CrimeCon puts victims' families at center of true crime fandom
At CrimeCon in Las Vegas, Maggie Zingman marked her 24th cross-country trip for Brittany Phillips' 2004 murder while the Goncalves family pushed accountability.
Steve and Kristi Goncalves took the CrimeCon stage in Las Vegas with a blunt reminder that the genre’s most devoted fans are still standing in the shadow of real loss. Their panel, True Crime, Real Victims: Ethics, Advocacy, Accountability, sat at the center of a weekend built around fascination with unresolved cases, but the conversation kept pulling back to the people left behind.
CrimeCon 2026 ran at Caesars Palace from May 29-31 and packed more than 70 hours of regular programming into three days, along with separately ticketed events and a schedule that kept expanding as new speakers and sessions were added. The convention began in Indianapolis in 2017, and in less than a decade it grew into a national gathering that now draws fans, creators, experts, advocates, survivors, investigators, journalists, brands and families under one roof.
That mix is part of the tension that has followed CrimeCon from the start. Organizers say the weekend is for true crime fans, creators and professionals, and their own guidance told attendees to dress respectfully while noting that victims, victims’ relatives and their friends and families are part of the audience. The message was clear enough to shape the room: this was not only about theories, documentaries and favorite cases, but about how to behave when the people closest to a homicide are standing nearby.
The Goncalves panel leaned into that accountability question. Organizers said the family, along with Andy Kahan of Crime Stoppers, helped create Idaho legislation that would prohibit the release of photos in death investigations from becoming public, a change they said had just passed. Renee Williams of the National Center for Victims of Crime moderated the discussion, which was framed as a way to help true-crime fans become change agents for victims’ families rather than passive consumers of case content.
The convention also made room for the long grind of unresolved grief. Maggie Zingman, the mother of Brittany Phillips, has made 24 cross-country trips since 2007 while searching for answers in her daughter’s 2004 murder. She brought that effort to CrimeCon through her Caravan to Catch a Killer, turning a fan convention into another stop in a decades-long campaign for answers.
That is the edge CrimeCon keeps trying to balance: the same floor can hold creators, law enforcement and casual fans, but the families who come through the doors are not there for a pastime. They are there because the case is still open in their lives, and the difference between respect and spectacle is measured in every panel, every hallway conversation and every unanswered name.
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