The Rabbit Hole: Saints and Killers

Editor’s Note: In pop culture circles, there has always been a morbid fascination with violent crimes. Between the online forums dissecting every aspect of a trial and podcasts going into gory details of a murder scene, there is clearly a section of the public that will be entranced by the latest high-profile tragedy. But there is a growing subset of the online community that takes that obsession to the extreme. The consequences of this have resulted in mass shootings around the country. In this week’s The Rabbit Hole, we take a look at “TCC,” the True Crime Community. 

The internet is ablaze with true crime conspiracies and documentaries. The kidnapping of Savannah Guthrie’s mother, the Alex Murdaugh saga, and the Idaho murders all underscore a growing public fascination with gruesome crimes and a desire to assign a motive. Hit television shows from Netflix’s Mindhunter to NBC’s long-running series Dateline cater to this morbid fascination, as people project onto killers their perceptions about who they are and why they did the deeds that they did. Reddit forums and podcast sleuths rack up millions of interactions from people who want to expose the “truth” about both solved and unsolved crimes, sometimes regardless of reality. 

Yet, there is also a smaller, younger, and concerning subset of the true crime community that takes an interest in violence and makes it into a deadly obsession.

On December 16, 2024, a 15-year-old, Natalie Rupnow, opened fire with a 9 millimeter Glock in the middle of a study hall session in Madison, Wisconsin. Rupnow killed a teacher and a student before taking their own life. A month later, on January 22, 2025, 17-year-old Solomon Henderson murdered a female classmate in the middle of a Nashville, Tennessee, school cafeteria, and then fired off shots into the crowd before killing himself. And again in September 2025, 16-year-old Desmond Holly critically wounded two students, one of whom was a 14-year-old classmate who bravely confronted him, at a Colorado high school before committing suicide. The shooting was overshadowed in the news cycle, in part, because Charlie Kirk was assassinated two minutes after the 16-year-old began his attack.

The three teens were part of an online fandom known as the “true crime community,” or “tcc.” It’s one of the darkest corners of the internet and part of the growing trend of increasingly younger violent perpetrators. The group is another instance of what the FBI labels nihilistic violent extremism, along with 764, an online terror network that similarly ritualizes violence and is mostly comprised of younger predators, victims, and individuals who are oftentimes one and the same. 

Since 2024, members of the true crime community have been responsible for at least seven school shootings and nine thwarted school shooting plots, killing a total of 11 victims and wounding 45 others. According to the Institute on Strategic Dialogue, attacks linked to the true crime community have been deadlier than all of the attacks since 2024 linked to ideologically motivated extremists combined. The threat posed by the online community doesn't show any signs of letting up: Two men were separately arrested in North Carolina and Ohio last week for alleged threats related to their online involvement with the true crime community. 

Yet, there aren’t many clear solutions on how to contain it. Like so many other contemporary extremist threats, the true crime community is overwhelmingly decentralized and online, operating on popular and usually innocuous apps, such as Discord, Telegram, X, Roblox, and TikTok. And the true crime community’s younger membership, as with 764, poses significant hurdles for both tracking and prosecuting their threats.

The true crime community started out exactly where its name implies: an online network of users interested in sharing theories and perspectives on violent crimes popularized in culture. Still today, there are plenty of true crime fans who are adjacent to the community because of their curiosity about violence. We all probably know someone who listens to a true crime podcast or knows a bit too much about a serial killer like Ted Bundy. 

But, as with many fandoms, levels of obsession vary. The hardcore members expand their level of intrigue about crime to being devoted to the killers themselves, and don’t stop at ideological taboos, glorifying mass murderers and terrorists for the suffering they caused. Killers such as Brenton Tarrant, the mosque attacker in Christchurch, New Zealand, Buffalo’s Payton Gendron, and Charleston’s Dylann Roof are “saints” whom members of the community aspire to follow. For Rupnow, her manifesto mentioned school shooters beyond Columbine and American pop culture to more obscure international perpetrators, demonstrating an obsession and her research into mass shooters that she spent years accumulating before the attack.

