The thing about solving a murder is you can probably do it better than the guy on your TV. You’ve listened to Serial, you’ve watched the prestige-drama reenactments, you think of “Who Are You” primarily as an investigative declaration. Given all the clues, some time to think, plus access to the good old internet—you could crack this thing, whatever it might be, wide open.
Anyway, that’s what I thought until I found myself sitting in my living room, reams of paper and my own furious notes scattered across my couch, holding a pre-crumpled paper cup and demanding what it all had to do with swans.
Over the course of the past year and change, Hunt a Killer has been mailing tidy boxes of cryptic clues to anyone willing to pay for a $30-ish-per-month subscription. The company’s mission is simple: Reel in some of this country’s mystery- and crime-obsessed sleuths, the sort who might have watched detectives bumble their way through Manhunt: Unabomber or The Keepers and thought, Hey, I could do that.
Each month, Hunt a Killer mails subscribers a box filled with arcane clues, building up—hopefully—to the successful identification of the perpetrator behind a fictional, decades-old murder. The premise is that a made-up society called the Listening Friends of America connects residents of mental institutions with considerate readers at home and that you, gracious volunteer that you are, have offered up your inbox. Your first shipment includes a letter from your appointed fictional resident, one John William James, who hints that he wants your help solving a murder case and includes an assortment of cryptic, but maybe useful, baubles from his ward: a postcard here, a photocopied and partially censored news story there. You piece things together, finding links between the items and sometimes hidden additional clues, slowly identifying the basics of the murder as well as possible suspects. Each successive box leads you closer to the answer, and the hunt has proved addictive: Hunt a Killer now boasts nearly 28,000 monthly subscribers.
“If we can break reality for even a split second, that’s the whole goal there,” says Ryan Hogan, who cofounded Hunt a Killer with Derrick Smith in 2016. Hogan, Hunt a Killer’s CEO, and Smith, the company’s creative lead, previously led Reed Street Productions, which organized obstacle-course-inspired 5Ks called “Run for Your Lives,” an aspect they took seriously: Races featured actors dressed as zombies, who chased runners for a little bit of athletic je ne sais quoi (adrenalin). The pair then began organizing in-person events under the guise of Hunt a Killer, including a 2016 event at a 200-acre campground outside Baltimore where small teams worked to find a fictional serial killer over a three-hour period. From there, they moved to Birchbox-esque subscription boxes, whose episodic mystery Hogan compares to a TV show. (Future mysteries beyond the John William James tale are planned, including Empty Faces, another subscription box billed as “an immersive paranormal investigation,” which launches this week.)
Hunt a Killer is designed with a number of internet-age quirks. Several companion sites have been set up, scripted by a growing team of writers. Many of the sites contain their own vital clues—the Listening Friends of America, for one, have been given their own realistic-enough website, complete with quarterly newsletters and a registry of extra files, each of which requires a password that must be found through other means. Other clues, such as snippets of real news reports, require you to find the genuine version online. This in turn has fueled numerous online communities devoted to the Hunt a Killer case, some administered by the spoiler-protecting Hunt a Killer team and others organized just by sleuths.
There have been more frightening real-world ramifications, too: Early in Hunt a Killer’s run, a woman in Harford County, Maryland, was subscribed by a relative without her knowledge. Upon receiving her first box of creepy clues, she promptly called the Harford County Sheriff’s Office, who in turn called Hogan.
“A lot of funny things have happened,” says Hogan.
From Mindhunter to The People v. O.J. Simpson to the just-debuted The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, the true-crime genre is having a moment. The crimes, it turns out, don’t even have to be true to catch the public imagination. This week saw the premiere of the Steven Soderbergh–helmed Mosaic on HBO. The show is a murder mystery, following attempts to learn the truth of the demise of the fictional children’s book author Olivia Lake (played by Sharon Stone). But it’s more than that: It’s an interactive tale, one that urges viewers to identify the killer on their own. Armed with a companion Mosaic app, couch-based detectives are able to sort through clues on their own time and sleuth through scenes from specific characters’ perspectives. Soderbergh is developing two additional projects with the same interactive platform.
Or take the rapid rise of escape rooms. In those, small groups—friends, mimosa-equipped bachelorette parties, team-building coworkers, lovers intent on seeing how their relationship fares under stress, etc.—are barricaded in sealed rooms filled with clues, which they must use to work their way out. Breakout, one of the bigger escape-room chains, now has 62 locations across the U.S. I can personally vouch that Breakout competitor Escape the Room’s newsroom lockup in Pittsburgh—it seemed like a funny idea at the time—is not for the faint of heart; the Obama family stopped by a Hawaii Breakout location in 2016, in what was surely a cherished experience for both teenagers.
There’s no getting around it: Reenacting a crime, or at least its grisly aftermath, is a weird thing to want to do. So too is dwelling on the most horrible details of atrocities past. But My Favorite Murder, the smash-hit podcast in which chatty hosts regale one another—and listeners—with the misdeeds of violent criminals, shows that the urge to pore over such events at length is especially strong right now. It’s a mix of morbid fascination and maybe, just maybe, a touch of wanting to draw a line between past horror and your present—or your self.
For Hogan, true crime hasn’t changed—it’s just gotten easier to talk about.
“For quote-unquote normal people, it’s unimaginable to take someone’s life,” he says. “And I think through not understanding it’s like we seek to understand even more, and that’s where that drive comes from. I think what you’ve seen over the past couple of years is that people have become more open about their desire for this.”
Indeed, sometimes they’re very open. Last fall, Hunt a Killer organized a meet-up in Baltimore, expecting only local hunters to show up. Instead, hunters flew in from around the country, including an Oklahoma judge keen to dish on serial killers, real and fictional alike. “That was a spectacular day for us,” says Hogan.
If I have a quibble with Hunt a Killer, it’s with the online nature of some of the clues. A few require you to conduct sometimes open-ended online research—a reasonable ask in theory, but something that in practice can expose you to spoilers from hunters further down the path. The first Google hits for some of the names and places involved in the mystery aren’t breadcrumbs from Hunt a Killer but instead pages set up by other hunters eagerly laying out their own evidence.
In all, though, it’s a pleasingly creepy journey, as well as one that has thoroughly convinced me that murder investigations are best left to the experts.
