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Feeling Guilty Enjoying True Crime Stories
This past week I tore through HBO’s most recent true crime documentary, “Who Killed Garrett Phillips?” — a two part, roughly three-hour long deep dive into the murder of a 12 year old boy in Potsdam, New York, in 2011.
The story grabbed me from the moment it began: how the crime occurred in the blink of an eye, with no eye-witnesses; how the primary suspect — Nick Hillary — was an ex-lover of Phillips’ mom and a black man in a predominately white community; and how there’s no substantial evidence.
Like any good true crime doc, over the course of the three hours you’ll find yourself going back and forth wondering if Hillary actually did it or not. But if not Hillary, then who? And why?
It’s absolutely gut-wrenching knowing that a young kid died and there being no justice for his killer. Unsurprisingly, by the end I had dozens and dozens of questions about the case that I wanted answered. I took to Google; I took to Reddit; I spent a solid hour figuring out what the documentary left out, as well as possible theories.
One thing was clear — I was suddenly invested in a story that three-hours prior I knew next to nothing about.
But I also found myself feeling sort of apprehensive, kind of icky, about the whole thing.
