Cold cases remain the hottest draw in true crime, from the Lizzie Borden house to CrimeCon, while victim families build private foundations to chase answers the system never delivered.
Crime rates in America may be falling, yet the public’s hunger for murder stories has not. Streaming series, podcasts, network specials, and Court TV keep feeding a market that treats unsolved killings as the ultimate unfinished plot.
CBS News tracked that appetite this fall across Netflix’s “Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story,” Crime Junkie, “48 Hours,” and live fan gatherings, and found a culture that still runs hottest when no one has been convicted.
In Massachusetts, the 1892 hatchet killings of Andrew Borden and his wife, Abby, never produced a conviction. Lizzie Borden was accused. She walked free. The case stayed open.
The house is now a bed-and-breakfast with fake murder victims and a gift shop. Professor Jean Murley, who studies the true-crime phenomenon at the Savannah College of Art and Design, sat for an interview there and called it what it is.
"It's an open case, yes. A very, very cold case."
Murley first felt the pull reading Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” published in 1966 about the Clutter family killings in Kansas. The book hit her at 17 or 18 “as no other book has ever hit me.” The drama was real. The horror was real. That combination never left.
"True crime deals with the biggest emotions within the human experience... The stakes are incredibly high. We're talking about facing mortality. We're talking about violence."
She still frames the Borden case the same way: a high-profile crime with a woman at the center of two acts of horrific violence, and no one ever held to account. Cold cases do not close the file in the public mind. They keep it open for another season.
Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark started “My Favorite Murder” in a one-bedroom Hollywood apartment with no air conditioning and a lot of cats. Hardstark wanted a hobby. They liked talking about crime. So they talked into microphones instead of at each other.
Kilgariff said they thought no one was listening, just two like-minded people and a small circle. The numbers say otherwise. The show has drawn more than two billion downloads, sold out live dates, and spun out its own network, Exactly Right Media.
Hardstark rejects the idea that their audience treats slaughter as light entertainment.
"True crime as entertainment, at first, worries a lot of people. We want it to be about the victims, because we understand as women how vulnerable we are. We're not entertained by true crime. What we want is all the information about human experience that we can get."
Kilgariff described live crowds that clap in excitement, then go quiet when the room turns a corner. Presence. Awareness. Care, at least the kind a ticketed show can stage.
“48 Hours” correspondent Erin Moriarty went to CrimeCon in Las Vegas this year and admitted she was worried about walking in. Real people. Real victims. Wrongful convictions. She did not want any part of a circus that mocked grief.
"I was worried about coming here. This isn't a joke. These are real people whose lives have been drastically affected by these cases. There are victims. There are people who have been wrongfully convicted. And they all have something to say. And I did not want to be part of anything that would make fun of that or trivialize it."
Attendees mobbed her anyway. Online sleuths, she noted, can sometimes surface clues from public information. They can also destroy the innocent. Moriarty pointed to the Idaho student killings and the Bryan Kohberger case, where amateur finger-pointing landed on people who had done nothing.
Steve and Kristi Goncalves were there too. Their daughter Kaylee was one of four University of Idaho students killed in 2022. Kristi said the stretch since then does not feel like three-and-a-half years. Some days it feels like ten. Some days it feels like yesterday.
Before the murders, the family binge-watched the genre like everyone else, “48 Hours,” “20/20,” “Forensic Files,” “Disappeared.” They traded episodes. They called the crazy ones “so good.” That habit is gone.
"I don't watch anymore. I mean, now it's like, my daughter is a '20/20,' she is a '48 Hours,' you know? She is on 'Dateline.'"
When television shows other parents crying, Kristi said, you know exactly what they feel. Steve put the permanent part plainly: “It doesn't get better.”
Victim families keep showing up at these conventions because the audience is already there, and because the justice system moves on a clock families cannot control. At CrimeCon 2023, Stacey Chapin, mother of Ethan Chapin, made an unplanned appearance after a forensics lecture on the Idaho murders and told the room the four students were “the greatest kids,” with every kind word written about them “legitimately true.”
Ethan Chapin, 20, was killed on Nov. 13, 2022, along with Xana Kernodle, Kaylee Goncalves, and Madison Mogen. Bryan Kohberger faces four murder charges, pleaded not guilty, and saw his trial pushed to at least 2024. The Chapin family also launched Ethan's Smile, a scholarship effort, and planned a fundraising gala on the attack’s anniversary, another private attempt to honor a child the courts had not yet fully answered for.
The New York Post and Fox News both captured that shock of a mother seizing the microphone in a hall built for true-crime fandom. The product on stage is content. The people in the front row are still burying their kids.
The Goncalveses did not stop at grief. They started Murder Has a Name, a foundation meant to privately fund investigations of unsolved murders. Kristi said Kaylee would be proud. Steve described the goal in the simplest terms a father can use: hug another family and say, “There’s your guy.” Call with news. Deliver a hit the public process never managed.
That is the quiet indictment inside the boom. Podcasts clear billions of downloads. Conventions fill Las Vegas and Florida ballrooms. A 19th-century murder house sells overnight stays and souvenirs. Capote’s template still works. Yet families of the freshly killed are building nonprofits to bankroll basic investigative work, and mothers are crashing panels to insist their children were real, good, and unfinished business.
Murley insists most people are good and would never harm anyone, and that viewers should keep repeating a hard sentence to themselves: this is a real person. Moriarty’s warning sits beside that hope. Sleuths who outrun evidence do not serve victims. They create new ones.
True crime thrives on the unresolved. Justice is supposed to resolve it. When a case stays cold for 130 years, or when a campus murder turns parents into full-time advocates and fundraisers, the entertainment machine is not the only institution on trial. The public’s fascination is honest about high stakes. The open questions are honest about unfinished duty.
Cold cases make great television. They make terrible public policy when families have to crowdfund the search for the truth.
