Kohberger pleaded guilty now claims 'absolute claim of innocence'

The criminology student convicted last year of murdering four University of Idaho students in their home is seeking to abandon his guilty plea and obtain a trial, claiming he is innocent and was misled into confessing to the high-profile killings, reported The New York Times.

In an interview with The New York Times, Bryan Kohberger, who is currently serving four life sentences, said he had filed a petition challenging his conviction, citing concerns about how the plea deal came together.

“My actual innocence is my truth, and the plea, hinged on by false promises and blatant disinformation, MUST be withdrawn,” Mr. Kohberger said in a statement provided to The Times on Sunday night. He reiterated in a phone call from prison in Idaho that he had an “absolute claim of innocence.”

Mr. Kohberger had not granted an interview or made public comments before speaking with The Times. He declined to discuss any evidence or other specific details related to his innocence claim, as well as the specific concerns he had about the plea process. It is rare for defendants to win post-conviction challenges.

The family of Kaylee Goncalves, one of the victims, said in a statement that Mr. Kohberger was like a “mosquito you just can’t seem to swat.”

“The real tragedy is this: If even a fraction of the energy spent trying to free a guilty man were directed toward honoring the victims, there would be statues of them on every corner, parks bearing their names, and days set aside to remember the lives they lost at the hands of a narcissist,” the statement read.

The Latah County Prosecutor’s Office did not return a call seeking comment. Idaho Attorney General Raul Labrador released a statement saying his heart went out to the victims’ families, noting they had “already endured unimaginable loss and now must face today’s deeply painful news.”

“My office stands ready to do whatever is necessary to ensure justice is fully carried out,” he said.

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FOX News: Man who put up $100K to find Nancy Guthrie says tipsters should skip the sheriff and call Crime Stoppers

As multiple agencies collect tips in the Nancy Guthrie case, the man funding a $100,000 reward says Crime Stoppers — not the sheriff — offers the safest path for witnesses to come forward and an enticing one for people who want to get paid for credible information without giving their name, reported Fox News.

"I believe that people will come forward if they’re anonymous and if they get a reward," said Wisconsin attorney Michael Hupy, who is the president of Crime Stoppers Milwaukee.

In Pima County, Arizona, the local Crime Stoppers affiliate is known as 88-CRIME, and the number is 520-882-7463.

Hupy has paid out $75,000 in rewards and posted another $200,000 in an effort to solve crimes in his hometown. But he told Fox News Digital this week he put up six figures in the Guthrie case due to the alarming circumstances of her disappearance.

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CREATORS: A Wild and Weird Year of True Crime

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
December 23, 2025

Mark Twain once remarked that "Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn't." This quip was no more evident than in courtrooms across the country this year.

"True Crime" had a banner year. There were cases with celebrities and surprises; mothers and sons; conspiracies and crazies.

Let's start with the celebrity. Sean "Diddy" Combs is a bona fide star, a highly successful music artist who has won multiple Grammys. Prosecutors accused Combs of leading a criminal enterprise that used threats, violence, forced labor, bribery and other crimes to force women to engage in drug-fueled sex acts with male escorts called "Freak Offs."

Diddy was charged by the federal government with racketeering and related sex trafficking charges. He endured a salacious eight-week trial.

Although he was acquitted of major sex trafficking and racketeering charges, it was a pyrrhic victory. He was sentenced in October of 2025 to more than four years in prison and a $500,000 fine on two counts of using transportation for prostitution.

The surprise. In the early morning of Nov. 13, 2022, four University of Idaho students, Ethan Chapin, 20, Xana Kernodle, 20, Kaylee Goncalves, 21 and Madison "Maddie" Mogen, 21, were brutally murdered in their off-campus home in Moscow, Idaho.

The crime shocked the nation as police gathered evidence and hunted for a suspect. More than a month later, they arrested Bryan Kohberger, a graduate criminology student at Washington State University.

