AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Our next story plays with the line between fact and fiction. It begins with a mysterious video.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
AUTOMATED VOICE: Today, we uncover the tragic and complex story of Richard Engelbert, a successful real estate agent whose hidden life and secrets led to his brutal murder.
CHANG: The crime had supposedly taken place in a city outside Denver more than a decade ago - or that's what viewers were led to believe. Reporter Henry Larson picks up the story from here for our regular segment of short-form audio documentaries.
HENRY LARSON: Elizabeth Hernandez had never heard about the case of Richard Engelbert. She's a reporter at The Denver Post, and back in August, people started sending her newsroom a bunch of emails all about this one YouTube video.
ELIZABETH HERNANDEZ: My editor said, like, hey, we're getting these messages. We have this thing from a tip line. Do you want to look at this video?
LARSON: The video was called "Husband's Secret Gay Love Affair With Stepson Ends In Grizzly Murder." Almost 2 million people had watched it.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
AUTOMATED VOICE: The truth about Richard's life and death had been revealed, but the scars left behind would take much longer to heal. The trial of...
LARSON: That stilted narration was accompanied by these hazy images of houses against some mountains, and headshots of suspects and victims.
Can you describe to me the tips? What did they say?
HERNANDEZ: At least one of them said something along the lines of, why hasn't The Denver Post covered this?
LARSON: What did you feel when you read that?
HERNANDEZ: Rage.
LARSON: Rage - because this crime readers were writing in about and blaming her paper for missing actually hadn't happened.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
HERNANDEZ: To me, it was very evident that it was not real pretty quickly. I was at The Denver Post in 2014 and probably would have remembered a very salacious case like this.
LARSON: She called law enforcement sources and quickly confirmed her suspicions. The video was fake - the characters, the plot, the narrator all generated by AI.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
LARSON: The video belonged to a YouTube channel called True Crime Case Files (ph). It was one of more than 150 videos on the page. A lot of them were hyper-sexual or hyper-violent. None of them were real. They'd all been created with AI and pretended to be about real places and people, and commenters were buying it.
JOHN: The point is, it needs to be called true crime because true crime is a genre. It's not just two words melded together. It's a genre - true crime.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
LARSON: Can you tell me your name?
JOHN: My name's John (ph).
LARSON: And John, that's your real first name?
JOHN: Yes, that's my real first name.
LARSON: And we're not using your last name, right?
JOHN: Yes, we're not.
LARSON: John and I started talking late last year. He was reluctant to go on the record, but agreed to chat over the phone in December. John said he started receiving hate mail and threats a while ago because of his videos, so NPR isn't using his last name to protect his identity. I was really fascinated with this whole operation. There are lots of people who lie on the internet, but it felt like John was lying in a brand-new way. It started after he graduated college, when the pandemic was in full swing.
JOHN: Me and my family - 'cause I was saying with my family then - we were - ended up binge-watching "Dateline." Because you know that there's, like, 20 seasons of "Dateline." Each was, like, 40 episodes. So, I mean, there's - you can watch it for hours and hours.
LARSON: John taught himself the show's formula - a scandalous affair, some brutal crime and a stunning trial of a perpetrator to bring things home. Around this time, John also started trying out ChatGPT. He experimented with making parodies of another kind of super-formulaic content - Hallmark movies. He uploaded these videos with titles like "Romance And Reindeer" (ph) to YouTube. They were pretty simple, but John also made sure to include a note on each one disclosing that they were AI-generated.
Why'd you stop?
JOHN: Well, because I realized it didn't do well. And I labeled it AI parody, and it didn't do well. I think the best one maybe got 20 views.
LARSON: The lesson John learned was that people wouldn't watch videos tagged as AI-generated. Then, around Thanksgiving two years ago, John also realized he could combine his AI video knowhow with what he learned watching all that "Dateline," and True Crime Case Files was born. This time, though, there was no mention that videos were made up or that they used AI. For months, he cranked out these videos, uploading sometimes two or three a week. He got about 100,000 subscribers, and his videos sometimes got 10 times that number in views. He told me he was making enough to live on.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
LARSON: Here's the thing that made me keep calling John. He believes what he's doing is better than real true crime because his stories don't use the suffering of real people as content.
JOHN: At the end of the day, true crime, no matter how much it's dressed up as, we care about the victims or is this about finding justice, it's a form of entertainment.
LARSON: Yeah. But, I mean, if you are so critical of true crime, and if it's causing all these problems in the world, why are you making it?
JOHN: I'm creating an alternative to it because in this way, people can have all the luridness they want, but it's not hurting people. So I see of myself sort of like the vegan alternative to true crime.
LARSON: Lots of people agree with John about this part - that true crime, popular as it is, has real problems. A 2003 study in the Journal of Communications showed people who watch violent, dramatic television news were more worried about crime. Nationwide, violent crime has been declining for decades, and yet polling consistently shows Americans believe crime is rising. Considering the tip sent to The Denver Post, some locals believed John's video, too. For some of John's critics, that's a problem.
CHARLIE SHUNICK: I found myself in this world on May 19, 2012, when my sister, Mickey Shunick, went missing. She was abducted and murdered by a stranger. It was a really high-profile case for the time.
LARSON: That's Charlie Shunick. These days, she's a missing persons advocate. Charlie estimates there have been thousands of videos, documentaries and podcasts all made about her sister's death. She knows from her own experience that real true crime can revictimize survivors. But as long as John keeps pretending his videos are true, she thinks he isn't any better.
SHUNICK: The fact that people are calling in about these fake cases is one of the things that just enrages me. It's so hard, especially for cold case or long-term missing person cases, to get any type of attention and support and sometimes to even get law enforcement or media to respond to a call, email, DM. And the fact that they're going to dedicate time and resources to fake cases because the people making these don't have the decency to say that they're not real, it's infuriating.
LARSON: When you press John about all this, though, about the kind of impact his videos might have, it falls flat.
Do you have misgivings about what you do?
JOHN: No, I don't. It's an absurdist art form. If people don't understand it, that says a lot about human nature and their own natures and the nature of true crime. And perhaps they're not willing to question themselves. But I don't have any misgivings about what I'm doing.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
LARSON: While reporting this story, I went to YouTube for comment about John's videos. A few days later, they told me they had deleted his channel, not because the videos were made by AI or that he lied about them being true, they were deleted for violating policies prohibiting child sexual exploitation. John disputes this. He says all of his characters were over the age of 18. But John's still making content. He uploads the stories as podcasts now, and he has copycats. YouTube channels with names like Hidden Family Crime Stories, True Crime Cases (ph) and Crime Tapes are pumping out more and more AI-generated true crime videos every day.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
CHANG: That was reporter Henry Larson. A version of this story first appeared in 404 Media. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
