True Crime Documentaries

[IdleRich]

This could go in various forums (fora?) I suppose, but it's not about the crimes themselves, it's about the documentary genre that has sprung up and quietly - or at least without my noticing it happening - suddenly become enormous. As well as that, in a sense I see it as a counterpart to the Detectives thread - if I'd had the foresight to realise I'd create this thread then I could have subtitled that one "Untrue Crime" or "False Crime" or something. But I missed that opportunity sadly so here we are.

Anyway, this thread was caused by my realising that on my tv, hidden among all the channels that no-one ever watches (Food channel, 24 hour paranormal investigations and UFOs, BBC News etc) I have the AMC Crime channel, a whole channel completely filled with true crime documentaries. When did it become possible to make a whole channel of documentaries like this? In fact my friend's telly has two true crime channels - I guess right back to In Cold Blood there has been an appetite for learning about true crimes and I'm sure that over the intervening years there have been a number of interesting documentaries about crimes solved and unsolved, but how can there suddenly be an infinite supply of these programmes?

One thing that I find quite interesting is the huge range in quality. Some are shoddily made with awful reconstructions, poorly researched and horribly sensationalised with the same information repeated again and again every side of the commercial breaks which occur every two minutes, while some are quality pieces of television that are sensitively constructed and offer genuine insights - and when you look through the listings on AMC you have absolutely no way of knowing which are which, they are just thrown into the schedules willy-nilly and you have to take pot luck... although some of them are so bad you will turn off within a few terrible seconds of the start...

Well, I've got a fair few thoughts to randomly splurge out but no coherent argument or anything so a pause won't hurt, and, given that it's six a.m and I'm knackered I think I'll turn it over to your bulging brains to tell us why this is happening, what it all means and probably a few extra things too... see you in the afternoon, I'll look forward to reading your - no doubt excellent - contributions.

 

[chava]

The Serial Killer phenomenon will continue to be forever fascinating, not least as it increasingly seems to be almost a historical phenomenon by now (thank god). A recommended thread here:

 

[IdleRich]

I watched (another) thing about murdered baby beauty contestant JonBenet Ramsey yesterday. And a couple of weeks back I watched a two part thing about the murder of Robert Wone, which seems similar to me in that in each case some people called the police to report a crime in their house and in each case it turned out that there was a dead body there with no real signs of the intruder that the inhabitants claimed was responsible - in each case police believed that there was no intruder and that the people who called the police were responsible but were completely unable to make it stick. The Robert Wone case was particularly strange in that way, the behaviour of the inhabitants (eg all taking a shower and emerging in towels as the police showed up to examine the body) was weird at best but cos they all stuck to their stories and there was no DNA or any other forensic evidence there was no real way to point the blame at any particular individual or to somehow rope them all in to a conspiracy.

In a way that I can't put my finger on it reminded me of the Stand Your Ground thing in Florida. With that it feels to me that - correct me if I'm wrong here - you are allowed to shoot and kill someone if they are attacking you. But it seems that people are able to shoot someone and then claim that they were under attack, and the victim/aggressor is too dead to put their side of their case. From the ones in the news it feels that, as far as the dead person is concerned, the burden of proof was reversed as, if the shooter was innocent until proven guilty, that meant that the person who was dead was assumed to be guilty of attacking them until proven innocent. Maybe I'm wrong and I've just seen the famous cases where this law has been abused. Maybe some in the US can clear up my understanding here?