True Crime in the Coming Age

by Dale Smith

So now we've warmed you up, we’re going to run for one minute. Just sixty seconds. You can do this, definitely. Just a gentle jog - we are not a run fast podcast. Are you ready? 

Three, two, one... and go. 

That's it. You're doing great. So, while you just keep putting one foot in front of the other, let me tell you about our first future crime. Alice Wakeling, born this very year, in this very part of town, and murdered eighteen years later. Whoa, right? You signed up for a true crime, sci-fi podcast that would get you running 5K in thirty minutes, and we desperately need to diversify our market share, so here we are.  

You can go back to a resting walk now, and if you tap “Yes” to the "Allow access to my phone data?" pop-up that's just appeared on your screen, I'll walk you to the very spot where Alice's body will be found eighteen years from today. 

Thank you. OK, so just walk at your own pace, following the green dot on the map that should be on your screen now. 

Alice was the first confirmed victim of the Blue Band Killer, but we're not here to talk about him. I want to tell you about Alice. She was a single mother to a beautiful six-month-old called Amber. Alice's income was what the police euphemistically called "unstable." She had no one around to give her support: she wasn't in touch with her parents and alternated between sofa-surfing and hostels. So, the police made some short-sighted assumptions about what she was doing out after midnight on a school night. Despite being told by the friends she had looking after Amber that Alice had been excited about the possibility of getting bar work, and that she had to go in to talk to the manager while he was on duty. She was found by a couple walking their dog the next morning. She had the tell-tale blue band around her neck. 

Oops, run time again. You ready? Keep following the green dot. 

Three, two, one... and go. 

Keep following that dot. I know it looks a little overgrown, but we're nearly there. 

The Blue Band Killer will be unmasked ten years after his death thanks to DNA evidence using revolutionary time travel technology developed by... wait for it... Amber Wakeling. That's right: our girl grew up smart. Time travel isn't possible... at the macro scale. That's the scale of things like you and me, cats and dogs, even bacteria. But at the nano scale, there's nothing stopping a particular particle from whizzing backwards or forwards in time. Time is just an emergent property of the macro scale: it doesn't even really exist for particles. Which is, you know, next to useless to you, me, and the cats and dogs, or bacteria if we want to travel in time. Unless we can start to build machines at the nano scale. Push all those little bosons and fermions around until they entangle and start jumping around the universe in tandem, pushing other bosons and fermions around to start changing stuff at the macro scale again. Amber built a machine in the past that gathered DNA data from her mother's killer while he was killing her and then buried it for her to dig up in her own time. 

You can stop running now. Back to your resting walk. 

By the time Amber found him, of course, the Blue Band Killer was dead. Natural causes, in a nursing home in Beijing. He'd been living there for two years when he died, working at a local monitoring site. He never faced justice. He went on to kill four other women that we know of: Alice Wakeling, Sarah Taylor, Julia-Maria Himenez, Sarah Dhillon, Lizzie Strode. Time for a fun poll—vote "Yes!" or "No!" on your screen: do you think the Blue Band Killer should have faced the death penalty for all those women? 

Thank you for your vote. I do too. 

But I would, wouldn’t I? 

Hi, I'm your host for this podcast, Amber Wakeling. 

Something else you can get those little bosons and fermions to make, it turns out, is audio signals. Enough for an entire podcast. And once you have someone's DNA and a time machine, you can find where they'll be at any point in history. Including the one when they're looking for a podcast to help them get a little fitter. And audio signals can be sent across telephone networks, so you can promise people things, future knowledge that will make them rich beyond their wildest dreams and help them come through the electro-pandemic unscathed. If they'll just wait in a patch of waste ground in the middle of nowhere for a man to come jogging up of his own free will. And make sure he doesn't leave again. 

No, don't run. Running's all done now. I've told them to make it quick. I don't want to cause you any pain. I don't know what in your life made you do those things, or if it's even happened to you yet. And I don't know what will happen to me once it's done. This is a pretty classic grandfather situation, right? I just know I have to try. For my mum, and Julia-Maria, and Lizzie, and the Sarahs, and anyone else the police couldn't be bothered to look at. So just close your eyes. Try to breathe and stay calm. It won't be long. 

Three, two... 

© 2025 Dale Smith