Graham Brown: I read somewhere that it's anecdotal, 80% of true crime podcast listeners are women. What do you think that is? Do you think that's true, firstly, and secondly, if that's the case, why?
Janne Aagaard: That's a very good observation. Well, I think the audience for true crime is mainly women and we know that not only from statistics and podcasts but also from readership from books. And I think there are more reasons for this. I think first and foremost, women are the victims of crime, especially violent crime, much more than men are or in different circumstances. And, I don't know if I should go all for a minister on you, but I, and I guess all the female friends I have all tried if not sexual assault then something like it. And also trying to be outmaneuvered or overpowered by men being stronger than us. So I think for many women, violence, especially sexual violence is a part of life or it's a fact of life and the whole true crime thing, I read that some psychologists suggest that we see horror movies in order to practice, being scared. And I think that is a very interesting way of looking at it that we are both coming to terms with our own fears while listening to it. But I think there's also a number of other reasons why true crime is so fascinating to us. One of the things I think is the safer we get, in our first-world countries and in our lives, the more intriguing crime becomes. It's one of the few things that we cannot plan for, we cannot be secure about. Where the rest of our lives is, it's very controlled and planned in so many ways. Our life expectancy is so long these days, and then there's the inherent good and evil. It's good stories. They attract us. We have always been people who enjoy, everybody loves a good story and these have good and evil characters. So it's very easy for the truest crime or anyone who listens to kind of place themselves within the goods of this story and it can make us all feel better because it emphasizes that we are good persons. And, on top of that I think it's just stories about, some will say there's two stories to be told overall in the whole world. One is, I wish it was me, like the lottery or whatever. And then the second one is, thank God it's not.
Graham Brown: Absolutely love it. Just so much true crime pot. My brother is, I've got an older brother and we're over an age now where we, that's when we speak to each other, we talk about what we watched on TV, Netflix, and pretty much what we both watch. Because we're both around about 50 I'm on the better side of 50 he's on the wrong side of 50 is mafia, movies and mafia, documentaries. And so I wonder as well, maybe when they talk about true crime, in being very popular as with women as well. There's also men consume it, but in a different way, like there's obsession with things like these sort of very masculine mafia movies. I don't want that, but the reasons are very different. I mean, the subjects are very similar. It's about killings and it's about the good and evil and it's about what, I think the interesting thing about mafia movies is that they're these characters who are compelled to do evil acts, even though deep down, they're very good people. That's the whole sort of way of portraying, isn't it? That they're victims of the system, if you like, but it still is like men consume that may be in different ways. That's just my psychological observation. So we don't feel victims of crime so much. Maybe we are enticed by the power of the mafia movies and all that aspect of it, but it's still true crime but in a different format.
Janne Aagaard: It would be so interesting to talk to men and women about their experience in true crime and then listing patterns. I would love to be on the side of data where I could sit and analyze and look into age groups and genders to see the differences because we have the readership numbers, but it doesn't tell us very much about why we do it and why did the gender gap or why the gender difference?
Graham Brown: I think you're right. Yeah. But why I'm just a theory, we don't as men, fear crime so much. It's not really, even though we don't experience it in the same way that women do. And therefore, the way we think about the crime is probably deferred. It seems like, we like gangster movies and mafia movies.
Janne Aagaard: There's another thing that you guys like, I know very few women who relish in seeing movies about the second world war, to be honest for me, that's a very male thing for me to do. So I think there is a gender gap for.
Graham Brown: I have watched them all, in color. I don't know it's like, okay, I've got six hours to spare. Let me just kind of, this thing like war, I mean like pretty much every war movie is or not documentary is told from the troops perspective. It's not told from the citizen’s perspective. So therefore it's very much pinning to men because it's about men. Like these are all documentaries and in times when only men fought. He doesn't tell the story.
Janne Aagaard: No, no, no, no. It is a very male gaze. And for many, many years, I think the spice young Shandra has also been with the male gaze, especially like I come on, I love James Bond movies, but that's because I like the whole idea of being undercover and being somewhere. But we are seeing an increased, you can tell an increased interest, from women in historical female figures, for instance, we made our female spies and we did it with a female audience at heart and there's no question that it's the women audience who haven't been told stories about what female herons can do. So I do think we're seeing a shift in the way we tell stories, but at the same time, I do fear that with all this data that the platforms have, we get to tell stories that are very catered for an audience and therefore might exclude another.
