Date night is the perfect time to ‘Hunt A Killer’
This magnifying glass was supposed to be for decorative purposes only — a $5 HomeGoods find that looks cute stacked atop the oldest books on my shelf.
Yet here I am, on a Saturday night, squinting through its dusty lens in hopes I’ll spot a well-hidden clue on the cryptic piece of paper in my other
hand. One couch cushion over, my boyfriend frantically types random letters we found on another piece of paper into a Google Translator, hoping they turn into real words in another language. It looks futile
from where I’m sitting, but he remains optimistic.
I sigh. Maybe we’re overthinking this. But what if we’re not? What if these little details are how we end up catching a murderer?
We’re working on a “Hunt A Killer” mystery — something best described as a mashup between subscription boxes and escape rooms. This is the second of six boxes in a series, and we’re attempting to crack new clues while also building upon aha moments from the first box, which we solved on a similar night about a week back.
But, for the moment, we’re wheel-spinning.
“One quick thing to note, I don’t know if you can overthink the boxes,” Hunt A Killer cofounder Derrick Smith tells me a couple days later. “If by overthinking you’re receiving that enjoyment of playing the game, then that’s something. You get out of it what you put into it.”
I laugh and tell him I must be getting a lot out of it.
Smith and his co-founder, Ryan Hogan, first launched Hunt A Killer in February 2016. They began with a live-action event, in which they gathered 600 murder-mystery and true-crime fans in a 200-acre Maryland campground riddled with clues and watched as the amateur Agatha Christies competed to solve the mystery first.
“We had entertainment, food, beverages and people camped out afterwards,” Smith says. “It was successful. But when we looked at scale, we weren’t going to scale up through live events.”
Instead, to create a viable business that taps into the wealth of true-crime lovers in our post-“Serial” society, Smith turned to the world of subscription boxes, a market that saw an 800 percent growth between 2014 and 2017, and reaches millions of Americans.
“We discovered it would be a lot easier for us to package the experience and deliver it to everyone, instead of bringing everyone to a central location,” he says. “So this concept of telling a compelling story, but also making it interactive led to the idea of a monthly box.”
When they first began sending out boxes, the Hunt A Killer team wrote simple mysteries that were solved in one self-contained box. Then they thought bigger.
“Three or four boxes in, we decided that if those were the TV show, let’s do the movie,” Smith says. Now, Hunt A Killer’s lead writer creates a sweeping murder mystery, which subscribers solve over the course of six boxes, delivered to their doors monthly. Some clues are easily cracked. Other nuggets may need knowledge acquired through several boxes.
A little more than a year after launch, Hunt A Killer now reaches about 28,000 monthly subscribers. Most are in America, though there’s a surprisingly devoted following in Australia that gives Smith a chuckle. In the future, he hopes to grow larger. But for right now, he’s pleased with the numbers Hunt A Killer has produced in such a short time. They even cap the number of new users. If you want to buy a box, you have to log on to HuntAKiller.com and fill out an application form; only 200 new users are accepted each day, though it’s more first come first served than based on the actual application data. Subscriptions run from $25 a month to $30 a month, prepaid.
Smith isn’t surprised by his company’s success. Not now, when subscription boxes and true crime are so hot in the cultural manifest.
“True crime is interesting, because it’s always been around, but I think there’s a peak happening right now — or at least a rise in popularity,” Smith says.
“One thing we see from members is that this has been their guilty pleasure to have this interest,” he continues. “I just think it’s not as much of a dirty secret as it used to be.”
Add that to the fact that millennials are known to choose experiences over material possessions, and a box stuffed full of an interactive experience just made sense.
“I think people enjoy having tangible items to play with, instead of things being flat on a screen,” Smith says. “There are plenty of apps you can play online, where you can escape the room, or solve something. But I think there’s a real value when people are actually holding the clues and there’s things to learn about how the paper is folded, or there’s invisible ink or something.”
Plus, who doesn’t love that code-cracking moment?
“I think that’s a big part of it,” Smith says. “Any kind of accomplishment — it needs to be challenging but achievable. You want to feel like you made some progress. And when you get that confirmation? It’s great.”
When I happened to solve the first cryptic clue through quick logic, math and reasoning, I felt like a genius. And, honestly, that was enough for me and my ego to keep going — even in the evenings that followed, when my boyfriend and I toiled over puzzles we couldn’t piece together. We made it through our first two boxes, with some clues solved and some unresolved. (Yes, my boyfriend is still Googling incessantly. No, I don’t think that’s the way to crack the code that has us stumped.)
It may be that we’re not meant to know the answers we have yet to find until we have more clues from more boxes. Or we may be a little behind. But the magnifying glass has a new home on our coffee table for the scattered moments when we take a break from our normal lives to try again with fresh eyes. And I think we’ll catch the killer, eventually.