The faces of some of the most talked-about crime stories are stripping away the headlines and speaking directly to audiences in a new live forum headed for Indianapolis.
Crime Unfiltered, a live tour featuring the subjects of popular true crime documentaries, is headed to Old National Centre on June 18. The people at the center of “Who Killed JonBenet Ramsey?,” “American Murder: The Gabby Petito Story,” “American Nightmare,” “Trial 4” and “Unknown Number: The High School Catfish” will sit for candid conversations about their cases in front of an audience.
Nicky Jackson, a professor of criminal justice at Purdue University Northwest and the executive director of the school’s Center for Justice and Exoneration Network, will host the conversation. She told IndyStar she hopes the event helps break through the often-sensationalized coverage surrounding these high-profile cases and allow subjects to share their experiences in their own words.
“People know these stories,” Jackson said. “It was really to take what they had seen in the documentaries and bring these people to the stage.”
The tour arrives in a moment where true crime remains culturally relevant. Thanks to TV programs like “Dateline” and “48 Hours,” podcasts like the Indiana-based “Crime Junkie” and social media accounts dedicated to piecing together cases in real time, personalities involved in cases of interest become household names overnight.
Nichole Schmidt experienced this with the death of her daughter Gabby Petito. The 22-year-old travel vlogger was killed by her fiancé in 2021, and her case sparked widespread public interest as well as a Lifetime movie and the Netflix documentary “American Murder.” It also thrust Schmidt and her family into the national spotlight.
Schmidt has since resolved to turn “tragedy into purpose,” she told IndyStar. She founded the Gabby Petito Foundation, a nonprofit that raises money and promotes resources for domestic violence aid, and she’s become an outspoken advocate for domestic violence response reform.
Schmidt said she hopes the Crime Unfiltered tour allows audiences to get to know the people behind the headlines and understand that experiences like hers can happen to anyone.
“People sometimes see us as just these people on TV or these cases that they’ve heard about. They think we’re just these tragedies that happened and that it can’t happen to them,” Schmidt said. “This happened to us in such a big way and such a public way, but that doesn’t change who we are as people.”
Tickets are available at crimeunfiltered.com. The tour is slated for a handful of dates across the Midwest: Chicago on June 6, Milwaukee on June 7, Indianapolis on June 18 and Detroit on June 19.
Contact IndyStar Pop Culture Reporter Heather Bushman at hbushman@indystar.com. Follow her on X @hmb_1013.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Crime Unfiltered hopes to spotlight people behind the headlines in Indy
Reporting by Heather Bushman, Indianapolis Star / Indianapolis Star
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