Kohberger maintained his innocence, claiming he was out for a drive at the time of the murders. Prosecutors said they found DNA evidence, surveillance video and cellphone records implicating Kohberger.

At first, Kohberger and his attorneys wanted to rush to trial, then they geared up for a contentious series of pretrial motions.

Shockingly, on the eve of a pretrial hearing, Kohberger admitted to killing all four students to avoid a potential death sentence. He was sentenced to consecutive life terms for each murder.

The Conspiracy. Karen Read was accused of running over her boyfriend, a Boston police officer, John O'Keefe. It was her second trial; the first ended with a hung jury.

Prosecutors argued Read struck O'Keefe with her SUV in a snowstorm, while the defense claimed she was framed in a law enforcement cover-up and that O'Keefe died because of a beating by drunken partygoers.

Each morning during the trial, on her way into the courthouse, Read waived and interacted with throngs of adoring supporters. The trial lasted eight weeks, with over 30 days of testimony from nearly 50 witnesses.

Read was found not guilty of murder and manslaughter and guilty of Operating a Motor Vehicle While Under the Influence. She was sentenced to one year of probation.

The mother and son. Charlie Adelson, a Florida dentist, was convicted of first-degree murder in the killing of Dan Markel, a Florida State Law University Professor, and his sister Wendi Adelson's estranged husband. The killings were carried out by Charlie's girlfriend and her new lover.

The murder was allegedly motivated by a child custody dispute between Wendi and Markel.

Wendi denied any involvement, but guess who was indicted after Charlie was convicted, their mom, Donna Adelson. Prosecutors alleged that she was the mastermind, using her wealth and influence to hire hitmen, while the defense argued insufficient evidence and pointed the finger at other culprits.

Adelson, like her son, was convicted of first-degree murder, conspiracy and solicitation. The 75-year-old Donna was sentenced to life in prison plus two 30-year consecutive prison terms.

The Crazies. Lori Vallow Daybell was the subject of multiple, separate trials in Idaho and Arizona, where she was convicted of murdering her two children and conspiring to murder her husband's first wife. As for this year, in April, she was convicted of conspiring to murder her fourth husband, Charles Vallow, who was shot and killed by her brother, Alex Cox. In June, she was found guilty of conspiring to murder her niece's ex-husband, who survived a drive-by shooting. Vallow represented herself during her last trial.

She is currently serving consecutive life sentences in prison without the possibility of parole.

That's a wrap for 2025. Stay tuned for next year.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner's Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino

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CREATORS: The Growing, and Impactful, Phenomenon of True Crime

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
July 8, 2025

Recently, I was scrolling through some news articles and came across this headline, "Nearly 2 in 3 Americans Are Fans of Serial Killer Content." My first thought was, "Is that healthy?"

We'll get to the health impact of true crime, if any, in a moment, but true crime sure is lucrative. If you search the top podcasts, you will find that at least three of the top 10 podcasts are focused on true crime.

America has always had a fascination with crime and criminals. Real-life criminals like John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd and Baby Face Nelson were turned into folk heroes by the yellow journalists of the 1920s and 1930s.

Across the pond, there was Sir Author Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot. Crime dramas were a Hollywood staple. Cinematic jewels like "Anatomy of a Murder" or "12 Angry Men" or television's "Perry Mason", the original "Hawaii 5-0" and" Law and Order" always fascinated viewers.

True crime is different. This phenomenon is not literature, or drama or the making of a myth — true crime is an obsession. According to a 2022 YouGov Poll, half of Americans reported they enjoy true crime content, and one in three say they consume it at least once a week.

According to experts from the University of North Carolina schools of law and journalism, the fascination with true crime stems from several causes. First, "people are drawn to these sensational stories by curiosity about the motivations of the criminals," as well as "concerns about justice and the legal system and the thrill of solving a real-life whodunnit."

For purposes of full disclosure, I occasionally offer an opinion on live trials for Court TV or the Law & Crime Network.

