“True crime has been around from the very beginning. It’s the ultimate human drama.”
That’s the opinion of retired cold case investigator Paul Holes, who spent 27 years specialising in serial predator crimes. He’s also the man, who after four decades, finally tracked down the Golden State killer.
On the subject of serial killers – the bread and butter of his career – he’s resolute, calling their actions “the ultimate depravity” and labelling them “the true monsters of today”.
Image: Evan Peters as Jeffrey Dahmer in Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. Pic: Netflix
Warning: Contains graphic content
As you’d expect, his job was no walk in the park.
“I was being called out in the middle of the night, going to crime scenes, attending the victims’ autopsies, seeing horrific things,” Holes tells Sky News.
While seeing dark and disturbing things was part of his job description, there’s a growing army of people seeking out such content – not for work, but for pleasure.
Ryan Murphy’s recent hit drama Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story – about a man who claimed the lives of 17 young men and dismembered, preserved and ate parts of their bodies – has been a talking point for many, with Netflix saying subscribers watched 205.33 million hours of it in just one week.
Another chilling series, The Watcher – based on a real-life case that made a million-dollar mansion unsellable and stumped police to boot, has also been topping the streaming giant’s most-watched.
And recent TikTok obsessions with crime scene clean-ups show that nothing’s too graphic when it comes to satisfying our appetite for the darker sides of society.
So, why – despite real life being far from a utopia (a pandemic, ongoing climate crisis and more polarised political landscape than ever before) – are we so keen to spend our leisure time soaking up depressing and downright gruesome content?
Image: Retired cold case investigator Paul Holes and crime historian Kate Winkler Dawson
It’s not a modern phenomenon
Holes, who has spent his career tracking down some of America’s most notorious criminals, says this hunger is nothing new – we now just have a multitude of ways to access such content, be it via the internet, podcasts or the numerous streaming platforms offering films, dramas and documentaries based on crime.
Holes, along with true crime historian Kate Winkler Dawson, fronts the hit podcast Buried Bones, dissecting some of America’s most compelling cold cases, including The Golden State Killer (an ex-cop who committed 13 murders and more than 50 rapes), The Zodiac Killer (who claimed to have killed 37 people in Northern California), and Doctor Crippen (an American homeopath who was hung in Pentonville Prison in 1910 for the murder of his wife).
Winkler Dawson agrees that our appetite for the unsavoury has been around for hundreds of years.
“I study the 1700s, 1800s and early 1900s, and we had public executions back then. People came and used picnic baskets and invited their children. And so, we are probably, in some ways, a little less obsessed than we were. People came to packed trials and still sent love notes to serial killers, even in the 1800s.”
Image: The Watcher. Pic: Netflix
‘The true monsters of today’
What are the ethics behind us enjoying true crime to such an extent?
Holes says it’s all about putting the victim at the heart of the case: “I spent my career working in real crime, so I saw first-hand the devastation of these horrific homicide cases. It really created a level of empathy for me because here you have a victim. The last moments of their life are just absolutely horrific. You have family members, friends, communities that are devastated by the loss of that person’s life.
“Now that I’ve stepped into the true crime genre, for me, from an ethical perspective, I always try to stay victim-centric. There is a component out there of consumers that are really fascinated with the offender, and most notably the serial killers.
“I take the perspective, it’s ok to study these individuals, to learn about them, what makes them tick, their psychology. But don’t glorify that. What they do is the ultimate depravity. In many ways, they are the true monsters of today.”
Winkler Dawson, who as a historian often has one foot in the past, says she’s more uncomfortable reporting on contemporary crime, than latter day killings.
For her, it’s all about the case.
“I’m not choosing these cases because the killings are gruesome or because the killer is fascinating. The cases we pick are more like the first case where they use fingerprints in a trial, or some sort of entomology [the study of insects], or some sort of a unique technique that people hadn’t heard of.
“I want cases that feel different and new and fresh that are important in history… As a crime historian, I love unearthing history that most people have never heard of.”
