The Queen of True Crime

Ashley Flowers has the top true crime podcast in the country. But heavy is the head that wears the crown in the often controversial industry.

- By Molly Langmuir

When Ashley Flowers was a child, she wanted to be a defense attorney. Once she realized the job wasn’t like it appeared on TV, she decided to be a cold case detective. “Then I found out you had to be a cop, and I was like, hard pass,” she said. As long as she could remember, she’d had an insatiable appetite for true crime. “But until podcasting, I never found the thing I was good at.” She released the first episode of the weekly podcast she cohosts, Crime Junkie, in December of 2017. The format involved Flowers recounting the details of a crime she’d researched online to her best friend, Brit Prawat, who interjected questions, asides, or midwesternisms like “Oh my word!” Flowers started out recording the show at home in an extra bedroom (with Prawat, who lives in South Bend, Indiana, on the telephone). Prawat’s husband composed the theme song, doing his best to interpret what Flowers meant when she asked for it to be “pingier”; Flowers’s younger brother, David, then a college student, took on the editing the following summer.