Welcome to True Crime Companion!
My name is Christopher Pierson and I blame my grandmother for getting me hooked on True Crime. Whenever I would visit there were two constants playing on the television: The Price is Right & Unsolved Mysteries. While I wouldn’t recommended going back and watching the 14 seasons of Unsolved Mysteries, or any 90’s True Crime programming for that matter, but it spawned an interest in the unknown and/or unsolved that lives on today. The arrival of podcasts and steaming television has shifted the genre away from the repetitive and melodramatic series of days past – bringing on a sort of True Crime renaissance that I’m thoroughly enjoying. However, as a practicing geographer I cannot help but notice the lack of spatial information used to tell these stories (podcasts do a particularly poor job at this). Which brings me to the reason for creating this website… in a weird alternative universe, maybe I would be making a website about The Price is Right instead.
The purpose behind this website is to be create a place where True Crime fans can go to discover the spatial component of cases. The content here is meant to be consumed alongside other True Crime medium – I won’t ever be a great storyteller, but I think I can add a little context to some of the great stories already out there. The fun part of consuming True Crime is coming up with your own theories and because of that my goal is to be as objective as possible. I will try to provide geospatial data that is relevant to different sides of each story.
Each case covered on this website will have a brief introduction to the case, an embedded map, links to some of the most popular coverages of each case, and the ability to download the data for yourself. I encourage you to consume stories from different perspectives and to look beyond what I have provided as I couldn’t possibly cover everything. To avoid publishing private and/or identifying information about those involved in these cases, I use yellow buffers in the map to show the general locations of homes.
All non-basemap geospatial data was created by myself - if you believe some information is incorrect or I am missing important features, please reach out to me via email at [christopher.pierson@me.com]. Maps were created using Mapbox Studio. Icons used in the maps are from the The Noun Project.