Many members who fall into the most extreme level of true crime devotees are the most online and the youngest, whose entire lives have been immersed in social media and online realities. Instead of being members of innocent fanbases like Harry Potter, Star Wars, or the Hunger Games, they fall into the true crime community, recruited through dark rabbit holes on the internet or even from messaging other players in online children’s games. True crime community members overwhelmingly struggle with mental illness and other traits common to teenagers and the internet era, such as anxiety, loneliness, anger, and social isolation, which draws them into apocalyptic rhetoric and to other individuals who express a rage they feel connected with. 

The result is that, instead of creating TikTok videos about Avatar the Last Airbender or drawing their own Marvel comics, teenagers as young as 12-years-old are making TikToks, shooting compilations, and memes glorifying mass killers. Before her suicide, one 13-year-old girl had interacted with true crime community members through Roblox, TikTok, and Discord. Some true crime community members have used Roblox and Minecraft to create virtual versions of schools targeted in past attacks. The girl’s first interaction with the community, according to a civil case filed by her mother against Roblox and Discord, dated back to when she was eight. Her mother said she believed the 13-year-old may have positioned her phone during her suicide to attempt to livestream her death for the true crime community.

Members share enough gore and graphic media to become desensitized to the violent content, which leads to a social contest, with members competing over who can produce the most gruesome and shocking material. All the while, the mental hurdle—their conscience—preventing them from committing their own acts of violence goes away, jaded by others’ normalization. In the midst of this environment is a subset of members who pressure each other to commit violence, causing a vicious cycle in which true crime community members praise their violent peers and award social credit based on killing. 

Adolescent psychology has taught us in the past decade that when a teen commits suicide, overly glorifying their death, portraying them as a hero, or giving them a larger-than-life persona, increases the chance of other teen suicides, as their peers who desire recognition feel more emboldened to self-harm. This was what was concerning to many about Netflix’s hit series Thirteen Reasons Why, which portrayed the social aftermath of a teenage girl’s suicide and coincided with an uptick in national teen suicide attempts.

The same dynamic plays out in the true crime community. Shooters are revered for how extreme their targets are and the level of harm caused; a deadlier attack elicits greater attention from the true crime community. So when true crime community members act on their threats, others feel inspired to follow suit. This happened with Henderson, the 17-year-old who opened fire in a Nashville school cafeteria, several weeks after Rupnow’s attack hundreds of miles away. Henderson had realized in the aftermath of Rupnow’s death that the fellow ‘tcc’ member had followed him on X, which he found inspiring enough as to create a Discord in Rupnow’s honor and revere as a “saintress.” 

Rupnow had followed Henderson on X less than two weeks before the attack in Wisconsin. In June 2023, the two each discovered an online gore site that led them down the dark path to the more extreme circles of the true crime community. Their violent radicalization would take less than two years to come to fruition. Rupnow’s father currently faces state charges in Wisconsin for his alleged role in allowing access to the guns used in the attack.

The phenomenon of teenagers idolizing murderers and mass shooters isn’t new. In the ‘90s, the Columbine school shooting led to a following of “edgy” teens who identified with the attackers’ seeming social struggles and desire for revenge. But the amount of violent media available online and the means by which sympathetic teens can communicate today didn’t exist then. It is more than likely that more school shootings would have happened in the ‘90s if radicalized teens across the country were together in online group chats where they pressure each other into violence. 

Today, those teens still glorify the Columbine shooters. In the Colorado attack, Holly wore a shirt with “wrath” on it to pay homage to one of the shooters. True crime community members also adopt the aesthetics—including dress, ideology, type of weapon, and pictures, among other symbols—of the mass-attackers that the community deems saints. Members of the true crime community do not have an ideology per se, but instead collect a hodgepodge of past shooters’ hateful motivations.

