REAL CRIME-James Hoare

ruthless mob bosses of the Jazz Age and beyond. Real Crime is the first high quality true crime magazine on the new stand. Every issue of Real Crime reveals the untold stories behind the world's most gripping cases, the breathtaking experiences of investigators and survivors, and blow by blow accounts of how lawbreakers were finally brought to justice. Deliver with the same icy intensity and forensic detail of popular documentaries

and TV shows. Every issue is packed with groundbreaking interviews, original research in the incriminating photos behind the world's most infamous cases, with breathtaking accounts from investigators' survivors and the criminal masterminds themselves. The magazine opens up the world of serial killers, ruthless mob bosses, organized crime, unsolved cases and beyond. James Horrer, editor in chief at Real Crime, said, we are always looking for new ways to meet our reader's

need for intelligent, trusted reporting and opinion. The first of its edition takes readers on a fascinating journey into the minds of some of the most notorious serial killers, including Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, and Fred and Rose West. It also includes a special interview with the woman who shot footage of the OJ Simpson car chase on the twentieth annivertversary of the contentious trial. The magazine that we're featuring this afternoon is Real Crime with my special guest editor,

journalist and author James Horr. Welcome to the program, and thank you for agreeing to this interview.

crime subculture. You know, a world that you're deeply immersed in and your your readers are immersed in, and they were kind of making their sort of impact felt in the the mainstream. And this was, you know, before Making

a Murderer. I mean, now we're living in the post Making a Murderer world and that seems kind of obvious, but back then we were just conscious of, you know, these were great, kind of compelling, exciting, thrilling stories and they were you know, they were reaching out to an audience that was sort of broader than we could really

kind of wrap our heads around. So our goal was very much to create a magazine that you know, drew from that that Polk tradition of you know, the original true detective magazine and the sort of true crime magazines of the past, but presented it in a sophisticated, kind of mainstream blockbuster away that would be familiar to readers of magazines like Wired or Empire that had those kind

of high production values. That was very much the kind of the written sort of newsstand equivalent of The Jinks or even Making a Murderer Now, and I think that is essentially what we wanted to bring to it. We wanted to reach out into the true crime world and bring in some of those kind of authors and some of those journalists that have a reputation already in that industry,

but then bring our magazine skills to that. Our ability to create these kind of incredible bespoke graphics and reconstructions of these the inside of Edgean's house or the you know, a blow by blow account of their left hands to heist or something like that, we had I think a lot of magazine craft and a lot of kind of skill in creating a you know, sort of sophisticated, thrilling product, and we just needed the incredible stories to match it.

And I think every single issue that we've produced, everything in there has just been absolutely compelling. I mean, when we pitch each issue of the magazine to our directors, they sign off the covers and they sign off the core features. They're kind of, i think appalled and fascinated by some of the stuff we're getting away with. But the point is that everything is just a great story.

All of these stories are fantastic, and it's just such a privilege to kind of bring these out of the dark corners of you know, the true crime sort of subsen and the true crime niche and into the you know, the supermarkets and into the news agents.

You talked about the people that you've the team that you've assembled. Well, where do you go to get your authors?

writers that I read on the internet. As I was approaching people that I recognized from Vice from Sword and Scale. Emily Webb, who writes about kind of suburban Australian murders, I was familiar with because my partner's Australian, so she was, you know, my go to for that sort of uniquely kind of ossie sort of picket fence sense of dread that I don't think you can fake and I think that sense of place is very important as well. And from those people, they sort of put me in touch

with other kind of like minded sort of freelancers. And one of the first people we approached was Seth Faranti, who kind of writes about his prison experiences and about kind of gangs that he was loosely associated with the members of when he was inside. And he writes for Vice and another other website, and he puts in touch with Christian Sepolini, who is a kind of an organized crime researcher. And all of these guys just have a

fantastic attitude. They're so excited, they're so kind of they're so willing to kind of leap into the space that we provide them. I mean, it's a very writer led magazine. We don't sit back and kind of make these demands about where we want features to go or how we want things to be covered. We i mean, part of the reason that we've picked them is for their voice, and for their expertise and for you know, all these

unique things that they bring to each story. We just want to give them the freedom to tell that story, give them the kind of the coaching and the guidance to kind of tell that story in a visual way that suits the publication. I think one of the most interesting kind of directions our freelance portuck was I was joined on issue one by my colleague from different magazine, Jonathan Hapfell, who is he comes from a creative writing background. I come from a journalism background, and he's a kind

