True Crime expert weighs in on HBO show

By J. Wesley Judd

Criminologist and author Michael Arntfield, BA'05, MA'07, PhD'11, talked to Pacific Standard recently about the HBO six-part documentary series The Jinx, which re-investigated the three murders that New York real estate millionaire Robert Durst had been suspected of. It came to a dramatic conclusion last Sunday. The Jinx built off the momentum established by Serial, last year’s episodic true crime podcast from NPR’s Sarah Koenig.

Arntfield was a police officer and detective for 15 years before he got his PhD in digital media with a focus on technological crime. Now, as a professor of forensic writing and investigative reporting at Western University in Ontario, and the founder of the Cold Case Society, a criminological think tank that he describes as “a RAND Institute for murder,” he has become a leading voice in true crime.

Pacific Standard spoke with Arntfield to get a better sense of the history of true crime, what this renaissance means for the genre, and whether The Jinx’s finale sets a dangerous precedent.