If an ideology does exist, it’s simply a fandom around the shooter themselves. Henderson, who was Black, wrote screeds in his journal conveying his hatred for Black people, trans persons, Muslims, and Jews, echoing narratives common in far-right circles on the internet and past shooters. In the month between his attack and Rupnow’s shooting, Henderson wrote about how happy he was that Rupnow had followed him on X. When Rupnow posted a final picture from a school bathroom before the attack, Henderson commented, “Livestream it.” 

In Colorado, Holly took a picture before his attack that tried to recreate one taken by Rupnow prior to the Wisconsin shooting. One of his social media accounts’ profile pictures was also an image of a gunman who killed 6 during a 2014 mass shooting in Isla Vista, California. On the other side of the world, in Indonesia, a 17-year-old posted a video also appearing to imitate Rupnow with true crime community-related hashtags before he detonated seven improvised explosive devices, injuring 97 students who had gathered for afternoon prayers at a public school.

Eric Byrd, one of the men arrested this week on threat-related charges that included language that appeared to resemble true crime community terms, allegedly wrote online, “Brenton Tarrant literally aired out a whole mosque and live-streamed it. Praise the chud! And Samantha [Natalie] Rupnow is a saintess. And Solomon Henderson killed a b***ner b****at his school also a saint … Yes they’re cleansing the world that’s full of filth of course they’re saints. They literally did God’s work,” and “The world needs more Brenton Tarrants.” According to a criminal complaint in the case, Byrd also created a video edit of Tarrant, Rupnow, and Henderson. 

This piece is part of our weekly Sunday Series we call The Rabbit Hole where we choose a single federal court docket, filing, or topic and dive deep into the details. You can read past issues on topics ranging from news deserts to the lack of consistent funding for court-appointed defense attorneys on our site. Normally, these Rabbit Hole pieces are behind a paywall to reflect the time and expense associated with their reporting. However, we occasionally make an exception to that rule, like the piece today. If you are not currently a paying member but you’d like to support independent journalism like this, please consider becoming a paid subscriber or making a one-time donation.

During an interrogation with FBI agents, Byrd reportedly admitted to agents that he had come close to killing his parents and a high school classmate. 20-year-old Wyatt Brzoska, the second man arrested with purported true crime community ties, allegedly posted a recording of himself to TikTok on March 10th in military fatigues and pointing the camera at a mosque in Northern Ohio, with the caption, “You will feel it.” The FBI wrote in a criminal complaint that Brzoska posted a TikTok two days later showing pictures of himself and a black-and-white photo of Tarrant merging into one person, with the text “Get revenge.”

Brzoska had reportedly been on the FBI’s radar for months, dating back to at least November 2025, when agents contacted him over a TikTok, which Brzoska said was simply a joke meant to trigger people. He then allegedly posted a series of TikToks in the days after using neo-Nazi and true crime community terms. One was reportedly captioned, “Hello FBI would you say this post is worthy of you raiding my house again?” When agents met with Brzoska and his mother again in March, according to federal court records, the agents told Brzoska’s mother to keep her guns locked away in a safe, which she agreed to do, and then asked, “What about his guns?”

The troubled young man promised authorities he would delete his TikTok account and stay offline. Four months later, he was arrested after allegedly posting a series of videos on a new social media account about attacking the mosque in Ohio. This cohort of terminally online fans of mass killers creates a self-fulfilling cycle of radicalization that encourages more and more young people to become desensitized to killing and take their violent ideations into the real world. The true crime community’s toxic environment attempts to normalize extreme violence as a noble goal to achieve, not a macabre urge to suppress. 

As Solomon Henderson, the Tennessee school shooter, wrote in his diary before the attack: “Mass shooters are the cool kids.” 

This piece was part of our weekly Sunday Series we call The Rabbit Hole where we choose a single federal court docket, filing, or topic and dive deep into the details. You can read past issues on topics ranging from news deserts to the lack of consistent funding for court-appointed defense attorneys on our site.

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