The Confessions of a True Crime Addict
by Cara Hunter
When I was asked if I’d like to contribute to the Strand’s blog, I naturally headed straight over to the website to see what you’re all interested in. And imagine my delight to find you have a whole section devoted to True Crime. These, I thought, are my kind of people. For yes, dear reader, my name is Cara, and I am a True Crime Addict.
This goes back a long way – long before crime became an occupation as well as a preoccupation. Back then, when my husband saw me watching true crime TV he would tease me mercilessly; these days he just nods and looks wise and says ‘Research’. And he’s right, of course: like so many other writers of crime fiction, I find material (I try to avoid the word inspiration) in real life, in situations that have really happened. But I’m never so much interested in the details of the crime or the step-by-step progress of the investigation, as in what horrific events like this tell us about ourselves. In other words, not the What or the Who or even the How, but the Why.
So for this blog I’m going to select the ten true-crime TV documentaries that I think offer the richest explorations of that question. Some answers, yes, but we all know life is rarely that clear-cut. No, what I find in these shows is a compelling insight into human nature. And not the psyches of psychopaths, either, but the way ordinary people react when they find themselves in extraordinary situations, either by bad luck, bad choices, or the lives – and lies – of others.
Some of these shows you’ll know, some maybe you won’t. And as we’ll discover along the way, there are stories here that have shaped some of my own…
- The Staircase
This is one you’ll definitely know. Still the grand-daddy of them all, and ground-breaking in its day, not least for the sheer length of time it allowed for the case. That access-all-areas approach was incredibly immersive but as it turned out, not quite as neutral as it claimed. I can’t have been the first person to sit bolt upright when apparent evidence of strangulation was mentioned, for the first time, in one of the additional episodes made a full eight years later, even though that evidence had been heard in the original trial. And then we find out that an all-important editorial role had been in the hands of someone who’d ended up in a relationship with Peterson.
The plot has thickened nicely since then, as we’ve now had a drama-doc version of the same story, with the same title, starring Colin Firth and Toni Collette. By ‘staging’ all the different theories of the death – including the left-field owl attack scenario – this allows viewers to make up their own minds about which scenario seems the most plausible. As the director of the drama, Antonio Campos, told Hollywood Life, “our intent was to explore the real elusive nature of truth and how ultimately the truth gets kind of caught up in storytelling, and everyone trying to tell their version of the story.”
Available on Netflix
- The Keepers
In November 1969 a much-loved nun and teacher, Catherine Cesnick, disappeared from her home in Baltimore, and was later found murdered. No-one was ever charged with the crime, and more than 40 years later, two of her former pupils decided they weren’t prepared to let it lie.
The Keepers follows them as they slowly peel back what was really happening in an apparently respectable girls’ high school. Sexual abuse, a possible cover-up, and Sister Cathy’s own refusal to let that lie, which may have led to her death. It’s not just the former pupils’ devotion to her that moves you, but the testimonies of the women who start to come forward as news of the investigation spreads. The Keepers is not about cliff-hangers or OMG revelations (though there are many) it’s about the quiet power of ordinary people, who refuse to accept an extraordinary wrong.
Available on Netflix
- The Vow
I first came across Nxivm in a podcast, and have been horribly fascinated by it ever since. Like all cults, it didn’t start out looking like one: as ex-member Mark Vicente says at one point “No-one joins a cult, they join a good thing”. Joy, self-improvement, success, what’s not to like? But the Nxivm founders knew how to turn people’s natural and commendable impulses towards achieving those things into a mechanism for coercive control. It wasn’t long before brave, intelligent women were submitting to branding irons. Truly horrifying, and a cautionary tale for our times.
Available on HBO
- Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street
I worked in the City of London, back when I first left university, so I know what it was like in capital markets in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and how heady the atmosphere was on those dealing floors. I also remember the Madoff scandal, but – knowing what I knew about market transactions – could never really understand how he’d managed to get away with it. Not until now, that is. It’s a fine forensic analysis of a staggeringly simple fraud (and I could listen to Diana Henriques all day long).
Available on Netflix
- The Innocence Files
Eight harrowing true-life accounts of miscarriages of justice that sent innocent men to prison for decades, and some to Death Row. There’s ‘junk science’ exposed here, like bite-mark analysis, but also an examination of the fallibility of both memory and eyewitness testimony, which is, if anything, even more disquieting. But these are, in the end, stories of triumph. The dignity of the exonerees – most of them African American – and their determination that the rest of their lives should count for something, is truly humbling.
