The Dark Origin of the True-Crime Frenzy at CrimeCon

On the weekend of September 22, 2023, 4,000 women, and some men too, descended on the Orlando World Center Marriott for the sixth annual CrimeCon, described by its founder, Kevin Balfe, as a place where victims can feel “loved.”

Launched in 2017, CrimeCon brings together consumers and content creators within the true-crime genre for presentations by criminology experts, law enforcement, victims, and niche celebrities, such as renowned pedophile catcher Chris Hansen. The convention’s attendance pales beside events like Gamescom (around 320,000 participants) and comic conventions (more than 126,000 at LA Comic Con alone) but distinguishes itself by its overwhelmingly female spectatorship; Balfe estimates that 80 percent of his attendees are women.

CrimeCon Orlando kicked off in the Grand Ballroom with a neon-themed rock concert by the Sole Purpose, featuring guitarist Creighton Waters, otherwise known as the prosecuting attorney in the Alex Murdaugh trial. The band played covers of “Peaceful Easy Feeling” by the Eagles and “Whiskey Glasses” by Morgan Wallen, while in a roped-off VIP area women posed in police caps and other props at a complimentary photo booth. Nearby, two adult sisters danced with their elderly mother, who had warned them since birth about bad men—and perhaps that’s why they were here tonight, still alive.

Later, the dance floor and cocktail tables would be replaced by enough chairs to accommodate thousands more true-crime fans. But for now, LED glasses and headbands shaped like Playboy Bunny ears flashed in the dark as women in sequins and feather boas shimmied to a bracing cover of “Shama Lama Ding Dong.”

“We literally marinate in true crime all day,” shouted an Orlando-based massage therapist, raising her voice to be heard over “I’m Every Woman.” She and a longtime client had embarked on a girls’ trip to CrimeCon and fondly recalled how they’d been talking about murder since their very first bodywork session. “We bonded from that.” Over the intervening years, the two had started playing true-crime podcasts and documentaries during massages. Now they described themselves as “best friends in true crime.”

“Excuse me,” intoned a low voice, and I looked up to see a bearded man wielding a bean bag—apparently I was blocking his neon cornhole game, an actual thing that was happening—because yes, there were men at CrimeCon, though my conversations with them gave the impression that they’d come under duress. One described his female companion’s true-crime obsession as “very weird.” Another would find himself so nauseated by the weekend’s proceedings that he left the conference while his wife stayed behind, riveted and unburdened. Even CrimeCon speaker Paul Holes, the handsome former investigator famous for his role in catching the Golden State Killer—now a niche celebrity among true-crime junkies who lust after the troubled male detective archetype—had, in a certain way, come at the behest of women. He, too, would feel overwhelmed that weekend, not just by traumatic memories of old cases, which simmered to the surface during his CrimeCon presentations (necessitating a CrimeCon-branded mug of bourbon, which Holes carried with him onstage) or during the simple and necessary act of sleep (necessitating more bourbon; blacking out was a respite from the nightmares, including a recurring one of a victim’s face, caved in and hatching flies), but also by the masses of women who hindered his movements and touched him during selfies.

When asked “What brought you here?” one man at the Sole Purpose concert, Shane (50s), answered plainly, “My wife.”

He and Tammy (couple’s name: Shammy, they told me twice) were discussing the gender disparity at CrimeCon when I arrived at their table; Shane attributed it to commercials, he said, presumably alluding to the Activia ads, or whatever, that air between segments of Dateline. When asked what she thought, Tammy hesitated, as if trying to formulate a response that would not discredit Shane’s. Finally she ventured—quietly, with evident self-doubt, as if not wanting to offend her husband—“Well, I wonder if it’s because a lot of the victims are women.”

As if on cue, two beautiful survivors of domestic violence, Natalia (38) and Stacy (43), danced through the ballroom’s doorway in matching tie-dyed overalls. Like many other women that evening, they were twinning. Natalia and Stacy had connected 15 years earlier while living in Colorado after Stacy spotted Natalia trudging through their shared apartment complex with a bottle of wine in each hand and quickly identified her as a kindred spirit. Later, during a blizzard, they watched the entire Casey Anthony trial together on Stacy’s laptop while sorting jelly beans into personalized piles; Stacy loved red, Natalia preferred green, and they both liked blue, which they stacked in the middle.

