The True Harms of True Crime: Snapped
by Leigh Goodmark, Kim Hricko, and Kwaneta Harris
In August 2004, the Oxygen network (Oprah Winfrey’s baby) introduced Snapped to the world. The true crime show’s tagline: “From socialites to secretaries, female killers share one thing in common: they all snapped.” Now in its thirty-sixth season, Snapped is Oxygen’s longest running program and has spawned spin-offs including Snapped: Killer Couples and Snapped: Behind Bars.
Snapped, and true crime shows like it, are a significant source of information about the criminal legal system. But for true crime to sell, it must be compelling—so producers of true crime sensationalize stories. Snapped is a prime example. Producer Zak Weisfeld contends that Snapped does not involve “the old stereotypes of battered women who are trying to defend themselves. This is the dark side of female empowerment. This is not syrupy, and these women are not sympathetic.” To tell those stories, Snapped takes liberties in its presentation of cases. Nancy Seaman, for example, killed her husband in self-defense after thirty-one years of abuse during their marriage. But, journalist Melissa Jeltsen observes, the Snapped episode on Seaman “focus[ed] on the salacious and titillating details of her crime.” Seaman told Jeltsen, “They didn’t tell a story of a woman who was a kind, loyal, gentle person, a devoted and faithful wife, loving mother, and award-winning teacher. No… they portrayed me as some ax-wielding crazy who ‘snapped’ and killed her husband. That’s not what happened.” When Mindy Dodd saw the episode Snapped made about her after she killed her husband, who had previously been her stepfather and who had sexually abused her since childhood, she felt that the show minimized the abuse she experienced, choosing instead to tell the prosecution’s story.
Kim: I believe I was one of the first Snapped episodes ever made, when the Oxygen network was brand new. I knew they were making an episode on my case and from the working title Snapped I knew it wouldn’t be a balanced piece. Still, a friend of mine tried to say nice things about me which ended up on the cutting room floor or as a punch line somehow. My episode seems to air frequently after all these years, and I often wonder if the public will ever tire of seeing it.
Dixie Shanahan Duty, the subject of an early episode of Snapped, had an experience similar to Mindy Dodd’s. Duty killed her husband, Scott Shanahan, after enduring decades of abuse. The episode makes mention of some of what Duty experienced during her marriage: a black eye during her first pregnancy; Shanahan’s control of her actions; Shanahan “beating” Duty. It covers an incident during which Shanahan bound Duty’s hands and feet with wire coat hangers and threw her in the basement for three days. The show then cuts to Scott Shanahan’s disappearance in the fall of 2002. Friends and neighbors observed that Duty was healthier, happier, and better off after Shanahan left. As one friend told Snapped, “No one had really cared. Nobody looked for him.” In July 2003, though, a “concerned citizen called the Shelby County Sheriff’s Department and asked them to investigate.” Police ultimately found Shanahan’s body in the back bedroom of Duty and Shanahan’s home; he had been shot in the back of the head.
Snapped recounts how Duty’s neighbors and friends in Defiance, Iowa, came together to pay her bail. One of Duty’s co-workers told Snapped, “if she wouldn’t have killed him in self-defense, eventually he would have killed her.” Duty rejected a plea deal and testified in her own defense. At trial, she described how, on the day Shanahan was killed, he beat her, told her he would kill their unborn child, and pointed a gun at her and threatened to kill her. Duty decided to call for help, but the only phone was in Shanahan’s room. As she moved toward the phone, Duty said, Shanahan started to come towards her, so she grabbed the gun he had earlier pointed at her and shot it. As jury foreman Chad Bruns recalls on Snapped, “The defense tried to make Scott look like he was a very bad person.”
This might seem like a balanced portrayal of what happened in Defiance, Iowa, on August 30, 2002. But no thirty-minute show (approximately twenty-one minutes with commercial breaks) could ever convey the horror of Duty’s nineteen years with Scott Shanahan.
Kim: The lives represented on a 30-minute true crime episode cannot be fleshed out beyond the quick designation of “good” or “bad.” They are flattened into easily digestible tropes because mitigating circumstances might muddy the formulaic narrative, confuse viewers who crave the palatable justice such shows offer. Complicated characters are bad for the brand.
At trial, Duty testified to numerous other incidents of violence that Snapped did not include in its account. Duty described how Shanahan had abused her verbally and physically from the beginning of their relationship. Shanahan beat Duty because she visited her family, because his mother was ill, because his grandfather died. While his mother was alive, Shanahan beat both his mother and Duty about twice a week. After Shanahan’s mother died, Duty testified, Shanahan “[w]ent off the wall... beating [Duty] more frequently about anything.” Shanahan beat Duty during each of her pregnancies; during her second pregnancy, after Duty refused to have an abortion, Shanahan targeted her stomach, telling her that he would get rid of the baby. Duty testified that Shanahan threw her down the basement steps, chipping her teeth. He beat her on top of the head with a cowboy boot. He poked her in the eye until it bled. Shanahan broke two doors by smashing Duty’s head into them, ran over her legs with a lawn tractor, and smashed a plate of potatoes over her head because they were runny. All of this, in addition to the regular beatings. None of that made it on to Snapped.
Snapped also gave airtime to the prosecution’s theory that Duty had a financial motive in killing Shanahan. In 1994, Shanahan’s mother died, leaving him a house and $150,000. By 2002, though, the money had run out, and, Snapped’s omniscient narrator explains, “once the money was gone, Dixie decided to get rid of Scott.”
