True crime is everywhere, and changing
If you’ve binged true crime on the treadmill, while cleaning your home, traveling to school or work, or in the background while you’re studying, you’re in the majority — a 2024 study shows “84% of the U.S. population age 13+ are true crime consumers.” While true crime writing has been around for centuries and the genre can still slide into sensationalism, in recent years many true crime podcasts, TV shows, books and documentaries have focused on real world investigation and advocacy, history, crime prevention and criminal justice reform. It often comes with a side of “There but for the grace of God go I,” adds criminologist and former criminology professor Scott Bonn. True crime experts and presenters include authors, filmmakers, investigators, journalists, law enforcement officers, podcasters, professors and scientists. Here’s why they do the work and where they went to college.
Paul Holes
A renowned cold case investigator, Paul Holes played a central role in identifying the infamous Golden State Killer — Joseph DeAngelo — a serial rapist and murderer who terrorized California between 1974 and 1986. After starting his career as a civilian forensic scientist at the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office, “I (began) to realize that as skilled as I was at the science of homicide, it was the victims’ stories that drew me in, that turned my cases into obsessions,” Holes recalled in his memoir, “Unmasked: My Life Solving America’s Cold Cases.” He became an investigator for the sheriff’s and district attorney’s offices and worked on numerous high-profile cases before retiring in 2018. Holes has contributed to many television productions, books and podcasts, and co-hosts the historical true crime podcast “Buried Bones” with journalist Kate Winkler Dawson. He is a forensic investigator with Othram, a forensic sequencing lab for law enforcement.
College: University of California, Davis
Kate Winkler Dawson
Kate Winkler Dawson is a true crime historian, nonfiction author and journalist who has created three hit crime podcasts: “Tenfold More Wicked,” “Wicked Words” and “Buried Bones.” On “Buried Bones,” Dawson and Holes explore historic cases — some centuries old — through a 21st-century lens. “We can learn so much about current crime, current criminals, why people kill, how to stop them, by looking into the past,” Dawson said on “Wicked Words.” “These are real people from the 1800s, and they are no different from us. … Human beings do not change.” Her books include “American Sherlock” and “Death In The Air,” as well as “The Sinners All Bow,” which was published in January 2025. Dawson started her career in television and radio, taught at Fordham University in New York and has produced more than 20 documentaries. She’s a senior lecturer in broadcast journalism at the University of Texas–Austin.
Colleges: Boston University in Massachusetts, Columbia University in New York
Keith Morrison
Beloved well beyond true crime circles, Canadian journalist Keith Morrison is a “Dateline NBC” correspondent and pop culture icon. Described as “the Mister Rogers of murder mysteries” and “the granddaddy of true crime,” Morrison went into broadcasting in the 1960s “after flunking out of college and having made rather a mess of this and that” until one day, he told People magazine, “I was sitting on the couch watching the local news. I thought, ‘I can do that.'” Winner of Emmy and Edward R. Murrow awards, he has covered wars, national politics, world events and numerous major criminal cases. He’s known for lyrical storytelling and interviewing victims with respect and compassion. “These are truly, truly deep and difficult things to get through, and I don’t think we want to make it any worse for anybody,” he says. “But I come away from those conversations feeling it’s a gift. They’ve given you something.”
College: University of Saskatchewan in Canada
Michelle McNamara
Journalist Michelle McNamara dedicated her career to unsolved mysteries and survivors of violent crime. She launched the True Crime Diary website in 2006, but is best known for reviving and investigating the Golden State Killer case. For her breakthrough Los Angeles Magazine article on GSK and her book “I’ll Be Gone In The Dark,” McNamara visited crime scenes, interviewed survivors and worked closely with Holes to pursue new leads. McNamara had written most of the book before she died after an accidental prescription drug overdose in 2016. She was 46. Her husband, comedian Patton Oswalt, with crime writer Billy Jensen and researcher Paul Haynes, finished her book in 2018. Two months later, the murderer was arrested. “I don’t care if I’m the one who captures him,” McNamara had written. “I just want bracelets on his wrists and a cell door slamming behind him.”
Colleges: University of Notre Dame in Indiana, University of Minnesota–Twin Cities
Karen Kilgariff
With co-host Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgariff launched the top-rated true crime podcast “My Favorite Murder” in 2016. The show broke new ground by focusing on the stories of victims and survivors, not perpetrators, and its open discussions of mental health. “I think there are lots of those moments when we meet people — listeners at a meet-and-greet — and they tell us that they’ve changed their major to forensic science, or criminal justice, or they’ve become a victim’s advocate” because of the podcast, Kilgariff told Entertainment Weekly. Through MFM, Kilgariff and Hardstark also fundraise for social justice and disaster relief and advocate for criminal justice reform. Kilgariff began her career in stand-up comedy and was head writer for “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” until 2007. Kilgariff and Hardstark co-founded the Exactly Right Podcast Network and co-authored “Stay Sexy & Don’t Get Murdered,” a New York Times bestseller.