However, if you want to understand the true crime phenomenon, you have to attend CrimeCon, the annual gathering of true crime enthusiasts. Thousands of true crime fans under one roof hanging on every word from the likes of Dateline's Josh Mankiewicz, Court TV's Vinnie Politan and Crime Online's Nancy Grace, among other notable purveyors of true crime.

True crime enthralls millions of people. Two recent trials, one televised every day and the other followed closely, revealed the extent to which true crime has captured the hearts and minds of many across America and abroad.

The first, the trial of Karen Read in Massachusetts. Read was accused of hitting her police officer boyfriend, John O'Keefe, with her car and leaving him to die in the snow.

The Read trial was a spectacle. Every day, she walked to the courthouse like it was the red carpet at the Oscars. Her fans — some extreme like the so-called "Turtleboy" who got charged with intimidating a witness — were enamored with Karen Read. No doubt the relentless support of her admirers had an impact — some jurors said as much after the trial. She was acquitted of all charges except operating while impaired.

Sean "Diddy" Combs' trial was also unique. He was charged federally with racketeering, sex trafficking and transportation for prostitution. The testimony about sex, drugs and violence was salacious. The Combs trial wasn't even televised, but the interest was extraordinary. Combs also beat the most serious charges filed by the government.

Binging on true crime has its drawbacks. The long-term effects of true crime consumption on mental health have not been fully studied. As we've recently observed, this growing genre of media is clearly having an impact on society and the legal system.

Some experts argue, too much true crime can be harmful. Chivonna Childs, PhD, a psychologist with the Cleveland Clinic, recently suggested, "It (true crime) can increase our anxiety because we become hypervigilant. We're always looking for the bad person. Every white van becomes the van of a killer or murderer."

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner's Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino.

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Kohberger's zealous defense fizzles agrees to plea deal

Bryan Kohberger, the man charged in the brutal stabbing deaths of four University of Idaho students, has reached a plea deal to avoid the death penalty, according to a letter that prosecutors sent to relatives of the victims, reported The New York Times.

Mr. Kohberger had been set to go on trial on murder charges in August, nearly three years after the killings, which occurred at a residence near the university in Moscow, Idaho. A plea hearing is set for Wednesday.

In a letter to the victims’ families on Monday, prosecutors said that Mr. Kohberger’s defense team asked for a plea offer last week. Under the proposed agreement, which must be approved by the judge in the case, Mr. Kohberger would plead guilty to all charges, face four consecutive life sentences and waive all rights to appeal.

The family of Kaylee Goncalves, one of the victims, criticized the prosecution team for failing to consult with the families. Some of them had worked to change Idaho law to allow the firing squad as a form of capital punishment.

“After more than two years, this is how it concludes, with a secretive deal and a hurried effort to close the case without any input from the victims’ families on the plea’s details,” the Goncalves family said in a statement.

In their letter to the families, prosecutors wrote that the plea deal was “our sincere attempt to seek justice.”

“This agreement ensures that the defendant will be convicted, will spend the rest of his life in prison, and will not be able to put you and other families through the uncertainty of decades of post-conviction appeals,” they wrote. “Your viewpoints weighed heavily in our decision-making process, and we hope that you may come to appreciate why we believe this resolution is in the best interests of justice.”

Prosecutors did not respond to messages seeking comment, nor did lawyers for Mr. Kohberger. The families of the other victims did not comment immediately on the proposed agreement.

Mr. Kohberger, now 30, was a criminology Ph.D. student at Washington State University, about a 20-minute drive from the crime scene. He grew up in Pennsylvania and studied psychology in college. He was arrested in December 2022 at his parents’ home in the Pocono Mountains area of Pennsylvania about six weeks after the killings.

Mr. Kohberger’s defense team tried unsuccessfully for months to undermine key pieces of evidence that investigators collected against him. Prosecutors have said that his DNA was found on a knife sheath recovered at the crime scene, and that records showed he had purchased a knife of a kind matching the sheath in the months before the killings. Video footage showed a car similar to his circling the neighborhood around the time of the deaths.

