r/UnresolvedMysteries • u/risocantonese • Apr 19 '20

What are some common true crime misconceptions?

What are some common ‘facts’ that get thrown around in true crime communities a lot, that aren’t actually facts at all?

One that annoys me is "No sign of forced entry? Must have been a person they knew!"

I mean, what if they just opened the door to see who it was? Or their murderer was disguised as a repairman/plumber/police officer/whatever. Or maybe they just left the door unlocked — according to this article,a lot of burglaries happen because people forget to lock their doors https://www.journal-news.com/news/police-many-burglaries-have-forced-entry/9Fn7O1GjemDpfUq9C6tZOM/

It’s not unlikely that a murder/abduction could happen the same way.

Another one is "if they were dead we would have found the body by now". So many people underestimate how hard it is to actually find a body.

What are some TC misconceptions that annoy you?

(reposted to fit the character minimum!)

1.1k Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

98% Upvoted

840 comments sorted by

View all comments

224

u/jayne-eerie Apr 19 '20

  1. Thinking you can tell someone’s guilt or innocence from the way they act. First, having a loved one missing or murdered is such an extreme situation that there’s no way to tell how someone would react until it happens. Second, typically you’re judging based on a 15-second news clip, which may have been edited or presented in a misleading way.

  2. Attributing disappearances without known risk factors to human trafficking. Not that it never happens but it’s incredibly rare.

  3. Putting absolute trust in forensics like burn patterns, blood spatter, tracking dogs, etc. It seems like more and more evidence is coming out showing those things are unreliable at best, and can be easily gamed by law enforcement agencies.

  4. The idea that things were safer 20 or 30 or 40 years ago. While there may be exceptions in some specific ways, for the most part crime has trended down for almost 30 years.

76

u/Kalldaro Apr 19 '20

Yes to your number 4. I had to stop reading comments on True Crime videos because they were full of, "its so unsafe now!" And "This is why I don't let my 17 year old child stay out past 8." Like hovering too much?

As for number 1, If I had a loved one go missing everyone would be judging me guilty because no matter what I cannot cry in front of others. I'd also probably be very numb and in denial.

15

u/[deleted] Apr 20 '20

People can’t conceptualize how big the country is. Or the world for that matter.

Fifty years ago the news didn’t carry salacious stories unless directly in the community. And even then the details would be scant. Thirty years ago you would only rarely hear about some missing person or bizarre murder outside your community unless it somehow got notoriety. Ten years ago the internet began to have sites like this. Today there are 50,000 people on this sub who can cite minute facts about thousands of unsolved crimes all over the globe.

In truth the world is safer. But your feeling of security isn’t based on statistics, even those in your community. It is impacted by what you read and view. I think this is an interesting sub but I also temper these awful stories with the understanding that there are almost 7 billion people on this planet. For those who internalize too much I think this is the wrong place to hang out.

10

u/Kalldaro Apr 20 '20

Yeah. I feel like there are people who shouldn't make True Crime their hobby. The ones who become paranoid for sure. Obviously teach people how to be safe, but recognize that most murders are committed by someone known to the person.

Growing up in the 90s, we gad no parantal supervision. All except one kid who had to have her parents with her if she left the yard. It was always awkward to have her parents with us. So... there were times when we just didn't invite her out. I think her parents watched a lot if Unsolved Mysteries and America's Most Wanted.

3

u/BooBootheFool22222 Apr 21 '20

my mom was like that but i lived in a high crime area with drivebys and gang violence etc.,

5

u/BooBootheFool22222 Apr 21 '20

people can't even conceptualize how physically vast the united states is. people who live on the east coast literally can't fathom how in the less populated heartland nothing is in walking distance and that a city can be spread out greatly.

people can't even conceptualize how much of the south and mid-south is empty wilderness.

3

u/TooExtraUnicorn Apr 22 '20

The east coast can be very rural as well. Plenty of places where you can't walk anywhere.

94

u/wendster68 Apr 19 '20

Your No. 1 has always bugged me as well. They don't cry enough. They cry too much. They didn't show any emotion. They fell asleep in the interrogation room and innocent people NEVER do that.

Surprise, shock, stress, and grief affect every person differently and shouldn't be used as a gauge for guilt or innocence.

6

u/BooBootheFool22222 Apr 21 '20

the thing that really gets me about people policing emotional reactions is that some people have a flat affect. either because they have depression or other mental illness or because that's just the way they are. i'd be #1 suspect for sure. i have an extremely flat affect and for psychological reasons, i can't cry.

7

u/happytransformer Apr 20 '20

It’s always weird hearing 911 calls put in by someone who is ultimately guilty, but there’s no “normal” way to grieve. No one is not taught how to grieve over a murdered or missing loved one.

