What is the proportion of murders in England and Wales that is resolved on a yearly basis? The success rate of solving murders in England and Wales is about 90 percent.

Why are the police so good at catching the killers? Is it through forensic science? DNA? Automatic Number Plate Recognition? Due to being classified as more serious than other crimes? You might suggest it's something to do with a profiler, which the police in England historically have not used. The profiler being a useful tool in media coverage. Prosecuting the case in the media results in the public providing clues that help solve the crime. All of that might be true, but none of that is why the clear-up figure is so high.

Most killers know their victims. Husbands kill wives, boyfriends kill girlfriends, and men who have attended the same school or who come from the same neighbourhood kill each other—especially when get-togethers involve large amounts of alcohol. Despite the vast number of murders that occur in close relationships, the phenomenon of murder still fascinates much of the public, especially when a smart production of "Murder, She Wrote" shows actor Gabriel Woolf in a fake hillside set as a mad genius killer who might as well be the main suspect in the next episode of "Criminal Minds."

Media influences you. Contemplate a television program, a Netflix documentary, or a recent news story you’ve seen, and it is very probable that their subject matter was murder. And not just any kind of murder, but the kind where the perpetrator is not a family member but a stranger. Acts of maniacal violence demand our attention. Now think of a series, with so many to choose from, or a film. Fictional portrayals of crime unfailingly gravitate toward serial violence; they need a head count just to stay afloat for multiple episodes. That’s why, when it comes to factual crime, the good kind of true crime is the stuff of guilty-pleasure dreams.

We desire to be entertained and maintain attention, and this often calls for a suspension of disbelief and an investment in fictional characters and shadowy figures. For instance, we might, at first, think of Thomas Harris' Hannibal Lecter as a boogeymen with a taste for human flesh. But Lecter is more than that; he is also a warped figure who maintains that the world is a series of power relationships, especially the kind in which a superior person kills an inferior—that is, the militaristic kind of murder that Harris often depicts.

News needs to be "newsworthy".

Professor Yvonne Jewkes lays out the 12 news values that a crime must embody to become a story in the nation's mainstream media. Those values, she explains, act like a set of hand-me-down criteria from the world of social science, ones that serve to shape our understanding not just of crime itself but of its resolution as well.

In what way, for example, are law-breaking women portrayed by the media, especially those who commit murder? Are they depicted as somehow being even worse than law-breaking men? Consider some infamous female killers from recent history—Myra Hindley, Rose West, Joanna Dennehy, etc. These are women whom society pretends to understand but views as doubly deviant. They are not only dangerous but also a threat to the middle-class ideal of femininity—that is, the seductive virtuosity of an appearance that is bourgeois without being improper.

When you look at the press coverage of children who kill, when you look inside the homes of those children, you are kind of invited to see the child as a monster; they're very much othered for us in the way they're reported on. And this is what I think about moral panics: how when the press takes certain groups of children or certain kinds of behaviours that children engage in, and then freaks out about them for a while.

In the 1970s, the concept of a moral panic took shape. During that time, the media stoked fears around "mods and rockers," key alter-egos of the decade. As portrayals of certain groups surged in the press, it became convenient for the authorities to ramp up public perceptions of crime waves, which allowed them to make forms of anti-crime policies seem urgent and necessary.

However, the plain criminological facts are that whether you watch movies (and no matter what you see in them), the people most likely to cause us harm are the very sorts of people most like us.