TRUE CRIME DISTORTS THE TRUTH ABOUT CRIME

In their telling, it was Kercher’s roommate, an American exchange student named Amanda Knox, who had killed the young woman during some sort of satanic sex game gone awry

Knox and her boyfriend, Raffaelle Sollecito, were tried separately from Guede, convicted of murder, and spent four years in prison before being released on appeal in 2011.

And that story you probably do remember. “What happened to my roommate was a horrible thing that happens to women all over the globe. She was at home, she was going to bed, and somebody came into our home and raped and murdered her,” Knox says. “But that story was completely lost.”

Knox is nearly a decade removed now from the days when her face was front-page tabloid fodder. Today, she’s the creator of a new podcast miniseries called Blood Money that explores the ethics and history of true crime; she’s also a wife and mother. Our phone conversation for this article was punctuated by the sound of her preschool-aged daughter fussing in the background. And yet the tabloid-headline version of Knox is still the one people think of when they hear her name.

“You’re captured in amber in the worst experience of your life, and nobody really wants you to evolve outside that moment in time,” she says.

Knox’s false imprisonment for a crime she didn’t commit was a global news story in its own time, but it’s also become something more than that: an odyssey, a legend. It’s not just a real tragedy; it’s true crime.

In its transformation of violence into a tabloid-ready narrative, true crime has the power to shape our collective understanding not just of violence, but of the systems we build to adjudicate it—if not of our concept of justice itself.

MURDER MOST FOUL