How "The Keepers" Reimagines True Crime Stories

Quick, think back to the last true crime mystery that you watched or read about. Maybe it was Serial or Making a Murderer or whatever you happened to see on Investigative Discovery last night or maybe even The People v. O.J. Simpson. Do you remember the name of the killer (or accused killer)? So long as the story is still fresh in your mind, I’m betting the likes of Adnan Syed or Steven Avery or O.J. Simpson are in your head. Now next question – do you remember the names of the victims?

Sometimes victims become as unintentionally famous as the people who killed them. Most times they fade into obscurity, unless they become part of the zeitgeist like Nicole Brown Simpson or Hae Min Lee. But whenever we watch movies about them or read stories or listen to podcasts, we almost always lose sight of the victims because we tend to get the story more or less from the perspective of the killer, accused or otherwise. There’s a practical reason for this, of course – dead people are notoriously hard to get on the record whereas accused or convicted killers can be interviewed.  That dynamic creates a skewed view on crime where the victims become cyphers, unable to give us the answers we really want.

So what if you had a crime story where the victim of the murder could still speak? Answer that question, and you’ve got Netflix’s new documentary series The Keepers. The series examines the murder of Sister Cathy Cesnik, a nun and Catholic high school teacher in Baltimore in 1969. And before you get too checked out, this is not a story about ghosts or mediums or mistaken identity or any other trickery. It is, however, about how the victims of a murder (mostly) survived.

Catholicism, man. Amirite?

A quick note: It’s hard to have traditional spoilers in a true crime story, especially one that officially remains unsolved. But The Keepers takes viewers on such an intense ride that if you prefer to experience the story with all the emotional twists and turns that the series intends you to experience, you may want to stop here and go watch the first three episodes before reading any further. The series is full of revelations and I’m only going to review a few of them briefly, but if that’s a concern for you consider this your spoiler warning.

Now that that’s taken care of, let’s explore the facts of the case. In 1969, Sister Cathy Cesnik was a 26-year-old nun living in Baltimore and working as a teacher. Not that much older than the girls she taught, she was popular and well-liked. Several of her students, now women in mostly their late 60s, recount how close they felt to her and inspired by her they were.

Sister Cathy began her teaching at Archbishop Keough High School, an exclusive all-girls Catholic school. She taught English and Drama for several years, but despite a strong tenure at Keough, Sister Cathy nonetheless left the school at the end of the 1968-1969 school year and took a position at a local public school with another young nun in her order. The two nuns even opted to live together in an apartment in West Baltimore. The move was part of an experiment in which nuns would try to live among the world rather than in cloistered lives.

On the evening of November 7, 1969, Sister Cathy left the shared apartment and drove in her car a short distance to a shopping center to buy an engagement present for her sister in Pennsylvania. Along the way, she cashed a paycheck and stopped off at a local bakery. She left around 8:00pm. When she hadn’t returned home around midnight, her roommate Sister Russell called a priest and mutual friend, Rev. Koob who drove to the women’s apartment. At 4:30am, Rev. Koob discovered Sister Cathy’s car parked illegally less than 100 yards from the apartment building. The car was dirty and had twigs and debris inside. (In a weird coincidence, Sister Cathy’s apartment was located near the spot where Hae Min Lee’s body would be found 30 years later. Stay classy, Baltimore.)

Baltimore Policy conducted a basic search, however they reportedly didn’t see any evidence of foul play or violence. Sister Cathy would be officially missing for almost two months until on January 3 when two hunters discovered her partially-clothed body in remote wooded area not far from her home. An autopsy revealed that she had likely died due to a skull fracture caused by a blunt instrument to the back of her head.

From there, the case went cold. It remained largely inactive for almost 25 years when something happened that began to shed new light.