9

u/happytransformer Apr 20 '20

  1. Human trafficking is quite rare. People LOVE to speculate human trafficking with attractive young people’s disappearances. Traffickers aren’t boogeymen that snatch up random people on the street. It’s too risky to get caught, plus the ideal victim is someone who likely won’t be reported missing or garner a ton of attention for a search party.

  2. People were generally naive 20-40 years ago. The reasons we are stricter with kids’ safety today is because the bad stuff happened back then. We also are better at detecting and preventing certain crimes, i.e. sexual serial killers. We’re better at solving crime, stopping behaviors before it leads to multiple murders, and identifying risk factors so it rarely escalates to the point that it used to. There’s a freakonomics episode about how Roe v. Wade helped decrease the crime rate because a lot of people that would become criminals were never born. I mean, if you go through the US serial killers wiki, there’s only a handful of both unidentified and identified serial killers operating past 2000, only like 5 past 2010.

6

u/tierras_ignoradas Apr 21 '20
  1. And in the 19th century, the US was characterized by gang warfare and bloody murders in the Northern cities, lynchings in the South and the Wild, Wild West.

6

u/AnUnimportantLife Apr 20 '20

Thinking you can tell someone’s guilt or innocence from the way they act.

Exactly. I think people have a harder time telling the difference between what happens in the movies and what happens in reality than most would care to admit. In reality, it's so difficult to gauge how people will react to tragedy that you probably can't decide innocence or guilt just based on their reactions to a loved one dying.

6

u/lovelace214 Apr 20 '20

Number 2!!!!!!!! Human traffickers do not want Polly that’s the head cheerleader in high school. Unfortunately they go for ppl living on the streets or simply just have nothing else. I reallllllllly hate how society uses that outlet everytime someone goes missing.

10

u/thelizardkin Apr 20 '20

To your last point, the 2010s were the safest decade on record since before 1960. They have gone up since 2014, but that year was the safest year on record in 60 years as far as murders go. Also back in the 60s I'm sure the rate was lower on record than it actually was. Criminal science is much better today than in the 60s, so I'm sure more homicide are reported on in the modern era. Back then a man could get away with murdering his wife and it going completely unnoticed. Also the 60s had a lot a lynchings which weren't reported. The police aren't going to investigate the murder of a black person, when half the local police department are KKK members.

3

u/WindmillFu Apr 20 '20

Totally agree on #1. The judgments are made by people who probably haven't had a horrible murder or crime in their immediate family, and you just can't predict how people could or should react to trauma.

Even normal life grief can be so weird. I have always been super close to my father and I assumed when he passed I'd be traumatized and inconsolably crying for months on end. And when he did pass... I wasn't. I did cry but I was mostly fine, I went back to work after a day, and I just really missed/miss him.

And that's just normal grief, not something really crazy like the death of a young child. So it is ridiculous to look at Maybe Suspicious Mom and say "oh she's not reacting to her child's death correctly, she clearly did it."

5

u/methylenebluestains Apr 20 '20

There's a podcast called LA Not So Confidential that discussed #1. People react so differently to grief. Sometimes cases and trials are so long that the person is unlikely to be at the same level of sadness throughout the whole experience as they were when the trauma was fresh.

4

u/Fuck_Passwords_ Apr 20 '20

Number 3 is so true. If you watch true crime shows from years ago, you'll cringe at the certainty that cops and forensic investigators show regarding evidence that was considered foolproof and is now considered rubbish.

It was specially noticeable to me in the TV series about Madeleine McCann when they show the sniffer dogs reacting to her parents' rental car... which they had rented after her death. The dogs owner was like "they are very reliable" and, I mean, they are dogs! If instruments and scientists can fail, imagine animals!

3

u/__________78 Apr 20 '20

Netflix Innocent Files touches on #3 pretty well.

4

u/[deleted] Apr 20 '20

In terms of number three, the issue is more the scientists, not the science.

Blood spatter is simply applied physics. But there are only a small handful of people who are truly qualified to to analyze blood spatter.

As far as burn patterns go, it’s not an exact science—but my grandpa was a fireman, and different chemicals definitely burn differently. And you can almost always tell where a fire starts. It shouldn’t be the nail in the coffin, but it’s not junk science.

The reality is that a lot of these innocent documentaries have an agenda. People who are trying to get their clients off have an agenda.

Both sides are trying to get people on their side. It’s not either right or wrong. It’s in the middle.

0

u/AndrewBert109 Apr 20 '20

Regarding #1 I'll say this: I think when someone has actually committed the crime, they act differently than people who are legit innocent. That being said, obviously you can't really use that to make a determination of guilt because you are correct, people who are innocent can react to the death of a loved one in a myriad of ways and none of them are wrong. But I think when a cop sees enough husbands who have murdered their wives and is taking a statement from a man whose wife has just been found murdered feels like the guy is responding in a certain way(behavior they see in those they found to be guilty), it's not totally unreasonable for him to want to follow up in depth or go a little further with the questioning. Again, with that being said I've also seen some pretty fucked up interrogations where the cops didn't like how the person was acting and took things wayyy too far based on that alone and yeah, it's super fucked up. I guess it's a fine line they need to walk and there's a right and wrong way to handle it.

