Hallie Rubenhold

And unfortunately, a lot of people have bought into this because people don't question true crime.

A crime that happened in the past is a historical event and should be interrogated as a historical event.

You know, it's not just a good story to tell.

Well, one of the problems is with historical true crime in particular is a kind of, you know, it's a freeze frame of an era and an era's values.

The way it's reported, the way it's prosecuted and defended is about an era's values.

And all of those values tend to be kind of frozen in aspect.

And that aspect is newspaper reports, you know.

You know, the newspapers reflect back to us what we want to see.

They reflect ourselves back to us and our own values.

So if we're talking about a crime that happened in 1910, what we're just doing, if we don't ask questions about who's telling this story, we are parroting back the values of 1910.

And we're all familiar with what the values of 1910 were, you know, and they're not very savoury in 2026.

Well, you know, that's a really interesting question.

Again, it's about how we tell these stories because we are fascinated more with the killer than we are with the weaker party, as it's believed, who just happened to get caught up in the killer's machinery.

We are fascinated with the psychology of the killer.

We're fascinated with the idea that a killer can outsmart ordinary people, that a killer is sometimes superhuman.

I think the focus is on the killer because the killer is thought to be extraordinary, whereas the victims are very ordinary.

And sometimes the way in which the narrative is always spun is that the victims had to have done something to have asked for it.

So they were deserving of it.

So they're less deserving of being remembered.

And, you know, this is completely untrue.