![]() “Some of that information came to light through the podcast ” “It’s been a puzzle and it’s a very slow process to find each of those little pieces,” Parkinson told reporters during a news conference this spring after the arrest of Paul Flores, the lead suspect in Smart’s disappearance and alleged murder. Chris Lambert, a singer-songwriter who grew up in the same town as Smart and remembers her disappearance during his childhood, created the podcast, which brought renewed interest to the 25-year-old case. More recently, and closer to home, San Luis Obispo County Sheriff Ian Parkinson praised the “Your Own Backyard” podcast for helping to bring Kristin Smart’s alleged killer into custody. In fact, Wilkins directly credits “Crimewatch UK” with helping to capture and put away for life a murderer when new potential witnesses came forward after seeing the episode: “It enabled the public to participate and contribute to the investigations,” says Wilkins. ![]() From best practices - like better liaising with the families and securing crime scenes faster - to bad practices - such as the use of excessive force - he feels that the popularity of true crime programming coupled with instant access to information via social media has helped identify law enforcement failures. (Holes participated in an “Unsolved Mysteries” episode in 2001 to profile the East Area Rapist and Original Night Stalker, as the Golden State Killer was then known, just after he’d discovered they were the same man.) And while chat rooms and message boards may have taken precedence over calling into a show’s 1-800 phone number, the citizen detective community continues to thrive, and modern technologies have made it easier than ever for investigators to draw on the public for information.įormer Detective Chief Superintendent Steve Wilkins, whose cold case work was recently dramatized on BritBox’s “The Pembrokeshire Murders” and profiled in a documentary on the same platform titled “Catching the Game Show Killer,” believes that true crime media has affected how law enforcement catches suspects. Kathleen McChesney, a consultant with 35 years of law enforcement experience - including at the FBI and the Seattle area’s King County Police Department, where she assisted on the Ted Bundy case - points directly to those programs as the start of a marriage of convenience between law enforcement and media. Long-running series such as “Unsolved Mysteries,” “America’s Most Wanted” and Britain’s “Crimewatch UK” may feature sinister music and ham-fisted reenactments, but they’ve also helped nab criminals: “America’s Most Wanted,” which was canceled after 25 years in 2013 and revived earlier this year (with a team including, who else, Holes), recently marked its 1,187th capture, while “Unsolved Mysteries,” rebooted by Netflix in 2020, has helped to solve more than 260 crimes. ![]() Like most things, there are nuances - “It’s complicated” was a phrase I heard from almost every source interviewed for this article. Even Holes, who co-hosts a podcast that crowd-sources clues, admits that. Michelle brought attention to the case, but it didn’t cause the case to be solved to be solved any faster.”ĭespite the genre’s proliferation on streaming platforms and podcast networks, then, it’s unclear whether, and how much, true crime media has changed the way law enforcement conducts investigations or solves crimes. ![]() We had a task force underway well before Michelle even knew about the case, and her involvement with the case didn’t cause us to work any harder, nor did any of us pay any attention to what was in her book. “However, I’d been involved in the case for 24 years. “Michelle and I were very close,” says Paul Holes, a retired cold case investigator in the Contra Costa Country Sheriff’s Office who features heavily in HBO’s adaptation, which premieres a follow-up special on Monday. But while McNamara’s investigation sometimes ran parallel to the detectives’ discoveries on the cold case, the timing was pure coincidence. the Golden State Killer, was finally caught after half a century, 50 rapes and 13 murders because of “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark.” Based on Michelle McNamara’s bestselling book of the same name, published posthumously in 2018, the HBO docuseries, which weaves together McNamara’s personal narrative with her citizen detective work, premiered last summer the day before DeAngelo pleaded guilty to multiple counts of murder and kidnapping. You’d be forgiven for believing that Joseph James DeAngelo, a.k.a.
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