True Crime Discovery
About

Crime, documented.

True Crime Discovery is an investigative crime media channel. We publish articles on real crimes from around the world — historical and recent, solved and unsolved — and we build every one of them from the official record: police case files, court documents, coronial findings, and the holdings of national and state archives.

Plenty of true-crime content runs on rumour, dramatisation and recycled retellings. Ours runs on documents. If a fact is in an article, you can follow the link at the bottom and read it in the source yourself.

Editorial standards

  1. Primary sources first. A primary source is the investigating or custodial authority's own published record — an FBI case history, a Metropolitan Police file at The National Archives, a capital case file at Public Record Office Victoria, a published court judgment. Every factual claim must trace to one.
  2. Secondary sources second. Books, documentaries, news reports and advocacy sites may be cited, but only after the primary record they rely on, and never in its place.
  3. No source, no claim. A claim we cannot source is cut, or it is explicitly labelled as unproven, disputed or a theory.
  4. Silence where the record is silent. Where the official record does not answer a question, the article says so rather than filling the gap.
  5. Living people. We do not speculate about the guilt, motives or private lives of identifiable living people. Where a person has been charged but not convicted, we say so. Where a case is unsolved, we report the record and stop.
  6. Corrections. If we get something wrong, we correct it in the article and note the correction at the bottom. Tell us.

Content policy

The subject matter is dark by nature. The presentation does not need to be.

  • No crime-scene, autopsy, or victim photographs. Illustrations only, and they are labelled as such.
  • No content that is illegal to publish in Australia or in the jurisdiction the case belongs to, including material under suppression orders or identifying protected persons.
  • No glorification of offenders. Names are used because the record uses them, not to build a profile.
  • Victims are named with care, and only where the official record names them.

Who is behind it

True Crime Discovery is published from the Northern Rivers of New South Wales, Australia. It is independent, carries no advertising for now, and takes no money from anyone it writes about.