Graham Brown: Yeah, exactly. You get an echo chamber.
Janne Aagaard: Yeah. It gets very niche that you produce for a certain angle. I would say when I write stories, I don't write it with a male or female gaze. I would say, the first season of murders by the mid terrain, for instance, it was hard to ignore that most of the victims were women and that they were killed in the most cool ways and that the perpetrators were men. It was very rare, I was able to find female, and of course, so even though I don't think I necessarily bring a female gaze, it ended up being a very feministic show after all, without wanting to do that.
Graham Brown: Interesting. Well, we'll talk about that in a minute. Even when we do female killers, they tend to be glamorized and sexualized, don't they? By the media, it's almost like they're some seductive figure. Even the media twists.
Janne Aagaard: There's a lot of feminist research that suggests that female killers goes into two categories. They're either mad or they're bad. Whereas male killers tend to be able to kill for a multitude of reasons. It could be money, it could be organized crime. It could be a heist gone wrong, but there's more motifs being able to put on male killers than there is on women. I think the whole, a woman killing is kind of a betrayal of, women herd and the essence of the woman, which is in all times suspected to be a mother. And when she takes a life, it is the opposite of giving a life and therefore the most horrible thing that can be done. So, some of the stories I wrote, looked into how the women are being portrayed when they've done this and what happens to them afterward and how we actually might look at them today with a whole different perspective. There's clear that some of them were suffering from post-traumatic disorders, for instance. So you can also see, going to spend 30 or 40 years, how this has changed, how the way we look at female killers is changing.
Graham Brown: Yeah. So let's start at the top. Tell me about a true-crime series you've worked on, give me the pitch first, the blurb about the series. What's the through story in this series. Let's start with that and then maybe we can talk about why you were attracted to write about these stories. So, start with a title and then what's the blurb on this?
Janne Aagaard: My new series is called Murder down under, and it's a series, it's a true-crime series about Australian killings. And, I lived in Australia for a while and I took my master's there. And, for me, Australia is a very special country. I don't know if you know this, but serial killers, the top five countries with serial killers are almost only English-speaking countries, which I find is very weird. It's almost like you have to speak English to be a serial killer and Australia is a re-known for its many brutal murders. And already, when I lived there 15 years ago, I was wondering, what it was about Australia that produced so many serial killers and horrific killings. And, first of all, it's a huge country and that means that it's very easy. It's very, very easy to hide a dead body.
Graham Brown: That doesn't make it a good reason to do it, does it? So it's not like, oh you could hide a dead body over there. Well, maybe I could kill somebody now.
Janne Aagaard: But you have to think of it differently? I'm from Denmark and in Denmark, it's extremely hard to hide a dead body. Very, very few people go missing. We have a social security system that makes it almost impossible for people to disappear for a long time. Whereas in Australia, there's different states and they don't necessarily have any information gathering, on the borders of the state. So that means it's very easy to get rid of a dead body and therefore a person who will be stopped in Denmark after one killing might go on to kill 10 in Australia. Another very interesting thing is that the country of course, has a very violent history. It was built on violence against its Aboriginal population and the people going there were themselves victims of a cruel system in Europe that were sending them there as punishment. So, in that sense, it's more like the U S than it is in Europe. Isn't it? And that's another reason. And then there's a whole mature culture in Australia, and I love Australia and Australians, but there is a very masculine, kind of document and what it means to be a man and that emphasizes that kind of built into all this. So all in all Australia is an extremely interesting country to look at when it comes to serial killers and also how women killers are being portrayed because they're very few and far in between, but they're vilified beyond belief. So I set out to describe the 16, most interesting murder cases in Australia, and also doing it with you can say a contemporary and a Scandinavian gaze because I can't hide where I'm from. So that means that all of these cases have been described internally in Australia, but this way I look at it from a very contemporary feminist perspective. That was a very long talk.
Graham Brown: That was brilliant. So 16 of the most interesting. How do you categorize interesting?
