Celia Taylor, Sky Atlantic's head of unscripted content, says the appeal lies partially in the demands they make of their audience: "These are the sorts of programmes that ask, where do you stand? How do you feel? It's not just that the stories are brilliant, but that they involve the audience in their tale."
Small wonder that when people talk of listening to Serial and watching The Jinx, it's in almost gluttonous terms. They are something to be gulped down, gorged on, devoured.
"Certainly for me, part of the pleasure of watching The Jinx was talking on Twitter afterwards," says award-winning crime writer Megan Abbott. "It's a unique feeding frenzy."
Neither does the obsession stop once the series ends. Over its 10-week run, Serial became a global addiction, with fans frantically waiting for each episode before debating online. Four months after the show ended, an impassioned section of Reddit continues to sift through the evidence, positing endless theories as to who really killed Hae Min Lee in 1999. Her former boyfriend, Adnan Syed, the man convicted of the crime, has an appeal hearing scheduled in June.
"The internet draws those who like to go down the rabbit hole," says Abbott. "It taps into the inner obsessive inside so many of us."
It's also an increasingly respectable hobby. Where admitting to enjoying true crime books with their lurid covers and pulpy titles - Helter Skelter, The Stranger Beside Me, Blood and Money - used to draw sniffs and talk of exploitation, today everyone's a fan.
"All my life people wanted me to apologise for liking true crime, but Serial made it appropriate," says Abbott, who has frequently spun her novels from real-life events. "New true crime fans love the genre for the same reasons I do - because you go to dark places, because of that slight queasiness - but because Serial is on public radio from the people behind This American Life it's somehow presented as classier. Peel back the layers and the issues remain the same."
Chief among those issues is what happens when the thrill of being caught up in a story makes you forget it is someone's reality. Hae Min Lee died. Durst's friend Susan Berman died. Durst's neighbour Morris Black died. Kathie Durst, his first wife, whose body has never been found, almost certainly died. Yet both Serial and The Jinx are frequently guilty of being so enmeshed in the guilt or otherwise of their protagonist that they allow the victim to be forgotten.
"It's that Janet Malcolm thing of how much distance exists between reporter and subject," says editor and critic Sarah Weinman, referring to Malcolm's celebrated book The Journalist and The Murderer, which unpicked the complex relationship between journalist Joe McGinniss and convicted killer Jeffrey R MacDonald.
That blurring between subject and interrogator has been a component of true crime since Truman Capote claimed to have created the first non-fiction novel with In Cold Blood. His masterfully written tale of the murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, remains for many the genre's benchmark. Yet in his 1988 Capote biography, Gerald Clarke claimed that the final scene, in which detective Alvin Dewey meets the friend of one of the Clutter daughters, was fabricated, while last year a judge ruled that the secret files of one of the FBI agents, which apparently contradict much of Capote's book, could be published.
It is also the case that, inevitably, any true crime story is shaped by what is included - or left out. Rabia Chaudry, Adnan Syed's childhood friend who initially contacted Koenig about the case, was outspoken in her criticism of aspects of Serial's reporting, explaining in a talk at Stanford law school that "Sarah's telling a story, but I want to tell Adnan's story," adding that she was frustrated by Koenig's refusal to push harder at certain witnesses.
"We want true crime narratives to be like mystery novels, to see order created out of chaos," says Weinman. "The trouble is that in real life the narrative is always messy."
In The Jinx, that something was the timing of the two interviews with Durst.
A New York Times report suggested that the timeline surrounding these interviews was murky, raising questions of when exactly Jarecki and co-producer Marc Smerling went to the police.
In response, they released a statement: "Given we are likely to be called as witnesses in any case law enforcement may decide to bring against Robert Durst, it is not appropriate for us to comment further.
5 top true crime films
Paradise Lost Trilogy
Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's films covered the US Robin Hood Hills murders, in which three heavy metal fans were accused of killing three boys in a Satanic ritual. They were released in 2011 after 18 years in jail.
The Staircase
This 2004 mini-series by Jean-Xavier de Lestrade follows the case of Michael Peterson, who was convicted of murdering his second wife in 2003.
The Thin Blue Line
This 1988 film by Errol Morris argues drifter Randall Adams was wrongly convicted of murdering a Texan policeman. Adams was later released.
Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer
Nick Broomfield's 1992 film about the murderer, executed in 2002.
The Central Park Five
Ken and Sarah Burns' study of the 1989 arrest of five black teenagers suspected of raping a white woman in Central Park. Another man later confessed to the crime.
- Observer