of a horror film fan. And that was really the overlap in the concentric circles between real crime and what he was doing in his day job. So I kind of borrowed him for a couple of weeks to do a few bits and bobs to kind of get some features commissioned for me to write some features as well. He did the the OJ Simpson article in the first issue, and he brought on a lot of his kind of

peers that were interested in the subject matter. A lot of those people come from sort of more movie writing background as the kind of film critics or the cultural critics, and that took us in quite an unexpected direction. I mean, two of the articles that you picked out, the Dennis Nielson article, which was written by Charlie Orton, who is a media lecture at university, A real kind of has a real interest in taboos and transgression and sexuality and

things like that. So this was all, you know, an opportunity that they were so keen to leap on. And the Hammermaniacs article as well was from another one of those those writers. And I was asked in an interview fairly recently with a Norwegian newspaper what I thought that fiction writers could take away from true crime writers. And I gave a fairly kind of concise aren't say, you know, do you research, get the facts right, your subject, get

that sort of all those details nailed. Don't take anything for granted, you know, make sure when you're talking about the crunch of gravel underfol that there was actually gravel underfoot, right.

But it made me think about the value that true crime writers could take away from the you know, the creative writers, the fiction writers, and these people, the horror writers have kind of become our go to guys for you know, the big name, compelling sort of visceral serial killers, the dharmas, the bundies, the gases, the milats, because I think over eight or ten pages, there's very little that real crime can offer that story in the way that we can we can add something to those smaller stories,

because there's already so much out there, it's already been written. We were just kind of standing on the shoulders of giants with those kind of stories. So in order to really bring something new to that, these guys kind of they hone in on that sense of narrative. They hone in for those kind of motifs, They look for the foreshadowings, and they're the kind of you know, the nice little narrative tricks, and that I think has been what's partly opened up real crime and you know, a completely from

direction for us. It's sort of bringing in that the theatrically, it's bringing in some of the tools of fiction. But it's those kind of theatrical elements and those tools of fiction that have made shows like Making a Murderer so successful, even though they're obviously kind of controversial from a straight sort of true crime the portage point of view. So it's that's a very long winded answer.

as true horror. And then there is a horror as horrible and incredible and amazing and almost unbelievable as horror stories, but they're absolutely true. So I think that's what your magazine represents to me, just fascinating stories that are written in that tone that you know, sort of because of the access as well, when you're talking to Ivan Malatt's nephew, you're getting a different perspective from the stories that we've already heard as well too.

But I think unless you have the authority, unless you have you know, you you reach out, you try and get those things in there, You try and talk to criminologists or the investigators of the psychologists, or you know, the relatives. I think that's when you're in danger of kind of crossing too far over the line. I mean, it would be ridiculous to think that everyone who's engaging with true crime, and I mean it's a broad church. There are people who read the magazine who have, you know,

what you might call professional interests. There'll be criminology students, or they'll be forensic psychology students, or they'll be you know, practicing forensic scientists and things like that. But I think the vast majority of the readers aren't, you know. I think there are all these different needs that they bring to the subject matter. So I'm sureways the case for many, if not all, true crime authors. They want to be they want to explore their fears in a safe environment.

They want to kind of twitch the curtains and peer out at something horrible that's happening in the street while still being kind of safe. They want that thrill, and they want that sense of voyeurism. And there's also the fascination and the allure. And I think it's a mistake to pretend that what we're doing here is just serving that kind of higher sort of that higher need. It's not just about offering something kind of sophisticating them worthy.

We're not ashamed of the fact that the allure for this is a fascination, a fascination mixed with a revulsion. And I think that the narrative style that we're playing with is a fair reflection of that. And that's especially brought out in some of the big serial killer features because I mean, those characters, and they are characters have taken on such a larger than life kind of folkloric element.

They have names like Batman villains. They occupy a place in I think the American kind of popular culture, especially that's you know, would have traditionally been occupied by earlier civilizations in you know, why the Grendel or the Harpies or the Cyclops and things like that, that these very living, kind of visceral evidence based tales of why you should not talk to strangers or you know, you should be

heaven before nightfall. It's yeah, it's a tricky balance. It's a tricky balance I think that we've been so mindful of from the outset especially because we are such a mainstream magazine and there's always that fear that the wrong people will pick up an issue and choose to be offended by what they see as being potentially exploitative or potentially sensation still potentially glib, and so it's important to

have that authority, you know, present on every page. As much as we kind of you know, playing around with the sheer nastiness of the of the cases.

