Heather Christena Schmidt

I’ve been watching a lot of true crime lately. Like daily. I am absolutely addicted. I dream about it.

I’d like to think it started with the new season of Making a Murderer, but the truth is it started when I was a small child. My mom used to watch Murder, She Wrote and Father Dowling, with a smattering of Perry Mason and Columbo. Pretty much all the time. My childhood memories, at least the ones that involve her, are peppered with the shows.

Then when my parents got divorced, visits with my mom would include day long marathons of the shows. Sometimes the entire week to visit her would be just one Unsolved Mysteries episode after another, with take out containers and pajamas littering the living room.

What I’m saying is: I’ve been binge watching true crime before binge watching true crime was cool.

Flash forward to now, and for years I have irritated my husband by obsessively adding the age old shows to the DVR. When I get up and start doing chores, they come on and annoy my kids. Sometimes they watch too; other times it is the source of Mom’s weirdness.

Then I discovered the wonders of True Crime and Crime Dramas on Netflix. It took a while for me to get really obsessive about them, but these last couple of months… man… we sure are getting our money’s worth for our recurring Netflix, Prime, and Hulu charges.

Now it’s like Unsolved Mysteries all over again. I watched the 2nd season of Making a Murderer in a matter of two days. Twice. I watched both Fyre Festival documentaries. Ted Bundy Tapes, that was a good one.

It’s also moved on to podcasts; I listened to Serial in one, long, tireless swoop.

Oh and… I just watched Abducted In Plain Sight today. Boy was that a mind fuck.

Then I started spending time online looking for published lists of shows and movies to add to my to watch file. Which I have now, on the computer – a file with lists by streaming app of what I want to watch.

I’m not even going to tell you guys how long the list is.

For me, this insatiable love of true crime and even fictional crime shows and podcasts is rooted in wanting to know more about what is going on in the world. I can only handle so much news and media; it becomes repetitive and never gets into stories like the ones I learn about listening to This American Life, or by watching a show like Murder Mountain or I Am A Killer. My life is so sheltered in these suburbs, true crime helps me realize and be aware of the world beyond my city walls.

The more I watch, as well, the more I realize how many people there are out there – in the world – who want their story to be heard. If I were to count up the number of times I, myself, felt unheard, my list would be so much longer than my own to-watch list, saved on the desktop of my MacBook. What better justice than to let the laundry go and the vacuuming wait so I can binge watch another true crime series, or another group of movies about real life crime? At least that’s what I tell myself.