In Buried Bones, Holes and Winkler Dawson apply investigative, behavioural, and forensic techniques to provide a modern perspective, even to historical crime.
Image: Serial killer Ted Bundy
Why do killers kill – and why do we want to know about it?
A 2005 FBI symposium on serial murder suggested the following broad categories of motivation for serial homicide: Anger, criminal enterprise, financial gain, ideology, power/thrill, psychosis, and sexually based. Severe mental illness was also a cause of serial killing, with no fixed motive.
Aside from motives, the FBI also made clear that serial killers felt compelled to commit murder and did it because they both wanted and needed to.
The same 2005 report explained that serial killers selected their victims based on three things: availability (the circumstances in which the victim is involved that may provide the offender access for an attack); vulnerability (the extent to which the victim is at-risk of attack to the offender); and desirability (the attractiveness of the victim to the offender).
Most of us will never be unfortunate enough to come into contact with a killer. Yet what is it that makes us so keen to learn the intimate details of those who have?
Image: Naomi Watts (L) and Bobby Cannavale in The Watcher. Pic: Netflix
The cast of The Watcher, who have been immersed in the real-life case that inspired the seven-part thriller about a suburban family terrorised by an unknown person in their new neighbourhood, have some ideas.
Bobby Cannavale, who plays Dean Brannock, told Sky News: “Particularly with these sort of famous crimes, whether it’s Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy, we want to know: what the heck were they thinking? What makes certain people tick and do those kinds of things?”
Cannavale says another draw to the show could be schadenfreude (a German word which translates as pleasure derived from someone else’s misfortune).
“There’s a certain sense of safety and knowing that maybe on some level, that’ll never happen to me. There’s a sort of safety in reading about somebody else’s horrible life.”
His co-star Naomi Watts, who plays his wife Nora Brannock, says she has a more prosaic approach: “[I think] what if it was me and how would I prepare? This is how I would manage it. This is how I would cope. I’d see the signs, especially now I’ve seen them here.
“I think there’s general fear and panic in the world right now. And we’re tapping into that, and we want to better understand it.”
Image: Adnan Syed and Hae Min Lee at prom. Pic: The Case Against Adnan Syed/Sky Atlantic
What’s the psychological payoff?
Watt’s personal theory chimes with the findings of Dutch professor Suzanne Oosterwijk, a social psychology researcher at the University of Amsterdam, who conducted a study, published in the National Library Of Medicine in 2017, looking into the motivation behind morbid curiosity.
In it, she gave dozens of university students 60 different choices of paired images relating to nature, social, and physical categories.
Shown two images as thumbnails for two seconds, the students were asked to choose one to look at in depth. Most of the time, the students in the study chose to focus on negative social images over neutral ones.
Prof Oosterwijk wrote: “Participants did not consistently avoid images portraying death, violence or harm, but instead chose to explore some of them.”
She went on to suggest that participants could be subconsciously seeking information through such morbid curiosity.
“People may explore stimuli that portray death, violence or harm because it gives them handholds that are useful in dealing with future negative situations.”
So, one way to explain the obsession would be that we are learning from true crime and using the information we glean to mentally prepare for any threat – however unlikely – that could come our way.
In a follow-up study using brain scanning technology, published three years later in Scientific Reports, Prof Oosterwijk and her team found that reward centres in the brain were triggered when viewing negative images, when compared to neutral and positive ones.
So, although we may not like what we see, our brains want to see it nevertheless.
Image: Dozens were terrorised by California’s Golden State Killer during a decade-long crime spree
What’s the cost?
Retired investigator Holes admits that having such a concentrated exposure to predatory crime – serial predators, killers, rapists and the like – can leave you with a mindset that these individuals are around every street corner, when in reality such offenders are relatively rare in society.
Not surprisingly, after seeing some of the dark things he’s seen, he says somebody has to prove they are trustworthy and demonstrate that they are not a predator before he will accept them into this life.
Winkler Dawson on the other hand says despite her knowledge of some of the world’s most shocking crimes, she doesn’t look under the bed when she checks into a hotel room like most of her female friends. However, she admits she probably should.