But investigators have yet to suggest a motive or offer any details on how the victims were chosen.

Mr. Kohberger’s lawyers filed a flurry of motions in recent months, including one trying to bar prosecutors from seeking the death penalty — in part, they said, because Mr. Kohberger had been diagnosed with autism. They unsuccessfully sought a delay in the trial, arguing that their team had not had enough time to comb through the vast amount of evidence in the case. But the judge ordered jury selection to commence on Aug. 4.

Just hours before news of the plea deal on Monday, one of Mr. Kohberger’s lawyers was in court in Pennsylvania, where she successfully argued that two witnesses who knew Mr. Kohberger as a teenager should be forced to testify at trial even though they did not want to.

Mr. Kohberger has been in jail since his arrest. His lawyers have given few hints about what defense they planned to offer, but have said that he was “out driving” on the night of the murders.

In the years before the killings, Mr. Kohberger indicated that he was interested in studying criminals. In a message to a friend in 2018, he wrote that he would like a job “dealing with high-profile offenders.” A few months before the murders, he posted on Reddit asking people who had spent time in prison to describe their “thoughts, emotions and actions from the beginning to end of the crime commission process.”

Investigators have said that the murders happened sometime around 4 a.m. on Nov. 13, 2022. The victims — Ms. Goncalves, 21; Madison Mogen, 21; Xana Kernodle, 20; and Ethan Chapin, 20 — had spent a typical Saturday night out near the university campus and returned to the house in the early hours of Sunday.

A roommate who survived the attack said she had heard what sounded like crying coming from the room of one of the women. She later told the police that she had opened her door and seen a man with bushy eyebrows in black clothes and a mask. The man left the house and the roommate began texting with another surviving roommate downstairs before taking refuge in her room.

But neither she nor anyone else called the police until more than seven hours later, when a friend came to the house and discovered the body of one of the victims.

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The true crime phenomenon can be traced to Truman Capote's 1966 release of 'In Cold Blood'

In 1966, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood all but created the true crime genre, reported Vox. Nearly 50 years later, radio journalist Sarah Koenig decided the case of a Baltimore high school student, Adnan Syed, convicted of murdering his teenage ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee, needed a second look. 

With its high production values, conversational style, and a storyline unfolding in real time across episodes, 2014’s Serial fueled a new wave of interest in true crime and transformed podcasting. Its first season — with its piano-plinking earworm of an opening theme and endless parodies — was once the most downloaded podcast in the world at 300 million, a number that now feels almost quaint thanks to the influence Serial has had on the entire medium. 

But Serial’s most consequential effect was on the criminal justice system itself.

Before the landmark series, the main way we received our pop culture narratives about crime came through police procedurals like Law & Order and high-profile investigations like that of O.J. Simpson or JonBenét Ramsey, where the accompanying media circus often overshadowed the facts; serious deconstruction of individual cases was relegated to niche internet forums or the occasional prestige documentary. Even in more routine circumstances, police departments typically controlled the stories around criminal investigations, choosing what the public got to know and when they knew it. This grip on information often meant the media had no choice but to parrot the police narrative of a case — a framing mirrored by the onscreen “copaganda” of procedurals and other scripted shows.

Serial changed that by ushering in an age of increased scrutiny over the narratives we’re fed about policing and by making millions of listeners more fundamentally aware of the limits and flaws of the justice system. From that awareness has come serious action that arguably helped free Serial’s own subject.

Much has been made of the ways in which the true crime podcasting boom may have normalized the more negative stereotypes of the genre: obsessed fans harassing suspects and thinking they know better than authorities, or boozed-up white women joking about murder as millions of fans laugh along without regard for victims or survivors. To be sure, thorny complications can arise, but little attention has been given to the positive outcomes of this kind of collectivism when it’s applied to an unjust system.

