The Day True Crime Became Personal
- Shelby Hughes
- Mar 7
- 3 min read
I never used to watch crime shows. They were not something I gravitated toward. I preferred stories that felt artistic or philosophical, films with depth or beauty in them. The darkness of true crime felt unnecessary to invite into my space. That changed the day I found out how my uncle actually died. For most of my life, the version I was given was softer and far less violent. My dad refused to talk about it, and when he did, the details were minimal and carefully controlled, shaped into something that did not invite questions. It was framed as tragic, but not brutal. My sister eventually went searching for answers, and what she uncovered shifted our understanding of our family history entirely.
Buried in old archives was a newspaper article from the Florida Star with the headline, “Police Have No New Leads On Man’s Whereabouts.” The article detailed the killing of my uncle, Gerald "Chuckie" Yaros, who was only 15 years old when he was found strangled and stuffed under a sofa in a Walnut Street apartment on May 6. The suspect was identified under multiple aliases including Joe Mason, Jessie Mason, Joseph Mason, Lee Montgomery, and John Philip Montgomery, and was still considered a wanted man in Duval County. Police described him as extremely dangerous and stated that despite reported sightings, they had no new information concerning his whereabouts. Reading those words felt surreal. This was not a distant case on television. It was my uncle. A child. And they never found his killer.
After that discovery, something shifted in me. That is when I began watching true crime. At first it felt analytical. I wanted to understand how investigations unfold, how evidence is processed, how suspects disappear and sometimes reappear years later. I paid attention to timelines, interrogation tactics, forensic details. But beneath that curiosity was something more personal. In almost every episode there is a moment when law enforcement connects the pieces and someone says, “We caught him.” There is an arrest. There is accountability. There is a closing chapter. My uncle never got that ending, and neither did my family.
My dad still does not talk about it. As the older sibling, he carried a different weight. He was the responsible one, the protector, the one who felt it was his job to take care of everyone. I think that kind of loss settles into a person differently when you are wired that way. Silence can be a form of grief. It can also be a form of guilt, anger, or unresolved responsibility. I do not push him to talk about it anymore. For me, coping looked different. It looked like researching, reading the article in full, saying my uncle’s name out loud, and refusing to let the truth stay buried simply because it was painful. True crime did not become an interest because I enjoy darkness. It became personal because justice was never served for someone in my family. And maybe, if I am honest, I keep watching because some part of me is still waiting to hear the words my family never did, we found him. I keep hoping I will hear the man’s name, one of his aliases, something that lets me know he was finally caught.