Rare as they might be, Winkler Dawson says serial killers are a repeating trend rather than a product of modern life.
“People who are rare in our society were present in the 1700s or 1600s. Someone like a Ted Bundy, when he popped up in the 1970s, there was a declaration that no one’s ever seen somebody like this, the charming predator who could be your daughter’s fiancé and you would never know it. But he was not new.”
Such predatory behaviour may be uncommon, but she warns: “This type of person has been pervasive for hundreds of years. They have not stopped. We have not figured out a way to predict and conclusively stop somebody like this.”
Don’t have nightmares…
While millions of us love nothing more than to curl up on the sofa with a blanket watching the likes of Dahmer et al, spare a thought for those whose real lives and careers have been dedicated to solving the most abhorrent of crimes and visiting the most disturbing crime scenes – not the polished Hollywood versions that make it on to your preferred streaming service.
Despite the international acclaim Holes received for his part in tracking down and stopping the Golden State Killer, he says it’s the killers that slipped through his fingers that remain firmly on his mind.
“What sticks with me are the cases I failed to solve. Those are the cases that haunt me in the middle of the night – the trauma of visualising all these cases that I’ve been involved with.”
Outside of the desensitisation necessary to succeed in such a gruesome career, Holes says there has been an impact on him psychologically.
He ends the interview describing his own recurring nightmare – which he calls a graphic dream – a throwback from his time in the force.
“[I worked on this case] of a wealthy, reclusive, transgender man who was bludgeoned to death in his home. When I went out to the scene in real life, the flies had gotten to him and his face was just a crushed-in ball, full of maggots.
“This dream I have is, I’m in that very house, which was a very medieval-looking house, and I find a trap door, hidden underneath this Persian rug. And I pull the rug back, open up that door, and I look down these wooden stairs into the darkness.
“And as I shine the flashlight, that smashed face with the maggots all of a sudden pops into view. And it’s that every single time.”
Kneecap have released a new single ahead of their headline performance at London’s Wide Awake festival, just days after one of their members was charged with a terror offence.
Image: Kneecap performing in Belfast last year. Pic: PA
Bandmembers Liam O hAnnaidh, Naoise O Caireallain and JJ O Dochartaigh, also thanked the 25,000 fans who had bought tickets for Friday night’s festival.
They also reference Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch, with whom they’ve had previous run-ins, writing: “Kemi Badenoch you might wanna sit down for this one, if you’ve any seats left.”
Last year, Kneecap won a discrimination case against the UK government in Belfast High Court after former business secretary Ms Badenoch tried to refuse them a £14,250 funding award when she was a minister.
Ms Badenoch has called for Kneecap to be banned and suggested they should be dropped from the Glastonbury Festival line-up. Some other politicians have made the same demand.
The track mocks Badenoch’s attempts to block their arts funding and the Conservative Party’s election loss. It features DJ Mozey.
It comes after O hAnnaidh, who performs under the stage name Mo Chara, was charged over the alleged display of a Hezbollah flag at a gig at the O2 Forum in Kentish Town, north London, in November last year, the Metropolitan Police said on Wednesday.
On Thursday, the band held a surprise gig at the 100 Club on Oxford Street, where O hAnnaidh could be seen in videos on social media arriving on stage with tape covering his mouth.
He then joked about being careful about what he said, adding that he wanted to thank his lawyer, saying: “I need to thank my lawyer, he’s here tonight as well.”
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Stars talk about risks of speaking out
In video footage posted to YouTube, the band led the audience in a chant of “free Mo Chara” and joked about the police presence at the venue.
Police said they attended to manage visitors to the sold-out event.
The band said on X that the central London event sold out in 90 seconds, with 2,000 people on the waiting list.
O hAnnaidh, 27, is due to appear at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on 18 June.
Formed in 2017, the group are known for their provocative lyrics in both Irish and English and proved a critical hit in the 2024 semi-fictionalised band origin story movie Kneecap, starring actor Michael Fassbender.
