How to Ethically Engage with True Crime: Reddit and the Doe Network

In an age where high-brow true crime content is released every couple of weeks, Redditors have figured out a way to ethically interact with it.

BY: MICHELLE KRASOVITSKI

In December of last year—when COVID-19 was but a neurotic whisper—a three-episode true-crime docuseries was released by Netflix, which immediately captured my attention. I’ve been a long-time consumer of true-crime content, going from podcast to documentary to novel, depending on what was available, and so my dropping everything to watch it was not out of the ordinary. But, before I even pressed play on episode one, I knew that this series would be different. This series would hit close to home. While the other cases I had binged largely occurred thousands of miles away from me, across international borders if not oceans altogether, this one took place in my very own city. Or rather, part of it did. 

Don’t F**k with Cats (DFWC) is a documentary series chronicling the many crimes and eventual capture of Luka Magnotta. Though it’s healthy to have skepticism about any media content you consume—especially if it’s a documentary, a genre where biases can be easily masked as objective fact —I immediately felt repulsed by the philosophy and the driving motivation of the docuseries. 

You see, despite the fact that Magnotta is Scarborough-born and the murder he committed occurred in Montreal, the main narrators of the series are two internet-sleuths from Las Vegas. Sat in their armchairs, an entire country away from where Chinese student Lin Jun was murdered back in 2010, John Green (an obvious pseudonym) and Deanna Thompson recall how, in their attempt to hunt down the maker of several cat snuff videos, they stumbled across Luka Magnotta. 

They explain that they used every internet avenue possible, from Reddit to GoogleMaps, to try to identify the person murdering cats in popular videos on the dark net. They feared that he would move on to murdering humans, which is what fueled their intense online pursuit. But while they do ultimately end up on Magnotta—not without first misidentifying him—their detective work plays no part in the eventual dramatic capture of Magnotta.

And so the choice to have Green and Thompson narrate Magnotta’s case is a puzzling one, especially since the homicide detectives who were actually active in the investigation, were also interviewed in the documentary and could have made for more reliable narrators. Green and Thompson’s spotlight is indicative of two things. First, we are beginning to experience an oversaturation of true-crime content, especially in the form of docuseries. It isn’t enough to just show a novel crime story anymore, the very narrators of the story need to be novel themselves. Making a Murderer, The Staircase, even this year’s Tiger King, are all narrated by lawyers and detectives, if not the subjects themselves or their families. To stand apart from its contemporaries, DFWC evidently rationed they needed to approach The Crime Story from a different angle. 

This leads us to the series’ second revelation, which is arguably its most compelling: regardless of their futility, there is something inherently interesting and engaging about armchair detectives. We, as spectators, are drawn to those on the periphery, those in the same position as us who—contrary to our own actions—choose to take agency over a specific situation. It is easy to feel anger at the injustice portrayed on screen; it is much harder to do something about it. 

While Green and Thompson come off as pretentious and ineffective, trying to take credit for a bust they had nothing to do with, not all internet sleuths’ efforts prove futile. In fact, some cases would not be solved were it not for the efforts of regular civilians with access to Reddit, a social media network made up of thousands of forums—called “subreddits”—where anyone is free to contribute.

Reddit is home to forums dedicated to everything from dead malls to cute animals, but it is the subreddit r/gratefuldoe that is especially interesting. No one posts pictures of dilapidated shopping centres or chipmunks with overstuffed cheeks in r/gratefuldoe; no, this forum was incepted with the sole intention of identifying Jane and John Does. 

Although, in the very beginning, there was only one Doe: the titular Grateful Doe. 

Jane Doe and John Doe are the stand-in names given to dead bodies that are unable to be identified. Most of these Jane and John Doe profiles are documented in the Doe Network, a network concerned with spreading information about these unknown individuals in hopes that it will help identify them. A profile usually consists of basic descriptors such as height and weight, as well as unique attributes, such as the clothing the Doe was wearing or any tattoos or scars they may have. The profile also contains contact information for the officers in charge of the case. So reads the Doe Network’s mission statement: “it is our mission to give the nameless back their names and return the missing to their families.” 

And it was in 2015 that an Australian woman named Layla Betts found the John Doe profile of a man from Virginia who was killed in a car accident twenty years earlier and was yet to be identified. Betts compiled the information available to her—a civilian in a country halfway across the world from the United States—and made the first post about the Grateful Doe, named so after the Grateful Dead shirt that he was found wearing. She also created the subreddit in his namesake, to amplify his case as well as those of other Jane and John Does’. 

Photo courtesy of Greymetal

With a blocked-letter title of “Can you help give him back his name?,” the profile estimated the Doe’s age and included pictures of his tattoo, his shoes, his shirt, and the ticket stubs that were found in his possession; tickets to two Grateful Dead concerts in Washington DC. The Doe died in a car accident, where he was the passenger. The driver, who was also killed, was identified, but due to the extent of his injuries, the Doe wasn’t. 