True crime podcasts, starting with Serial and the high-profile podcasts that followed, “have offered a critical lens through which to scrutinize the procedures and decision-making in the criminal justice system,” Kent Bausman, a criminologist and sociology professor at Maryville University, told Vox in an email. “They have enlightened the public consciousness about the convoluted machinations of the system and revealed with great clarity the human experience of miscarriages of justice.” Bausman noted that true crime podcasts frequently provide insight into “everything from the production and use of false confessions and the inherent problems that exist regarding the use of forensic evidence in the courtroom.”

Bausman pointed out that organizations like the Innocence Project have existed for decades, yet it’s only recently that they’ve become better known as a result of the true crime explosion. We’ve gained a broader cultural awareness of the factors that lead to the wrongful convictions that the Innocence Project and its peers help overturn — things like false confessions, police misconduct, bad forensics, and false testimony at trial. Additionally, terms like “Missing White Woman Syndrome” and “Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women” have sprung up to encompass an entire range of police inadequacies when it comes to the racial and socioeconomic gaps between “perfect” victims and forgotten ones.

True crime has “revealed with great clarity the human experience of miscarriages of justice”

True crime fans are now loud advocates for thorough investigations. They’re more knowledgeable about shady criminal justice techniques, from entrapment and “Mr. Big” operations to Brady violations and the Reid technique. There’s an increased familiarity with nonprofits that help law enforcement solve cases, from Texas EquuSearch to the DNA Doe project, as well as those that seek criminal justice reform, like End the Backlog.

Several of these organizations build upon what is perhaps the biggest recent breakthrough in criminal investigations: forensic genealogy. The use of familial DNA to catch culprits has revolutionized crime-solving amid the true crime boom. In 2018, when forensic genealogy led to the capture of the Golden State Killer, the true crime world greeted the announcement like sports fans might celebrate winning the World Series — a comparison that captures the complicated nature of a genre that makes entertainment out of tragedy. Wider concerns about genealogical privacy and private companies sharing user information quickly followed.

That collectivity and the sense that a “true crime community” exists also largely came about because of Serial.  After Serial, millions of people became amateur detectives. Legions of fans have made themselves an invaluable part of the crime-solving process via social media, as well as longtime true crime forums like Websleuths. They’ve pored over cases until they’ve become nigh experts themselves, drummed up tips to law enforcement, generated new interest in cold cases, and often all but led authorities by the nose to conclusions they should have reached long ago; in one famous case, this latter scenario played out before the ears of millions of listeners after an amateur sleuth made his own podcast to draw attention to the Kristin Smart case and forced his local cops to pay attention. 

Journalist-led true crime podcasts have also had a direct impact on the cases they’ve investigated in the intervening years — like In the Dark, which helped free its season two subject, Curtis Flowers, from death row in 2019. In 2022, the runaway hit Murdaugh Murders helped catalyze the re-investigation of the death of Stephen Smith, which is widely believed to be connected to the byzantine crimes of Alex Murdaugh. 

Not all criminal investigations benefit from millions of newly minted amateur sleuths diving into the fray. Bausman warns it can in fact “commodify both offenders and victims for the public’s amusement.” He also pointed out that despite the renewed attention true crime podcasts can bring to stagnant investigations, the clearance rates for homicide cold cases have not increased due to this influence. 

Still, Serial continues to have an outsized impact on our cultural understanding of the criminal justice system, and this sea change ultimately came full circle back to Adnan Syed. 

Legions of fans have made themselves an invaluable part of the crime-solving process

In 2022, Syed’s hometown of Baltimore revisited dozens of convictions as part of a larger overall effort by Maryland to atone for decades of draconian sentences handed out to juvenile and young offenders, many of whom spent their entire adult lives in prison with no opportunity for parole. This is just one example of how prosecutorial divisions across the country are reexamining wrongful and unfair convictions through what are known as conviction integrity units and sentencing review units. These programs are part of the normalization of criminal justice reform that has come amid an enormous shift in attitudes about prosecutions in the decade since Serial aired.

