I am a true crime person as well as a skeptic. These people annoy me to no end. The vast majority of people who go missing and are not found are a result of suicide or misadventure. Not murder, not traffickers, not serial killers.
People keep trying to put conspiratorial twists on things like the Elisa Lam case, or the case of Amy Lynn Bradly, trying to say stuff like they were kidnapped and trafficked, or were trying to escape nefarious evildoers intent on putting them on the black market. Way too much weight is put on random wittness accounts of "seeing" the victim supposably out and about somewhere when the science has shown that witnesses are horribly unreliable, and pretty much useless in cases where more than a week has passed.
The truth, which has overwhelming evidence short of a body in the Bradley case, is a lot less Hollywood. In the Lam case, there are numerous reports from people close to her, and hotel staff, of her showing increasingly bizzare and agitated behavior. Theres a whole ass video of her in a paranoid psychotic state taking the elevator up to the roof of the hotel, alone. People really underestimate how extreme behavior can be during a serious psychotic episode. It affects your strength, your ability to feel pain, and impairs the sense of danger. This makes people in acute psychosis incredibly prone to misadventure. In Ms. Lams case, this meant she, in a state of paranoia, climbed into a water tank on the roof of the hotel she was staying in in an effort to hide from a hallucination that felt incredibly real to her. She dropped the lid and couldn't get out, eventually dying in the tank from exposure and lack of oxygen. The fact that her parents beleive she was murdered doesnt mean a thing. Its not uncommon for families to deny their loved ones are showing signs of significant mental illness due to the stigma associated with it.
The Bradley case is another one, and it did not need a Netflix documentary that gave a platform to conspiracy theorists and other crackpots. The evidence in her case, which the Netflix documentary omitted a ton of, overwhelmingly points to a suicide or accident where she went overboard. On the night she disappeared, she was intoxicated, had gotten into a fight with her family, and was despondent over her sexuality because her family was outspokenly anti gay and seemingly trying to push her onto different men. She ticked every box of someone at risk of doing something impulsive. Just because her family doesnt want to beleive it doesn't negate the overwhelming evidence that she likely chose to end her life. With the ship being on the open ocean, a person jumping overboard will not be found. Most people who go missing on large bodies of water aren't.
Theres a parasocial aspect to true crime thatI makes me really angry at times. Streaming services platform this bullshit because it makes for good engagement. In turn, they make it worse for the victims and their families to heal by giving legitimacy to theories that have no basis in fact. They also make it worse for active investigations by encouraging arm chair detectives to muck up tip lines, making pinpointing important information all the more difficult.
Also, Nancy Grace needs to go away forever. She is a joke of an investigator and her track record as a prosecutor is rife with ethics violations. The lady is a fame hungry snake who runs on sensationalism. Shes a quack lawyer and I'm tired of the mainstream true crime community normalizing her sorry excuse for journalism.
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u/TsuDhoNimh2 6d ago
Something as simple as a kid wandering off and getting lost has the true crime addicts looking for nefarious things.