We watch Forensic Files. A lot of Forensic Files. (We’ve seen most of the original series, I would guess. At least a majority.) And they all sort of blend in together after a while. It often takes us a few minutes to realize we’ve seen an episode. Well, it took me well into the second episode of this three-part mini series to realize we’d seen the Forensic Files of this. That’s good news, because it means the telling is fairly different.

This is a crazy story, and it’s crazy enough that, even though she’s seen two different versions of the story, Jenn still bought the book. It’s one of those stories where it does feel like there could be more detail here.

Unfortunately there are times when it feels way too long, like it could have easily been a movie instead of a movie series. (This is true of seemingly every recent Netflix true crime documentary series, though this one is far from the worst offender.) This is particularly true in the second episode when they repeat a lot of the facts of the case and re-use a lot of audio they used in the first episode. (And, because it’s Netflix, we literally just watched the first episode immediately before! Right?) It feels like a bit of a missed opportunity that they didn’t go more detail about how he committed the crimes that caused the murder and that is why Jenn will be reading the book.

But it’s still shorter than most of these Netflix series and it is mostly pretty effective. I was mostly quite rapt and I feel like at times it’s quite well done. Many of the interviewees are quite good which is one of the reasons why it didn’t matter that I had already seen a Forensic Files episode about this case. The final episode has some particularly thoughtful/affective interviews where we can really see the legacy of something like this.

It’s short, and it’s a crazy case, so watch it.

7/10