It was a dogged pursuit of local criminal justice reform that allowed Syed to finally walk free, though the flashier “whodunit” aspects of his case that initially attracted Koenig also delivered a twist. Syed’s case review uncovered new evidence, including two new suspects, that cast reasonable doubt on his trial and conviction. Prosecutors dropped all charges against Syed just days later; they later walked this back on a technicality. Those nuances also reflect a post-Serial shift in public advocacy and focus: on the rights of victims and their families in cases like this one.

Although his case is still in limbo, Syed remains out of jail, his conviction stayed until Hae Min Lee’s family’s concerns can be resolved. It’s the kind of messy, satisfyingly unsatisfying conclusion that befits both Serial itself and the evolved criminal justice era we’re in — one in which answers rarely come easily, but for perhaps the first time, all of us are looking.

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The 'Trump bump' influences true-crime podcasts

True crime is among the most popular genres in podcasting. One of the biggest stories in the coming months is the wave of criminal charges facing former President Donald J. Trump, reported The New York Times.

The result: a boomlet of podcasts dedicated to the criminal cases against him.

MSNBC, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, NPR, Vox Media and The First TV, an upstart conservative media company, have all introduced or are about to start new shows examining Mr. Trump’s courtroom travails as he campaigns to win back the White House.

On MSNBC’s “Prosecuting Donald Trump,” the legal commentators Andrew Weissmann and Mary McCord offer analysis gleaned from their years serving as prosecutors. A recent episode of “Breakdown,” from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, includes a newsy interview with Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney. Recently on “Trump’s Trials,” the NPR host Scott Detrow discussed whether Mr. Trump could claim presidential immunity.

The criminal charges against Mr. Trump — brought by state prosecutors in New York and Georgia, as well as in two federal indictments — involve allegations of election interference, his role in the Jan. 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol, his handling of sensitive documents and payments to cover up a sex scandal. Mr. Trump denies any wrongdoing.

Many of the hosts interviewed by The New York Times cited the newsworthiness of the story — a former president and a leading candidate for the office is facing a legal onslaught while battling for the White House — as the impetus to go wall to wall with dedicated podcasts.

“He is the far and away front-runner to the nomination and has a real chance of being president again,” Mr. Detrow said. “That, to me, is an enormous legal story, an enormous political story.”

But there is a significant potential economic upside as well: capturing a slice of the $2.4 billion that advertisers are expected to spend on podcasts in 2024, according to the data firm eMarketer. For years, news organizations have benefited financially from the public’s interest in Mr. Trump — colloquially known as the “Trump bump.”

“The number of users is up, but the number of people vying for those users in terms of dollars is also way up,” said Chris Balfe, founder of The First TV.

Mr. Trump’s legal challenges present an unusual twist on the true-crime genre, which often focuses on grisly murders or dramatic heists. “Serial,” a podcast from the creators of “This American Life,” was a pioneer of the category, which has also included entrants like “Exit Scam” (about a vanished cryptocurrency mogul) and “Last Seen,” a suspenseful yarn about the theft of 13 irreplaceable artworks from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. (The New York Times Company now owns Serial Productions, maker of “Serial.”)

The Trump cases, by contrast, involve complicated questions about the Constitution and democracy. Adding to the complexity: They span state and federal jurisdictions in Florida, Georgia, New York and Washington, D.C.

Podcasts are an ideal format to explain the nuances to the public, because they give journalists the time and space to examine complicated issues at length, Mr. Balfe said. They also allow news organizations to create a listener destination for coverage quickly and relatively inexpensively, with two mics and a simple distribution feed for Spotify and Apple Podcasts, he said.

“You don’t have to go lease a beautiful studio on Sixth Avenue and hire a crew and all this other stuff,” Mr. Balfe said. “A podcast is a low-floor, high-ceiling way to start a new product. And if it works, it can be very successful, very quickly.”