“Barbie!” Natalia exclaimed, admiring a woman dressed like the doll.

Stacy promised me that Natalia had strong opinions about ongoing cases. Both women believe that Bryan Kohberger, the former criminology student charged with murdering four college kids at the University of Idaho in 2022, is definitely guilty—in part because of the evidence against him, but also because…well, he just looked like one of those guys women instinctively avoid.

“We have to deal with creeps 24/7,” Natalia said, “even when we’re children.”

After the concert ended, I returned to my hotel around 1 a.m. Heading to the elevators, I overheard newlyweds Kirsten (31) and Molly (32) debating the death penalty in the lobby.

“The only way that it should be okay is in a lethal injection situation,” argued Kirsten, a nanny with pink-streaked hair. “That’s…kind of moral. We do that to our dogs, you know what I mean?”

Molly, a deadpan attorney, turned to me. “On the record: Our dogs are alive.”

Kirsten rolled her eyes. “No, I’m just saying…when they’re old.”

“We have two basset hounds, we love them, they’re alive,” Molly reiterated.

Both were CrimeCon diehards, honeymooning at this year’s convention after getting engaged at the previous one in Vegas. There, Molly had taken Kirsten to the Shark Reef Aquarium at Mandalay Bay, where a scuba diver swam over and pressed to the exhibit glass a laminated printout bearing clip art of two dolphins kissing and the proposal: “Kirsten, will you marry me?” As animal lovers, both wanted to wed at a zoo. But back home in Tennessee, the two ended up getting “emergency married,” as Kirsten put it, after Governor Bill Lee signed “anti-drag” legislation into law (which was later overturned). It could be scary living down South, Molly conceded; she’d once been chased from a mall by a man screaming, “Faggots!”

Upon reflection, Molly granted that being gay in America had scaffolded at least some of her interest in true crime, attributing the relatability of victimization to “why a lot of women in general” gravitate toward the genre. “It could happen to you…so you have to be aware and vigilant,” she explained, describing the urge to study criminal cases as a means of self-defense. “Information is knowledge.”

AROUND 12 P.M., A MASSIVE AUDIENCE FILLED THE MAIN BALLROOM FOR A MOTIVATIONAL TALK BY KATHY KLEINER RUBIN ABOUT SURVIVING BOTH BREAST CANCER AND TED BUNDY.

For her part, Kirsten traced her own obsession with crime to the fact that her childhood babysitter had been “murdered violently”—kidnapped, tortured, raped, and “stuffed in a trash can,” where she’d slowly suffocated. Kirsten sighed, summarizing the experience as, “Sad, really depressing, gonna fuck you up in the mind.”

At this, Molly shot Kirsten a lawyerly look, as if questioning the wisdom of saying “fuck” in a Vanity Fair article. “I’m not a professional lady, I’ll say whatever I want,” Kirsten joked back. “You’re a grown-up and I’m…”

She trailed off, seeming to realize, then and there, that she’d chosen the same career path as her murdered babysitter.

“I don’t know that any woman has made it to being an adult without having some sort of traumatic experience,” Kirsten concluded. “I literally don’t think it exists.”

The next day, presentations started at noon, but by 9 a.m. the World Center Marriott convention center was already packed. While some collected “prizes” from mock evidence lockers in the Oxygen TV Lounge (mine: an unflattering bucket hat in bumblebee colors), others queued to sit in massage chairs set before TVs playing Cold Justice—a true-crime show about cold cases starring veteran prosecutor Kelly Siegler. (Prosecuting Evil With Kelly Siegler dropped a month after CrimeCon.)

Siegler has spoken openly about witnessing domestic violence throughout her childhood; when she was a kid, her then stepdad beat her mother. Yet it was Siegler’s mom who found herself on the receiving end of police lectures. “If you would learn how to shut your mouth,” the cops said, “you wouldn’t get in trouble.” Young Siegler had seethed. “You’re telling her that? Go arrest him! Go do something!” But they didn’t, and the injustice of that was one factor that later propelled Siegler into law school, followed by a successful career as a prosecutor. In court, she won 19 out of 20 death penalty cases, earning Siegler the nickname “Giant Killer.”

