“Live, Laugh, Luminol”: Feminized Fandom at CrimeCon

In late spring 2024, six thousand mostly female true crime fans packed the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center in Nashville. They came for CrimeCon, an annual convention that connects fans with content producers, entrepreneurs, victim advocates, and law enforcers. To understand why so many women (including myself) are drawn to shows, podcasts, and Internet forums about mayhem and murder, I paid $399 plus tax to join their ranks, notebook in hand. Rooms at the Gaylord were ridiculously pricey—the faux-Grecian resort boasts a massive glass atrium with indoor gardens, manmade rivers and waterfalls, three swimming pools, a luxury spa, a four-acre waterpark, high end boutiques, restaurants, and a golf course—so I commuted from a budget hotel down the street. No matter. On the opening morning, everyone hurried past the amenities to the yellow CrimeCon banner (which featured an outsized fingerprint as its logo) on the edge of the compound, eager to spend several days in windowless ballrooms and a jam-packed exhibit hall.

The convention space was bursting with middle-aged white women circulating in small groups (girlfriends, sisters, new acquaintances formed through CrimeCon meetups) through panels, meet-and-greets, live tapings, and hands-on activities like “Solve the Scene,” where attendees donned latex gloves to investigate the simulated murder of a blood-splattered dummy and tried out CSI equipment. Many signaled their true crime fandom and sense of belonging at the event by wearing CrimeCon hoodies and tee-shirts with slogans like “Stay Suspicious,” “Talk Motive to Me,” and “Stay at Home Detective.” I spotted a few men as well, but they were so outnumbered that the closest men’s restroom was redesignated as another (much needed) women’s room. Women of color were jarringly underrepresented.

None of this was surprising to me. As a middle-aged white woman who enjoys true crime, I am part of the CrimeCon demographic, even as I also critique a popular culture phenomenon that places imperiled white femininity at its center.¹ As the true crime historian Jean Murley notes, true crime was once pitched to working-class male readers of pulp magazine stories about hard-boiled detectives in pursuit of deviant outsiders.² In recent decades, the melodramatic concerns of women’s media (emotion, family, everyday life) have been folded into factual crime-solving narratives for mass audiences.³ Along with modern true crime’s disproportionate concern with “innocent” white female victims,⁴ the feminization of the genre cultivated women as the primary audience for the spectacular proliferation of mainstream true-crime content across media platforms. Unlike prestigious true crime outliers like the NPR podcast Serial (2014–24) or the acclaimed HBO documentary series Making a Murderer (2015–18), the endless podcasts, formulaic TV programs, 24-hour true crime networks, revolving Court TV cases, and adjacent Facebook forums that now underwrite CrimeCon operate under the radar of most media scholars and critics. My research involves making sense of this vast universe of quotidian true crime and the women who consume it avidly. I was at CrimeCon searching for clues of a different sort.

CrimeCon parasitizes the burgeoning true crime mediascape by rehashing popular crimes and connecting consumers with talent and microcelebrities, including detectives, prosecutors, and families of victims featured in media productions. The welcome session leaned in this complex (and deeply unsettling) amalgamation of real-life violence and trauma, actual crime-solving, female-centric storytelling, and fan culture. CrimeCon organizers addressed an overstuffed room with multiple jumbotrons and pressed play on a video compilation of true crimes of the year set to a Muzak rendition of Eminem’s anthem “Lose Yourself.” Culled from recent media, and edited for maximum intrigue and affective response, this teaser also showcased cathartic resolutions (“criminals busted, missing persons recovered, truths revealed”) to a true crime meta-narrative in which fans are invited to participate.⁵ “Together, We Can Do Anything,” the video rallied its viewers with its final slogan, addressing CrimeCon attendees as a community of justice seekers and crime solvers. When it was over, the enthusiastic crowd erupted in wild applause.

Because true crime mediates real experiences of crime, it intervenes in the public sphere in ways that differentiate CrimeCon from conventions for comic lovers or Pokémon fans. To be sure, the overarching motive for transforming murder and mayhem into factual entertainment is commercial. Unlike investigative journalism or culturally legitimated forms of documentary filmmaking, run-of-the mill true crime is a quick and inexpensive product suited to ever more channels and platforms requiring endless content. This market favors tried-and-true formulas with predictable ideological slants—a troubling faith in law enforcement and a focus on individual acts of violence over structures of disempowerment and gun laws, for example. These constraints are disavowed by CrimeCon, which adopts a simplistic understanding of verisimilitude between real life and representation. Ironically, this naivete makes it easier to stitch the narrative pleasure of true crime storytelling (suspense, fear, identification, emotion, resolution) into castigatory advocacy in the social world.

At CrimeCon, true crime fandom is constituted as a version of civic responsibility that requires abundant media consumption in the service of solidarity with (some) victims, along with self-protection and active participation in the pursuit of us-versus-them justice. After attending a few panels, I began to see how this particular civic subjectivity is gendered. The blockbuster sessions were dominated by aging white men treated as true crime royalty and unlikely heartthrobs, wearing black leather jackets and tailed by star-struck female groupies—authoritative patriarchal figures like former detective Paul Holes, who helped solve the Golden State Killer case, John Walsh, creator of the TV show America’s Most Wanted (Fox, 1988–2011) and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, Dateline (NBC, 1992–present) correspondent Josh Mankiewicz, and former homicide prosecutor and true crime personality Matt Murphy.