Last year, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the largest newspaper in Georgia, dedicated the latest season of its true-crime podcast, “Breakdown,” to the criminal investigation. Since then, it has been all Trump, all the time, with 22 episodes on the topic since August.

This year, the podcast garnered more than one million downloads, making it the newspaper’s most popular, finding audiences in Florida, California and New York, according to a spokeswoman for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The newspaper also has three full-time reporters covering Mr. Trump’s case in Fulton County, where he faces 13 felony charges, including racketeering.

Tamar Hallerman, one of those reporters, co-anchors the podcast. She describes herself as a “recovering Washington correspondent.” (She was previously a reporter at Roll Call.)

“All of these legal cases that Trump is in the middle of are already creating a unique set of circumstances for a leading presidential candidate,” said Ms. Hallerman, who covered the 2016 presidential campaign. “This is absolutely not business as usual for the campaign press corps.”

Preet Bharara, a former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, has dedicated much of one of his three podcasts for Vox Media to the criminal investigations facing Mr. Trump. Mr. Bharara has covered Mr. Trump’s legal issues since 2018, saying, “There’s really been no shortage of legal-based news.”

Yet “the dam broke” in April, he said, after Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, brought the first criminal charges against Mr. Trump.

“Every month or two, there was another one,” Mr. Bharara said. “And it became clear that that was going to be a central focus.”

Political coverage of Mr. Trump should focus on the criminal investigations into the former president, rather than traditional horse-race coverage, said Timothy Crouse, whose 1973 book, “The Boys on the Bus,” about the media’s coverage of the previous year’s presidential campaign, became a classic of the genre.

Investigative reporters like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, not campaign reporters, did the most enduring political journalism of that era, Mr. Crouse said. At the time, many campaign reporters were skeptical of those stories. He added that sustained exploration of Mr. Trump’s criminal charges would probably follow the same pattern.

“Fewer political reporters might be OK, but only if that decrease were to be balanced by an increase in investigative reporters,” Mr. Crouse said.

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Modern true crime practitioners face challenges

 Author Sarah Weinman writes in The New York Times:

During the end credits of the recent film “Boston Strangler,” which dramatized the real-life efforts to crack that criminal case, there’s a notation that addresses the fate of a convicted murderer named George Nassar who, the movie states, is “still in prison in Massachusetts.” I’ve long been fascinated with the Strangler case and Mr. Nassar’s connection to it, so this detail caught my attention — since I was pretty sure I recalled an interview from a few years back in which he announced that he had terminal prostate cancer. As it turns out, Mr. Nassar, who told authorities that his cellmate had confessed to being the Strangler, died in 2018 at a prison hospital in Jamaica Plain.

As a writer and editor of true crime, I might be more sensitive to these sorts of factual errors than most people. But they are part of a troubling trend. Errors like the one in “Boston Strangler” threaten the integrity of true crime, which as a genre has grappled with whether the stories it tells about crimes are, in fact, true.

True crime has always had a volatile relationship with facts. A century ago, tabloid newspapers routinely hyped up the most lurid aspects of a crime, even if there were few verifiable facts to be had. One reason the Hall-Mills murders of 1922 remain unsolved is that the press trampled all over the crime scene, literally and metaphorically.

Truman Capote, who is credited with inventing the modern true crime genre with “In Cold Blood,” radically expanded its creative possibilities — even as he resorted to making things up for effect. The book’s final scene in the cemetery, in which the detective visits the Clutter family’s graves with the daughter’s best friend? Invented out of whole cloth. Capote even landed in jail after he refused to take the stand because, according to a death-row prisoner, Capote would have had to reveal that he’d lied about their interview. The crime journalist Jack Olsen once said of Capote’s book that it “made true crime an interesting, successful, commercial genre, but it also began the process of tearing it down.”

