I learned about the story from a reporter named Elizabeth Hernandez at the Denver Post.

She wrote this piece in August about a murder that supposedly happened in Littleton, Colorado.

On July four, twenty fourteen, just before noon, the Littleton Police Department made a decisive move.

Harrison, twenty one, a college student and part time bartender, had been living a life of turmoil and confusion.

Harrison admitted to the police that he had been in a secret sexual relationship with his stepfather for the past two years.

There was this YouTube channel that made this video and it was a pretty wild case.

Welcome to True Crime Case Files.

Today we uncover the tragic and complex story of Richard Engelbert, a successful real estate agent who's hidden life and secrets led to his brutal murder.

And Elizabeth Hernandez, her editor, told her about these emails that the newsroom have been receiving, all linking to this video, all talking about this weird murder.

And her editor said, this seems like it's a story made for you.

And she read these emails and there were some that just said you should check out this video.

This is weird.

But there were others that were mad at the Denver posts that were saying, why aren't you covering this?

How could you miss such a big, horrific case.

It makes sense that people would be upset.

This video had been seen almost two million times, and frankly, it was embarrassing that the story of Richard Engelbert, this grizzly murder hadn't been covered by the local paper.

How is it that an independent YouTube channel was doing a better job of doing an investigation than professional reporters.

Well there was a reason.

It was pretty quickly clear that the story was made up, that was invented using AI, and that no such murder had ever happened.

I talked to Henry Larson, who wrote about this not so true true crime phenomenon for FO for Media.

My name is Henry Larson.

I'm a reporter and I cover typically criminal justice.

This is not that at all, so much weirder story about fake crimes.

The channel was called True Crime Case Files and it had about one hundred thousand subscribers and tons of videos.

The channel itself seemed to have been making dozens and dozens of similar fake crimes, pumping them out, and it seemed like people were buying into these fake crimes thinking they were real.

I'm afraid Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts.

This is kill Switch, I'm Dexter Thomas, I'm.

Goodbye.

Henry started looking at the YouTube channel and he noticed something.

A lot of videos on the channel were pretty perverse sexualized.

Then again, so are a lot of true crime stories.

These ones just always had a particular extra element of drama.

That would usually have something to do with someone in a position of power murdering or taking advantage of someone who had less power than them, like a sheriff and the secretary, or a teacher and a student, a parent and their stepchild.

There were dozens of story with that same setup, and just as an example, let me red you some of these titles here.

So one of them goes judge beats college student to death after secret gay affair ends in scandal.

Then couple's wife swap experiment ends in obsession and brutal murders, or cheating husband murder's loyal wife and claims he was on an acid trip.

And then of course there's the one the reporter of the dever posts got the emails about husband's secret gay love affair, with step son, ends in grizzly murder, and whatever you're imagining the story is like, you're probably right.

I will say that they got progressively more scandalous click baity sexual over time.

When this channel first started making these videos, they were a little tamer.

The video of the went viral and alerted the Denver Post to this fake channel was definitely from the era after the channel had gotten much more scandalous.

It told the story of Richard Engelbert, a real estate agent who lived a seemingly perfect life but was having a secret sexual affair with his step son.

Richard kept this relationship hidden from everyone, fearing it would ruin his reputation and career.

In addition to this, he continued to meet other men for sex through his work, using the homes he showed as secret meeting places.

The whole crime took place in Littleton, Colorado, and the video showed pictures of these generic looking rows of suburban homes, and for anyone who actually lived there, it was obvious that this was not Lyttleton, but for people who don't live there, it might have been convincing.

All these videos look kind of like a lower budget version of something you might see on the Hallmark channel.

They're usually around twenty five minutes long.

They're narrated by a host with this authoritative radio voice, and there's photos of suburban living rooms, and then there's the setup.

It introduces the victim or the witnesses or the perpetrator with a plausible looking photograph.

