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.

Within a year, Rolling Stone had declared Crime Junkie one of the best true crime podcasts of 2018. By mid-2019, Flowers and Prawat were on a panel at CrimeCon, the conference that draws everyone from serial killer obsessives to victims’ advocates to journalists trying to figure out what to make of the fact that so many attendees—mostly white, largely women—rank it, at least according to CrimeCon, as “one of the best weekends of my life!” In October 2021, the company signed a multiyear ad sales deal with SiriusXM, reportedly worth more than $100 million. As of this spring,