Janne Aagaard: Yes. Very good question. How do you categorize an interesting, true story, a true crime story. First of all I look at what it meant. Of course you can categorize it in a number of way. You can say how many victims are there? That's one way of doing it. You can say how many lives are impacted over a frame of time. Some are mass murders, some are three women, serial killers, for instance. So it also goes to say, what did it do at the time? What did it represent at the time that new investigation methods come out of this way out of this crime? That's another way of looking at did new law end up being legislated because of this crime. Did it have an immense impact on the local area, this crime was committed, and will it be remembered as such? So there's a number of different ways of seeing it. And then there is, of course, was there, a miscarriage of justice done as well. So these stories all very different but for me, they represent something that is unique. It's different in investigation, not all of them, of course, some of them, and also leave a lasting legacy on the local area and on the legislation and the investigation of it.
Graham Brown: So out of those 16, share with us one, particularly we're studying one, which I know you've, we'll talk about it in a minute. You've been doing crime journalism for many years, so you've seen a lot, I imagine out of these 16, was there one that made you go? Oh yeah.
Janne Aagaard: But the craziest thing is when I delve into them, almost all of them did. And when I selected them from a number of overall criteria. So every one I write, I go like this one is just the main one, but right now I'm investigating a story, which is about a mother of four children who all died and she was convicted of killing all her four babies. And she was convicted, not on medical evidence, but on her diary entries and there's a huge medical and research community is trying to ask for a pardon because her four children ought to have genetic differences or genetic abnormalities that could suggest that they died of natural causes. And she's been in prison for 18 years and she is the most hated woman in Australia and she might be innocent. So that story really touches a nerve in me, even though I myself do not have any kids, I think it's a very brutal story. It's a story about a woman who had four kids and who might not been the best of mothers, but we overall seems she was a good mother. And when she left her husband, he went to the police with her diaries and accused her and she was convicted of that. Yeah. It's a crazy story.
[00:15:02] Graham Brown: Do you present new evidence that hasn't been aired, then you're in legal area, right? What was that, how do you do that?
Janne Aagaard: Well, I base my stories on all available resources. So that means I buy a lot of the existing books that are on it. I of course read and see documentaries, but I haven't as such done new research. This case I'm actually considering doing new research because one of the scientists who have positioned for this mother to be released as a Daniel's scientist. So this would actually be one of the cases where would make sense for me to reach out and have an in-depth conversation to the scientist behind it.
Graham Brown: Would that end up having any legal implications? Like they would reopen a case based on
Janne Aagaard: Well, actually they already tried in 2019 and 2020, to get the case reopened. But the Supreme court of new south Wales said that there was not enough new evidence for it to cause a retrial. So all they have left now done is to ask the governor of new south Wales for a pardon. It's all the legal amplification, all the legal appeals have been exhausted. So they will, I try most of the cases I cover up, all cases, and I try only to describe them once the appeals have been done, because there are relatives sitting out there who are over and over having to listen to the murders of their loved ones being regurgitated by people who have no idea what happened. So I try very much only to do old cases also because having some years distance to these cases makes us see them in a new light. But there's no question that everyone who does true crime, I essentially profiting from something horribly happened and that is an ethical question that all of us has to ask ourselves, is it worth regurgitating, this particular case?
Graham Brown: How do you deal with that? Like in your own mind.
Janne Aagaard: Yeah, I don't know. I think I try to like everyone else to justify it, to justify that there are very valid information that needs to be told and that these stories can teach us something both about just how it is to be a human being and the human condition, but also teach us that there are many grays and it's not all black and whites. And I guess try to have compassion, of course with the victims and the families, but to some extent also to the people who commit these murders, because very few of them are evil. I think it's a concept. I have a struggle with evil concept, but there are a few of them are, and I do believe most of us would be able to kill if we were in circumstances that demanded it from us. So I guess I try in many ways to use the psychologists and sociologists, there's two guys called Sykes and Matza, and they made an amazing theory in the sixties called techniques of neutralization. And there was actually a theory that was made to kind of describe how white collar criminals, financial criminals try to minimize the hurt they cost. And I think we all do that. And it's, minimized the crime itself and justify that the victim, kind of victimize the victim that they were asking for it and all these ranges of techniques, exactly victimless crimes and how we all deal with.