You'll see a smiling businessman with a blue suit and bleach white teeth, or an office worker with blonde hair and dangling earrings, and then it'll cut to a photo of police cars parked outside the crime scene.

And stories are on par with a lot of true crime stuff you might see on TV.

Was it obvious to you that this stuff was AI generated?

It was pretty clear to me that the narrator was an AI generated voice, that the photos are very weird.

Everyone had impeccable veneers in the headshots that were generated and looked very glossy and kind of plasticky, and so that made me initially think, oh, okay, this is pretty obvious, right, this has been AI generated.

But then when you go in the comments, there might be a couple people who are raising of red flag saying I don't know about this.

I can't find any information about this online, but they were drowned out by people finding specific details from the videos and saying, I can't believe that the police missed this, or I think that there is this theory that was overlooked, or here's this other comment I have about like a material fact that was presented in the video, and that at least to me, showed that people were buying into this, and combined with the people who are mad at the Denver Post for not reporting that story, makes me think that this was compelling to at least a fair amount of this channel's viewers.

Generally, people were interacting with each other talking about the details of this fake case as if it was real.

Okay, just the recap.

The images look AI generated.

The voice is also AI generated.

Okay, it's fake and huh, people are falling for it.

Not surprising.

This is the Internet and that is where most of us would stop.

We'd close the window and go back to white day.

But Henry didn't do that.

He kept digging.

I got really intrigued about the kind of person that would make this video.

So I found the contact email associated with the YouTube channel and I reached out.

So hold on this person.

They had just left their contact email just on their YouTube page.

Yeah, they had a contact email.

Not every YouTuber does that.

That's actually kind of unusual.

Why do you think they did that?

I don't know.

I think, well, I guess I have the theory.

I think a lot of the reason why these videos were being made by this person were because they wanted to be a filmmaker and get some attention.

So Henry gave him some of that attention.

Now, just a note in case you want to go and read about this.

The guy behind the channel, his name is out there now if you want to look for it.

But back when Henry wrote the article and when we did the interview, he was referring to him anonymously with the name Paul.

So that's the name that you'll hear in this episode.

So, yeah, what's his deal?

Why did you start all this up?

What did he tell you?

He graduated from college right before the pandemic, and when the pandemic hit, he was living with his parents and together.

You know, a lot of families did all sorts of traditions around this time.

Paul and his family decided they were going to watch dateline together, okay, and they watched a lot of Dateline He told me he really didn't like the show all that much, but he taught himself the formula.

He taught himself the process of the procedural true crime genre.

Here's the characters, here's the Grizzly murder, and this lengthy investigation presenting each of the suspects in turn, and then eventually a trial and some resolution for the victims.

This is also around the time that chat GPT is really rolling out publicly, and he watches there's like a twitch live stream of AI generated Seinfeld episodes.

Hey, yvone, did you hear about that new restaurant around the corner?

I remember that.

Yeah, they're supposed to have the best food in town.

Yeah, I forgot all about that.

I heard they just opened up, and I'm dying to try it, but it looks so expensive.

Maybe we can make a deal with the owner, you know, trade them some of our jokes for a free meal.

He loved it real, he got really interesting.

He was like, oh, this is the thing.

This is weird and new and probably cost nothing to make.

So Paul decides to try his hand at AI generated content, but before he lands on true crime, he tries a different genre.

First.

He comes up with the bones of a plot for a four to five minute Hallmark style rom com.

Crucially, he labels them as AI generated.

He calls this channel AI Film Studio.

He thinks they're very good.

We disagree on that.

I didn't think they were very good when I watch them.

Did you tell him that?

I asked him if he thought they were good, and he said yes, and I said okay, And they bomb.

The videos do terribly that none of them cross over one hundred views, and so for some that might sort of been part a lesson that this technology isn't ready.

There's something weird about this format.

You need some more production value, even if you want to use AI in media.

The lesson he learns is, don't tell people it's made from AI.