“In some cases, in special cases—not all the time, and not that often—but sometimes,” Siegler said of the death penalty, “oh, it’s justice.”

Later that day, a massive audience filled the main ballroom for a motivational talk by Kathy Kleiner Rubin, who recently published a memoir about triumphing over lupus, breast cancer, and one of the most infamous serial killers in history: A Light in the Dark: Surviving More Than Ted Bundy, cowritten with Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi (and it’s very good). Forty-five years earlier, when Kleiner was just 20 years old, the serial killer had brained her with an oak log, the same wood species used to make the electric chair in which Bundy later burned.

Inspirational music and videography hyped Kleiner’s entrance. Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida” blared over the speaker system as a screen above the stage beamed the words “ARE YOU READY FOR THE MOST EMOTIONAL CRIMECON YET?” And with that, Kleiner—all four feet eleven inches of her—stepped onstage. She waited out the deafening applause before launching into it:

“This is my story.”

After escaping through the ceiling duct of a Colorado jail in 1977, Bundy crossed state lines and crept on to the Florida State University campus, slipping through the back door of the Chi Omega house to beat and strangle to death two sorority sisters. He raped one of them once she stopped breathing. Next, he entered 19-year-old Kleiner’s bedroom.

Kleiner, then an aspiring interior decorator, lay sleeping under a tree-patterned comforter, which she’d selected to match the bedroom’s green carpeting. She woke to a silhouette looming over her. Suddenly she was in searing pain—her tongue half severed, jaw shattered, one cheek torn open.

But before Bundy could kill her, car headlights swept across the bedroom window, prompting him to flee. In the ensuing melee of ambulance sirens and Bundy’s criminal trial, young Kleiner found herself fixated on that precious blood-soaked bedspread, feeling sad that it was ruined.

Forty-five years later, Kleiner’s jaw still aches. “I can’t eat corn.” She manages the pain with hot packs and cold packs, and every few years she endures yet another surgery. But what really helps, Kleiner says, is CrimeCon. “I never had a therapist or anything, so just talking it out has been my therapy.”

She described the convention as a kind of wellness retreat for survivors, saying she’d met “so many” attendees “in so many different stages of trauma.” Kleiner wanted them to know that “women can get through more than they think,” even though “it’s painful and they might still be living through it—so it’s not just a past crime, it’s a current crime.” Of her own scars, courtesy of Bundy, Kleiner said, “It’s kind of, you know, melting into who I am.”

Kleiner’s sentiment would later be echoed by renowned serial killer expert Katherine Ramsland, PhD, a prolific author of 71 (and counting) books, who also happens to have once been Kohberger’s criminology professor.

When asked during her CrimeCon presentation, “Violent Minds,” whether, looking back at her life, any experiences stood out as having seeded an early interest in crime, Ramsland laughed in surprise. Nobody had ever asked her that before. “Well,” she said, “When I was a kid, there was a serial killer operating in my hometown, and friends of my brother’s found the first body”—the crowd oohed and aahed—“So, I would have to say that probably established it.” There were other ordeals too, it turned out, like “a great-grandfather who tried to poison the whole family” and “a grandmother who was murdered.”

“So I have lots of things,” Ramsland realized. After the presentation, she would elaborate to NewsNation, “There’s certainly violence in the background that has trickled down to me.”

As a scholar, Ramsland approaches true crime through a clinical lens, distinguishing her interest in the genre from its entertainment value. Like many of the women at CrimeCon—whose long list of safety precautions had partly been gleaned, they said, from crime stories (carrying mace, walking in groups, calling a friend to say where you’re going—the subtext being that if you’re abducted, people will know sooner, raising the statistical likelihood of finding you, or at least your corpse)—Ramsland’s conclusions on personal safety underscore the universal danger of being female.

“When I walk past a male on the street, I will always watch over my shoulder. Always,” Ramsland said to me in a follow-up interview, explaining that if somebody were to roll down their window and ask for directions, she would never approach the car. “Because I’ve known some of the strategies that offenders use to grab vulnerable people.”

“Which is not to say they could never get one over on me, of course they could,” she added.

Still, Ramsland said she did what she could to avoid being killed by men like those she studied. “I have yet to take a rideshare.”

