On this season, we'll be covering our vehicles of hysteria, how pop culture and the media shape our psychology and society, and how our national mythologies manipulate the realities we share, and sometimes

the realities we don't. I'm your host, Chelsea Weber Smith, and this is American hysteria.

Who killed Jean-Beney Ramsey? The Zodiac killers sent cryptograms to newspapers and the police.

Sharon Tate's mother has dedicated herself to keeping the killers in prison.

There was some real deep and intense work that she did, just a bigger sense of justice in the universe.

John Penet Ramsey has one of the most recognizable faces in American history, permanently glossy from both her heavy pageant makeup and the fact that we saw her most often on the cover of sheeny tabloids as we waited in line at the grocery

store, set forever next to the rows of bright gum and candy bars. On Christmas of 1996,

John Bonae was found missing from her room, and a strange and rambling ransom note was discovered

on the stairs, the longest in American crime history. But the little girl, just six years old,

was not waiting somewhere to be rescued. She was downstairs in the wine cellar, already bludgeoned and strangled to death.

This monumental mystery that came in the middle of the 1990s true crime boom had everything.

A rich and possibly twisted, perfect American family, a strong whiff of stranger danger,

with a man possibly climbing through the window to find her, a ransom note to dissect,

conflicting testimony and eyewitness accounts, both a lack of strong evidence and a plethora

of tiny pieces that so many of us believed and still believe may one day add up to an answer.

And as we hear again and again in these highly publicized true crime cases, doesn't America deserve an answer?

Our current true crime boom has given us endless docu-series and films, podcasts, and books,

some that breathe life back into cold cases, some that expose injustice and exonerate the wrongfully

accused, and others that seem to exist for pure and lucrative entertainment.

Many sociologists and psychologists, both academic and armchair, theorize at length about the reasons were drawn to these

gruesome stories. A common explanation is that people, especially women, who consume the most

true crime, are looking to learn how to avoid dangerous situations, the warning signs that can

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