College: Sacramento State University, now California State University–Sacramento
John Douglas
New York native John Douglas revolutionized criminal profiling and inspired the character Jack Crawford in the film “The Silence of the Lambs.” As an FBI special agent, he helped catch the Atlanta child murderer, the Tylenol poisoner and numerous other serial offenders. Douglas, who originally wanted to be a veterinarian, joined the FBI in 1970 and led a landmark study interviewing and analyzing incarcerated killers to improve investigative methods. That work led him to create the FBI’s Criminal Profiling Program. “If you want to learn about violent crime,” he told the Powell Tribune, “talk to the experts: the criminals perpetrating rapes, arsons and serial homicides.” Retiring in 1995 as chief of the bureau’s Investigative Support Unit, he wrote more than a dozen nonfiction books including “Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit” and “The Cases That Haunt Us.”
Colleges: Montana State University, Eastern New Mexico University, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Nova Southeastern University in Florida
Mandy Matney
Reporter Mandy Matney launched the “Murdaugh Murders Podcast” from her kitchen in June 2021. It hit No. 1 on Apple Podcasts within three months. But what looked like overnight success was the result of Matney’s determined pursuit of the powerful South Carolina family “that (got) away with everything.” Her investigation started while disgraced attorney Alex Murdaugh was stealing millions from vulnerable clients, and long before he murdered his wife and son. Matney has been exposing the “good ole boy system” and crimes and corruption across the U.S. ever since, through two podcasts — “True Sunlight” with journalist Liz Farrell and “Cup of Justice” with Farrell and attorney Eric Bland. She co-founded Lunashark Media, published “Blood on Their Hands” in 2023, and has a Hulu series on the way. Her work, Matney says, “is a reminder that accuracy-over-access journalism pays off, that ethical reporting pays off — that peskiness pays off.”
College: University of Kansas
Ann Rule
In 1971, Ann Rule worked nights at a suicide crisis hotline alongside a “sensitive, handsome” young student named Ted Bundy. She had no idea her friend was a sociopath, rapist and serial killer who would eventually confess to murdering at least 30 women — although investigators believe the number is closer to 100. “He fooled any number of intelligent, experienced people — including myself,” Rule, a former Seattle police officer, later wrote, “and he was fully capable of doing it again and again.” Rule started writing for True Detective magazine in 1968, and in 1974 was commissioned for a book about Bundy’s then-unsolved murders. That book, “The Stranger Beside Me,” launched her to fame and has been called “perhaps the most unnerving true-crime book ever published.” In a career spanning almost 50 years, Rule wrote 35 New York Times bestsellers. She died in 2015 at age 83.
College: University of Washington
Sarah Koenig
Sarah Koenig guest hosts NPR’s “This American Life,” and was a producer for the show when she started working on “Serial,” the 2014 podcast reinvestigation of the 1999 murder of Maryland high school student Hae Min Lee and the trial and conviction of Lee’s ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed. “Crime Junkie” podcast creator Ashley Flowers called the podcast “a game changer” for true crime, the first to reach “mainstream success without using a sensationalized or dramatized approach.” Koenig’s investigation uncovered new facts and raised questions about the evidence and Syed’s attorney, who was later disbarred. Syed maintained his innocence and while Koenig recalled telling his family, “just so we’re all clear, I’m not here to exonerate Adnan. I’m here to report this story,” the podcast vaulted the case to national attention and legal battles ensued. Syed — originally sentenced to life plus 30 years — was released from prison in 2022.
College: University of Chicago in Illinois
Where True Crime Experts Went To College
Paul Holes — University of California, Davis
Kate Winkler Dawson — Boston University in Massachusetts, Columbia University in New York
Keith Morrison — University of Saskatchewan in Canada
Michelle McNamara — University of Notre Dame in Indiana, University of Minnesota–Twin Cities
Karen Kilgariff — California State University–Sacramento
John Douglas — Montana State University, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Eastern New Mexico University, Nova Southeastern University
Mandy Matney — University of Kansas
Ann Rule — University of Washington
Sarah Koenig — University of Chicago in Illinois
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9 True Crime Experts and Where They Went To College originally appeared on usnews.com