I caught up with Natalia and Stacy later that evening at a bar off the Marriott lobby. The two were enjoying a long-awaited glass of wine. Earlier that day, to Stacy’s irritation, Natalia had forgotten to bring along their water bottles, filled to the brim with Pinot Grigio, a misunderstanding they’d since settled. “We love each other to the moon and back,” Natalia said, flashing her moonstone ring, a gift from Stacy.

Stacy recounted how, as a kid, she used to drill pins for her dad outside the family’s construction company in a field surrounded by men. When her dad noticed his male employees staring at her budding breasts, he moved her to the front office, assigning her solitary administrative work instead. “Pay attention to what’s going on around you,” he warned.

“I thought I was being punished,” Stacy admitted.

Yet she recalled with apparent fondness how the same men who had ogled her as a child suddenly became “protective” of her when other men did the same. She was describing the patriarchy’s split personality, which simultaneously sexualizes and infantilizes women. The latter approach, when weighed against the alternative (being killed), begins to feel surprisingly comforting. “It does kind of suck,” she admitted. “Like, yeah, maybe I didn’t get strangled…but…why do we have to wake up and think about that?”

Like Stacy, Natalia worked in a male-dominated industry. Mixing in those circles had made her “a little bit of a dick,” she admitted, just to prevent men from taking advantage—a phenomenon, her tone implied, with which she had ample experience. “I have understood your tribe. I hear your jokes. I smell your farts,” she said of men, whom Natalia had learned to live without, choosing instead to snuggle with her pet turtles, Sexy Rexy and Ninja Turtle—which Stacy later cited (jokingly) as one reason that she and Natalia had not simply married one other.

Just then, Stacy’s husband, Amit—who was sitting at the bar, glued to a college football game—shouted at the TV, drunk and happy, “Shit, he’s running!” Stacy recalled “a joke” she’d recently made to him.

“And this is a terrible thing to say,” she said, “but I joked one day, Oh”—her voice turned sad, tinged with theatrical realization—“I’m not rapeable anymore.”

It was something she remembered hearing on a show, where a woman “was running through a parking lot” and someone said, “‘You should be careful.’”

“‘Don’t worry,’” the character responded, “‘I’m too old for anyone to rape me,’” a sentence that, to Stacy, perfectly distilled what is, arguably, the most fucked-up layer of womanhood; after a certain age, the constant threat of rape fades, leaving in its wake a deafening silence. And pathetically, it’s only then, once the constant catcalling and threats of violence wane, that the truly pathological part sets in: Suddenly deprived of all the little indignities that have soundtracked our lives, we miss them. The patriarchy leaves an indelible mark on us, and we hate it for that, even as we still crave its attention.

“It gets harder and harder being a woman,” Natalia agreed.

And then they turned to me, demanding to know why I seemed so interested in their pain and whether I had any of my own.

Of course I related to them. The first time a stranger slapped my ass, I was 12 years old. Over the intervening years, strange men pulled me onto their laps, called me a bitch, and stood in my way when I wanted to leave, among countless other formative experiences, including more overt forms of sexual violence that I don’t care to list here because I’d rather lose myself in other people’s stories than relive my own.

At this point, Amit sank into the booth, wanting me to know that, so far, he had not enjoyed CrimeCon. “Pedophiles, rape, it’s not for me,” he said, sounding proud of himself.

“It’s interesting,” Stacy began carefully, hypothesizing that perhaps part of the reason she and Natalia gravitated toward crime stories was not necessarily because they loved rape and murder and pedophilia, but because being a woman leads to trauma, and exposing oneself to other people’s traumas helps to make sense of one’s own experiences, to contextualize them, and to find community. “For women, I think, especially when it comes to rape or sexual assault…I think we already kind of know about it?” she ventured, instinctively adding a question mark to the end of her sentence to soften its blow, just like Tammy of Shammy had done.

Amit interrupted her, “Wait, wait, wait, hold on,” but said nothing else.

“I think that’s why there might be way more women here than men,” I offered.

“Yeah, I saw the line to the restroom,” he joked back.

