On Halloween night in 1974, eight-year-old Timothy O'Bryan died after eating poisoned candy. What began as a terrifying case of suspected Halloween candy tampering soon revealed a far more disturbing truth.

A criminologist pushed ChatGPT into accepting a false confession using fabricated evidence. The experiment raises a harder question about what confessions really prove.

Violent crime in the United States has fallen 49% since 1993. Yet 77% of Americans believe it is rising. That gap is not ignorance — it is a product of a multibillion-dollar industry that packages real suffering as entertainment. From Netflix recreating a victim's courtroom breakdown without her consent, to a $10 million defamation verdict against a TikTok user who accused an innocent professor of murder, the cost of sensationalised true crime is measurable and growing.