Abstract
I recently watched Murder at the Cottage: The Search for Justice for Sophie (2021), director Jim Sheridan’s five-part true crime documentary about the killing of Sophie Toscan du Plantier on 23 December 1996 in Ireland. Du Plantier, a French woman, owned a holiday cottage in Schull, a village in West Cork, and intended to spend Christmas there. Her beaten body was discovered by a neighbor. In Ireland, no one has been convicted of du Plantier’s murder. The main suspect, Ian Bailey, was convicted in absentia of voluntary homicide in France in 2019 and sentenced to 25 years in prison. Ireland has refused to extradite him.
Murder at the Cottage was fresh in my mind when I read Dawn Cecil’s Fear, Justice, and Modern True Crime. It bears several of the hallmarks of modern true crime that Cecil identifies. True crime shows are disproportionately about murder cases and are disproportionately about the murders of white women and girls. Such cases are paradigmatic for true crime. Cecil notes that conventionally true crime television programming focuses on cases with a definitive ending. The criminal justice system is depicted as competent and functional. The resolution is part of the reward of true crime viewing—bad things happen but the perpetrators are brought to justice, restoring order. However, some commercially and critically successful examples of modern true crime have broken these conventions. The criminal justice system is portrayed as incompetent or even corrupt; it convicts the wrong people or fails to convict anyone at all. It invites the audience to fear not only criminals, but state agencies too. It is to this new era of true crime that Murder at the Cottage belongs.
In the modern era, true crime series have blossomed on streaming services and as podcasts. This enables viewers and listeners to consume them all at once, if they wish to. Podcasting especially has deepened the intimacy of true crime, a key aspect of its appeal. Episodic series explore different cases each week; a distinctive feature of modern true crime is the “deep dive,” which follows a single case across the whole series. The game-changing Serial (2014–present) podcast and Making a Murderer (2015–2018) Netflix series are both examples of deep dives. At five hour-long episodes, so is Murder at the Cottage. The deep dive enables true crime to embrace complexity and to connect the case in question to social issues, which include the actions of the police and the workings of the courts. Murder at the Cottage is about a lot of things—grief, unreliability, belonging and unbelonging, men’s violence toward women, loyalty, and delusion. It is true crime as prestige television.
Cecil highlights how significant Serial and Making a Murderer were in making miscarriage of justice a central concern of modern true crime. Another notable aspect of modern true crime is investigation, which is related to the phenomenon of “citizen sleuthing.” Michelle McNamara’s (2018) I’ll Be Gone in the Dark chronicles her years of sleuthing in order to identify the Golden State Killer, who was revealed to be Joseph James DeAngelo in 2018, two years after McNamara’s untimely death. Since the publication of Fear, Justice, and Modern True Crime, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark has been adapted into an HBO docuseries (2020), which examines not only DeAngelo’s crimes but also the impact of McNamara’s death on her family.
Another landmark in terms of true crime investigation is the HBO series The Jinx (2015). Famously, perhaps notoriously, its subject Robert Durst seemed to unwittingly confess to murdering three people when he went to the bathroom still mic’d up and anxiously talked to himself. This “confession” made for a showstopping end to the series, although Cecil points out that The Jinx has since been criticized for misleadingly editing the recording of Durst. The templates of miscarriage of justice and investigation are invoked by Murder at the Cottage, but ultimately it follows neither of these. Ian Bailey might have been unfairly hounded by the Gardai (Irish police), or he might have (in Ireland at least) gotten away with murder. Refusing to draw conclusions, the series closes elliptically, with Sheridan asking if Ian Bailey is capable of murder and answering, “Aren’t we all?”
Fear, Justice, and Modern Crime is highly readable and satisfying in its attention to the forms of modern true crime and the genre’s remarkable popularity. Cecil intersperses her analysis of true crime with reflections on her experiences at CrimeCon 2018 and a podcast festival. She asks what kinds of fear true crime induces and ponders its psychological effects and the implications of its distorted overrepresentation of murder, and the murders of white women and girls in particular. Cecil’s book is about American true crime; but, as my discussion of Murder at the Cottage demonstrates, her insights apply beyond the United States. The reach of podcasts and Netflix documentaries is international, something that further work on true crime could address. The role of true crime—in terms of its portrayals and its fanbase—in constructing white femininity as fearful and in need of protection is also something that could productively be examined further.
Overall, Fear, Justice, and Modern Crime is highly recommended for offering an engaging media and crime analysis that takes recent shifts in the consumption of media-based entertainment as its starting point. While “traditional” media remain important in terms of the representation of crime, streaming and podcasting have reinvigorated true crime as a genre, giving it a new cultural prominence. This prominence requires the attention of sociologists, criminologists, and media scholars, and Cecil deserves congratulation for her compelling analysis.