by In the 1990s you would have been hard pressed to find someone who didn’t know my sister Polly Klaas’s name. I was 6 years old when a stranger abducted 12-year-old Polly from our bedroom on the night of October 1, 1993. Her face quickly became a fixture on the nightly news, her name appearing prominently in the headlines along with with alarmists about crime rates. News crews broadcast from our living room and remained camped in front of our house during the two-month search before her body was found.
Although the media frenzy should have ended there, it only intensified, fueling a political climate primed for reactionary retaliation. Polly’s kidnapping from our white, middle-class suburban community sparked a national outcry calling for punishment and retribution.
In the years that followed, true crime began to morph into the media obsession it is today. Last year, The Hollywood Reporter alerted its readers to “30 True Crime Series to Binge Right Now.” As I write this, nearly half of Apple’s top 20 podcasts in the United States are dedicated to true crime, and the Internet is saturated with recommendations for the best new true crime books to read.
One could argue that this genre honors the victims and those who solved or attempted to solve the cases. However, as a survivor whose tragedy continues to be exploited by the creators of true crime stories, I know the personal pain of this appropriation, as well as how coverage of these high-profile cases can contribute to broader injustices. Exploiting victims’ stories often comes at a high cost to their families, as their tragedies are commodified and their privacy repeatedly violated for mass consumption.
In 2022, for example, the release of “Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” on Netflix caused deep distress among many family members of Dahmer’s victims, who felt that the show was profiting of your pain, misrepresenting real events and retraumatize those who had lived through the horror of Dahmer’s crimes.
On top of those harms, stories that don’t fit true crime’s cultural emphasis on the victimization of white women too often go untold.
Before my sister’s murder, a version of what is known as the three strikes law was proposed in California. The measure called for a sentence of 25 years to life in prison for almost any crime, no matter how minor, if the defendant had two prior convictions for crimes that the law designated as serious or violent. The measure was initially considered so unreasonably harsh that it was quickly rejected by the State Assembly’s Public Safety Committee.
But Polly’s case changed things in California. In the wake of our highly publicized tragedy and the murder of 18-year-old Kimber Reynolds the previous year, politicians were able to take advantage of the pain of some victims’ families to revive their proposal, quickly passing one of the harsher sentencing laws the last century.
Since the law was enacted, more than half of people sentenced under it have been incarcerated for nonviolent crimes, and the law is disproportionately applied to people of color and people with mental illnesses and physical disabilities. Although the law was changed (now requiring the third offense to be a serious or violent crime), the law continues to egregiously amplify institutional discrimination affecting communities of color and other marginalized groups.
It was difficult for me to feel a sense of justice in the years after Polly’s death. Although her killer was caught and convicted, I grew up watching the brief beauty of my sister’s life overshadowed by a political narrative that weaponized her innocence to fuel an era of mass incarceration and obsession with true crime.
Those early experiences showed me how sensational media stories about high-profile crimes not only erode the dignity of victims but can also Inflate public perception of national crime rates., which have been in decline for decades. Misguided policies like three-strikes laws are not simply unfortunate side effects of inflammatory speech; They are the direct result of moral outrage cured by hyperbolic headlines and the omnipresence of the gruesome method of true crime storytelling.
True crime narratives are often more concerned with exacting revenge than with understanding what survivors need to heal and recover from unthinkable harm. They can encourage our appetite for revenge and combine justice with punishment when Victims need and deserve much more support. that revenge or punishment can offer. And yet a majority of survivors They do not receive any victim compensation or referrals from the justice system to support services that are essential for trauma recovery.
Additionally, true crime stories often focus on white female victims who were harmed by strangers. This overshadows the reality that black Americans are more likely to be victims of homicide and that in cases where the perpetrator is identified, a vast majority of homicides They are committed by people known to the victims. Exploitation and erasure that tilt true crime toward sensational violence undermine our ability to address the root systemic causes of harm, while distancing us from our empathy toward the marginalized victims most affected by crime.
Although none of the content creators who dramatized my sister’s murder ever asked me for my consent, some have reached out in recent years to ask for my memories. In doing so, I was often enthusiastically bombarded with details about the case that I didn’t want to know, causing an avalanche of post-traumatic stress. I can remember the next few weeks spent lying awake at night, trying to quell the panic in my nervous system. How could I explain to these writers and producers that my memories of Polly are the only thing I have left of her that hasn’t been exploited or mined for public consumption? How could I convey the traumatic upheaval that these books and shows could cause in my life and the lives of my loved ones? Would our pain matter to these people who claimed to care so much about justice and the well-being of the victims?
An unfortunate result is that presenting trauma as entertainment ignores the diverse needs of victims. While some true crime audiences may view victims and their families as a monolithic crusade for punitive sentencing, a 2022 report by Alliance for security and justice, an organization I work with, reveals that the majority of survivors surveyed preferred rehabilitation and prevention over punishment. To truly dismantle cycles of harm, it is imperative to amplify survivors’ stories on their own terms and seriously embrace the security solutions They are pioneers in their communities.
On our path to healing, my sister Jess Nichol and I began “A new legacy”in memory of Polly, a podcast of conversations with community organizers and people harmed by three strikes laws to explore how we can replace systems of punishment with systems of care. I am also a producer of the “Crime Survivors Speak” podcast, in which we amplify the knowledge and experiences of the members of Crime survivors for safety and justice, a survivor organization with nearly 190,000 members, to reduce incarceration and increase investments in crime prevention, trauma recovery, and rehabilitation. Through this work, I have learned that when you really listen to survivors, your heart rate should never speed up; should be slowing down. This is how new dimensions of justice and healing become imaginable.