Don't tell people's think.

The other decision he makes is to focus on true crime, and in January of twenty twenty four, he starts the True Crime Case Files channel and he tests this idea he had that maybe one of the things that was holding him back was that he was telling people that these videos were AI generated.

So he stops doing that.

I mean, it turns out that maybe he wasn't wrong, because his videos started to take off after that.

Yeah, in all honesty, he was success.

At least for a series of months.

His channel was working.

It was working so well that other people noticed and started copying his style, his formats, even the exact titles of some of his videos.

And now you can find dozens of channels that are all posting similar fake true crime content.

There's variations in different niches here and there, but it's all basically the same format, AI generated images accompanied by AI generated voices reading stories that are also probably AI generated.

He saw himself at the forefront of this gold rush, this new medium of entertainment, and here he is experimenting, trying something, and so I think part of the allure of making AI films for him was the fact that it was AI, was the fact that this was a new technology.

He told me he does consider himself to be a filmmaker, one without a studio or expensive production costs.

Or in this case, I guess a camera.

Or a camera, yeah, or a microphone.

Okay, So how much of a gold rush are we talking?

Though?

It's a little hard to say.

A few times Henry did try asking him how much he was making, but he couldn't get a straight answer.

He never told me exactly how much money he made.

I did learn that this was the only thing he was working on, and as far as I know, it was his only source of income.

All right, let's just stick with the facts for a second.

This is all fake and nobody's denying that the stories are made up.

The voice isn't real, the images aren't real.

Yes, people, a lot of people actually are being fooled.

But does fake mean bad?

Is there anything wrong with what he's doing here?

We'll get into that after the break.

So true crime.

Listen, I don't know how you feel about true crime.

I've got some feelings.

I think a lot of people have some feelings about true crime.

But let's be real, it is an extremely popular genre of I'm gonna say content.

I'm gonna be as neutral as I can here.

Not a fan personally, But why did he pick true crime?

Do you think he.

Picked true crime because he knew the format?

But Paul has a lot of criticisms of true crime, and this was actually one of the reasons why he justified his work.

He said, what I'm doing making these AI videos is actually better than real true crime.

It's better.

It's better.

It's better because there's no real victims involved.

He got to make his videos and his money and no one suffered.

How did you feel about that?

I thought he was wrong.

I still think he's wrong, and I told him that.

I mean, there's the reporter line, which is just injecting fake information into the world is bad.

But there's also the component that true crime as a medium has plenty of flaws that are not just about the specific victim of a crime, but also our societal understandings of criminal justice in general.

We turn on the evening news on our local TV broadcaster and it leads with a murder in a neighborhood near us, and we think that crime is going up, And we listen to a true crime podcast about a serial killer, and we're a little more nervous around our neighbors.

And there's a real societal impact that a lot of researchers have looked into and analyzed about crime media impacting our perceptions of actual crime.

Right.

So, I think his work in many ways was committing some of the same sins as the true crime genre in general.

Right.

What you're talking about here is research essentially that shows it this stuff also makes us feel like your neighborhood is not safe, which is pro Your neighborhood's pretty safe.

You live in the suburbs, You're fine, it's gonna be okay.

But we watch a lot of this stuff, and if it's maybe fun to watch, you know when you just want to turn your brain off at the end of the day, which I think is what a lot of people do for true crime.

Look, I get it, but in the back of your mind, it also makes you think that the world around you is more dangerous than it actually is, and what does that do to you?

But Paul the AI True Crime creator, he had a different point of view on what he was doing.

He said, what he was making is a form of abstract art.

He really liked his structural touches that he would introduce into these videos, and at several points he basically said, you know, I make these stories so ludicrous, so insane that people should just assume that they're fake, that they didn't really happen, and if they don't get it, that's on that.

Really it was so like in an absurdist art form.

Yeah, he said what he's doing is absurdist start, and he doesn't regret any of it.

