Crime Library

» see crimelibrary.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Crime Library was a reading habit, and the reading was english-language longform about american murders. that puts it a long way from where i was sitting. i was on a 33.6k modem in turkey when it launched, and the sort of page i loaded and waited for was a driver or a shareware download. Sitting through a forty-thousand word account of a 1970s serial case at that connection speed was never going to happen.

Marilyn J. Bardsley started it in january 1998 and the editorial idea was unusual for the web at that point. Instead of aggregating news reports she commissioned original long pieces from people who wrote true crime for a living, names like Katherine Ramsland and Anthony Bruno, and paid for the length. The pieces ran in chapters with photo galleries attached, some of them well over a hundred slides.

Court TV bought the site in 2001, the same year it picked up The Smoking Gun, and for a while the fit was obvious. The channel was running live trials during the day and the website was running the written version of the same appetite. Both were selling american crime as something you follow closely rather than something you catch on the news.

Then the channel changed its mind about what it was. Court TV became truTV on 1 january 2008 and the programming moved to bait cars and reality formats, and eventually toward comedy. a serious archive about murder victims did not sit well next to that, and the site was left running with less and less behind it. Updates stopped in august 2014 and the domain was gone by 2015.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

What it had was scale of a specific kind. Crime Library was one of the few places on the early web where a single case got fifteen thousand words with a structure and an editor behind it, rather than a fan page or a clipped newspaper column. that made it the default first result for a lot of case names for well over a decade.

The writer list is the part that gets forgotten. These were published authors doing paid work, and several of them used the site to lay out research that later turned into books. It functioned as a working market for true-crime writing at a moment when almost nothing on the web paid by the word.

~ what got buried with it ~

When the domain went, the commissioned work went with it. None of it was reprinted anywhere by the owner and the writers largely did not hold the rights to republish it themselves. What survives is whatever the Internet Archive happened to crawl, which is most of it but not in a form anybody can search properly.

The genre it was early to did not die at all, it moved. Serial and Making a Murderer arrived within a year or two of the shutdown, and the audience that Crime Library had been serving since 1998 turned out to be enormous. The site that proved there was a readership for it was already offline by the time the money showed up.

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