Their best-known tracks include Get Your Brits Out, Better Way To Live, featuring Grian Chatten from Fontaines DC, and 3Cag.
Before that, there had been calls for festivals to reconsider booking the band over their political stances, and several have done, which prompted artists like Brian Eno, the Mystery Jets and CMAT to sign an open letter accusing Westminster and the British media of a campaign to “remove Kneecap from the public eye”.
They put their names to wording that said “in a democracy, no political figures… have the right to dictate who does and does not play at music festivals.”
So what’s the reality like for artists who are outspoken at a time when the world is so divided?
As some of the biggest names in music gathered in London for the Ivors, an annual celebration of songwriting, Self-Esteem – aka Rebecca Lucy Taylor – said the level of scrutiny can be “terrifying”.
‘The problem with the internet’
She told Sky News: “The problem with the internet is you say one thing, which gets scrutinised, and then you shit yourself, you really do… then you’re advised not to. And then you’re like ‘don’t advise me not to!’
“You second-guess anything you want to say any more… but any time I do that, I think ‘well that’s why you’ve got to say it then’.”
She said it can be frustrating that focus turns on to pop stars’ opinions instead of “the people doing the bad things”.
Former Little Mix singer Jade said: “To be a pop artist these days, it’s not just about music, it’s: ‘What’s your political stance?’
“I’ve always been quite vocal about those things, but in doing so you have even more of a scary spotlight on you, constantly assessing what your thoughts are as a human…it is scary.”
Trinidad-born London artist Berwyn, whose songs depict his struggles with UK immigration, says: “Silencing freedom of speech… is a road we don’t want to walk down.
“I’m not a politician, this is a very complicated issue, but I do absolutely believe in a human’s right to express themselves freely.”
But is that freedom of speech dependent on what side you’re coming from?
Image: Berwyn speaking to Sky News
‘Unethical investments’
Soon, an event called Mighty Hoopla will take place at Brockwell Park as part of its programme of six festivals this summer.
Artists performing at that are coming under increased pressure from pro-Palestine groups to quit because it’s owned by a company called Superstruct, which has links to an American investment firm called KKR.
Critics argue that any KKR-affiliated events should be a red flag to artists as campaigners claim it “invests billions of pounds in companies” that do things like “develop Israeli underground data centres”, and they say it has shares in companies that “advertise property on illegally occupied land in the West Bank”.
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Mighty Hoopla itself has said while it “cannot control investments made in our parent companies”, it wants to “state its clear opposition to KKR’s unethical investments”.
And Superstruct – which puts on over 80 festivals around the world – says while horrified by the crisis in Gaza: “We are aware that there is a significant amount of debate… around our festivals.
“Our owners, made up of our promoters and several investment firms, support us to achieve the highest standards… fans and artists rightly expect.”
They insist that operationally, Superstruct is independently run and all its “revenue and profits… remains entirely within our business… towards the ongoing development… of our festivals.”
Even deciding where to perform can have political connotations for musicians these days.
As Tom Gray, a founding member of the rock band Gomez, now chair of the Ivors, explains: “The amount of commercial interest required to get a young artist into the public eye means they have to keep their head down a lot and that’s a terrible shame.
“It’s not just artistic expression, but personal human expression is one of the fundamental things that allows people to feel they have agency.”
Kid Cudi has told a court Sean “Diddy” Combs broke into his home, “messed with” his dog and opened some of his Christmas presents during a break-in in December 2011.
The 41-year-old rapper was giving evidence on day nine of the trial, after briefly dating Diddy’s former girlfriend Cassie the same year.
Cassie and Diddy dated for 11 years, from 2007 to 2018, and Cassie has testified the rapper physically abused her during most of their relationship.
Cudi described Cassie phoning him early one morning, sounding “stressed, nervous and scared”, telling him Diddy had “found out about us”.
He said Diddy later called him from his home and told him, “I’m here waiting for you”.
