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What happens when ordinary people, in real-life murder clubs, set out to investigate cold cases and other crimes?
The Netflix hit Don’t F**k with Cats was based on the 2012 Montreal murder of Lin Jun by his porn-star boyfriend, Luka Magnotta. Previously Magnotta had anonymously posted videos of himself killing kittens. This spurred horrified Facebook sleuths into working tirelessly to uncover his identity and location.
A self-taught forensic artist uses software and coroners’ photographs to show what victims looked like when alive; a mother fulfils her graveside promise to her daughter to get the gang who had killed her; Websleuths matched the IP address of a suspicious contributor to a lottery-winning victim’s financial advisor – his body was found in his advisor’s boyfriend’s garden.
Sometimes citizen sleuthing goes wrong, though, with innocent people being accused of crimes they haven’t committed, with tragic results. This real-life version of Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club is grittier, with intrepid amateur investigators delving into truly gruesome unsolved crimes in pursuit of justice.
Nicola Stow is the bestselling co-author of a number of books. She has over twenty years of experience as a national newspaper and magazine journalist.