ABSTRACT
South Africa’s They Killed Dulcie and Canada’s Missing and Murdered: Finding Cleo are both true crime podcast series that use this wildly popular audio genre to interrogate structural violence. To do this they replace the central question ‘who did it?’ with ‘why did this happen?’ This framing shifts the focus from individual murderers to broader systems of violence. In so doing the two series use storytelling to widen the definition of violence and expand the circle of culpability. They Killed Dulcie and Finding Cleo use sound not only to render systemic violence audible, but also to restore voice to the victims. By working with the families of the victims and weaving in Dulcie and Cleo’s own words, both podcast series refuse to let either woman become another statistic reduced to her death. By comparing They Killed Dulcie and Finding Cleo we see how the tools of narrative audio storytelling – such as character, plot and scenes – can be used to tell complex structural stories about formations of power.
