Why Women Are Obsessed With True Crime
For many female fans, true crime is exposure therapy
The summer before my sophomore year of high school, a classmate of mine was murdered by a stranger while he was doing yard work on his parents’ front lawn. His name was Alain Colaco, and while we weren’t close, I knew him as ridiculously smart, very cute (he was the object of various friends’ crushes), and extremely polite.
Not that any of that matters when it comes to senseless acts of violence. Alain was shot six times in the head and chest by a man who later said he “had the urge to do it.” The killer, Sean Lee Qualls, was sentenced to 15 years to life.
This was Washington, D.C., in the early 1990s, back when the city was known as the murder capital of the United States. In 1991 alone, there were 485 homicides. Even with my relatively sheltered, upper-middle-class upbringing, I knew multiple people who died horrible, random deaths: My seventh grade science teacher, Fred Parris, was shot to death in a botched robbery on his front stoop. A janitor at my tiny elementary school was caught in the cross fire of a shoot-out near a Maryland 7-Eleven. The parents of a girl a few grades below me were killed with an axe during a home invasion.
As a kid, I didn’t fully understand how these murders affected me. There were…