Enter these two jerks

In 1994, a woman in her 40s came forward to say that she had attended school at Archbishop Keough during the late 1960s. She alleged that for three years, from her sophomore year until graduation, she was routinely, systematically, and sometimes violently raped by a member of Archbishop Keough’s staff, Father Joseph Maskell, who served as the school’s counselor. The woman recalled detailed events where Father Maskell would call her into his private office, demean her as a “whore” and a “slut” and then rape her, telling her that only by having sex with him could her soul find forgiveness. What’s more, he routinely arranged for her to be raped by multiple men at the same time, often in his office with the door locked while he watched. Some of these men, the woman later learned, were high-ranking city and police officials.

While the woman’s reports were shocking, what really grabbed public attention was another detail: the woman claimed that not only had Sister Cathy known something about these attacks, but that Father Maskell had taken the woman to see Sister Cathy’s dead body a few days after the nun went missing. And what’s more, she may not have been the only one exposed to all this; there could be others.

Tom Nugent (no relation to Ted), reporter, shows the headline of his 90s era article re-opening the case

And therein lies the detail that separates The Keepers from other true crime series that I’ve seen. Unlike most that focus on the accused, The Keepers has access to the victims and investigates the events surrounding Sister Cathy’s murder and Father Maskell’s alleged conspiracy and sexual assaults through the eyes of people who were witnesses to them because it was happening to them too. Sister Cathy is a victim, to be sure, but the story quickly grows to encompass a number of victims who have spent more than 40 years unable to tell their own stories.

The Keepers is dense, but immensely watchable. As I binge-watched it with a friend, I turned to her after one episode and said out loud, “How are there four more episodes to go? There’s so much information here; how are they going to keep shedding new light on this story?” And yet, with each episode, the creators do.

This is largely thanks to the access they have not only to the still living victims of the crimes committed at Keough High School, but also thanks to the small sorority of women who, nearly 50 years later, are still dedicated to getting to the bottom of the murder of a teacher they loved and respected so much. What this means is that the narrative of the series is almost entirely told through the voices of women, most of them middle-aged or older. The women in this story have been abused, literally and figuratively, by a variety of forces and personages and they’re only now getting to tell their stories. That makes The Keepers a natural expression of the nascent “Nevertheless, She Persisted” notion.

Abbie (r) and Gemma (l), the amateur investigators still trying to piece together the crimes. AKA #Heroes.

As such, the series gives out a measure of justice, but justice is like Schrodinger’s cat – it both exists and doesn’t exist at the same time. These women finally get to tell their stories and be believed, but of course many of the perpetrators of the crimes done to them are long dead, having escaped whatever worldly justice the law could have meted out to them. There’s a sense throughout the series that history has already passed much of this story by, making it even harder to gain any sense of closure about these events. In a timely, though unrelated event, Keough high school, now officially named Seton Keough High School, announced last fall that the school would be closing its doors for good once school lets out this summer.

Crime and punishment are almost always, by their nature, reactionary things. It’s in keeping then that the way we’ve talked about both of those things has been reactionary as well. The Keepers represents an attempt to change that narrative, if only by looking at those concepts from a different perspective. The results are fascinating to watch.

TV Sluts Threeway, OJ Simpson Edition

Hello, Readers! As we are wont to do from time to time, your TV Sluts have joined forces to collectively discuss The People v. OJ Simpson: American Crime Story. The miniseries, the latest from Ryan Murphy and co. and following up on the success of American Horror Story, profiles the trail surrounding the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman in 1995. What did we think of it? Find out... 

Please let there be aliens... please let there be aliens...

Arsenic Pie: SLUTS ASSEMBLE

Maggie Cats: WOOHOO. That's the secret; we're always slutty.

Clovis: Slutty, slutty assembling.

AP: But we are not always assembled and not always slutty in the same place in time and space. Who would like to begin? BECAUSE OMG

MC: General thoughts?

C: So much racism! So much sexism!

AP: It was, much like the case itself, a train wreck. In that I could not look away.

MC: I remember when the trial was happening, I think I was...14? But most of the broader cultural implications were completely lost on me.

AP: Also: Kato!! What what what was he on?

C: Kato was criminally (see what I did there?) underused.

AP: I see what you did, and I appreciate it.

