Many of us can’t explain why but humans are innately fascinated by murder.
From Jack the Ripper to Erin Patterson, the most notorious killings have a way of burrowing into the public consciousness.
We want to know who did it, why they did it and what happened behind closed doors.
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Today, we have more ways than ever to feed into this true crime fascination.
We listen to podcasts that spend hours dissecting a case, watch documentaries that revisit murders committed decades ago or cases that remain unsolved, follow trials in real time and scroll through social media as strangers piece together evidence and rumours and build out their own theories.
In the most legal way possible, we have become participants in true crime and, from that, the genre has grown into a multimillion-dollar industry with a life of its own.
But amid all of that noise, we seem to forget there is a procedure still to follow.
A jury is selected on the expectation of impartiality, instructed to put aside what it has seen or heard outside the courtroom and consider only the evidence presented before it.
But in an age when murder cases can become a national obsession long before a verdict is reached, can 12 people ever really create an unbiased jury or will they always be influenced by the court of public opinion?
Why are we so fascinated?
There is no shortage of explanations for why we keep coming back to true crime stories, but Professor Blake McKimmie, who researches jury decision-making at the University of Queensland, told 7NEWS.com.au it may come down to our desire to understand what is happening around us and make sense of things that do not make sense.
“We have a strong motive to know what’s going on. We have a strong need to explain things,” McKimmie said.
That desire can become even stronger when the crime itself is unusual or shocking, with some cases seeming so extraordinary they would be difficult to believe even if they appeared in fiction.
We are not simply interested in the answer, we want to understand the clues, the people involved, their motives and the chain of events that led to the crime.
“People like the idea that they might be able to be involved in finding out what happened themselves,” McKimmie said.
That fascination is hardly a modern phenomenon. The Lindy Chamberlain case in the 1980s is a prime example of Australians finding ways to participate in major criminal cases.
Decades before podcasts and social media, people followed the story through newspapers, wrote letters to editors and called radio stations to discuss their theories on what had or hadn’t happened.
So while our appetite for these kinds of stories has always been there, what has changed is our accessibility to them.
True crime is now more accessible than ever. Credit: AAP
We’ve always wanted to be part of the story
The audience that once waited for the newspaper or radio bulletin can now spend hours immersed in a case, moving between a podcast episode, a Reddit thread, a TikTok theory, and a news story before ultimately forming their own view on what happened.
True crime has become something we interact with rather than simply consume, and in some cases that involvement has had a tangible impact on the cases themselves.
The Teacher’s Pet podcast is perhaps the clearest example of this happening in Australia.
The podcast’s investigation into the 1982 disappearance of Lynette Dawson reignited public interest in a case that had remained unsolved for decades, bringing the story to a new audience and prompting people with information to finally come forward.
The renewed attention ultimately led to the arrest and subsequent conviction of Lynette’s former husband Chris Dawson in 2022.
“It can surface evidence, information becomes evidence that wasn’t otherwise available because you get people who come forward,” McKimmie said.
However, that same public interest can create a difficult problem once a case enters a courtroom, because information that makes for a compelling podcast episode is not always admissible in a court of law.
A podcast can explore a theory, discuss an untested allegation or present information that never makes it into evidence.
The general audience can listen, debate and decide for themselves what they think happened. A juror cannot.
And what happens when the juror has spent months being an audience member before ever taking a seat in the courtroom?
Then the story enters the courtroom
Jurors are specifically instructed to consider the evidence presented in court and put aside information they may have encountered elsewhere, with judges reinforcing those directions throughout the trial.
The rules of evidence are designed to determine what information can properly be placed before the jury in the first place.
The rules of evidence are designed to determine what information can properly be placed before the jury. Credit: AAP
Then there are safeguards before a trial even begins, with potential jurors asked whether they have followed the case or whether there is anything that might prevent them from approaching the trial fairly.
This gives someone who has followed a case avidly the chance to disclose that information and allows the judge to determine whether they should be excused.
McKimmie’s research suggests media exposure can influence the way people percieve a defendant.
Negative coverage can lead to more negative perceptions, while positive coverage can have the opposite effect.
But following a case does not automatically mean someone is incapable of being impartial.
There is an important counterweight: McKimmie said the strength of the evidence presented in court remains the biggest influence on jurors.
“It’s not the situation that everyone who’s seen a single story or whatever about a case will be excluded,” McKimmie said.
“They’re testing for whether somebody could still be fair and unbiased despite being exposed to some aspects of the case.”
Research shows media exposure can influence individuals, but there is less evidence about whether those effects survive the process of jury deliberation.
Once 12 people are placed in a room together and required to discuss the evidence, they are inevitably bringing different experiences, reactions and interpretations to the conversation.
That deliberation can reduce the influence of individual biases because jurors have to explain their reasoning to one another and reach a decision together.
The question, then, becomes whether the safeguards inside the courtroom are strong enough to counter what they may already have absorbed outside it.
The Google problem
Few recent Australian cases demonstrate that tension more clearly than the trial of Erin Patterson.
Long before the jury reached its verdict, the case had become a national obsession, with extensive reporting, podcasts, social media discussion from around the globe and near-constant public interest.
Long before the jury reached its verdict, the Erin Patterson case had become a national obsession. Credit: AAP
The scale of the attention meant the people selected to hear the evidence were entering a trial that millions of Australians had already been following, discussing and dissecting.
The court repeatedly reminded jurors that they could not investigate the case themselves or seek out information beyond what was presented in court.
Those instructions are clear but they do go against something most people have been conditioned to do daily: to just “Google it”.
If you don’t understand something, you Google it. If you want more context, you Google it. If you hear a name or legal term you do not recognise, you Google it. If you want to know whether something you have just been told is true, you Google it.
For a juror, that reflex is suddenly forbidden.
“It takes a lot of self-control to not go looking for information when that’s what you’re used to in your everyday life,” McKimmie said.
It is difficult to resist searching for information when that is such an ordinary part of everyday life, particularly when a juror encounters evidence they do not understand or becomes curious about something that has been mentioned in court.
McKimmie said there was a case in Queensland in which jurors were repeatedly instructed not to seek information about the case, yet jurors still accessed material outside the courtroom.
Ultimately, jurors face a bigger challenge than shutting down what they may have seen before the trial; they must also resist accessing this kind of information while they are still in the jury box.
And if Google makes it difficult for a juror to resist the urge to investigate, artificial intelligence could make that temptation even greater, with tools capable of summarising complex information, explaining unfamiliar concepts and producing a seemingly authoritative answer in seconds.
Can the system keep up?
The courts have options when concerns about publicity become overwhelming.
Trials can sometimes be delayed, moved to another jurisdiction or, in certain circumstances, heard by a judge alone rather than a jury.
But while moving a trial may have once meant moving it away from the community that had been saturated with coverage, in an online world information does not stop at a geographic boundary.
And while professional journalists operate under legal obligations and court orders, the same cannot necessarily be assumed of everyone publishing about a case online.
That leaves the legal system trying to preserve one of the fundamental principles of a criminal trial, an impartial jury, in an environment that has fundamentally changed the way people consume information.
The courts can instruct jurors to leave the investigation at the courtroom door but there is only so much they can do in a world where many of us like to think of ourselves as amateur Olivia Bensons.
After all, when we have spent months trying to solve a crime from our phones and living rooms, curiosity does not simply disappear when the case hits the courts.
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