After dropping Cassie at a West Hollywood hotel, Cudi said he returned to his home and found no one there, but said his dog had been locked in the bathroom.
He described his pet later becoming “jittery and on edge all the time”.
He also said someone had opened Christmas presents he’d bought for his family.
While Cudi, whose real name is Scott Mescudi, said he initially wanted “to fight” Diddy, he later thought through “the reality of the situation,” and called the police to report the break-in.
Earlier this week, Cassie finished giving four days of evidence, becoming emotional at times, and testifying that Combs had threatened to blow up Cudi’s car and hurt him after he learned she was dating him by looking at messages on her phone during a “freak off”.
Prosecutors say Combs, the founder of Bad Boy Records, forced women to take part in days-long, drug-fuelled sexual performances known as “Freak Offs” from 2004 to 2024, facilitated by his large retinue of staff.
Combs, 55, has pleaded not guilty.
The rapper faces five criminal counts: one count of racketeering conspiracy; two counts of sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion; and two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution.
Image: Diddy and Cassie on a red carpet in 2016. Pic: zz/JMA/STAR MAX/IPx/AP
The month after the break-in, Cudi’s Porsche was firebombed in his drive, with a hole cut into the roof and a Molotov cocktail dropped into the driver’s seat.
Cudi said he realised he had to talk to Diddy, before things “got out of hand,” meeting up with Diddy, who he said was weirdly “calm” and staring out the window with his hands behind his back “like a Marvel super villain”.
Cudi says Diddy told him he had still been dating Cassie during his relationship with her, with Cudi replying: “[Cassie] told me you were broke up and I took her word for it.”
Shaking hands at the end of the conversation, Cudi said he asked Diddy about “burning” his car, and Diddy replied, “I don’t know what you’re talking about”. Cudi later said he believed that to be a lie.
Cudi says he saw Diddy once a few years later at Soho House in Los Angeles with his daughter, and Diddy told him: “Man, I just want to apologise for all that bullshit”.
Image: Diddy sketched in court while listening to Kaplan’s testimony. Pic: Reuters/Jane Rosenberg
During his cross-examination, the defence suggested Cassie had been “living two different lives”, and “played” both Cudi and Combs.
Cudi concluded his time on the stand, saying his relationship with Cassie ended because he wanted “to give her space” and “the drama was too out of hand”.
Celebrity make-up artist Mylah Morales also gave evidence, describing a fight between Cassie and Diddy in 2010, which she says left Cassie with a “swollen eye, busted lip, and knots on her head”.
Image: Celebrity make-up artist Mylah Morales. Pic: AP
Morales said while she had heard the row, she hadn’t physically seen it as she wasn’t in the room.
She told the court, “I feared for my life”, explaining that she took Cassie to her apartment for several days to recover, but that Cassie refused to go to hospital as she was afraid of Diddy’s reaction.
The defence attempted to damage Morales’s credibility by listing her TV appearances, which included programmes on CNN, and with Don Lemon and Piers Morgan, attempting to paint her as attention-seeking.
The day also saw Combs’s former assistant George Kaplan complete his testimony.
Image: George Kaplan, former assistant to Combs. Pic: AP
He talked about two occasions when he had been asked to carry cash for Diddy, who he said never paid for things himself in the moment, recalling one time in 2015 when he looked after $50,000, and another when he was asked to pick up $10,000.
Kaplan described seeing “regular” physical violence between Cassie and Diddy, including an incident in 2015 with whisky glasses on a private plane, when he heard glass breaking and saw Diddy standing over Cassie in the plane’s central aisle.
He says he also saw Diddy hurling “decorative apples” at another of his girlfriends, Gina, late the same year, handing in his notice the following month.
Also known throughout his career as Puff Daddy and P Diddy, Combs turned artists like Notorious BIG and Usher into household names, elevating hip-hop in American culture and becoming a billionaire in the process.
Diddy has been held in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn since September and faces at least 15 years or possibly life in prison if convicted.
The trial is set to last for around six weeks in total and will go into its third week next week.