America’s True Crime Obsession, Mapped

If there’s one non-fiction genre that’s really having its moment right now, it’s true crime.

The current cultural craze for the genre kicked off with the podcast Serial in 2014. And ever since Netflix’s Making A Murderer made headlines all over the world the following year, true crime documentaries have rarely to been out of the streaming service’s Top 10 most-watched chart, with new series released all the time.

The shows listed on a recent Hollywood Reporter rundown of the most popular true crime series of recent years, meanwhile, had more than 60 Emmy Award nominations among them. And add to that all the true crime podcasts, teledramas, literary exposés, and cold-case documentaries we’re all continually caught up in, and this looks to be a genre that’s not going away any time soon.

But just how obsessed are we all with true crime? According to a fascinating new analysis by online security website Privacy Journal, some of us are a lot more interested than others.

The team at Privacy Journal compiled search engine data from all 50 U.S. states (plus Washington, D.C.) based on more than 200 true crime keywords, names, subjects, and subgenres. Each state was then ranked by the number of related searches per 100,000 people so that “states of different population sizes could be fairly compared.” The data was then further broken down into several true crime categories—among them, serial killers, famous cases, unsolved disappearances, true crime movies, and podcasts.

Washington, D.C. came out on top in the study as America’s most crime-obsessed region, with more than 8800 true crime searches there in total for every 100,000 people. That placed it far ahead of Massachusetts, which came in second place with less than half that figure (roughly 4,157.52 searches per 100,00 people), and put D.C at almost three times the national U.S. average of 3,428.98 searches.

At the opposite end of the scale, America’s least true crime-obsessed state is Georgia, where true crime content made up just over 2100 internet search requests for every 100,000 people.

The data overall also showed an intriguing east–west divide in America’s true crime obsession, with both the Pacific coast and New England appearing far more obsessed than the Midwest and central belt. And four of the study’s bottom eight crime-obsessed states were located in the South: Louisiana (45), Arkansas (47), Mississippi (50) and Georgia (51).

Washington, D.C. didn’t just nab the top spot overall, either—it also came out on top in every single one of the true crime categories the study took into consideration. The 50 states, however, showed some intriguing differences in taste and interest.

According to the analysis, for example, the people of Massachusetts are far more interested in famous murder cases (where Massachusetts ranked second overall) than serial killers (where it didn’t even make the top 10, landing at a relatively lowly 13th). Georgia, on the other hand, might be the least true crime obsessed state in the entire United States, but it shot up the rankings from 51st to 12th in its interest in serial killers.

Netflix’s recent dramatization of the Jeffrey Dahmer murders meanwhile likely helped his name top the list of the most searched serial killers in many states (followed in most places by Ted Bundy). In fact, America appears so fascinated with the Dahmer case at the moment that his name still topped the poll in all the least true-crime obsessed states too.

When it came to searches for famous cases, Washington D.C., Massachusetts, Connecticut, Illinois and New York made up the top five. The O.J. Simpson case proved to be the most searched for true crime story in this category, but there were plenty of searches in Connecticut about the disappearance of local woman Jennifer Dulos, who went missing from her home in New Canaan, Connecticut, in 2019.

Not all the missing persons cases and other disappearances that cropped up in the study were quite so recent, however. Surprisingly, in all of the top five spots in this category—namely Washington, D.C., North Carolina, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Washington—it was Amelia Earhart’s name that was searched more than any other missing person, despite her disappearance over the Pacific Ocean taking place way back in 1937. In several of the notably less true crime-obsessed southern states, Earhart’s name was joined by that of Alabama’s Natalee Holloway, who disappeared while on vacation in the Caribbean in 2005.

As for media and true-crime content, Goodfellas turned out to be America’s most searched-for crime film, while Netflix’s true crime docuseries American Nightmare proved the most popular television show, followed by Hulu’s The Act.

For more on the study—and to find out how your state fared in each of the true crime categories—head over to the Privacy Journal blog. And if you’re curious to find out what the experts have to say about your love for true crime, we’ve got you covered.

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