My parents watch Criminal Minds and similar shows all the time, two friends of mine bought a book about a serial killer and my Twitter timeline is full of people talking about a new true crime podcast. It's just my bubble or is it a broad cultural phenomenon?
Maybe I'm doing a terrible job of explaining whats in my head.
I haven't followed any of this type of thing in the last 15 years or so but when I used to frequent more conspiratorially themed sites there was a TON of time spent psycho analyzing "bad" people. It wasn't always for the purpose of self defense but obsessing over what caused the terrible incident. Its the same shit that I used to go down rabbit holes for. Like why did 9/11 happen the way it did, or why did the response to Hurricane Katrina happen the way it did, etc.
Its like, there's this event that shakes your faith in society, the world, maybe even reality, and you're desperately trying to wrap your feeble human mind around the truth that the cosmos is uncaring, unfathomable, and apathetically cruel. Its some real HP Lovecraft vibes for some of us, after having stared into the abyss and lost a bit of sanity, there's a desperate clawing to try to go back to a reality that no longer exists.
That just sounds like morbid curiosity like rubbernecking
For some sure but for others there is an impulse to "fix" things that gets triggered when there is an event like this.