By 5 p.m. that evening, crowds that had gathered eight hours earlier showed no signs of thinning. One woman zoomed past me on her surgery scooter, pushing herself along with one good foot, unstoppable in her quest for more crime stories. Inside the Grand Ballroom, a huge audience awaited a presentation by the tenacious former prosecutor turned crime commentator Nancy Grace: “Mad as H*ll and We’re Not Gonna Take It Anymore.”

Like so many women at CrimeCon, Grace was driven into this space by unthinkable trauma. When she was 19 years old, Grace’s fiancé was murdered just before their wedding, a tragedy that catapulted Grace into a long, successful tenure as a special prosecutor in Atlanta (then known as the “murder capital” of America), after which came jobs at Court TV’s Closing Arguments (1997–2007), followed by other shows like Nancy Grace (2005–2016), and years punctuated by a slew of books, TV appearances, public speeches, and a podcast.

Grace’s CrimeCon presentations in particular are something to behold—“speeches” doesn’t quite capture the drama of her stagecraft, which feels more akin to performance art, good performance art, about a woman who fucking hates crime. At each recitation, Grace weeps fresh tears into the microphone, reliving her fiancé’s murder, bullet wound by bullet wound (his back, his neck, his face, with—those beautiful blue eyes), conducting her grief into furious dissections of contemporary criminal cases, followed by adulations of joy over her many blessings.

NANCY GRACE EMBODIES CRIMECON’S FEMININE ID, THE UNFILTERED VOICE OF 4,000 WOMEN’S COLLECTIVE RAGE AND SORROW.

The process involves lots of yelling from Grace, known in part for her brash Southern drawl—bellowing sometimes in anger (“They saw their mommy’s head blow up like a pumpkin!”) but also sometimes in joy (“One of the happiest moments of my day is when I take the twins to school!”). Her eyes flash. Her nose runs. The fringe on her leather blazer trembles with every emotional turn.

The night before, Molly and Kirsten had warned me of Grace’s intensity. “The most memorable experience of CrimeCon last year, for me, was the unhinged quality of Nancy Grace’s session,” applauded Kirsten. “She was out of her mind.” Molly recalled how Grace had railed against “illegal immigrants,” prompting the women in her audience to rejoice, “‘God bless you, Nancy!’”

“It felt like I was at some weird Republican convention,” Kirsten said, and Molly launched into an alarmingly accurate impersonation of Grace’s accent, all sliding vowels and loud consonants, exclaiming, “Good Southern gentleman. Good Southern girl. Good Southern young man.” When I observed that Grace might not be “up” on her “gender studies,” Molly quipped, “She’s not up on anything.”

“But she is up on volume studies,” wisecracked Kirsten, referring to Grace’s voice and voluminous bleached-blond hair.

While Kirsten considered Grace’s messaging to be problematic, bordering on dangerous, she nevertheless conceded her support as a fellow woman. “I love that you’re a lady and you’re successful. I’m glad. I’m happy,” she said of Grace. “The point is, she’s just wild in the mind,” Kirsten explained. But for Nancy Grace superfans, the “unhinged” quality of her talks is exactly what makes them so powerful.

Grace subscribes to old-school Christian standards of femininity: She cooks for her family five nights a week, prays over every meal, and painstakingly compiles at least three scrapbooks per year to commemorate Christmas, summer vacation, and the twins’ birthday—born two months premature when Grace was 48, a miracle that never ceases to amaze her. (After our interview, she urged me, “Get back to your babies!”) Her burning hatred for crime is easily mistaken for tough-on-crime politics, a dangerous movement that has ruined our juvenile justice system, drained taxes, disproportionately affected people of color and, studies have shown, raised recidivism rates.

But Grace is not a politician. She rallies for no cause other than emotional ventilation.

At her CrimeCon book signing—where an endless queue of women clutched copies of Grace’s book Don’t Be a Victim—I met several survivors, including Ashley and her wife, Kimalee, together 17 years. Kimalee had helped Ashley overcome the psychological scarring of child abuse. As lesbians, they were unbothered by Grace’s right-leaning politics, because what mattered to them more was that she screamed herself hoarse on behalf of victims, just as she once had in Atlanta, back when a male attorney called Grace an embarrassment to female prosecutors because she dared advocate for murdered women from a place of emotion. Ashley compared her to Olivia Benson, the fictional heroine on Law & Order: SVU; as a child, Ashley had fantasized that Benson might save her.

