As the inquest into her murder moves into its fifth day, public interest remains high.

Her name has continually passed the lips of countless television and radio reporters, and been etched in newspaper ink across the decades.

In the past week, her inquest has made the front pages of two Tasmanian newspapers while the number of people clicking and reading the online news articles sits in the thousands.

Most Tasmanians would recognise her name.

Lucille Butterworth, along with Eve Askew, Nancy Grunwaldt and Helen Munnings, and unsolved murder victims Victoria Cafasso and Shane Barker, are people who through unfortunate circumstance will be remembered in our state's history.

They have also become fodder for armchair detectives; those who have theories about what happened and whodunnit.

But it is not just these disappearances and murders that the public craves knowledge and closure about.

Fascination with mystery and murder has, and always will, tickle the curiosity of human beings.

The unknown is like a vacuum.

Hard-boiled crime fiction writer Raymond Chandler realised this and spawned a series of books with private investigator Philip Marlowe, who turned and twisted his way through the plot to catch killers and crooks.

Dexter Morgan of the US television drama Dexter was the blood pattern analyst serial killer protagonist that kept international audiences fixated for eight series.

While who can forget the famous shower scene in Psycho and the movie's psychological thriller genius Sir Alfred Hitchcock?

There is a long and laborious list of movies, television shows, crime documentaries, fiction and non-fiction books and other creative arts that have used death as the drawcard.

Then there is the online media that has created yet another avenue for murder and mystery voyeurs to click and watch and look and learn the brutal and gruesome details of real horrific acts.

Sometimes, shockingly, as the events unfold.

Photos of the victims of the Malaysian Airlines flight 17 quickly circulated the internet, available for adults and children to click away.

The video footage of ISIS beheadings have been viewed millions of times the world over.

The internet has opened up another means to look at the tales and images of other people's ends, and has also blurred the lines between the real and the imagined.

People have become desensitised, and sometimes, in their search for morbid gore, seem to lack humanity.

While it would be easy to blame the media for searching out and reporting on the bad and the ugly, it cannot be denied the public have a callous appetite for it.

It may be because they want to learn about the dangers that exist, it may be because they want to see others' suffering to understand it, or it may be that they need to know to prepare themselves for their own eventual death.

Whatever the reasons, there is always a story behind a face and the face belonged to someone who was loved by another and they were someone's daughter or son.

As the inquest continues, Lucille's brothers, Jim and John, are still wondering about their sister, telling a journalist earlier this year: "in a gathering of the family we always end up at that subject; what happened, who got her, where is she now".