Read an extract from CSI Told You Lies by Meshel Laurie!

Meshel Laurie is a comedian and radio and television personality. She has appeared on Spicks and Specks, Good News Week and Rove. On KIIS 101.1 she hosts Matt & Meshel with Matt Tilley and The 3PM Pick-Up with Katie ‘Monty’ Dimond. She writes for Mamamia and is the author of The Fence-Painting Fortnight of Destiny and a new book, CSI Told You Lies: Giving victims a voice through forensics.

Today, we’re featuring an extract from the introduction of CSI Told You Lies, in which Meshel Laurie shares why and how she became interested in true crime podcasts. Read on …

Meshel Laurie

CSI Told You Lies: Giving victims a voice through forensics

Introduction

‘So, why true crime?’

I’m still astounded that anyone finds my foray into true crime odd. I was never asked ‘Why daytime television?’ or ‘Why breakfast radio?’ or about anything else I’ve done over the course of my career with such a sense of incredulity. Actually, I lie. ‘So, why Buddhism?’ was big for a while, because I’ve written a few books on that topic too.

What can I say? I guess I have broad tastes and I like to keep busy.

I started podcasting around 2006 with the guys I was doing a radio show with and then in 2014 I decided to start a podcast of my own so that I could interview people for longer than the three minutes our FM radio station allowed. I called it The Nitty Gritty Committee.

When I interviewed local true crime author Emily Webb in September 2016, podcasting was still very low-key, although there had already been two significant developments that had changed the course of the medium forever. The first was the Apple podcast app, which had just appeared on our iPhones one day whether we liked it or not, and the second was a certain true crime podcast from 2014.

Traditional media increasingly contends that consumers have shrinking attention spans (hence the three-minute radio interviews). That may be, but we also have ever-expanding commutes, whether we use cars or public transport, which makes the repetitive, old-school radio formula of time, temp, and traffic reports pretty uninspiring. We’ve also been conditioned over these many years to abhor a vacuum cleaner. Personally, I can’t conceive of cleaning the kitchen unless I’ve chosen an entertainment option up to the task of distracting me. The selection will often take far longer than the chore itself, but I’m not going in without one.

We have an insatiable appetite for entertainment, but more than that, we now want to experience exactly the content we feel like experiencing in the format that suits the activity we’re pairing it with and the environment we’re in. For those of us who enjoy documentaries and longform journalism but don’t have a lot of time to sit still and watch or read something, the podcast was an absolute life-changer. No peak-hour commute, waiting room, solo trip or boring chore has ever been the same.

In 2014 journalist Sarah Koenig introduced the world to Hae Min Lee in the weekly podcast Serial. Hae was a senior at Woodlawn High School in Baltimore in 1999. Like many of her friends, including her former boyfriend Adnan Syed, Hae kept secrets from her strict immigrant parents as she tried to navigate life as an American teenager, all of which made for compelling fodder when Koenig came to investigate Adnan’s conviction for Hae’s murder.

Week after week, Serial unfolded in meticulous detail. It was at times a story of typical (if cringeworthy) teenage drama and intrigue. We felt the flush of first love in Hae’s swooning diary entries detailing her devotion to Adnan. We admired the convoluted ingenuity they employed to speak nightly on the home phone without Hae’s mother ever knowing, despite the many obstacles she’d placed in their way.

In the end, though, none of it mattered for the two young people at the heart of the story. Neither of them could be protected by their parents from the evils of the world, and neither would graduate high school alongside their classmates. Hae would be discovered in a shallow grave in Baltimore’s Leakin Park, a notoriously popular site for the dumping of bodies, and Adnan would spend the rest of his life in the prison system for leaving her there.

For her part, Sarah Koenig did much more than just recount this tragic story. She presented many disturbing failings in the investigation, the case against Syed and the defence provided for him by his attorney, Cristina Gutierrez, who was subsequently disbarred following multiple complaints from multiple clients.

Rather than pander to an imagined audience of goldfish-brained listeners who couldn’t possibly sit still and focus for more than a couple of minutes, Koenig and her team dived deep on the details and demanded we keep up.

Serial has been downloaded roughly 175 million times (and counting). It has spawned several spin-off documentary series and books and the world still seems split down the middle as to the guilt or innocence of Adnan Syed.

As for the attention span of the audience, the passion and clarity with which every aspect of evidence and testimony continues to be debated by fans of the podcast is truly peak internet, not to mention the hours invested in understanding cell-tower ‘ping’ technology as it stood in 1999. To google ‘the Nisha call’, ‘the Best Buy pay phone’ or ‘Jay Wilds’ is to plunge oneself down a rabbit hole for experienced players only. Beginner’s questions will not be tolerated.

Serial changed the media landscape in many ways, but the choosing of a true crime story was surely no accident for Koenig’s seasoned team. When considering this audacious project, they no doubt hedged their bets on the naturally engaging nature of the true crime genre. Why is it so engaging? Because at the end of the day it’s about the explosive emotion that lurks within us all. We fear it and we’re fascinated by it.

—CSI Told You Lies by Meshel Laurie (Penguin Books Australia) is out now.

CSI Told You Lies

Giving victims a voice through forensics.

by Meshel Laurie

Meshel Laurie, host of the incredibly successful Australian True Crime podcast speaks to the forensic pathologists, homicide detectives, defence barristers and victims' families in this moving and gripping study of violent crime and largescale natural disaster.

CSI Told You Lies is a surprisingly moving account of the real forensic pathologists at the frontline of Australia's major crime and disaster investigations. These are the men and women whose post-mortem examinations help the dead to speak...

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