I had recently begun reading articles and watching videos on various "bizarre, unsolved mysteries" such as the Boy in the Box, St. Louis Jane Doe, Princess Doe, Brian Shaffer, Alan Jeal, The Jamison Family and other similar cases. I had suddenly been hit by an onslaught of every memory I possessed of the usage of the phrase "truth is stranger than fiction" and I realized that a lot of these real world mysteries are amazingly more intriguing than any mystery premise I could think of, especially some of the later ones I listed, and I thought that I could base the concepts behind some of my fictional mysteries off of these real world murders, the parallels to the original varying. But then I began to worry. There are likely people who are/were mourning because of these murders, and I worried it'd be wrong to make entertainment that is almost directly inspired by those murders and that I may upset someone in deep mourning. What made be worry about this, is that I remembered that one time I had read a story and one of the character's backstories really hit close to home for me, and I had to take a short break from reading it because of the sudden, unexpected relatability that hit me like a brick. I just thought it'd be unfair for me to do that to somebody else. Would doing this be considered amoral or morally reprehensible? Even if I do change enough of it to where it may be somewhat difficult to directly relate its inspirational origins to those individual cases?
For me, it would be truly amoral, as in "neither moral nor immoral". True Crime is an established genre that uses actual names and details of cases. You'd be a step back from that, as I understand it, using the cases more as inspiration than factual sources. We encourage writers to research their topics; you'd be researching your topic. I don't see an issue.
Tons of crime novels are based, at least in part, on real cases. I don't think it's disrespectful, as long as it's not treated like satire or anything. You could also use the ideas from the crimes, but then change the details like the person's family/character. That way any resemblance is pure coincidence, and you don't have to worry about how your portrayal of someone could be interpreted.
Ed Gein was so obsessed with being a dutiful son that when his mother died, he started grave-robbing and skinning corpses to make a woman-suit so that he could pretend to be his mother rather than face the fact that he was living his life without her. Sound familiar This man was the inspiration for Psycho, Silence of the Lambs, and to a lesser degree the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
How many novels have been inspired by Jack the Ripper? Peace, Tex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_the_Ripper_in_fiction
It's good that you're thinking about this angle. However, if you worked hard enough to change enough of the events so it truly wasn't recognisable, I think you'll be fine. And if you get published, never NEVER let on that you got your idea from any real occurrence. I imagine any horrible event that takes place in fiction will have some counterpart in real life, that might trigger bad feelings or bad memories for certain people. It's just important not to actually exploit any real people, and certainly not fictionalize a real event so somebody recognizes it as theirs.
I can't see an issue with it. James Ellroy took the real life murder of Elizabeth Short and subsequent media frenzy and builds a fictional story around it in the Black Dahlia.
I think most of the stuff people have said do far is good. A lot of crime fiction is based off real crime - and this goes double for crime procedural TV shows (who are known to use very thinly disguised plots that obviously mimic big cases in the media). But yeah, if you're going straight fiction I'd stir in enough extra stuff to make it hard to trace - have things end slightly differently, or better yet stir multiple real crimes together into a crazy mess. I don't do a lot of this but I do have one side project that mimics crime fiction my plan is definitely to use a lot of aspects of the one big media case in recent years that really scared and disgusted me - but you can take the some of the big elements that make a case what it is (in that case the fact that the killer was posting his work on the internet as an exhibitionist and seeking fans), and then add scary elements from other cases or plotlines (in my case the idea of cults grooming children to accept and perpetrate violence) - so then you have something that contains the key elements of the main case, with an entirely different cast of characters, a suspect that looks totally different, and an added bonus of taking a one-off horrible crime a string of industrialized horrors.