We're not going to be breaking new ground on that. So those features are our license to kind of tell a story, not tell Lee's story, but tell a story that conforms to certain motifs. And you know, now want to get back to what I think of as the horror writers we can. Part of the joy I have as an editor is being so surprised by them because I'm able to just give them a few reference points, like, for instance, with the Eileen one Us cover a feature, all I said was, you know, give it a bit

of eye spit on your grave. You know, think of this as being a kind of revenge torture porn movie. And the feature kind of sprung out of that, and those, you know, those alpha serial killer features are are kind of licensed to be a little bit more creative. The secondary, kind of sort of main feature, which I think fights with the serial killers for the cover space, are the kind of I think of them as, mean, the domestic horrors.

They're the more contemporary cases, usually from the last decade or the last two decades, but they're the ones that I think that bring the you know, bring the kind of just the sheer and pleasantness of the subject home for people. They're the ones that really kind of leap off the news stand for us, and I think that's why they have been predominant the UK based cases like Madeline McCann or Becky Watts or Beverly alett Or and the hammer Maniacs was a rare international example of that.

It taps into more kind of domestic fears, It taps into fears about the safety of your children, fears about your own safety. And in contrast, I think to that the serial killers can often appear remote and you know, sometimes cartoonish. I guess that's partly a result of the way in which they've informed the portrayal of characters like Michael Myers and his ilk and you know, films like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But they've kind of been absorbed

into that same cannon. So you know, you look at pictures of John Wayne Gacy and his clown makeup and you think, there's no danger of me meeting that time. I'm not going to meet anyone like that. My life does not involve murderous clowns. That's just not a thing. But you see some of these, the domestic terrors, and those are the things I think that really get you. Those are the cover and the images will be the features.

When we look searching through the images and we're making our imagdraces for the features, those are usually the ones that kind of might get some of the team when they're going through them. The rest of the magazine, we try and have a kind of a mob feature, not always a kind of classic mob feature, sometimes you know, sort of nineteen eighties, nineteen nineties one for a bit of balance, and we try and move around the globe a little bit as well and get some some heists

in there. And the heists almost feel like a little bit of a breather after some of the more kind of you know, intense stuff. They're the features where you can pull back a little bit and almost have a bit of fun. They especially if they're a little bit caper in I think that's quite important to us. So really the core of the magazine are those two, those two tent pole features, the domestic terrors and the serial killers.

And I think it's our treatment of those that gives us gives us that edge, especially with the serial killers, which you know is obviously a huge driving force of the true crime. They've got fandoms and they've got you know, murder abilia kind of industries that are sprung up around them, and they've inspired popular culture. They have inspired songs and TV shows and movies.

organized crime going to this dark net. Very interesting article. And also stuff like New Guinea Street gangs as well, the Rascals, and you also have Pirates of Malaysia. So stuff that we're not hearing absolutely not in mainstream media, or at least I have not been reading this material. So this is the kind of stuff that's also in your magazine as well, isn't it.

This has probably come across the needlessly philosophical now, but you know, as the world bigger, and you know, our role in it gets a little bit bigger as well, we were more aware of things that happen in other countries. We're more aware of other cultures, we see how those cultures interact with ours. It's a much more globalized, internationalized world.

And I get a lift from finding these stories that remind me that there is such an incredible variety to you know, the human experience, albeit within this very you know, narrow confines of organized crime. But I love it. I love the fact that under every rock there is a you know, idiosyncratic kind of gang that has their own codes, and has their own kind of language and their own sort of rituals and things like that that I think it just really.

the pre fifty six K mode generation. I still think of the Internet as being this place where you can watch cat videos, and I'm my fears come from the power of the web sometimes because I'm not a digital native in that sense, and it was something I wanted to understand. And we've done a few other features like that.

We did one in the first issue that was about the way that young people are being kind of lurd and exploited by international drug gangs the smuggling purposes, and I think those are still a little bit experimental for us, to the extent that they don't always have a face to lead them, they don't always have a human a single human tragedy that can guide them in the way that you know, the sort of the stories of Ed

Kemper and his victims will steer that article through. And I think because of the way that real crime has positioned itself, because it is such a hand on heart, heart and mouth, you know, any other kind of heart combination cliche, you like, sort of edge of seat magazine. It's been quite difficult for us to find the right tone when we do those features what we pull back a little bit, but I think we have found it.

