About CaseBond
I was about ten when I found it. Digging through boxes in my grandmother's attic, I pulled out a battered copy of Helter Skelter — the book about the Manson murders. I started reading and didn't really stop. It wasn't the gore that pulled me in. It was the how: how a person convinces other people to do unthinkable things, the psychology of influence, the small manipulations that add up to something monstrous. I'm a musician, too, and that case runs right through music — the Beatles, the songs, the whole scene — so it grabbed me from every direction at once.
That same attic is where I found my first guitar, an old nylon-string classical. I taught myself to play on it by hammering along to Metallica's Master of Puppets — not remotely the instrument that album was built for, which is probably why it took a while. Both things stuck: the cases and the music. I've been following both ever since.
Here's what started bugging me over the years: when I get into a case, I want everything. The full story. The exact dates and the chronology, because in true crime the timeline is everything. The books. The old magazine pieces, the news coverage, the podcast episodes, the documentaries and films. Whether it changed a law, or a piece of culture, or showed up in a song. I want all of it in one place — and that place doesn't really exist. What's out there is scattered, and a lot of it is out of date.
So I'm building it.
What CaseBond is
CaseBond is meant to be the first place you go when you want to actually understand a case — not a thread, not a fragment, but the whole record. The story, the timeline, the sources, the media, the cultural and legal aftermath, all on one page that stays current instead of quietly rotting.
It's a living record. When something's wrong or missing, it gets fixed and added to — and every correction is logged out in the open, so anyone can see what changed and when.
Where you come in
Here's the part that matters most: the verifying is yours to do.
AI can help compile a case fast, but a claim isn't true because a machine asserted it — it's true because people checked it. That's the whole model. You review, you correct, you add the source nobody else found, you flag the date that's off. The community is what drives the record toward the truth, case by case. My job is to build the thing and keep it honest. Yours, if you want it, is to help get it right.
And that participation earns you something real. The more you contribute, the more say you get in where CaseBond's donations go (more on that below). Helping drive the truth and helping direct the good your contribution does are the same act here.
The bigger idea
I think true crime people want to do more than consume. We see the same problems come up again and again — backlogged rape kits that never get tested, families left to fund their own fights, good causes running on fumes.
So a significant share of any profit CaseBond makes will go to vetted causes connected to true crime — and the contributors who keep the record honest are the ones who get to help steer where it lands. Someday, if this grows the way I hope, I'd love to stand up a proper nonprofit of our own. That's a long way off. But it's the direction I'm pointed.
It's just me — and that's on purpose
I want to be straight with you: CaseBond is one person. Me. Built on nights and weekends, with AI helping me move faster than one set of hands normally could, but with a human making the calls. It's a passion project before it's anything else.
That means a few things. It means you're early — genuinely on the ground floor of something. It means the pace is a real-person pace, not a media-company pace, and I'd rather tell you that up front than over-promise. And it means I'm building in the open and actually listening. If you tell me something's broken, or missing, or could be better, I'll take it seriously. I'm trying to build the thing you reach for first — so your feedback isn't a suggestion box, it's the blueprint.
No newsroom, no investors steering it, no content quotas. Just someone who cares about getting it right, and a community he's hoping to build it with.
How you can help
This part is simple, and I'll only really ask once.
Subscribe to the free newsletter — and actually open it. I know it sounds funny to put that in writing, but for a project this small, the people who open and read are the proof that this is worth doing. It costs you nothing and helps more than you'd guess.
Buy me a coffee if you'd rather make a one-time gesture toward the build.
Paid subscriptions are coming, too — I'll explain what they include when they're ready. Whatever you give — your attention, a few dollars, a correction, a source — goes straight back into the work: server bills, building out the record, the next batch of cases. There's no marketing budget for it to vanish into. It's me, a laptop, and the cases.
Thanks for being here this early. Let's build the record these stories deserve.
— David