Yeah, I mean like his larger artistic message is lost on me because it sounds like complete BS.

I was gonna say, I'm gonna call BS on the AI excuse.

You might have been wondering what actual true crime podcasters think about all this stuff.

Well you just heard from two of them.

Hi.

I am Bob Mauta and my name is Lauren brtcheck out.

Bob used to be a defense attorney.

Then he made a podcast telling the story of how his father defended the notorious serial killer John Wayne Gacy, and since then he's been a true crime podcaster.

Lauren is a former television producer, but now she's focused on true crime audio.

She produced the podcast Happy Face, which was about another serial killer, and that's been adapted to a show on Paramount Plus.

The two of them work together on a true crime podcast called Murder on Songbird Road.

But I think what be happening here, and I'm curious to hear what you think about this, is this may be exposing something about the audience for true crime.

And I think this is one of the things that this person who who are calling Paul is you know this point he's trying to make, which he's saying, Well, the stuff that he's making, This AI generated stuff is actually better than real true crime because no actual victims are being exploited.

That would work with the assumption that the intention of all true crime creators is to exploit victims.

And that's the antithesis of my intention of Bob's intention.

And I would ask Paul, since he has wrapped this very I think disingenuous scam up with the I'm teaching everybody a lesson, Bo, what he's doing with the profits?

Mm hmm, Like are you are you are you sending all the proceeds LIKECTIMS organizations, Like are you doing good with it to teach your lesson?

Or are you just using that as a convenient excuse as to why you're creating this stuff under the guys that it's actually real.

But and look, I'm going to devils advocate on Paul's behalf here, true criminal defense attorney here.

Yeah right, I mean, I can't help it.

So in terms of I mean, there is a large chunk of creators out there in the true crime realm that they're they are just they're out there peddling the violence of the crimes.

They are not taking into consideration the victims themselves, their families that have to live with these tragedies for generations beyond when the crime took place.

They're merely just retelling a story that's not their story to tell, you know, and really in order to just make money and look like I have a lot of friends that do it, you know, that don't like there aren't deep divers that really just kind of sit there and reread.

They'll watch a Discovery ID thing and they'll go right up an episode about it and just.

Speak about it with authority.

Right, you know.

So it's like, I don't want to offend any of the people that do that out there, but I think that Paul might have a point as to those type of creators because what like, really, at the end of the day, what do they bringing to the table?

I'm hearing YouTube really kind of distinguishing yourself from a lot of other people who make true crime podcasts, even though you all may you know, be situated in the same podcast in the listing right, even in the same genre.

In this way, we could maybe think of what you two do as creating really carefully prepared organic meals.

It's a lot of people who are very happy with a bag of Cheetos.

I right.

I mean, like a lot of people just do like kind of that pulp fiction quick hitter.

I want to rip open that bag of Cheetos.

I want to dive in.

And it's arguably a much bigger market.

But remember the Paul talked about his work as holding up a mirror to the industry of true crime, which I think is actually pretty interesting as a concept.

You know, show the audience truly what it is that they're looking at.

But that made me wonder about the response of that audience when he was talking about his work is absurdist art.

He's got to be looking at the comments.

He's seen the same comments you're seeing a lot of people.

The majority, the bulk of the comments clearly are people who do not understand that this is fake.

Yeah, in large part also because he would moderate his own comments and delete comments that would call him out for his lives.

Did he tell you that.

Yeah, he said that he would go in and cut comments that were negative or said that what he was making was fake.

He didn't get all of them, but he said that he would try and get as many as he could.

Yo, hold on, Okay, I'm sorry man.

So at that point, saying it's on you.

If you don't get it, you are manufacturing something that's fake, and you're also manufacturing an echo chamber of other people of basically social proof.

You know, it's like walking into a room and everybody says, wow, look at this amazing thing.

You think, well, everybody else thinks this thing is amazing.

I suppose if I think it's not amazing, something's probably wrong with me.