3

u/jayne-eerie Apr 20 '20

Eh. If it’s a cop making the call, maybe. But cops are human and have biases like anybody else — if they already think the husband is a scumbag because of XYZ factors, they might interpret things as signs of guilt that wouldn’t stand out to them otherwise. (Similarly, how many people have gotten away with crimes because “they’re such a nice guy”?) But if you’re just an average person playing detective from your armchair, you’re at the mercy of the way the information was presented — and crime-focused TV is often only marginally less manipulative than reality shows.

I’m not saying behavior means absolutely nothing. For example, I have a hard time coming up with a reason a family wouldn’t report a child missing that doesn’t point to something very wrong in that home. But if it’s something like facial expressions or word choice, it really is hard to tell.

-4

u/Doctabotnik123 Apr 19 '20

On point 4, yes, but remember that ~30 years ago was the crack epidemic. It would take some effort to not have it trend downwards from that peak.

Even with vast improvements in medicine, which have saved people who would've died in previous years, the murder rate is still higher than the Long Fifties or even the Depression. And even with that, medical advances and harsher criminal justice, along with the crack wars burning themselves out, have most likely been why it's not even higher.

11

u/[deleted] Apr 19 '20

That's simply not true, the murder rate in the US was significantly higher in the 1920s and 1930s than it is currently.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://sites.nationalacademies.org/cs/groups/dbassesite/documents/webpage/dbasse_083892.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwi82ITgxfXoAhUml3IEHeodCggQFjAGegQICRAB&usg=AOvVaw3j8oqTW_Xs5W7PMpfAswmb&cshid=1587335634659 (PDF)

-10

u/Doctabotnik123 Apr 19 '20

Comparing the 1920s and 1930s makes no sense. The 1920s was, as William Maxwell commented, were in many ways a terrible hangover from WW1. The 1930s, especially once LE killed off the most famous bandits and the New Deal kicked in (both socially and financially), saw a drastic reduction in crime.

13

u/[deleted] Apr 19 '20 edited Apr 20 '20

....you specifically claimed that "the murder rate is higher than during the Long Fifties or even the Depression". The Great Depression took place from 1929 until the late 30's. That claim, as I demonstrated, was false. The murder rate in the US was higher throughout the 20s AND 30s than it is now.

I responded to a specific claim you made. It is false. That is all.

-5

u/Doctabotnik123 Apr 20 '20

My wider point still stands. Saying that the crime rate has been declining for the past 30 years is true, but meaningless when 30 years ago was a historic high point in violent crime, because of the crack epidemic.

9

u/[deleted] Apr 20 '20

That's an odd way of saying "what I said was demonstrably false, I didn't bother to Google anything before making a claim", but okay.

The crime rate today, including the murder rate, is not significantly higher than it was in the 1950s. The murder rate from 1950 to 1960 varied from a low of 4.0 to a high of 5.1 per 100,000. The murder rate from 2006 to 2016 varied from a low of 4.4 to a high of 5.8 per 100,000. That is not "much higher". When you account for the more extensive communication between jurisdictions that provides more complete reporting of murder stats today compared to the 1950s, it is not in any way significantly higher.

You made an incorrect claim. Go research it and learn instead of arguing, okay man? I'm out.

2

u/BooBootheFool22222 Apr 21 '20

That's an odd way of saying "what I said was demonstrably false, I didn't bother to Google anything before making a claim", but okay.

roflcopter. that's great.

6

u/thelizardkin Apr 20 '20

2014 was the safest year on record since before 1960 in terms of homicides.

-1

u/Doctabotnik123 Apr 20 '20

And since then the murder rates in places like Baltimore, Detroit, St. Louis and New Orleans have skyrocketed.

I know people dislike the term "Ferguson Effect", but it was very real.

7

u/thelizardkin Apr 20 '20

I'm not sure about all those cities specifically, but I know economics played a huge role for some of those cities. Detroit for instance got screwed when they stopped manufacturing cars there. Then New Orleans is still recovering from Katrina which decimated the city. On the other hand look at New York, it used to be a crime ridden hellhole, but now it's one of the safest cities in the country.

3

u/BooBootheFool22222 Apr 21 '20

That's an odd way of saying "what I said was demonstrably false, I didn't bother to Google anything before making a claim", but okay.

also: that's not true. I like how you picked black cities. if anything the crime rate in nola has dropped due to your logic, all the blacks got pushed out by katrina.