These and other hand-picked commentators situated violent crime as an imminent threat from within seemingly wholesome families and communities. Presenting themselves as protectors of vulnerable women and children, rather than entrepreneurs of violence and trauma, they emphasized from different angles a shared imperative to detect and punish dangerous individuals hiding in plain sight. This rhetoric echoed true crime’s shifting focus on the feminized space of the “ordinary, the trusted, and the prosaic” as sites of danger.⁶ While serial killers and stranger danger are still covered, horrific acts perpetrated by spouses, family members, neighbors, and acquaintances now dominate. Across popular true-crime narratives, white women and children are at perpetual risk from the “evil” lurking within pastoral, middle-class America. This trope enables melodramatic storytelling (as epitomized by the Dateline idiom “the husband did it”) at the expense of any acknowledgement of racialized, classed, and gendered structures of violence.

CrimeCon was founded by another middle-aged white man, Kevin Balfe, a corporate media consultant who coauthored several books with the right-wing commentator Glenn Beck. Not surprisingly, the convention pledges allegiance to dominant institutions of law and order. While botched police investigations and wrongful convictions occasionally came up at the convention, such cases were presented as glitches to be solved with better policing and tweaked legislation. The female superstars of CrimeCon presented a similar message with a carceral feminist slant. In another popular session, former prosecutor turned TV personality Nancy Grace, host of a string of true crime cable shows including Swift Justice with Nancy Grace (syndicated, 2011–12), Bloodline Detectives (syndicated, 2020–), and Crime Stories with Nancy Grace (Fox Nation, 2020–), introduced herself as a victims’ rights advocate. Teary-eyed, she spent her hour on stage recounting examples of horrific child abuse, drawing lurid details from sensational true crime stories. Fusing feminist rhetoric with a demand for carceral justice, Grace attributed these cases to the pure evil of perpetrators, deploying shock value to endorse more punitive retribution as a form of victim empowerment. Ignoring any collective societal context or potential policy solution to everyday violence, Grace wrapped up by deputizing true crime fans to surveil and report others in their everyday spheres, rallying a vigilante form of justice to supplement and extend official law enforcement. It is everyone’s duty, she told the cheering audience, to protect the “littlest victims.”

While most speakers at the convention evaded discussion of the intersection of race, class, and gender in violence and crime, several panels cast a spotlight on indigenous and Black victims. In a panel sponsored by the Black and Missing Foundation’s podcast Untold Stories (Black and Missing Foundation, 2023–), which covers missing women of color, I finally heard true crime’s emphasis on white middle-class women addressed. Indigenous and Black family members of missing women appeared on the panel to discuss the significantly higher rates of violence that women of color experience and the inattention their cases received from law enforcement and the media. Unfortunately, this panel was far less attended than others, despite the fact that the parents of Gabby Petito (a white woman and social media influencer whose disappearance and murder became a viral true crime sensation) sat on the panel in order to lend their fame to these issues. I also found myself skeptical that the reforms being called for by the panelists (modifications to existing institutions of law and order, equal media visibility for all), even if they were somehow enacted, would be enough to combat the gendered violence rooted in deep structures of racialized and economic disempowerment. These kinds of questions unsettle the generic parameters of true crime and the dominant ideology of CrimeCon fandom, and they went unasked at the convention. When a white woman, visibly moved by the conversation at this panel, asked how fans could help, the panelists advised sharing photos and support on social media for less-covered cases. One of the most things striking things about CrimeCon is its ability to contain discussions of civic responsibility within conventional borders.

At the entrance to the convention was a wall of missing person fliers, many with family photos and heartfelt pleas for help finding loved ones. CrimeCon provided Post-it notes so fans could share equally touching and supportive messages. This looming tower of hurt and empathy was a constant reminder of the genuine affective pull of true crime and its gendered address to what Lauren Berlant calls an “intimate public.”⁷ Shaped through melodramatic women’s culture, intimate publics foster a sense of collective membership and belonging based on emotion and trauma, Berlant argues. As the mediated public sphere dissolves into mediated intimate publics, intimate citizenship has become a dominant structure for thinking about and solving societal problems. True crime enables this by conjoining the masculinized sphere of law enforcement to the intimate domain of feeling and personal action. In the world of CrimeCon, there is nothing else, no democratic body to dissent or advocate for change.

At a panel with FBI behavioral profilers, I realized how true crime also appropriates skills associated with earlier female genres to encourage fans to profile and criminalize “risky” people and activities as an extension of law enforcement. As Tania Modleski has shown, daytime soaps train female viewers to “read” people by paying close attention to body language, facial expressions, subtext, and emotional cues.⁸ This resonates with the dynamics of emotional labor and everyday life as experienced by women. The FBI profilers demonstrated close people-reading skills in a pedagogical exercise that involved analyzing a CNN interview with the alleged female stalker dramatized in the Netflix series Baby Reindeer (2024), which claims to be based on a true story. When Internet sleuths tracked down the woman, she was doxed and received death threats. She agreed to the television interview thinking that it might help her refute the accusations against her and share her side of the story, but this plan backfired.

