[imagesource: Ben Kothe / BuzzFeed News]

For many, when their personal life starts feeling overwhelming, drowning themselves in true crime becomes a way to self-soothe.

Getting involved in a true-crime show of some kind is a comfortable, controlled environment in which to contemplate some pretty tough questions about the law, family dynamics, and trauma.

It sounds bad, but at least your life isn’t ever as horrendous, right?

Thankfully, there is never a scarcity of content to feed our lust for true crime. Even Kim Kardashian has jumped on the bandwagon.

Sky News has explored a few shows that have had a real-world impact, though, from miscarriages of justice to horrific crimes, whether the stories lead to criminal convictions or their overturning, or simply transfix audiences.

We recently wrote about the popular Ozzie true-crime podcast, Teacher’s Pet, which helped solve a decades-old murder case.

Serial, which is perhaps the most famous true-crime podcast of all, hit the news this week.

From the podcast’s jaunty opening keyboard trill, to host Sarah Konig’s forensic dissection of the case, this show had audiences hooked from day one, becoming a word-of-mouth sensation back in 2014.

Since kicking the true-crime podcast genre into the mainstream, Serial helped throw doubt on Adnan Syed’s conviction for the murder of his then-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee.

Min Lee was found strangled and buried in a Baltimore park in 1999.

Eight years after the podcast was first released, this week Syed was released from jail and his murder conviction was squashed after 23 years in prison.

Then there’s The Jinx, which is streaming on Showmax:

New York multi-millionaire and property heir Robert Durst was suspected of multiple crimes but maintained his innocence.

He was convicted of murder in 2021, right after the hit HBO documentary The Jinx came out:

The show focused on three crimes – the unsolved 1982 disappearance of his first wife Kathleen McCormack, the 2000 murder of his long-time friend Susan Berman, and the 2001 killing of his neighbour Morris Black.

Although Durst was acquitted of murdering Black in 2001, a conversation caught on the mic during filming for the documentary appeared to show him confessing to all three murders. He apparently didn’t know he was still being recorded.

Durst, the grandson of Joseph Durst, who founded the Durst Organisation, one of Manhattan’s largest commercial property firms, was sentenced to life in prison.

When the 78-year-old died, he was believed to be worth $100 million.

Next up, Lucky, a memoir adaptation that led to the overturning of a rape conviction:

The man convicted of raping Lovely Bones author Alice Sebold had his conviction overturned after a producer who was making her 1999 memoir Lucky into a film began questioning why the first draft of the script differed so much from the book.

Anthony Broadwater had spent 16 years in prison when in 2001, a judge cleared him for raping Sebold when she was a student, something she wrote about in her 1999 award-winning memoir Lucky.

Tim Mucciante, who owns a production company called Red Badge Films, was about to work with Sebold on the filming of Lucky, but sensed some dodgy vibes and launched his own investigation.

What eventually came to light was that Sebold had merely pointed at a black man walking the streets and accused him of raping her as a first-year student at Syracuse in May 1981.

It turned out to be Broadwater, who was convicted under “junk science” as his lawyer put it.

Lucky the film was subsequently cancelled.

[source:skynews]