Shanda Gimson's bedtime routine starts out pretty ordinarily: She turns off the lights and gets comfortable in bed. But before shutting her eyes, she picks up her phone and presses play on her favorite true crime podcast. Soon enough, she knows, she'll be fast asleep.
"My friends think I'm crazy. They don't understand how I could fall asleep listening to a true crime podcast," Gimson, 31, tells CNBC Make It.
"It was never something that came off as scary to me. It was always a sense of comfort."
And Gimson is not alone. Spend some time on TikTok, and you'll find that many women prefer to doze off to stories about stalking, kidnapping and murder.
True crime is a genre of entertainment that details the events of a real crime, often quite salaciously. Historically, TV shows and movies have been the primary way Americans consume true crime, but in the last decade, podcasts have become increasingly popular.
Of the top-ranked podcasts on Apple and Spotify, true crime is the most common topic, according to data from the Pew Research Center taken during a six-month period in 2022.
More than one-third, 34%, of Americans who listened to a podcast in the past year say they regularly listen to podcasts about true crime, according to another Pew Research Center study from 2022.
Of those listeners, women are more than twice as likely than men to opt for the genre.
True crime narrators can be 'calm, comforting'
True crime's appeal to women isn't new, says David Schmid, an assistant professor of English at the University at Buffalo. Schmid studies pop culture and crime in the media.
"This is a trend that goes back a long way," he says. "Much earlier in the 20th century when people started to realize a majority of crime fiction readers are women, it was met with a similar kind of surprise and shock."
But it makes sense, he says, that women would be more captivated by this content as they are more often than men the victims of violent, intimate crimes.
"The interest in the subject comes from women's awareness that they are the victims of a vast majority of interpersonal violent crime especially crimes like serial murder," he says.
Of all female murder victims, more than one-third, 34%, were killed by an intimate partner, according to data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Only 6% of men were killed by an intimate partner. And 65% of all murder-suicides involve an intimate partner, according to data from the Violence Policy Center. Of these, 95% of victims were female.
Watching a TV show or listening to a podcast also allows women to "handle this fear in a way they can control," Schmid says.
"You can turn off the TV or turn off your laptop or close the book," he says. "It's the way you experience the fear. You experience some of these feelings but in a way you are in control."
At night, he adds, true crime content can also give the effect of "ghost stories," a narrative people regularly associate with bedtime.
Gimson's podcasts never fail to lull her to sleep.
"The narrators for true crime, their voices are always unique in that they have a calm, comforting voice whenever they're narrating," says Gimson. "I find that easier to fall asleep to than if I'm listening to an upbeat podcast."
They are also nostalgic for her. When listening to "Canadian True Crime," she's reminded of the spooky stories she loved hearing when camping in Canada. Growing up, her family also watched true crime shows such as "Dateline" and "Unsolved Mysteries," and she bonded over the thrillers with her grandmother.
"My grandma would be like, 'You could watch this with me, but keep in mind this didn't even happen close to us and this person is in jail now,'" Gimson says. "I guess the sense of reassurance from them would always put those fears at ease."
'By learning how people end up the victim, they can keep it from happening to themselves'
Many women also find true crime content educational, says Amanda Vicary, an associate professor of psychology at Illinois Wesleyan University.
"My research shows that women like true crime because they can learn something from it," she says. "They can learn how not to be killed, essentially. They like true content where they learn the signs to watch for in a killer or they learn what to do if kidnapped. By learning how people end up the victim, they can keep it from happening to themselves."
At CrimeCon, an annual event with speakers and crime experts that attracts more than 5,000 people, about 75% are women, according to data shared by the conference.
Sheryl "Mac" McCollum has spoken at CrimeCon since its genesis in 2017. She is a crime analyst and the founder of Cold Case Investigative Research Institute, a nonprofit that brings together universities and researchers to help solve cold cases.
Most of the attendees who she speaks with are women.
"It's mainly women, but all kinds of women," McCollum says. "Married, not married, older, in college. Some are in law enforcement. Some are young moms who aren't in the workforce."
What they all have in common, she says, is they want to offer help. The conference allows them to be part of the stories they listen to so diligently. Men might not have that same urge, she says.
"Let's just be honest — men don't normally want to gravitate toward someone crying and sit with them," she says.
Julia Ivanicka likes to watch YouTube's true crime content before bed.
"Because I listen to it so often, it's more of like a comfort thing and I know it'll instantly send me to sleep," Ivanicka says.
Eventually, her live-in partner, Tokelo Mogorosi, started to listen in on the episodes, too. "They'll open the platform for a dialogue about it," he says.
"You learn certain lessons through them," Ivanicka says.
"Yeah, exactly," Mogorosi says. "It makes for a good conversation and also kind of keeps our relationship in [good] health and intact — until she decides to murder me, but we'll never know when that's gonna be."
Knowing more is a double-edged sword, though.
"It makes you a lot more aware," says Ivanicka. "Obviously, it's a good thing to an extent, but also sometimes it might be the most innocent person walking past me and I'm like on alert because of all of the stuff I'm listening to."
Since she started listening to true crime, Ivanicka is much more cautious and even began double-checking that her backdoor is locked.
For Gimson, listening to true crime podcasts makes her feel like an investigator searching for clues.
"You're kind of doing your own detective work as you're listening," she says. "Thinking, 'Can I solve this before the end of the story?' It just really gets my brain going."
Many true-crime enthusiasts share the same sentiment. Often, people turn to TikTok to share their theories about true crime cases — and that has landed some in hot water.
True crime increased Gimson's interest in human behavior and law. "There's definitely a research part of it that I find super interesting. If I could go back, I'd want to be like a criminal lawyer," she says.
It seems that the answer to why some women fall asleep from listening to true crime lies between the calmness they experience from hearing soothing voices and the protection they feel from "knowing how to catch criminals" and prepare themselves for the unexpected.
"But also, I wonder if there's that side of [it] that when you listen to so much true crime, are you kind of attracting it?" says Ivanicka. "Are you kind of attracting those kinds of situations? Do you know what I mean? I never know."
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