How we tell these cases
This Happened makes short videos about real crimes and the people caught up in them. The videos are built to grip you in a couple of minutes. The case files on this site are built to hold up.
The videos are dramatized
Every image in an episode is an illustrated recreation made with AI image tools. The narration is a synthetic voice, and the music is AI-generated too. None of it is real footage, and none of it shows graphic injuries.
A couple of minutes cannot hold a whole case, so the videos shorten timelines, merge steps and pick moments for suspense. That is a storytelling choice, and we would rather say so plainly than let an episode stand in for the record.
The case files are not
Each file lays out who was involved, where and when it happened, the full timeline, what investigators found and where the case stands now. Facts come from court records, police statements, news reporting and first-person accounts, and each file lists its sources. A title appears in quotation marks only when we have checked that it is the publisher's own headline.
People who were charged but not convicted are described as accused or alleged. Where reports disagree, we say so or leave the detail out. Victims are named and described with care, and we do not publish crime-scene or autopsy images.
Four marks for the video's key moments
Every complete file lines up the episode's key moments with the record and gives each one of these marks.
- Documented
- Shown as it is recorded in court filings, police statements, or consistent reporting.
- Reconstruction
- A reasonable visual recreation of a documented event. The event happened; the image is illustrative.
- Compressed
- Real events shortened, merged, or reordered to fit the runtime.
- Dramatized
- A storytelling choice (framing, wording, emphasis) that the record does not establish.
Files still in progress
Every episode gets a page, but not every page is a finished file yet. Right now 21 of 21 are complete. A page marked in progress shows the episode and only the details already confirmed in our production records. It stays out of search engines until its timeline and outcome are sourced.