Accuracy is not the only challenge that true crime practitioners face. Janet Malcolm’s “The Journalist and the Murderer” famously explores the inherent ethical dilemmas in earning a subject’s trust — especially if it’s a story of violence, trauma and tragedy. Malcolm wrote that “the writer-subject relationship seems to depend for its life on a kind of fuzziness and murkiness, if not utter covertness, of purpose.”

Given this fraught history, you’d think that modern true crime practitioners would proceed with utmost care and caution. In reality, the opposite is true, plunging true crime into a credibility crisis — thanks to the pressures of a voracious market for documentaries, docuseries, podcasts and movies purporting to be based on real events.

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The variety of lapses are as plentiful as the examples are. HBO’s blockbuster 2015 documentary series “The Jinx,” about the murderer Robert Durst, was lauded for its shocking twist ending — which was later revealed to be the product of editing that manipulated the timeline for maximum impact. “Making a Murderer,” a Netflix series which debuted the same year, stirred public outrage over an apparently unjust conviction — and then it came out that the show had omitted evidence that supported the prosecutor’s case.

Beyond factual lapses and questionable techniques, the rush to feed the true crime beast has led to all sorts of slippery practices. The limited series “Dahmer” on Netflix retold a well-documented story with a new, exploitative gloss — over the objections of family members of Dahmer’s victims, who protested that the series was “retraumatizing over and over again.” As the market becomes more competitive, true crime filmmakers have raced to lock down exclusive access to sources, preventing other journalists from reporting out a story, as happened in the case of a film about the women R. Kelly assaulted.

The proliferation of true crime podcasts has led to some honorable examples of investigative journalism, such as “In the Dark,” which won two Peabody awards for its re-examination of mishandled murder cases. But for every podcast like that, there are 10 (or more) in which so-called experts speculate on infamous mysteries with far more eagerness than authority.

These slipshod approaches have real-world consequences. Richard Walter, an expert criminal profiler whose testimony led to many convictions, was recently revealed to be a fraud. That’s particularly disturbing not only for those wrongfully imprisoned thanks, in part, to his faked credentials but for the way his fakery hid in plain sight for decades. Walter had become a hero to some in the true crime community, lionized in books that were more interested in chronicling his dramatic exploits than in the authenticity of his expertise.

Given a figure as egregious as Walter, it may seem ungenerous to call out an error in a film like “Boston Strangler” — after all, we tolerate, and even expect, a certain level of embellishment in our entertainment, even in those works based on real events. But this misstep illustrates how, increasingly, stories of tragedy (and, ironically, stories of dogged journalistic reporting) have become simply another form of intellectual property to be put through a churn of repackaging and reselling.

It’s become a familiar cycle: A criminal case becomes a book, becomes a podcast, becomes a documentary, becomes a scripted series or a film, becomes another, more sensational film. There are now even true crime cookbooks. But somewhere at the start of it all an actual crime took place, leaving behind not just facts but victims and survivors. Where does a true crime cookbook leave them?

At its best, true crime grapples with what can and cannot be uncovered and verified about the past, and even incorporates those challenges into the story. I’m thinking of two recent books, Alex Mar’s “Seventy Times Seven,” a compassionate account of mercy for a teenage girl on death row, and Roxanna Asgarian’s “We Were Once a Family,” on the heartbreaking failures of child foster systems to prevent senseless deaths. Both demonstrate the impact that great true crime can have. They give a full accounting not just of the details of the crimes but of the lives of those affected by violence, exploring whether the legal system can truly provide justice.

But if the facts aren’t there, or they’re flatly wrong, or they’re twisted beyond recognition, then true crime transforms into something closer to lurid fiction — and the entities cashing in on it are making a cynical, shortsighted bet. If creators want to benefit from the frisson of a “true” story, they must honor the truth — it’s that simple. If true crime practitioners give up on doing better and succumb to the temptation of exploitation, that would be a crime in and of itself.

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