True crime has a strange problem.
The person at the center of the story—the person whose life was actually taken—can sometimes become the least remembered person in it.
The killer gets a name people recognize. The investigation becomes a puzzle. The crime becomes a documentary, a podcast, a headline, or a mystery people debate for decades.
And somewhere along the way, the victim can disappear.
Author and journalist Alexandra Kitty has spent years thinking about that problem. Her book Murder in a Sundown Town examines the 1968 murder of Carol Jenkins and the forces that allowed her story to remain unresolved for decades.
At the heart of Kitty's approach to true crime is something deceptively simple:
Empathy.
Carol Jenkins Was More Than a Murder Victim
Carol Jenkins was 21 years old when she was murdered in Martinsville, Indiana, in 1968.
She had been selling encyclopedias door-to-door when she was stabbed in the heart with a screwdriver.
Her murder would remain unsolved for more than four decades.
But telling Carol's story means looking beyond the circumstances of her death.
It means remembering that before she became the subject of a murder investigation, she was a person.
That distinction matters.
True crime often asks us to focus on what happened.
Victim-centered true crime asks us to remember who it happened to.
Which Victims Become Stories?
Carol's case also raises a larger and more uncomfortable question:
Why do some victims become household names while others barely enter the public consciousness?
Race matters.
Gender matters.
Class matters.
Geography matters.
The assumptions reporters, investigators, communities, and audiences make about victims matter too.
Carol was a young Black woman murdered in Martinsville, Indiana, while working door-to-door in 1968. Understanding her story requires understanding the racial climate surrounding her death as well as the crime itself.
It also means looking at the way stories are selected and remembered.
Some cases receive years of television coverage, documentaries, podcasts, books, and renewed investigations.
Others fade.
That difference isn't always about how compelling or mysterious a case is. Sometimes it reflects whose life a culture has decided is worthy of sustained attention.
The Responsibility of True Crime
There is an ethical question underneath all of this.
What responsibility does a writer have when another person's worst day becomes the story they're telling?
For Kitty, the answer begins with refusing to treat victims as props in someone else's drama.
True crime can easily become centered on the perpetrator: Why did they do it? How did they get away with it? What was happening inside their mind?
Those can be legitimate questions.
But they shouldn't erase the person whose life was taken.
That means examining the racism, sexism, gossip, silence, institutional failures, and cultural assumptions surrounding a case—not simply reconstructing the mechanics of a crime.
It also means resisting the temptation to flatten a victim into a symbol.
Carol Jenkins had a life before the moment that made her name part of a murder case.
Remembering that changes the way the story is told.
Telling the Stories History Overlooks
One of the most valuable things true crime can do is return attention to people and cases history has overlooked.
Not because every case can be solved.
Not because every unanswered question has a dramatic revelation waiting at the end.
But because being remembered matters.
When true crime is at its best, it can do more than ask who committed a crime.
It can ask whose stories were ignored, why they were ignored, and what we lose when the victim disappears behind the mystery.
And sometimes, telling the story again is itself an act of remembrance.