Today, Grace preaches to a different sort of jury, telling brutal true stories about dead women to massive audiences of women who, statistically, have likely been victimized themselves—and in that sense, although Grace might take issue with this characterization given the loathsome politicization of the term, she is a feminist.

“WHEN I WAS A KID, THERE WAS A SERIAL KILLER OPERATING IN MY HOMETOWN,” SAID RAMSLAND, “AND FRIENDS OF MY BROTHER’S FOUND THEFIRST BODY.” THE CROWD OOHED AND AAHED.

In a way, she embodies CrimeCon’s feminine id, the unfiltered voice of 4,000 women’s collective rage and sorrow.

As the unending line of Grace acolytes inched closer to their patron saint of trauma, a crying woman, Dornett Mullings, stepped from the front.

She had flown to Orlando with a stack of fliers bearing the face of her twin, Calvin. According to Mullings, he died under suspicious circumstances that the local police seemed intent to ignore.

Grace sat quietly at her folding table listening to Mullings’s story. That Dornett had traveled to CrimeCon to beg Grace to cover Calvin’s case on her podcast tugged at Grace’s heartstrings. That the two had been twins brought Grace to tears.

“We will do it,” she assured Mullings, promising to highlight Calvin’s story. “We will do it immediately.”

Mullings sobbed with sheer relief. Later she texted me that CrimeCon had been “the therapy I needed.”

“In two days, I got so much support from people who understood my emotions and my thoughts,” Mullings texted. “Even though the focus was on crime, there was an opportunity for grieving and healing for me.”

On the final day of CrimeCon, I visited Expo Hall. True-crime-related booths filled the space. Some repped podcasts, hawking free stickers, while others were manned by small businesses, marketing items ranging from “clitoris dolls” to self-defense weapons disguised as women’s handbags, hairspray canisters, and lipstick. Nearby stood a female mannequin wearing a gown of crime scene tape, her black and yellow skirt fluttering gently in the breeze from an air-conditioning unit.

Outside the Grand Ballroom, I bid goodbye to Molly and Kirsten. They’d spent just enough time at CrimeCon to get all the autographs they wanted, and next on their honeymoon was Tampa, followed by an Airbnb on the Gulf, where they hoped to see some manatees, Kirsten’s favorite animal.

As attendees wheeled suitcases past emptying event spaces, I found Stacy and Natalia at the Marriott bar, immersed in casual conversation with a fellow crime junkie and her dog photos. “We’re conducting our own interview,” Stacy joked, gesturing to the stranger, Ashley—who, incidentally, owned seven dogs and was currently at odds with the bartender over service of more mimosas. After coaxing him into pouring a beer, Ashley shared with us that she had escaped an abusive relationship at age 19, shortly after having her first child. As a survivor, she felt activated by true stories of domestic violence; Gabby Petito’s infamous traffic stop, in particular, had enraged her, especially when people insinuated online that Gabby should have been tougher or more vocal with police, who had handled the entire situation atrociously. In fact, being “tougher” or “strongheaded,” as Ashley described her younger self, “just makes it [the abuse] worse.” According to research, standing up to one’s oppressor can prove deadly to a woman suffering intimate partner violence; the most dangerous moment is when a woman tries to leave. Alternatively, a lack of support from law enforcement can also foster a “kill or be killed” mindset, driving some victims to murder their abusers.

“Because that’s what happens if you are a tough woman,” Natalia commiserated. “You’re probably going to end up being the one in trouble the rest of your life.” During her own abusive marriage, one of Natalia’s biggest anxieties had been the possibility of accidentally killing her husband in self-defense—hence her fascination with Snapped, a true-crime series that profiles women accused or convicted of murder, focusing on the violence that made them “snap.” “Not that I would do it,” she emphasized. Yet she related to the despair of seeing no other way out.

Natalia had wed at the tender age of 20 after courting a close friend under the watchful eye of a chaperone. “Everything was by the Bible,” she said, describing the community of Jehovah’s Witnesses in which she’d been raised. “Once we married, everything changed. He was a completely different person.” Natalia says she appealed to church elders, who warned that leaving her husband would result in excommunication. She did it anyway. After the divorce, Natalia lost everything—her friends, her family, her spirituality—and completely started over on her own.

