True crime, where there’s nothing hotter than a cold case

September 27, 2026 / 10:02 AM EDT / CBS News

Crime rates in America may be falling, but the appetite for true crime coverage? That's never been bigger. And this fall, there's plenty for fans of the topic to choose from, whether it's streaming (like Netflix's "Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story"), podcasts ("Crime Junkie"), popular broadcast series (CBS News' own "48 Hours"), the big screen ("By Any Means"), and even good old-fashioned Court TV, it's practically everywhere.

And the fixation isn't new. Many trace the genre's mass appeal back to the 1960s, when Truman Capote wrote "In Cold Blood" about the murder of the Clutter family in Kansas. "I read Truman Capote's 'In Cold Blood' when I was probably 17, 18; it hit me as no other book has ever hit me," said Jean Murley, a professor at the Savanah College of Art and Design, who studies the true crime phenomenon. "I just became more and more fascinated with it – the sort of drama, the fact that these stories were real, horrifying."

One such real and horrifying story was the hatchet-deaths Lizzie Borden was accused of back in 1892, which took place in the very Massachusetts house where we…

Original source: https://www.cbsnews.com/entertainment/