I think there is a lot of back and forth with that Silk Road piece before we settled on that lead image of the the chap that had been arrested in happier times his university gown on. I think before that we were going with a more abstract kind of opening image of a guy at a laptop. But it felt a little bit too sterile. It felt like something from a you know, a warning video about piracy at the start of a you know, a film you've rented, or something like that, and it felt a little bit hokey.

I mean, the only thing I knew for certain when we started working on that feature is I didn't want to see that kind of neon green on black scrolling matrix numbers or anything like that. I think that's just cheesy, and I don't think the readers would have responded well to it. But it's important we keep pushing those those kind of stories and we keep expanding that rumit. It shouldn't all be about every feature, shouldn't just be boiled down to someone's name. We should always be kind of

pushing outwards. And I think that's why it's nice that we have that regular briefing feature, which is where we look at a gang or a cartel or a syndicate or an organization from around the world and we just tell a relatively simple kind of overview of them. Because it's they're less well known, we kind of have the freedom to do a more basic you know, this is what these guys do. These are the Rascals from pat

New Guinea. They manufacture their own kind of home brew, terrifying looking home brew firearms and you know, battle for supremacy in the world's most dangerous city. Or this is the Mongol Mob. They're one of the you know, the most infamous biker gangs in New Zealand. And I think having a set space where we can do that's very useful because it stops us kind of sliding back into just telling stories about murder.

these boys were a gang. And the documentary I spoke to the durex or for that feature was this very intimate portrait of mainly his parents, Jodan David's parents during the trial, and it was I mean, it's heartbreaking the into that spending that time with them, you know, these moments of stillness, the silences, the exchanged glances, it was all super affecting and over the course of that trial.

I mean, this happened not long after the Trayvon Martin shooting, so there wasn't yet a narrative developing that this is. You know, this is a big problem right now. This is a thing all the white men are pulling guns on young black guys and shooting them on the most kind of spurious of reasoning. But over the course of the trial, which I think the two trials or was in two parts, the Black Lives Matter movement was starting to gather pace, and now the Jordan Davis shootings shooting

fits comfortably within that narrative. I mean, it was quite an interesting experience speaking to the director because he was is an English chap as well, so it kind of got over that initial awkwardness. You know, you never want to feel like you're a tourist in someone else's grief.

I don't want to kind of enter what is an incredibly complex and emotive, you know, arena, which is, you know, racism in the United States, the kind of the criminalization of young black men, the effortlessness with which the shooter's defense team went out of their way to present Jordan Davis as being somehow threatening. He was listening to a loud that music, he was kind of shouting, you know,

he's from the hood. And I didn't want to enter that world as a tourist, and it appeared disingenuous or patronize. I don't kind of open that door and make a big sweeping statement about you know, what this says about America today. And then back out again and get on with my life. I just didn't feel that it was appropriate. So being able to talk to the director of that film was incredibly helpful to me because he was an outsider as well, so I felt like we were sharing

an outsider's view. I wasn't trying to you know, I wasn't asking an insider questions and then passing off their experience as being some kind of insider insight that I've gleaned. And it really did feel like a way into into that world. And I think that why that's why it was such an effective documentary, because you know, the chap who made it was going in openly as someone who wasn't of that world, and what he was seeing he

was seeing new for the first time. I mean, I think it's a similar sort of problem that I think comes with dealing, you know, as a British magazine and as largely I think British writers dealing with subjects such as gun ownership in the United States. It's easy for us to to be glib, to be arrogant, to be condescending, but ultimately that's not our world. So I definitely wouldn't have written that feature if it had been a straight retelling of the Jordan Davis case, I don't think I

would have been qualified to do that at all. I was just very lucky in that my inn was something a lot kind of closer to my experience, and that, I mean, that's another thing that's informed the selection of freelancers. It made sense for us to have someone like Emily Webb tell those stories about suburban Australia because that's her world.