Segments from the interview were played in sequence, with regular pauses for the profilers to identify and interpret clues about her guilt or innocence. After each lesson, the audience was called on to decode the next segment in a similar fashion. The male FBI profilers validated female audience practices of “reading” characters with pseudoscientific protocols and conflated the results with legal standards of evidence. Based on the downward gaze of the woman’s eyes, her rapid blink rate, verbal pauses, and predilection for elongating her vowels, among other issues, they determined that she was probably not a psychopath, but most certainly was strange, delusional, and untruthful. The derisive and joking tone of the panelists generated uproarious laughter from the audience, which made me increasingly uneasy about true crime as a court of adjudication. Above all, the panel underscored the ease through which the sphere of intimate citizenship can be mobilized for biopolitical forms of crime control and the contradictions of CrimeCon’s female solidarity messaging.

The carceral state is a crucial part of the infrastructure of CrimeCon, which makes no bones about its staunch support of police power. The detectives, profilers, and prosecutors who walk the halls, appear on panels, and participate in meet-and-greets are revered for protecting “us” from dangerous others. At the same time, these representatives of the state are folded into the convoluted logics of true-crime fan culture. At CrimeCon, they are worshiped as celebrities whose allure is rooted in their constructed visibility as real-life media characters. The same holds true of real-life victims, who become some of the hottest commodities at the convention, as if their trauma itself was a saleable resource to be mined by themselves or others. Fans packed the room for a session showcasing “Baby Holly” Clouse, who, as an infant, had been abducted in the wake of her parents’ murder, only to be found decades later. The case checked all the boxes of a major true crime story—intrigue, an innocent white female victim, a cathartic and almost miraculous resolution—and had recently been featured on the TV show 20/20 (ABC, “Baby Holly Found,” S46 E6, 2024). Like thousands of other CrimeCon attendees, I saw the episode and was curious about Holly, who seemed nervous and ill at ease in this strange setting.

As it turned out, she (like many true-crime personalities) was there to pitch her new book. It is not only an account of her story but also advocates for voluntary genetic testing as a crime-solving tool. Her plea taps into feelings of empathy and victim advocacy, and provides an individual plan of action for true crime fans. This is the same plan advocated by several companies that trade in DNA testing, conveniently on site at CrimeCon. Before and after panels, the jumbotrons showed commercials for GEDMatch, urging fans to help solve cases by uploading their DNA to proprietary databases that share data with law enforcement agencies. The prospect of making a difference this way is rooted in a neoliberal discourse that proposes to offload security to private firms and to individuals, in partnership with a diminished public sector. Underwriting this approach are taken-for-granted assumptions about who is a criminal and who is not. At the Expo area of the conference, CrimeCon attendees were prompted to have their cheeks swabbed on the spot, free of charge, as an act of solidarity with victims and civic responsibility. When I agreed to the test in the spirit of research, the man performing it told me that my data could provide answers to families of unidentified victims like Holly. The extents to which GEDMatch and similar databases can be used for more nefarious ends that erode privacy and intensify the policing of differently empowered bodies, including uses far beyond the initially stated purpose of the test (including potential medical applications outside the orbit of law enforcement), were obviously not part of the pitch.

The Expo was a fascinating amalgam of privatized justice and mediated fan culture. I was struck by the tension between playfulness and looming peril across the rows of podcasters, cable stations, and merchandisers, each with their own interactive displays, banners, and swag. I spent hours watching fans pose for mock mug shots courtesy of Court TV, shop for pink stun guns, witness a police artist transform a skull into a clay bust, and chat with the hosts of podcasts like Pretty Lies and Alibis (2020–), Small Town Dicks (2017–), and Cold Cake Files (2024–), whose display included a stand of cupcakes set up as a mock crime scene. I waited in a lengthy line to take a lie detector test administered by the cable channel Ion, which caught me in a fib about my cat. Sometimes celebrity panelists wandered through the space, shaking hands with attendees and posing for photographs with eager fans. Victims’ rights organizations were on hand distributing informational flyers and luggage tags with scannable barcodes that connect travelers with local information about crimes and missing-persons cases wherever they might go. Interspersed throughout were booths selling all manner of merch, from Cold Case Coffee subscriptions to baseball caps to original artwork based on true crime cases.

At one of these merchandise booths, I spotted a canvas tote bag with the words “Live, Laugh, Luminol” (the chemical that can reveal invisible blood traces). At the time, I rolled my eyes at this cutesy commercialization. But, in retrospect, this slogan may be the perfect summation of feminized true crime fandom. For the thousands of middle-aged white women who flock to CrimeCon each year, true crime validates the ordinary, everyday sphere of femininity by investing it with intrigue and importance. More than that, true crime cultivates an imagined community of women whose tastes, empathy, and actions matter. The real crime, as I see it, is how a booming culture industry and its carceral partners claim this intimate public as their own.