Graham Brown: Just taking orders, blah, blah, blah, all that kind of stuff, right?
Janne Aagaard: Yes, exactly. I call it the Nazi defense. Somebody told me to do it and I did, if I didn't do it, somebody else would have done it. And when I was a crime writer many years ago at a tabloid, I struggled a lot because there were always an editor telling me how I should frame this particular story. And now I tell myself I can do the stories exactly how I want them to be done with the complexity and the depths and the ethics that I want to do now, but I
Graham Brown: What is the difference there between, for example, how a newspaper tabloid particularly would write about crime. And then now you have the bandwidth in a podcast, do justice to it. What's the difference in the frame?
Janne Aagaard: To me, there's a huge difference in how a tabloid and a news journalist go about crime and how I do them in a podcast because looking back at a crime and having all the facts enables you to do a more societal and historical reference and the setting. How did this crime take place and what were the circumstances? Back when I was a true crime reporter at the tabloid, it was from day to day. And that meant sometimes you made mistakes or sometimes you suggested or hinted that somebody was a suspect and they might end up not being that. For instance, I was covering a horriffic crime where a young girl, 10 year old girl disappeared and was later found, raped and scandalized and killed in the basement. And again, the other crime family is the first thing that gets suspected in a thing like that. And I had a massive argument with my editor who wanted to suggest that the father was a suspect and it wasn't a lie, but I just couldn't write it and I put my job on the line, not to write it, and instead they made another more seasoned colleague. Like suggested in a different rubber Rabbitohs. So that's kind of the dilemmas you end up with as a crime reporter and for me looking at the case from a fine trying to describe it more factual and with all the details for me is more satisfying and it also allows me to, to have empathy to the characters in these stories.
Graham Brown: Wow. Yeah. I mean, that's powerful stuff, isn't it? Yeah. I was just thinking about also the Australia thing, in the sense that whenever I think about Australia and like crime, the thing that comes to my head, I don't know if it's a reality or not as backpackers crime, like these sort of backpackers that go disappeared. It's a woman back packer goes to Australia, and disappears somewhere and then shows up, the body shows up years later. Now that was just my image like of your 16 were any like that or is that just kind of a fantasy image I've got over Australia.
Janne Aagaard: No, no, that's very much the idea of Australia that the show, the 16 episodes, the first one is about the backpacker killers, where 10, 13, I think at the end of it , the killer was convicted of seven deaths, but probably there's 20 or 30 more backpackers buried somewhere out there and will never be found. So that's very much what happens, but some of the other cases in Australia are maybe very different. There's a, I just finished a story about a serial killer in Perth who targeted young women and was only found 20 years later because the DNA under one of the victim's fingernails was being processed in a better way. So there are all kinds of stories, but some of them definitely. There's another very famous story is called the bodies in the barrels or , the killings in Snow Town where a little small town north of Adelaide gets to be the center of all of Australia's attention, when eight bodies are found in barrels in a closed bank vault. So there are all kinds, yeah
Graham Brown: Why, what was it? Was it a gang murder.
Janne Aagaard: No, no. It turned out to be a well, I called the story, The Apprentice, cause it turns out to be a very sadistic killer one guy who finds himself a posse of Coke killers. He trains young men how to talk it and kill a very vulnerable young, homosexuals and then he empties their banks accounts.
Graham Brown: Wow. That's very strange for a crime. You can understand, the Bonnie and Clyde type seduction. Somebody just goes along, cause it's all very glamorous or you can understand somebody doing it on their own, but that I've never kind of come across that before. That's bizarre.
Janne Aagaard: It happens very, very rarely and the story, it starts with this one guy who is just, he was probably born a psychopath, but he ends up finding these young men that he saves, who are homosexual and he rips them out of the jaws of a homosexual transvestite, who they have been in relations with and the ones he doesn't convert to being killers he kills himself. It's a unique story because very, very few killings are done by more than one person. It's quite rare. So this is an actual story. What I've found out is like podcast wise, it's very hard to describe these serial killings with just an hour, they're so complex stories like for instance, the bodies in the barrels story he starts with, should start with a diagram over the persons involved because it's so complex. So that makes it for very hard telling, especially in audio where you don't have all these visuals to help you in the storytelling. Whereas the story of the lesbian vampire killer up in Brisbane was one murder and one perpetrator is easier to tell
Graham Brown: But even the title of that one is like, okay, all right, I've seen the horror movie of that one. So you've already, you can imagine what it is, right?
