Guest: Ashley Flowers

True crime shows actually aren’t a new thing. They weren’t invented with podcasts. Who remembers being on the edge of our seats watching America’s Most Wanted back in the day or Dateline? Or there’s some newer, really amazing, true crime documentaries, like The Staircase or Making a Murderer–I mean who couldn’t tear their eyes away from Tiger King in 2020? There’s something compelling about the true crime genre and it’s not just the “we can’t look away from the car wreck” stereotype–it has a lot to do with how technology in crime solving has developed so rapidly in the last few decades and how fascinating it is that a single strand of hair or a carpet fiber, to say nothing of the digital maps that can be utilized now, like our cell phone records, our web history, can take us straight to the guilty party. It’s such an interesting, fascinating mix of science and sleuthing. True crime stories also highlight he best and the worst of human behavior. Plus, it puts us in the seat of being the detectives. Which one of us hasn’t yelled at a program or a podcast when we could see or hear who the perp obviously was (and yes, we now use terms like “perp,” like the true detectives we are). We’ve got an amazing guest who is here to talk about the true crime podcast phenom, and she’s one of the folks that really put it on the map. Ashley Flowers is the host of the wildly popular podcast, Crime Junkies. She and her co-host Brit have spent years researching, analyzing, and solving cases. And with over 1 billion downloads, it’s easy to say they are pretty good at what they do. So, you will not want to miss one second of this episode. Jen and Ashley get into how Crime Junkies got started, their thoughts on why the true crime genre is so popular and how Ashely’s using the platform to educate as well as entertain.