True crime is everywhere these days. Thanks to streaming services, podcasts, and social media, serial killers have more "fans" than ever. So how do these fans get their fix once they've binged the latest true crime documentary? The answer is googling real images from crime scenes.


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Everything is one click away thanks to the internet. And that now includes crime scene photos, police sketches, graphic images and more, all at your fingertips. Sites such as CrimeOnline, provide massive databases of crime podcasts, missing persons, and of course crime scene photos.


One of the newest internet trends is telling followers, "Do not google Jeffrey Dahmer's polaroids" and having the internet do the exact opposite.



Lest we forget about true crime merchandise.



At the end of the day, it's all a business.


The fascination with true crime at its core is simply this; we want danger in our lives, but at a safe distance. It's an oxymoron, but we as humans want to digest graphic material, gore, death, and murder while still controlling the fact that it isn't happening to us.


There's also an aspect to true crime stories that horror movies just don't supply. These crimes actually happened. Real-life, real people.


The latest Netflix biopic, Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story allows true crime fanatics to engage at a perfectly safe distance. All the while, truly horrific events (that actually happened in real life) are being shown to us in graphic fashion on our screens.


Social media pulls its weight in fueling our obsession with true crime as well. When I was a kid we had Unsolved Mysteries. But you couldn't live tweet about an episode you were watching. You couldn't jump on TikTok and post a video like Google Jeffrey Dahmer's Victims. That sort of interaction didn't exist. We also had to wait a week for another episode to air. Netflix has created an environment where viewers can binge-watch an entire documentary or show in a span of days - even hours.


We're living in the golden age of streaming, and the internet only feeds the fire of curiosity.