It made sense to have a light from the North of England write about the Moor's murders because that's his world, his memories of growing up with terrace houses and the specter of Myra Hindley kind of looming on every parent's lips. And I think that sense of place is very important and the context is very important. But both of those things can only come with authenticity. So I've digressed massively

from the original question. I think I will basically use any opportunity to talk about how good are writers are.

that vein, I found it very very interesting. The magazine article that you have in Real Crime called I Stuck the Screwdriver in his Brain the vile snuff videos the Ukrainian team who they had caught all their murderous activities on camera. Tell us about this story about these two Ukrainian teenagers, because this is a story I had not heard anything about, and this is a fascinating story that you concluded.

from a film background. It's all part of the kind of the tapestry of controversial cinema, and he pitched that that came straight from him. And I think there's a good balance of maybe half the content comes from the editorial team going, oh, this is a really cool story. You like, what can you do with this? How can you develop this? Does this interest you? And then the other half comes from writers just getting you know, super

passionate about that. And Martin I've been keen wrestled with whether or not to even watch these videos or whether to just write around the subject. I can't off the top of my head remember what he decided in the end.

But I mean we were worrying about that on team as well, because I mean, weirdly, we got into a kind of an image usage discussion about it, about the legality of screen grabbing their you know, voyeuristic torture porn footage because they owned the copyright to that, surely, but you know, the world would be in a terrible state if we had to worry about the copyright of you know,

Ukrainian murderers. So we did kind of screen rab it under fair use purposes, and I think we settled for watching some of the less grizzly bits, some of the edited footage that's out there from news programs. I think what was really interesting about that case to me is these two young Ukrainian men, teenagers. They there's no pattern to what they were doing. They were doing things simply

for the things in themselves. They were attacking passes by, they were filming it, they were attacking animals and filming that. And I think there's something. I mean, there are two elements of this that I think really struck me. There's the it felt like a very social media murder. It was a it was a murder native or a murdercipree native to the social media age. It was being driven by the knowledge that they could upload their experiences online and people would, you know, like it or share it

or pass it on to their friends. And and that taps into a little bit of that that fear I was talking about earlier. I think fears are fears are at their heart, very conservative things. We're feared of the thing, we're afraid of the things we don't understand, and we're afraid of the things that might happen. I'm afraid of the outcome of new things, and I think the sort of the terror is offered up by social media a

fantastic example. I mean, it's it's it's perfect kind of fodder for making parents alarmed about their children's Internet usage. And there's a number of other cases I think one must fit into that microasion. There's like the slender Man murders.

I can't remember much of the background off at the top of my head, but they were motivated by I think a young lady was killed by two other girls as a as a kind of not offering to slender Man, who is a kind of a folkloric character created on the Internet who appears in in in memes and in videos and things like that. The other aspect of the case that really lets out of me is this story, and it's the thing that Martin wrestled give it a

little bit as well. He spoke to an expert in in the kind of in the snuff film trade who sort of debunked this story a little bit. But they claimed that the videos were being produced to sell to some kind of mystery buyer, of which there was no There was no evidence and I think it kind I

think that explanation was useful for them. It's useful for people, for the parents, it's useful for the you know, the survivors, because it means we don't have to accept the fact that sometimes people, especially young people, especially children, just do things. They do things just to see what the things are like, and they do things in ways that can't be fully explained. I mean, it made me think back to my own childhood when I was doing something you know, perfectly kind

of silly and benign, the grand scheme of things. I wasn't attacking my standards of a hammer and then filming it or anything like that just to you know, just to put your mind at ease. But it made me think of things that my mum would suddenly reproach me

for and just suddenly stop me. And I think it's the shock of being you know, pulled out of whatever weird little tangent I was on when I was pouring coffee into a pop plant or something like that, and I wouldn't be able to explain why I was doing it, so I was just doing it on a whim, on a kind of as part of I guess the whole business of young exploring the world and you know, testing their boundaries and things like that, but I'd always feel

the need to retrofit an explanation to it. It's like, oh, you know, I thought the plant was thirsty and it needed coffee or something like that, and I think, you know, and obviously, my without coming from a background as a psychologist or anything like that, I think there was an element of that to the hammer maniacs. I think they just did things because they could. I made it difficult to predict what they're doing, but it also makes it

very difficult to rationalize what they're doing. And I think it's very important for us as people to feel like there is a logic behind this. You know, ed Kemper did these things because if he's upbringing problem solved.

along the same lines as you. Was not you and I anyway, I wanted to ask I know, this might not be the intended purpose, But with a mix of his story crime and current crime, serial killers and all kinds of other psychopathic personalities and killers and criminals in this, does it really give the viewer? Doesn't it really give the viewer sort of an overview of how true crime has changed? Many things remain the same in terms of personalities, but in terms of those things that have changed in

true crime? Isn't this magazine sort of inadvertently demonstrating and showing and illustrating those changes.