Available on Netflix
- Buried
More junk science – or is it? In 1969, Eileen Franklin’s childhood friend Susan disappeared, and was later found murdered; in 1989, she said she recovered the memory of her father, George, raping and murdering Susan. And it was on the strength of those ‘recovered memories’, and those alone, that George was brought to trial and subsequently convicted (spoiler alert: he was later exonerated). The case became a mini-series starring Shelley Long, and a whole wave of TV programmes and novels followed that drew on this apparently new phenomenon, including one of my all-time favourite crime novels, Nicci French’s The Memory Game.
There’s something peculiarly compelling about the idea that the brain can suppress traumatic memories, and then release them, years later, but you only need to watch The Innocence Files to know that it’s rarely, if ever, that simple. Memory simply doesn’t work like a videotape you can rewind and replay. Buried feels like eavesdropping on a deeply dysfunctional family, and leaves you with no easy resolutions.
Available on Hulu
- Exposed: The Case of Keli Lane
Keli Lane was a young Australian woman convicted in 2010 for the murder of Tegan, her new-born daughter, fourteen years earlier. The baby has never been found. But that’s only the start. Lane had been pregnant five times before her early twenties: she had two terminations and put two babies up for adoption. She could easily have done the same with Tegan. Only she didn’t; the baby simply disappeared. More bizarrely still, no-one knew about any of the pregnancies, not her parents, her friends or her team-mates in water polo. Lane maintains her innocence to this day, insisting she gave Tegan to her biological father, a man who has never been found, and whose true identity has never been established.
The case is utterly baffling – there are so many unanswered questions here, and Lane herself seems unable to answer most of them. So I did – or at least I tried to. My novel Hope to Die re-imagines Lane’s story on the other side of the world, in another girl’s life. Why did she do what she did, and what would happen if that long-lost child ever came back?
- Murder on Middle Beach
Murder on Middle Beach is Madison Hamburg’s investigation into the unsolved murder of his mother, Barbara, in 2010. This is an onion-peeler of a show – every episode takes us into completely new territory, from financial motives to potentially fatal fault-lines within the family. There are no easy answers here, either, and the finale leaves us on the 10th anniversary of the murder, little further forward. But as the cliché goes, in this case, it’s not so much about the destination, as the journey we take to get there.
Hamburg’s profound emotional connection to all the people involved – living and dead – and the pain he has to both create and endure when he explores his theories, make for compelling television. It was something I had vividly in mind when I was developing Murder in the Family, which follows another young film-maker as he investigates a dark period in his personal past, only to find all is not as he’s always been told.
Available on HBO
- American Murder: The Family Next Door
This is the true-crime series I’d take to a desert island if I could only choose one. Chris Watts’ murder of his pregnant wife Shan’ann and their two little girls was an almost unbelievable crime – how could an apparently kind and caring husband and father do anything so brutal, even if he did want out of the marriage?
American Murder allows Shan’ann to tell her own story from beyond the grave, collating some of the myriad public posts and private messages she wrote and sent in the months leading up to her death. It’s heart-breaking to see her trying so hard to understand why her relationship is failing, and even more distressing to see footage of the girls – at one point little CeCe gives the unborn baby a hug. Despite the gruelling footage of Chris’s interviews with law enforcement he remains an enigma – awkward, evasive, uncomfortable in his own skin. And if the motive for what he did is clear – he had a new girlfriend – everything else eludes explanation.
So what draws me back to this show again and again? Not just the unbearable poignancy of the story, but the compelling and very contemporary way it’s told. There’s no narrator here, no filtering through an omniscient third party. My books have always involved a lot of mixed media – transcripts, maps, drawings, Twitter feeds and the like – and readers have told me they love the ‘unmediated’ access to the story that this gives them. So in this new book I’ve taken that even further – like American Murder, Murder in the Family has no narrative voice, not even any conventional prose. Just the people involved – their words, their voices.
Available on Netflix
- Wrong Man
In Joe Berlinger’s series a group of law enforcement experts is brought together to re-investigate potential miscarriages of justice, from the Patricia Rorrer case to Curtis Flowers and Vonda Smith. It’s definitely one for the cold-case geek in all of us, and the reportage style really gets under the skin of the investigation. The dynamic between the team-members also becomes a good part of the appeal, and as I watched I started to wonder if that could be taken even further.
What if I created a cold-case investigative team which included people who knew far more than they were letting on? What if one of them was the guilty party? Wouldn’t that be a great set-up for a story…
Available on Hulu