Then she met Stacy, who had been raised Mormon. They related to each other’s experience of being “black sheep” in high-demand religions. And there were darker shared experiences too; outside the church, they had both suffered abuse at the hands of men. Clearly rattled by the memory, Stacy said to me, “I don’t think I wanna go back to that room.” Chiding herself, she added, “I didn’t even mean to talk about it.”

When asked what feelings arose when she tried to talk about it, Stacy hesitated before answering on behalf of herself, Natalia, Ashley, and perhaps all women embroiled in intimate partner violence: “I think the unfortunate thing is that we feel shame—we feel like somehow, we had something to do with it.” Even now, she was hardest on herself, contemplating, “What could I have done better? How did I put myself in that position?”

“And also, how they talk to you later, after the fact,” Stacy added, “because then [after the abuse, he says], ‘It didn’t happen the way that you thought it happened.’… And then you question yourself and what you really saw or felt. It’s just a spiral.” She trailed off, unwilling to go further, explaining that even remembering the abuse made her “red.”

Nobody understood that fire like Natalia, with whom Stacy had so much in common. Shortly after their meeting, Stacy recalled finding herself alone in a parking garage when, all at once, the enormity of that face-reddening abuse washed over her and she felt her knees buckle. The next thing she knew, she was sitting on the cold concrete floor with her back against the tire of somebody else’s car, crying uncontrollably—and despite not really knowing her that well, Stacy instinctively phoned Natalia, who showed up in what felt like zero seconds and held Stacy in her arms for an eternity. And then, sometime later, they binged the entire Casey Anthony trial, and everything started to feel better somehow.

It was a friendship forged in violence, empathy, and healing, one that carried them to CrimeCon, where the last recorded song to play over the intercom before Creighton Waters’s band took the stage had been “I Will Survive.”

Before leaving for the airport, I wandered the CrimeCon gift shop, passing up branded travel mugs and cheeky crop tops (“I’M ONLY HERE FOR AN ALIBI”) for a tote stamped with “I KNOW THINGS” in groovy pink lettering.

For whatever reason, the bag called to me. But I ended up putting it back. Too much of a conversation starter. Strange men no longer tried to rape me—but they still got in my way, subjecting me to lectures and other unwanted advances unimaginable to any man. Just that weekend, an Uber driver tried to buckle my seat belt. A male Marriott staffer forced me to guess, three times, the cost of my ramen noodles before agreeing to sell them to me at a discount, pressuring me to thank him. The next man I encountered cornered me at 1 a.m. to preach about his love of Marriott Bonvoy travel points before asking me whether I had children. I did not wish to increase the likelihood of such encounters by wearing “I Know Things” over one shoulder, inevitably prompting someone bearded to smirk, “So…what things do you know?” At which point I would need to respond (and who knew how long the stupid back-and-forth would last) all to preserve his fragile ego, because regardless of a woman’s age, you just never know who’s going to kill you.

But I’m alive, and I am lucky. As I write this, countless people, some of them only children, are being subjected to sex trafficking and enslavement, among other horrors. Eighty-nine thousand women and girls were murdered around the globe in 2022—one of the most violent years on record. People like the Afghan activist I recently met who told me she can never return home or the Taliban will kill her. Or Keeshae Jacobs, who went missing seven years ago, prompting her mother Toni to attend last year’s CrimeCon to raise awareness. Toni learned a few weeks before this story was published that Keeshae was murdered. The vast majority of these stories are never heard.

Later, I thought of the women of CrimeCon as I boarded my flight home. I was planning to write this story on the plane, but as I took my seat, my brain blitzed, short-circuited by all those traumas.

And so, to clear my head, I did what many women do.

I switched on a violent crime show.

About a victim I’d never met.

She’d been abducted to replace another woman who had, herself, been abducted to replace the one before her, and so on, like Russian dolls, each one killed and tossed aside like garbage when she could not satisfy their captor’s sick fantasies—until finally, the newest woman in the chain murdered their jailer on every woman’s behalf, breaking the cycle—and it relaxed me to go into this dark place, where all my troubles felt light in comparison.

My mind could finally start working.