This year’s CrimeCon is more than a chance for true crime enthusiasts like Celeste Kim of Broomfield to connect with other fans like herself.
She said she belongs to a Facebook true crime group, and bought her ticket a year ago. She and her friend were working their way through the vendors’ and creators’ room, weaving past authors who were selling books and giving away key chains.
Down the hall were ballrooms where well-known personalities in the true-crime world, such as Chris Hansen, Marcia Clark and John Walsh, were set to speak.
“It’s a little overwhelming,” Kim said, “with so much to see, and I’m trying to wrap my brain around it.”
Last year, over 6,000 people attended the conference, and this year, even more people are expected to show up, according to CrimeCon CEO Kevin Balfe, who made time for a 10-minute telephone interview amidst the din of people in T-shirts announcing a range of true crime stories or shows, tags slung around their necks, some bumping into each other while they browsed the thick manual of speakers and events.
“The typical conference, when you pick a headliner, we’ve never done that, so everybody who comes comes because they know and love the genre,” he said of the conference that has occurred every year since 2017, a few times virtually because of the pandemic.
He pointed out that one of the speakers is John Ramsey, father of JonBenet Ramsey, a 6-year-old girl who participated in pageants and was found dead in her Boulder home around Christmas of 1996. The homicide, which attracted worldwide attention, has not been solved.
“The Ramsey case has international fascination,” he said. “We supported John Ramsey’s push for more scrutiny around why DNA has not been tested.”
The conference is a gathering place for all things true crime, and that includes representatives from production companies with new shows coming out.
One table was set up with stickers and other promotional giveaways about “Pushed to Death,” a true-crime documentary series by the company FilmRise. The first episode in the series, available to stream free on YouTube in about three weeks, will be a 13-year-old story based here in Colorado.
It’s about Harold Henthorn, a talkative braggart who pretended to have a good job but was actually unemployed. He was convicted for pushing his wife, Toni, off a cliff in Rocky Mountain National Park during their 2012 visit, after saying that she’d fallen.
While people were hearing from the rep for that series and many others about their upcoming programs, Balfe said his goal is to make the conference about advocacy for victims’ rights as well.
“If you see the way we program, it’s really much more about giving a platform to unheard victims and their families, legislation around advocacy, and getting passionate about change,” he said.
That focus was apparent during a visit to the conference on Friday, when Iva Rody was sitting at a table outside a row of ballrooms with bookmarks and fliers listing eight rules for being an ethical true crime fanatic, including respecting victims, their voices and their boundaries and making sure not to harm them in getting them to share her stories.
She said that on Saturday, the National Center for Victims of Crime, of which she is chief operating officer, will hold a panel at which crime victims and their loved ones can give a victim impact statement. Many written words go unspoken because the perpetrator is never located, or the case is pleaded out before making it to trial.
“A lot of times, victim/survivors want to be heard,” she said. “We want to make sure we treat them with respect and respecting their emotional response, and looking at it as more than just entertainment.”
She said putting voice to words that might have been living inside their head is an act of healing because it offers listening ears — even if not those of the one who caused harm.
“Some of them get to do it for the first time. I think the one thing we know is the one thing they want is to be heard. Any opportunity we can give them to do that can be very healing and helpful for them.”
While many there had books and podcasts to hawk, there was also a man at the Missing & Murdered Diné Relatives Coalition, raising awareness about the non-profit organization that helps families of missing and murdered Indigenous people around the Navajo Nation pay for funeral costs.
Set up in a hallway bustling with people was a large bulletin board covered with fliers of missing people. A table near it had pens and Post-its, and a lot of people had used them to write notes like “Still Thinking Of You” or “Come Home, Mom” to their loved ones. People were taking pictures of the fliers, some of them journalists who said they might use the fliers to spark future stories.
Another vendor at the conference was Gordon Atkinson, vice president of Newspapers.com, a partner of Ancestry.com, which makes available online versions of newspapers dating back decades.
Often, true crime enthusiasts and researchers look at old newspapers to find details on cases, and his service makes it possible to do so online.
“In the usage of our site, a lot of people were clipping crime-related articles,” Atkinson said. Last year, we heard about CrimeCon — it was in Nashville. If you’re a family history researcher, you might be a crime researcher. It’s like a time machine. Sometimes, it’s crime; sometimes it’s a marriage story — you can get the facts as they were presented at the time.”
The conference, which costs $189 on Saturday and $109 on Sunday, is not all about healing and research, though. It will also include a presentation Saturday night by Ice-T, who will talk about his career on the NBC drama, "Law and Order: SVU," before wrapping up on Sunday.
“He’s going to talk about playing this TV detective [and] how to translate real-life crime into a scripted show,” Balfe said.