So if you watch the video, look at the comments, everybody else seems to think it's real, You're gonna feel kind of weird if you don't also go along with that.

Also, like, maybe it's just me.

Everybody else seems to think it's real.

Yeah, that's incredible.

So I don't know about you, but maybe this does change things a little.

Are we trying to alert people to the danger of harmful entertainment or we just trying to make money or are those two things totally compatible.

Maybe it's just recognizing that people wanted cheetos, and Paul figured out that he could provide people with those cheetos really easily, really quickly, and in massive quantities.

He started picking up the pace, and he was publishing videos every day or so.

Before long, he put out over one hundred and fifty of these things and people were watching these.

Some people are being fooled.

But what if some people don't care?

If the people just want Paul's Cheetos?

Is that so bad?

I'll go further with that metaphor.

You are what you eat?

And are you putting ideas out there into the world.

Are you having an overspill into real life in which these crimes could become real?

I mean, if I'm picking up what you're saying here, do you think that there's some worry that this AI generated stuff becoming more prevalent, which it's getting more and more salacious, the details get more and more outlandish, more and more silacious, but also seem to get more listens, more views, more clicks.

That this could start to affect how people perceive action cases or even just the news and give them ideas.

Yeah, I mean, what's to say that AI created you know, true crime isn't going to come up with concepts of ways to really effectively evade.

You know, I'll tell you another issue that I have with it.

If you're leaning heavily into sensationalizing what you are claiming is real trauma suffered by real people, but it's all fake and all made up.

You are pulling out emotion and concern from real people.

And when you are exhausting that reservoir, they're going to have a lot less capacity to care about real trauma and crime for other people.

So and that's a real thing.

That's a real thing.

I mean, we see it especially in what we do Dexter in terms of people become emotionally invested in cases.

And I think it's kind of like one of the unforeseen side effects of botox that has been studied extensively is that when people have been doing it for a period of time, they lose their ability to be empathetic because when you're listening to somebody in real time, we don't realize how much our face is mimicking that person's emotions, and that gives us the empathy.

That is how wild.

I had not heard that.

It makes sense though.

But now just take that and put that over AI true crime.

It will ultimately be the same thing.

We'll stop caring about these cases.

So what now, have we become too addicted to junk food?

Kind?

Can we or can the platforms do anything about all this?

That's after the break the channel had around one hundred thousand subscribers and across the videos millions of views.

It's made Henry wonder he might not like this, but was Paul actually doing anything against YouTube's policies?

So he contacted YouTube and asked them, so you head up YouTube, and YouTube nuked hiss channel essentially, Yeah.

Not only that channel, but another three or four that he also had.

What was the reason that they gave for pulling these channels down?

YouTube told me in an email they said that Paul's videos had violated YouTube's policies around child safety, particularly their policy and child sexual exploitation.

So not about AI.

No, No, he wasn't violating any of YouTube's policies around AI.

And even though this channel was taken off of YouTube, you can still find it on other platforms.

He's still making this stuff, clearly because it's on Spotify.

I found it on Amazon Music, all the platform channels that I look for, it's on there too.

Yeah, he has an RSS feed and a podcast player and he's still generating these true crime stories.

Also, they're selling ads ads on all of these yeah, for hummus and universities and all sorts of weird stuff.

So he's still clearly making money.

So again, YouTube takes down the channel because they say it violated child safety policies, not because it was fake, and Spotify doesn't really seem to care that it's fake or that it's explicit.

So for now, there's not really any reason for this stuff to stop.

True crime is really popular and people love it, and so of course there's going to be ripoffs and parodies and scams associated with it.

It's just the world we live in now, I think.

So if you want to know how to make a true crime case story video that will go viral, then you are in luck because hey, there, and how are you doing?

And now there are tutorials on how to make this stuff.

In this video, I am going to show you how you can create your own true crime story video and go viral.

So are you excited?

Well, let's dive right in.

