The title of Hulu’s How I Caught My Killer intrigued me. A lot. Like, what could that possibly mean? I knew it was a docu-series, meaning these were true stories. Were these stories where victims called their friends or loved ones and told them who killed them before they died? Sadly, no.
How I Caught My Killer is a nine episode series that tells nine separate stories of murder. In most of the stories, the killers were caught thanks to some clues from the victim’s cell phone GPS or diary entries or a conversation they had with someone in the days before their death.
Hulu has a lot of true crime documentaries on their roster. It seems like every time I try to watch one of them, I find myself disappointed. In this case, the series wants you to believe that the victims made a conscious decision to identify their attacker. Alas, that is not the case. While the victim’s cell phone or personal conversations have a hand in catching their killer, it’s nothing that the victim did on purpose. In a lot of these cases, it was the cell phone’s GPS that told the police where the victim’s body was or what their movements were before their death. Unless you are actively turning off your GPS, I wouldn’t count that information as you “finding” your killer.
Not only are the victims not “catching” their killer, in some of the stories, they had nothing to do with the arrest at all. In one of the stories, an ex-boyfriend who was already in jail told the police that the killer confessed to him and that is how she was apprehended. Now, I’ll admit that some of the stories had some awful police work but just as many of the stories relied totally on the police doing their job. Looking into a victim’s text history or Facebook chat history is basic policework. And none of those messages were “Hey, I’m going to murder you tomorrow.”
The only positive thing I can say about this series is that I was not familiar with a lot of the stories. I stopped consuming a lot of true crime media during the pandemic because it was doing bad things to my mental health. But it is still pretty rare for a docu-series like this to be filled with stories that I haven’t heard about. I just wish the series was a little more honest about it’s content.