“Trial Watchers,” a new book by Savannah’s Neil Gordon with Sandy Springs’ Mike Petchenik, has its roots in a group of true crime enthusiasts including Gordon’s wife, Melissa.
“My wife is the first trial watcher that I’ve ever known,” Gordon said.
Melissa told him she wanted to take on a personal project as a buddy trip with a fellow photographer to attend the Alex Murdaugh murder trial in the Low Country of South Carolina. She made that trip and met journalists and “regular people” who came to watch the trial.
Melissa gained empathy for members of the Murdaugh family at the trial. Twenty-five years earlier, she was attending the trial of her uncle, who, like Alex Murdaugh, was an attorney accused of murder. Melissa attended his trial for weeks in Augusta, at first believing he was innocent until the presentation of evidence and his ultimate conviction. Then she felt a sort of shame for being associated with her uncle.
“Trial Watchers” tells his wife’s story and those of several other trial watchers. He coupled those stories with co-author Petchenik’s look at other aspects of trial watching, including the psychology of it.
Gordon first asked Petchenik to help him develop a documentary series on true crime enthusiasts after his PR firm helped him out of a jam over a book he had written on the Murdaugh trial.
Gordon had co-written “Behind the Doors of Justice” with Becky Hill, the former Clerk of Court for Colleton County where the Murdaugh trial was held. Allegations of her possibly tampering with jurors after the verdict resulted in Gordon discovering she had lifted an entire section of the book from another writer’s work. Publication of the book was subsequently withdrawn. Petchenik, now CEO of Pethenik Media Group, helped Gordon navigate the PR nightmare.
Local residents best know Petchenik from his news work with WSB-TV, but his relationship with Gordon goes much farther back, as Gordon hired him for his first broadcasting job in Savannah.
Petchenik said the market for true crime is incredibly robust. The fans they encountered during the research for this book follow cases closely on Court TV, listening to podcasts or attending in person.
What they learned was that the people who became trial watchers weren’t doing it as a hobby. They found some common threads, starting with having had past trauma in their own lives. An example was two daughters whose father had been murdered in Atlanta about 30 years ago.
“The killer was never brought to justice, Petchenik said.
For years his daughters carried around a piece of paper with the accused killer’s name on it in their pocket, because they wanted to exact revenge on that person, Petchenik said.
Then the daughters started following trials. In the process Petchenik said the daughters realized they were trying to achieve justice for their father by going to these trials to listen to the testimony.
A media psychologist he interviewed said the disproportionate number of women trial watchers want the good guy to prevail and the bad guy to go to prison.
“The other thing that we learned from talking to this psychologist was that it’s like a blueprint for them to learn how to not become the victims of a crime. So they watch these trials and they listen to the evidence and they can sort of learn how to how to avoid becoming victims,” Petchenik said.
The authors have created a TrialWatchers.com website and will be sharing information in podcasts. Gordan said they’d have some sizzle reels of video episodes they plan for a docu-series.
“We’ll be writing articles and then we’re going to get the individual authors who wrote chapters to lend their voice to an audiobook and one,” he said.
Every week, they plan to produce these podcasts, articles and bits of the docu-series. Memberships will be offered for $10 a month for exclusive content.
“Trial Watchers” is available on Amazon as of June 18. Petchenik said the book would be rolled out to 15,000 online retailers from Target.com, to Amazon to Walmart.
It was available at the Phoenix and Dragon Bookstore in Sandy Springs, where they read excerpts from the book and discussed how it came about recently.