I mean, of course there are tutorials, right, of course, Pandora's box is now open, and there's really nothing to do except hope for a solar flare, right, That's what I'm my fingers are crossed for.

I mean, at this point, just bring the asteroid man, because I don't know what we're gonna do.

Yeah, let's just clear all the satellites from orbit and start fresh.

And I don't know, maybe someone will cut all the undersea telecoms cables and we'll be good that.

I mean, that might be it.

At this point, I'm going to refrain from saying kill switch.

I'm going to refrain from saying that because that would be too corny.

So you spent months reporting on this, What is your takeaway from this?

There's a couple I think the very boring reporter in me is like, you know, truth matter is more than ever right, and misinformation is bad.

But of course we all know that.

I think we have to ask ourselves why we get interested in the media we consume.

I think that's a really important part of being a consumer in an age where we have so much to choose from, there's so much more of our media diet that's completely in our own hands, and we can totally screw ourselves over if we let ourselves.

I would imagine that there are some people who will continuing to listen to Paul's podcasts who know that it's fake and who don't care because it's good enough for them.

And not only is it good enough for them.

We's escalated to something, to a level that Netflix is not going to give them because the source material doesn't exist.

There isn't a husband who is secretly gay who ca his wife on a cruise that happens every week.

There is not a trans person who crosses state lines to participate in some drug ring or something like that every single week.

It's not possible, but AI does make it possible.

And maybe that's where we are.

Maybe we've gotten so addicted to true crime that we we there are people who want the fake stuff.

This is something Bob also brought up.

I mean, I think at some point people are gonna become like it, Like more and more people are listening to it, and they're they're going in or do the guys as if it happened, And then when they come to realize that it didn't, they're going to be upset.

But then the question becomes the next time it comes up, they be like, well, I know now that it's fake, but it was still pretty good.

Again.

Look when I when I open a bag of Cheetos, I know what I'm in for.

Right, And Bob and Lauren are also worried about some other real life effects.

I've got the distinct fear about how it's going to add actually move into the criminal justice system, because it's only a matter of time before they're able to use these same type of programs in terms of creating imagery where they're going to be able to bring false evidence into cases, like there is nothing stopping somebody from saying, yeah, I have a recording of a phone call wherein this person just confessed.

I mean, the thought of what could be in the very very near future is terrifying on an entirely different level than in terms of just the fact that it's able to create out of whole cloth things that don't even exist and make it seem as if they do.

You know, we're seeing it on the political stage right now, and so we are gradually becoming more and more comfortable with accepting ai.

AI generated evidence being used in a courtroom.

I hope we never have to do an episode about that, but honestly, at this point, man, give it a couple months, but I think what we're starting to learn is that there is a segment of the population that knows what they're getting is fake and they don't care.

Maybe you personally are okay with the chat GBT filters that can redraw your picture as a Simpsons character, or you're cool with the audio generation engines that can turn your lyrics into a pop song or a mariachi song or a rap song.

Maybe you personally draw the line at simulated approximations of people being murdered, but we should acknowledge that these are all uses for the same technology.

Thank you so much for listening to kill Switch.

You can hit us up at kill Switch at Kaleidoscope dot NYC with any of your thoughts, or you can hit me personally at dex digi that's d e x d i GI on Instagram or blue Sky if that's more your think.

And if you liked the episode, hopefully you did.

If you're on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, you know, take that phone out of that pocket and leave us a review.

It really does help people find the show, which in turn helps us keep doing our thing.

Kill Switch is hosted by Me, Dexter Thomas.

It's produced by Shena Ozaki, darl Of Potts, and Kate Osborne.

A theme song was written by me and Kyle Murdoch, and Kyle also mixed the show from Kaleidoscope Our executive producers are Oswallashin, mangesh Hati Gadur and Kate Osborne.

From iHeart our executive producers our Katrina Norvil and Nikki Etour.

We'll catch you on the next one.