Shortly after her post, Betts was contacted by someone who believed that the man in the composite sketch resembled his former roommate. After receiving this tip and getting a potential name, Betts searched for the possible victim’s family to verify his identity. It was confirmed that the Grateful Doe was 19-year-old  Jason Callahan, once Betts was able to get in touch with Callahan’s step-sister, who gladly agreed to take a DNA test. 

Since then, members of the subreddit—along with the r/unresolvedmysteries subreddit and the Websleuths community—have tried their best to develop and spread information about unidentified victims. 

Granted, it is not unusual for civilians to be involved in criminal cases—take the capture of family annihilator John List as an example. List ran off after murdering his entire family in 1971 only to be caught 18 years later when America’s Most Wanted aired an episode dedicated to his case, showcasing a bust depicting what an aged-List would look like. 

Image: Frank Bender working on the List bust, screenshot taken from Forensic Files season 1, episode 12 (aired December 12, 1996) -- available on YouTube

Unsolved Mysteries, a show which originally aired from 1987 to 2010 and was recently rebooted by Netflix, also attempted to engage audiences in order to solve cold cases. This type of show is not unique to North America: there is Efterlyst in Sweden, Police Report in Hong Kong, Linha Derita in Brazil, and Crime Watch in Trinidad and Tobago. 

The difference between civilian-engagement in shows like America’s Most Wanted and the detective-work done on Reddit is that the former is an appeal to the public for information—not meant to galvanize independent investigating—while the latter is amateur-sleuthing. And, as there has been much debate about the ethics in consuming true crime content—arguing that turning to crime stories as a form of entertainment is disrespectful to victims’ families—there are also instances of misidentification in amateur-investigating perpetrators. The most famous case being that of Reddit’s hunt for the Boston bombers back in 2013. 

After a tragic bombing shook spectators and participants alike in the 117th annual Boston Marathon held in April of 2013, Reddit users scrambled to find the perpetrators, starting a now-defunct subreddit called r/findbostonbombers. The subreddit posted breaking news moments after it was released and was mainly concerned with identifying the grainy, hoodied figures dropping off backpacks near the finish line, which contained the bombs. The Reddit users behind the “most crowdsourced terror investigation in American history” misidentified the perpetrators several times, the most egregious instance being when they claimed that 22-year-old Sunil Tripathi was one of the men behind the bombing because he had been missing since March. A deceased Tripathi would be found only days later. This misidentification, as well as the harassment Tripathi’s family received, resulted in a rare letter of apology from Reddit’s then-General Manager Erik Martin. 

Even in Don’t F*** with Cats, Thompson and Green, and their Facebook group of sleuths, initially misidentified Magnotta as being a man from Namibia. Thompson and Green claim that they tried to steer the other members of the group away from the Namibian man, referred to as “Jamesy”—a statement that cannot be verified as no other group member was interviewed for the docuseries—but the fact remains that an innocent man was incessantly bullied, eventually taking his own life. 

And so, given the Boston situation and that of Jamesy, it may seem that civilian-involvement in crime cases results in more bad than good. The key difference between the members of r/findbostonbombers and r/gratefuldoe is that one was concerned with finding a perpetrator while the other is concerned with giving a lost person their name back—without placing much emphasis on their death. The Does profiled in the Doe Network are mainly victims of accidents, suicides, or natural disasters—though there are a number of murder victims as well—and are usually runaways or individuals from marginalized communities. 

One of the main criticisms of Don’t F*** with Cats was that victim Lin Jun was lost amidst the glamorized depictions of internet-sleuthing and amateur-investigating. Indeed, many ethical quandaries arise within true crime content when the spotlight is directed at a perpetrator—or his investigators—instead of the victim. There are many avenues from which it is possible to garner fame in our modern day; more and more, people are turning to true crime to gain it. 

This is why r/gratefuldoe is a community that can actually be commended, as it holds the important distinction that its users largely remain anonymous; Layla Betts was known as user “zombiegrey” before granting an interview to Boston radio station WBUR in 2018. The users are not concerned with fame nor is their end-goal to star in a Netflix documentary, they simply want to give answers to families who are left in the dark. 

As we navigate the increasingly-muddying waters of true crime documentaries and podcasts—ones that seem to be springing up every couple of months if not weeks—we have to start reckoning with what role we play in the fabric of the genre. If sleuths are seeking out fame, misidentifying individuals, and invading victims’ families’ privacy in the process, are we not their target audience— the people who they do this for? 

There is still much for us to consider and deliberate within the true crime genre, but a good base start is the belief that anything—whether it is content that we passively consume or actively involve ourselves in—that is not centered on bringing peace to a victim and their family, is content that is dirtied.