Janne Aagaard: Exactly, and I've written almost a hundred murder cases from the Nordic countries. I did that last year under lockdown and what I found with all these murders, they were gruesome in their own way, but there were in an audit context and none of them mess it up to Australia and the killing there. They are truly unique in that country. I'm sure somebody who delved into the American serial killers would feel the same, but Australia only has 20 million inhabitants. It's actually not a lot in a space that's many, many times the size of Europe. So the sheer size of the country combined with its history makes it quite unique to report from.
Graham Brown: Fascinating. What do you know about murder cases that most people don't know in the sense that you've written hundreds of stories about true crime and I imagine a lot of people like me are amateur consumers, but you're, there's, you're a professional, literally. What do you know that most of the world doesn't know about these stories in the sense of light, you see motivations, most people don't see, or you have a different perspective about them.
Janne Aagaard: I think what strikes me across all these different nations. Now I described murders in the Nordic countries and also in the midst of Radian area now Australia. I think what strikes me is of course, the type of person who commits more than one murder, that there are many reasons . There's a lot of categories of murder and after writing what almost 150, I would say I would very much say there's the murder who does it out of enjoyment and then there's the ones who do it for survival and those two are very different species of human beings. So I think, yeah, I think like for instance, there was this Italian woman who killed three men in a span of 10 years, but what was very saying about was worse, she was raped multiple times deeply traumatized and suffering from PTSD, which is extremely different from the serial killer we merged in Perth and killed three young women, and afterwards describes his fantasies in his own short stories in details. Those are very different and I would say more often than not killers, even if they have enjoyed what they did have an innate sense to negate what they done, deny what they done and blame the victims for what they ended up doing. So I would say there's definitely the professional or the innate killer and then there's the rest of us who might kill in special circumstances
Graham Brown: If we lived in Australia, it sounds
Janne Aagaard: No, no, no. I love Australia, there's many good things to be said about that country as well. The series is born from a deep, deep love of the country. So
Graham Brown: yeah, it was a contrast. Isn't it? That's the point. There's so many nice people and yet they have this dark edge. It's like everything. Isn't that? I'm sure you look at any culture it's the same, right?
Janne Aagaard: Yes and no. I would say I was a happy hitchhiker until I moved to Australia. After moving to Australia, I have never, ever hiked again. There is definitely a difference between the Nordic welfare society, where our initial response to strangers is a trust and to Australia where you do not open your car window or stop if you meet someone in an emergency because you don't know what they might do to you.
Graham Brown: Yeah. Well, exactly. It's that. Yeah. I mean, it's culturally like within the rash, isn't it? It's the same, it's that sort of settler mindset, isn't it?
Janne Aagaard: I think it is. I think it is, but it's so many as hundreds of years ago and still that is still there.
Graham Brown: Yeah, that's not going to change anytime soon. Well, I mean, it's fascinating as well. I'm curious about the idea of audio as a medium for storytelling when true crime compared to other forms. So obviously movies and written being are the books or journalistic writing. Is there something unique about audio that you've found has taken true crime into another area?
Janne Aagaard: Like I consume crime on every platform there is. So I might not be the best one to look at this from the outside. I am not myself, a big podcast listener when it comes to true crime shows, especially because a lot of them appear to be done by people who haven't much of a previous knowledge about crime and legislative or investigative affairs and I struggle with that. So I would say that the podcast media has been a cheap, affordable way of people without previous knowledge to talk about true crime, that can be a good or bad thing, whoever you are. But for me as a professional, it hasn't heightened the standards of true crime reporting.
Graham Brown: Do you think there's a risk now that we've overdone true crime podcasts. We've started with serial that really popularized it. We've got some really high end productions, the stuff that you're doing, for example, now there's, everybody's doing their own sort of democratized versions of it. Like you say, people who are amateurs, is there a risk there's too much out there or would it evolve? Do you think there's ways in which this is evolving?
