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If Dateline and Unsolved Mysteries kickstarted the mainstream obsession with true crime, podcasts have reinvigorated it. Nowadays, Spotify and Apple’s top shows brim over with podcasts of murder, mystery and missing person cases that have kept us up at night. But few scratch that true crime itch like Crime Junkie.
Ranked Apple Podcasts’ No. 1 show in 2022 and 2023, Crime Junkie unfolds each week with best friends and award-winning hosts Ashley Flowers and Brit Prawat, who bring new research and perspective to infamous cases. The podcast has expanded its reach since debuting in 2017, adding investigative journalists to its team and establishing a strong YouTube presence.
The Weekly spoke with Flowers and Prawat ahead of their live show at Resorts World on May 17.
Why are people so obsessed with true crime? It feels like the interest increases more every day.
Ashley Flowers: Maybe it’s just because I’ve always been a crime junkie, but I don’t feel like it’s increasing because my circle has been into it for so long.
Brit Prawat: It’s the access.
AF: Yeah, it feels like there’s more access. It’s more mainstream. I also think with the podcast … seeing people who feel like you, who aren’t these experts, talk about these cases, is making the cases themselves feel more accessible.
BP: And more relatable.
AF: I can’t speak for why everyone else listens, but when I used to just be a consumer, I was obsessive about my own safety and so much of listening or watching true crime was about what went wrong.
BP: It’s almost educational.
What were your early introductions to true crime?
AF: Early on to start, it wasn’t true crime. It was a lot of fiction. When I was really little, like 8, my mom was reading me Nancy Drew and Agatha Christie.
BP: Around that same time … that’s when JonBenét [Ramsey] happened, and we were at tabloid height when she was murdered. That’s really formative to see a little kid who looks like you, who’s your age, your sister’s age, and something terrible happened to them. That stays in your brain in a way that changes you. And both of our moms watched Dateline and everything growing up.
AF: I would religiously watch America’s Most Wanted. I used to say John Walsh was my first boyfriend because we spent every Saturday night together.
Is there a particular case that still nags at you or keeps you up at night?
AF: I always say that there isn’t one. My superpower is I have the details of every case just in my brain. I can retell a story I told a year ago. It’s almost like they’re on rotation, and they’ll just pop up when I’m reminded, or completely out of nowhere. Usually there’s two or three cases that, with our reporters, we’re doing a deep dive investigation. That one becomes all-consuming at the moment.
BP: Any of the missing people cases. If you drop the name, I’m like, Oh my gosh, but where are they? I spiral on that one.
AF: Yeah, missing people is what I was always most drawn to.
You do an exhaustive amount of research on these cases and a lot of them aren’t happy stories. How do you decompress from intense cases?
AF: I do think some people are built for it. I think it’s why people find themselves in law enforcement and forensics and journalism. I feel like I’m built for it in a certain way. We just got a case file right, and the thing I can’t wait to do is go right back into it. But if we get to the point where we need to turn off our brains, I’m newly into reality TV.
BF: Especially on tour, we’ve been binging trashy reality dating shows [laughs].
AF: We just did Temptation Island.
BP: One thing that helps with the content we do is we don’t just sit in it. A lot of what we do is advocacy work. So as dark and as heavy as it is, there is this sort of glimmer of hope or action behind it that makes it feel less hopeless for me.
AF: When we started the show, it was all about creating true crime differently, consuming it differently because as a consumer, I was like, I can’t just sit in it. Before I ever had this, I was volunteering with Crime Stoppers and stuff because I had to find a way to give back. So much of what I think makes it easy for us is the fact that we’re trying to do good on the end of it.
And there are times when people do get found and families do get justice. Your podcast has played a part in that, like in the case of Father Patrick Ryan that was solved.
AF: That’s when the wins are really big and they change someone’s life.
Some people feel true crime glamorizes murder and exploits it for profit. What would you say to those people?
AF: I would have them look at our team. It’s a podcast, but it’s a new form of news and journalism. We have an entire team of researchers, reporters and fact checkers. I would have them point to any other news organization and say, “Well, it’s the same as them.” We’re talking about things that need to be talked about, that nobody’s talking about, and we’ve put in all the time and resources to make sure we’re doing it the right way.
What will the show at Resorts World be like?
AF: It’s going to feel like what people imagine for an episode. We’re sitting in a living room on the stage. I’m telling a story. This is a story that we started a year and a half ago investigating. Our reporting team went out, and we sent out a documentary team as well. We filmed some of the detectives involved, the victim’s brother and other people involved in the case. It’s part podcast where you see me telling a story and interacting with the audience …
BP: And part documentary.
AF: It’s an experience you can only get live.
BP: To be able to sit with an audience, reacting to it with each other is really something special and something we love experiencing, I think, just as much as our audience does.
It almost feels like you’re the next generation of Dateline. What’s next?
AF: The simplest version for Crime Junkie is more stories, more places. We are doing all of our episodes on YouTube now, so we’re filming every single one, and we are looking at what would this look like in a TV investigative format? Because I think that’s completely different from the YouTube version of this. The chops we have on our reporting team are incredible. The stories that we’re telling, how do we give them an even bigger platform and tell stories maybe that don’t work for podcasts and need a visual format? I think it gives us the opportunity to do that more.
CRIME JUNKIE PODCAST: LIVE May 17, 8 p.m., $45-$180, Resorts World Theatre, axs.com.
English (US) ·