On January 26, Grave Line Tours’ Adam Levine joined Celisia Stanton on the Truer Crime podcast, bringing together two storytellers who refuse to flatten real people into simple villains or victims. Their conversation underscored a shared belief: true crime is not entertainment first, but a vehicle for understanding how violence, power, and community actually work in the real world.
Both Levine and Stanton have built their work on centering people rather than plot twists. Truer Crime explicitly frames its mission as telling stories of “murdered, missing, misled” people with more nuance, context, and questions, pushing back on the genre’s tendency to sensationalize pain. Grave Line Tours, meanwhile, markets itself as a historically grounded exploration of Los Angeles’ morbid past, emphasizing context, social history, and the lived experiences around each crime scene rather than cheap thrills. In the episode, that alignment becomes clear as both voices insist that ethical storytelling starts with respecting the people whose worst days generate these stories in the first place.
Nuance, for both of them, begins with asking harder questions than “whodunit.” Stanton’s approach to Truer Crime has always been to interrogate the systems and histories that make certain people more vulnerable to violence, from policing and racism to media bias. Levine’s tours similarly root LA’s “fabulous homicides” and mobbed‑up scandals in the city’s evolution, showing how development, power brokers, and vice economies shaped everything from the Sunset Strip to Beverly Hills. When they talk, you can hear the same impulse: every case sits inside a web of choices, pressures, and narratives that deserve to be unpacked, not glossed over for a jump scare.
That shared commitment naturally leads them to challenge assumptions and inherited myths. Stanton has spoken about pushing back on the way traditional shows flatten victims and glorify suspects, often repeating police narratives without scrutiny. Levine’s work with Grave Line Tours similarly questions the pop‑culture versions of cases like the Menendez murders or LA mob lore, contrasting media caricatures with the messy, documented history of how these events actually reshaped the city. Together on Truer Crime, they model a way of consuming true crime that invites listeners to reconsider what they think they know—and to sit with ambiguity instead of tidy moral endings.
Their collaboration ultimately offers a blueprint for a more responsible true crime culture. By pairing Stanton’s deeply reported, victim‑centered audio storytelling with Levine’s on‑the‑ground historical work in Los Angeles, the episode bridges the gap between headphones and streets, between narrative and place. It is an invitation to move beyond passive listening, to question every neat story we’ve been handed about crime, and to recognize that the truth is almost always more complicated, more human, and more worthy of care than the myth.
You can listen to the episode, "When True Crime Becomes a Place You Can Visit", on Spotify here, or wherever you get your podcasts.