Prosecutors, like Snapped, conceded that Duty had been a victim of intimate partner violence. But they blamed Duty for that violence. Snapped recounts how Duty asked law enforcement for assistance on three occasions. The first instance resulted in a two-day jail stay for Shanahan and a stay away order, which Duty later asked to have lifted. The second led to four days in jail. But, the Snapped narrator explains, after the second jail stay, “Once again, Dixie decided to give Scott another chance, and he moved back in.” The show then cuts to a “friend of Dixie Shanahan,” Marcie Carl, saying, “I don’t know, she thought she couldn’t make it on her own—she was kind of codependent on him in a weird way.” Another friend suggested, “She didn’t know no different.” What Snapped does not mention (but what Duty testified to at trial) was that Duty had promised Shanahan’s mother, Beverly, to whom she was deeply devoted, that she would never leave Shanahan. Or that after each incident, Shanahan would call Duty, her family, and her friends relentlessly, promising to change, begging her to come back, asking her friends to urge her to go back to him. Shanahan was charged a third time after the basement incident; by then, Duty had moved to Texas with her children. “Unfortunately,” the narrator says, “Dixie neglected to take care of a little unfinished business from her old life: her husband’s court date,” and adds, “Dixie decided not to testify... out of fear, or love.”
Moreover, what the account of Duty’s encounters with law enforcement misses entirely is how useless law enforcement was in keeping her safe. Six days in jail (two after the first arrest, four after the second) did nothing to deter or decrease Shanahan’s violence. Rather than acknowledging that the intervention of law enforcement had not made Shanahan less violent, and that Duty was likely far safer in Texas than she would have been if she had returned to Iowa, Snapped blamed Duty for her failure to participate in prosecution, saying, “Prosecutors had no choice but to drop the charges against Scott.” But prosecutors had ample evidence of Duty’s victimization: they saw Duty’s injuries (two black eyes); they had Duty’s statement about what Shanahan had done to her; and they saw the hole in the door created when Shanahan rammed Duty’s head through it. Prosecutors could have pursued the case without Duty. They chose not to.
The last few minutes of the episode recount Duty’s conviction for second degree murder and the prosecution’s theories: that the position of Scott Shanahan on the bed demonstrated that he was sleeping, not reaching for a gun; that if she had acted in self-defense, Duty would have called police rather than pretending Shanahan was alive (and forging his name on checks); that “[h]er attempt to cover this up really rebutted” her self-defense claim. At the end of the episode, one juror seems to express regret about the length of the sentence imposed. Snapped provides the number of the National Domestic Violence Hotline with the message “Abuse is never OK. If you or someone you love is in an abusive relationship, there is help available.” But only Duty’s defense attorney is seen questioning whether justice was done in this case.
The story that Snapped told about Dixie Shanahan Duty shaped how viewers would subsequently see her. Snapped told a story that minimized the violence she endured for nineteen years, held her responsible for the violence done to her, and portrayed her as a gold digger and a liar. She returned to the community with that image.
Kim: How many of Snapped’s featured women have themselves suffered traumas? I’ve always said of my own case that “damaged woman makes horrible choices” would sell far less than “calculating, diabolical wife murders husband on romantic getaway.” The narrative was shaped early (pretrial coverage) and often. Violent male offenders don’t titillate the media like a violent female offender does, yet a higher percentage of us have suffered significant traumas before offending, often at the hands of men.
I always instinctively felt that true crime producers who approached me for my cooperation promising to value my input for their work were a lot like the police detectives who’d told me they “only want to help me” with cuffs and a gun under their jacket. Say what they want, both specialize in twisting words to fit an already developed story line.
I occasionally flip past a program featuring an incarcerated woman, easy to spot because of the uniform and background that scream “guilty!” I wonder why they chose to participate. Are they hoping for a miracle? Did they need the money? Or were they just desperate to tell a truth? I continue channel surfing, saying a little prayer that they get what they sought, a little worried they didn’t, angry at the predatory true crime producer that used her for profit.
True crime media like Snapped shapes the public’s understanding of what it means to be a criminalized survivor. As criminologist Diana Rickard writes, “Crime news and crime entertainment are usually built around ‘ideal victims,’ those in whom innocence and virtue, in the broadest, most stereotypical strokes, can be imbued.” Those stereotypes are reinforced when true crime rejects the victimization claims of criminalized survivors—and imperfect victims like the women portrayed on Snapped pay the price.
Leigh Goodmark is the Marjorie Cook Professor of Law and director of the Gender, Prison, and Trauma clinic at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law and the author of Imperfect Victims: Criminalized Survivors and the Promise of Abolition Feminism.
Kim Hricko is an award-winning writer whose work has previously been published in the Washington Post and the Marshall Project.
Kwaneta Harris is a renowned prison journalist and a Haymarket Writing Freedom Fellow. Her work has been published in outlets including Teen Vogue, The Appeal, Truthout, the Dallas Morning News, Slate, Inquest, Scalawag Magazine, the Austin Chronicle, the Texas Observer, and Prism. She is currently at work on her first book.
Adapted from “The True Harms of True Crime,” Wisconsin Journal of Gender, Law and Society, Volume 40, No. 1 (Spring 2025).