True Crime

Finally, it’s that time of day when all the chaos has settled down. It’s 9:00 on a Tuesday night. No more kids fighting or asking a thousand questions. No more being pulled in different directions for multiple projects needing to be finished by tomorrow. The dinner dishes have been washed and the kitchen is clean. The kids are in bed and the husband is working late. It is just me, a glass of wine, and the remote control.

I turn on the television and the ROKU home screen pops up. I instinctively and subconsciously go right to the ID GO app first. Mind you, I have already seen almost everything on here worth watching, so I am trying to see if there is anything that is interesting to me. I scroll through the series that are on the home page of the app. Hometown Homicide, Killer Kids, See No Evil, and Evil Lives Here are a few of the series that are featured. I find there aren’t any episodes of the series I like that I haven’t already seen.

Saddened, I then go back to the ROKU home page and go to the NBC app to see if there are any other Dateline episodes I may have missed. When I realized they all say “WATCHED”, I am disappointed.

My next option is to see what Netflix has to offer. I immediately check to see what true crime documentaries there are to watch. After wasting about 20 minutes of my precious time, I settle on watching Forensic Files. Knowing I have already binged this whole series, I choose an episode I have watched before. I sit and enjoy watching this episode as if it is the first time I have ever seen it.

Now, I am not a morbid person, I am not emo or gothic, I am not homicidal, nor do I have a fascination about death itself. I think where my intrigue lies is with the mystery and the motive behind why people do what they do. I like to try and understand the psychology behind why killers feel they have the right to take precious lives.

I like how true crime shows take you from beginning to end within the time frame allotted. Most shows have a resolution at the end which gives the watcher instant gratification of a result. It can take days, weeks, months, or even years for some cases to get solved. We, as watchers, get to put ourselves inside the detectives and investigators shoes for the entirety of the segment and learn what took them so much time and work to accomplish.

I have always been interested in psychology. I even attempted to go back to school for a Psychology degree to be able to help and counsel people. The main reason for my decision to start taking classes in psychology was a famous shooting at a movie theater in my city.

My husband and I moved to Aurora, Colorado in October of 2010. We had been to the Aurora Town Center Theater several times. We even attended several midnight showings of new release movies at that theater. On Friday, July 20, 2012, we talked about going to the midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises before it was released to the public the next day. My husband pointed out that he had had a busy day and wasn’t feeling up to the late-night movie. So, we passed on going to the theater that night.

In the middle of the night, our phones were bombarded with phone calls and text messages from our friends and family. They were reaching out to make sure we were safe and to inform us about what happened.

James Holmes, a psychopath, set out to inflict as much harm as possible and to take out as many casualties as he could on that summer night at the Aurora Theater. In a matter of minutes, he killed 12 people and injured 70 others. He even booby-trapped his apartment anticipating the authorities’ arrival. He also sent a notebook detailing his intentions to his psychiatrist the day before.

It occurred to me this was an incident that hit really close to home. The thought that we could have been there that night was frightening. However, my thoughts were more on being helpful and sympathetic rather than being afraid. At that time, I wished I were a counselor to help those people understand and cope with what they were just exposed to.

I had always been interested in true crime, but this event made me want to understand the reasoning behind why someone would want to do something like this. Psychology takes an in-depth investigation into the brain and how it operates. I found the development of the brain is the most interesting part because everything stems from it, even as young as newborn age; the age when the brain is just starting to form and take shape.

Although, the interest in psychology was still there, my life took a different turn. I was required to change my focus because in the next two years, my husband and I had two little girls. I have used the little knowledge I was able to attain from psychology classes to help me better understand my children and their needs. So, I became Supermom and have not looked back since.

I still love to indulge in true crime shows, though, to capture a small glimpse of how it really feels to catch the killer and close the case.