create these very specific paint jobs on ships that can identify themselves in international waters.
Bowlin: It's a corporate oligarchy.
Frederick: We have to do an update at some point if we can just get better information. Honestly, it's not confirmed.
