PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — “Serial” is arguably the original true crime podcast. In 2014, its debut season revolutionized the genre with the case of Hae Min Lee and Adnan Syed, the latter of whom was released from prison last month. His conviction was overturned after more than two decades behind bars.
In 1999, Baltimore high schooler Lee disappeared. Her body was found a month later. Her ex-boyfriend, then-17-year-old Syed, was ultimately sentenced to life in prison for her murder.
What made the case interesting to “Serial” host Sarah Koenig — and her devoted listeners — was that Syed’s case was based mostly on the testimony of one witness. Syed has always maintained his innocence, and the podcast series raised doubts about some of the evidence prosecutors had used.
Koenig followed Syed’s case with a heavy air of skepticism, which helped push the podcast to the forefront of the zeitgeist. If “Serial” really helped correct a wrongful conviction, then it truly made a major positive impact.
“‘Serial’ really showed that putting the spotlight on a case can get audience members of all different walks of life, of all different professions involved in putting pressure on a government, on a police force to really take another look at this case,” said Dr. Bess Rowen, who teaches a gender, performance and true crime class at Villanova University.
She said the podcast spawned many others of a similar caliber — like “Undisclosed” and “Truth & Justice” — which really examine the intricacies of cases that had been long forgotten. There are seemingly endless follow-up podcasts and documentaries just on Syed’s case alone.
Related
“The fact that he originally got a chance for a new trial … this all came out of the attention people paid to that podcast, and the podcasts that responded to that podcast,” said Rowen. “What it did was shake the trees. And all of a sudden, people were talking about these things.”
But a lot of true crime stories don’t have similar outcomes — nor do they come close to the unprecedented amount of attention that “Serial” received. Sometimes, they may draw attention to the wrong places.
Even popular series, like the case of Steven Avery in Netflix’s 2015 show “Making a Murderer,” put a lot of focus and time into exonerating people who “probably have already had a lot of resources put to their exoneration,” Rowen noted.
Related
“Meanwhile, there are murdered and missing Indigenous women all over the place who don’t have 12-part series on Netflix,” she argued. “There are other groups of people who really are being erased and forgotten about.” Rowen pointed to thousands of cases involving people of color — both victims of murder and those behind bars, like Syed.
Sometimes, she said, people are so hungry for true crime content that they create scenarios out of cases that are just “unfortunate accidents” — take the case of Elisa Lam in Netflix’s 2021 “Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel.”
“Why use true crime resources to create a crime when there are so many people who already are victims of crime that we could be talking about?” Rowen asked.
Listen to KYW Newsradio In Depth below to hear Rowen talk more about the ethical responsibilities of the true crime world: Who benefits and who suffers from resurfacing these tragic stories? Can the true crime trend last?
The Associated Press contributed to reporting about Adnan Syed’s conviction.