And it's a testament to the changes in society and changes in law enforcement and and in criminal profiling and forensics and all of these things that the serial killers of today are less able to kind of build, you know, the less able to build a murder hotel basically it's very difficult to do that without someone noticing anymore, which is fantastic. But I think at the heart of it,

there's a universality to it. I mean, as part of my department, I have I have two history magazines and we're launching two other history magazines soon, so we are a very busy and my first love is history, really and I'm constantly, I'm constantly amazed by how modern everything feels.

When you're explaining the story to somebody, they might not always be able to tell you when it happened, from the bearbones, from the barbones details for an instance, you know, the story of Pablo Escobar, the story of El Chapter, that kind of that kind of excess and that corruption, that self aggrandizing and that empire building is I mean, it's just al Capone, but in a you know, with

a wider shirt collar and no hat. I mean, it's so fascinatingly universal, and it's so fascinatingly unchanging, and I think it does neatly underline the point that they really were no good old days. There were no simpler times

when these things didn't happen. It's just that our perception of them has only grown over the years, and perhaps their sophistication has grown, but so too his our sophistication in dealing with among I think the major difference is the time scale as well, which goes back to the HHH Holmes, Albert Fish Jack the Ripper kind of thing. These people have bursts of action and then they're over.

I guess the only I guess the kind of the native crime of the twentieth and the twenty first century is probably the mass murder, And they've got the kind of the school shootings and the massacres, because that's something that's very much driven by the media that we have now and the media environment that would have been completely unforeseen thirty or forty years ago. But I think, yes, we do kind of give people this overview of, you know,

the last hundred years in everyday nightmares. But I think I think the lesson might be a bit different. Lesson is that people have always been doing terrible things, that nothing is all that all that new. I mean, talking about the hammermoniacs, for example, I was drawn when I was talking to Martin Contario, the writer, we ended up talking about the James Bolder case, which was a big

case in the UK. In the nineties where this toddler was abducted from a shopping center and he walked to a canel path and he was basically brutalized and kind of abused and tortured and then murdered by two older boys who I think were aged about eight nine or ten, right, And the similarity between the complete lack of motives really or the lack of reasoning, the lack of any tidy way of putting a bow on this and saying, oh, Okay, this is why they did it, we can avoid this

next time, or this won't happen to me. Was it's just nonexistent because they just did it. They did it because they could, or because they saw an opportunity, or they wondered what it would feel like. And that's a that's a terrifying you know, constant throughout our story is, you know, true crime fans or true crime researchers. These people have always been doing these horrible things. It's just now they're doing them in color. YEA.

from a certain angle. Dennis Nilsen, like Jeffrey Darmer, is a character and a love story. It's just not a love story for anyone else. And I think Charlie has that kind of that playful willingness to kind of explore those angles, and it fits quitely into their existing academic work.

ChIL you'd written something on grief tourism and actually actually a couple of weeks before we approached him to do the piece, had visited one of Dennis Nielsen's homes and kind of had a little look around to get into the mood. And in that case it was, you know, a narrative presented itself quite easily. Is it's very much a trend in the United Kingdom of people of Scott's moving down to London and working and you know, struggling. There was that sense of alienation and it's a story

I'm you know, personally familiar with. I've got Scottish friends who made the journey to work in London because you know, it's the center of media, it's the center of finance or whatever in the in the UK. And he was very much one of those. He's a man that didn't

fit in wherever he was. You know, it's a smart, sensitive young man that grew up to be a lonely older man that grew up to be an older man that didn't know how to how to kind of regulate his feelings, how to get the sexual romantic satisfaction that

he wanted. And he picked men up and he murdered them and he kind of broke down their remains and is flat and clogged up the pipes with their you know, their insides, and the narrative kind of naturally came out of that, and it naturally kind of coincided with the evolution of the kind of the gay scene in London at the time around SOHO, and I think being able to pull back a bit and tell it almost as

if it's a horrible love story. It makes me think of that Ryan Reynolds film The Voices, where he stops taking his medication and he starts doing terrible things. He murders a girl that likes him, and it's a kind