Janne Aagaard: I think it's a little bit like when YouTube came as a medium and we all could be photographers or video grout, video, aquifers film, we could all make our own films for YouTube. But the idea of the democratization of the media, I think it's a little bit the same with podcasting, but as it is with YouTube, I think it will find it's level. I think whenever a new media comes along, whether it's a social media like Tik TOK or the audio thing, there will always be a risk of some kind of just being abused and abandoned or just run with it. I think it was settled with time, but I think before it settles, there will be a saturation with some Shang Russ. Yes. I think it will. The only podcast I truly enjoy is actually an amazing psychologist called Esther Perel, who does a couples therapy, unopened microphones. And for me, that is really true cry because there you get to see what relationship does to people and what people do to each other on an emotional level and for me that is fascinating stuff.
Graham Brown: Esther Perel.
Janne Aagaard: Yes. She has two shows. She's how do I begin is the one with people and how's work is when she does four people work together. They are amazing shows and I think they are deep dives into the human psyche
Graham Brown: The dark place.
Janne Aagaard: Yes. I mean, most of my reading is psychiatry. That's what I spend my time on.
Graham Brown: Fascinating. I love it. I love your passion for it as well and from the human angle, I want one thing I didn't ask you on in terms of producing a true crime podcast. I don't think people realize how many people are involved. It seems to be on my way, there's a narrator and that's it. Maybe there's a host. Maybe there's an actor. Give us an idea of, for example, the last podcast not murder down under or motor by the motors, by the Mediterranean. How many people are involved in these productions?
Janne Aagaard: I can tell you a bit about, first of all, when I did the Nordic stories, I was the one researching and then I wrote them and there was an editor and then somebody taped them. But when we started producing our own shows, we had to change it because I'm able to research in many languages, but not in Turkish and not in Portuguese and not in Spanish. So instead we set up almost this pipeline on how to do a scripted podcast ,and I should say one should differentiate a lot between the hosted podcast and the scripted podcast, because I feel the scripted podcast is a genre by itself that needs a lot of work. So for instance, when we do a productions, we start with an overall search for stories that I do from the criteria we talked about, like them being exceptional by the number of victims or the impact on the local society or the investigation and the convictions in it. Then we find local journalists that research the crimes and sometimes are able for instance, to get the court transcripts from the crime. Then they do a rough translation of these into English that are sent to me. Then I write the story, then retranslate it back into English for them to check that the facts are correct. Then we have a Danish editor going through my daily scripts, and then we have the commissioning editor from the platform we have commissioned that has bought the show to read it through and to ask questions. Then we send it to the translators. Then there's an editor for each language that adapts the translation to more audio friendly languages and then we have found local voices. And I think this is the most important to have the right voices. That actually, tapes of shows and then at the end of the day, we have the sound designer and the final product. When we started doing this, I thought, and then we'll try and translate and then I will speak them because I do believe that speaking your own podcasts, give a legitimacy to the podcast and have a tone of voice that really works, but it turned out my voice was too old. Which I laugh because I'm 49 and yeah, so I obviously too old for my own stories. So we actually spend, a lot of time finding the right voices. But as you can tell, it's like a pipeline, and when we do a season, that's normally 16 shows it takes a four to five months from we get the pitch and until the final episode is done.
Graham Brown: Well, how many people do you think roughly.
Janne Aagaard: It depends on number of languages, but for this at birth, this, the last one of murder by the miscellaneous think we were 20 or 25 people involved altogether, in a production.
Graham Brown: Amazing. You don't realize, do you, just how much detailed work goes into that. You're just consuming it. You might only think maybe two people, three people.
Janne Aagaard: Yeah. And actually we're looking into maybe doing some conversion of some American shows that we're being commissioned to do in different languages, which is a spoken podcast, but a good spoken podcast is scripted as well. There will be bits of the story that's prerecorded by a different voice, and the people in the studio have a manuscript to follow as well, maybe a rough manuscript, but still a manuscript that you have to cover these points like we are doing now. Of course we have to plan. Otherwise it would be horrible to listen to.
Graham Brown: Yeah, just be a ramble. Oh, well it was a lot of fun. I know it was a dark subject, but really appreciate the depth we've gone into this.
Janne Aagaard: You're very welcome.