of black comedy. But the frame shifts between the real world where everything's dowdy and dark and the flies are buzzing and you can almost you know, smell that stench of rotting meat through the through the TV set, to this kind of fairy tale, you know, bright pastor pink world that he lives in, where the severed heads are talking to him and his cat, his dog are talking

to him. And there's an element of that to Nielsen, I think, an element to dharma, and it's it's an interesting thing to play with because we can see a little bit of ourselves in that. We can see a little bit of you know, our own motivations just on a just you know, cast through this with this this sort of funhouse mirror that's twisted them all out of shape and turned them into something malevolent and murderous. And I think, I mean, that's another one of those appeals true crime.

exploitative and to be to be too titillating. Because this one's a lot closer to home for us geographically and in terms of the time frame, is you know this guy is still still alive, is there are survivors that are still there? And because we were telling you know, arguably a more sympathetic version of that story, we didn't want it to look as though we were writing him, you know, a retrospective blank check to be a monster.

We get to tell the story of, you know, a young man out of you know, out of his element, who's finding his place in the world and against the backdrop of you know, London's emerging kind of gay and lesbian culture. But we also get to tell this horrible kind of cautionary tale. This this this this modern fairy tale with a nice kind of ending of a man that goes to prison because he was a murderer. And that is absolutely one of my favorite features that Real

Crime has published. I think is it balanced all those elements so well and I think it served all of those needs. It's you know, I can't praise that one highly enough.

the legwork in terms of tracking these people down. If it was just down to you know, the editorial team to source everything, it just wouldn't be possible and we'd be very much reduced to using the same, you know, the images that you've seen from the Press Association or from Getty or Corbis over and over again. And I think sometimes it just takes a couple of new incidental shots to suddenly bringing a story to life. I think if people are flicking through on the newsstands and they

see something that they haven't seen before. It makes them reconsider the product, especially in you know, those well known cases. I mean it's because of that. I think our illustrations are very important as well, and they kind of bespoke cutaways and recreations and graphics that we do, know, the top down views of crime scenes and things like that. It's all hugely important because not only does it enhance the experience of reading the thing, but it's such a

fantastic advert for what's in the magazine. I mean, I'm very firm believer that you can do as much marketing as you like on a product, but nothing sells the product like the product.

bit about those editions. How many editions there are? Just tell us a little bit about that.

distributors and different newsagents and things like that. And they did really, really well, and we made sure that we've got extra copies into the office, especially for this because I know there is there is such a loyal global community for true crime, and I thought, you know, this, one of all the magazines we do is going to be the one where we get a lot of direct sales.

And those just vanished almost straight away. The first issue, the launch issue, was limited directly by myself, and we're really trying to make a statement with it and to kind of set out our store, let people know just how much they were going to get with every issue of Real Crime. We wanted to give them the kind of startup interviews like James L. Roy and Zoey tur the O. J. Simpson Chase Pilot would to give them a good array of the alpha serial killers and some

smaller stories as well. From around the world, and I think that became quite a good template for the following issues. The second issue, which was the Charles Manson issue, I think I set up, but then I passed the direct running of the magazine on to Ben Biggs, who's the editor. My role now is mainly to talk about features with them and to talk about covers and things like that. I don't really you know, roll my sleeves up very often and get involved in the you know, the page

furniture and things like that. And that was the first feature where we gave Charlie Orton then It's Nilson writer a little bit of a free run to tell the story of the Manson family from the perspective of the family members, to focus on how he controlled them and

the mood of the time. And it was a fantastic kind of learning experience for us that second issue because in that one feature, I think we kind of pushed down the picket fence that surrounds us in terms of what we've already felt like magazines can and can't do, and opened ourselves up to telling stories in those different ways. And we brought in kind of song lyrics from the time that reflected the kind of the era we talked about the effect of psychedelic drugs on the family members.

And they're always incredible little sort of clever references to sort of Age of Aquarius mythology and New Age beliefs and things like that. So I think those first two issues are both incredibly important, and yeah, they are available digitally, but unfortunately the physical copies are in the wind.

fits the tone a little bit. And then, as I said, we've got the French and the German editions as well. So I think, piece by piece our empire is growing a little bit.

subject matter that the entire magazine is full of. So I've got to give you kudos to just a brilliant magazine. Especially for this audience that listens to this program. It's just be very much in their interest to check this out.