MC: That pun was a crime.

AP: Yeah, I remember it all happening, but I also paid zero attention to it. If punning you is wrong, I don't want to be right!

C: I remember classes in my high school shutting down so that we could watch the verdict being delivered. Even in small town lily-white MI, it was a thing.

MC: I think the main things I took away from the show was how ridiculously underprepared the prosecution was for the defense's strategy and how Marcia Clark was eviscerated in the media. Basically for being a woman. That enraged me.

Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!

AP: Well, that hairdo was pretty bad. I had no idea she was a rape victim.

MC: Me neither! I wonder if that came out in the book she wrote after the trial.

AP: And I also didn't remember/know that a tabloid published a nekked photo of her. Because what do you do when there's a lady lawyer? You slut shame her OBVS.

C: Duh. Ladies practicing law? Pshaw! Who ever heard of such a thing?

AP: Next you'll tell me they let the womenfolk do the doctorin’. That just ain't natural.

MC: Seriously. It kind of opened my eyes to the progress we have made even in the last few decades. Though stuff like this still happens, but nowadays I think there would be backlash.

C: I was really glad to see how they treated Marcia Clark as a character. Which is to say, I thought they showed really well that she was always in a damned-if-she-does-damned-if-she-doesn't place.

MC: I absolutely agree. Any character with Kiss From a Rose as their theme song is OK by me.

C: Oh Man, we need to talk about the wondrous ‘90s music employed in this show.

AP: I was also interested in the way they portrayed her. They showed her as someone who was really trying to do her job and get at the truth, and not as a famewhore. Who was Johnnie Cochran. Who is the biggest famewhore in the history of famewhores BT Dubs. And that actor’s portrayal was spot on. 

Real life v. Hollywood. Brother from another mother?

MC: Absolutely. She did an impossible job AND was in the middle of a custody battle. That's brutal.

C: Agreed, but I also liked that Johnnie Cochran was a complex character himself. Like, he was a total famewhore, but one who did have a very clear guiding principle that wasn't just around his own self-aggrandizement. (Though, that obviously was a factor as well.)

MC: The guy who played Cochran [Courtney B. Vance] has been in a lot of Law & Orders and is always great. I was psyched when I saw he was playing that role.

AP: I remember when I started watching it, I looked up who was playing Cochran because he nailed it. He was really the stand-out for me, acting-wise.

C: Totally. I had to keep reminding myself that he wasn't actually Johnnie Cochran. And on the other end of the spectrum WTF John Travolta?

AP: I know, right! Oh, he was baaaaaad.

MC: OMG that was so weird! Sarah Paulson for me was the real stand out.

AP: Yes, she was excellent.

MC: Was Travolta supposed to be bad though? Like, was that the character? He was just so swarmy.

C: It was like watching a demented sad clown trying to be a lawyer. Krusty would have been a better choice.

AP: I am so over Travolta. And was he wearing a bad make-up job or is that is face now?

MC: He is plastic fantastic. I actually thought he was fabulous as that character; but that's because we aren't supposed to like that guy either.

AP: It was a departure for him, but I can't say I'm a fan of his acting. Just kind of chewed the scenery a bit. It was a bit too much.

Pennywise wasn't this disturbing.

MC: CAN WE PLEASE TALK ABOUT DAVID SCHWIMMER? He was great.

AP: YES! YES WE CAN BECAUSE HOLY SHIT ROSS IS ROBERT KARDASHIAN!

MC: "Juice...Juice..." It was crazy. So basically OJ Simpson is responsible for the Kardashians. THANKS,OJ.

AP: And that is why OJ is currently in prison. He *was* good, I have to say. But I was always distracted by his skunk hair.

MC: That's what that guy's hair looked like though!

AP: No wonder Kris cheated.

C: What did you guys think of the decision to incorporate the Kardashians into the story? Obviously, they're trying to say something about what fame does to people.

MC: I had read the showrunners were specifically setting out to show the cultural impact of the trial. Example: Kato.

C: And the Kardashians are obviously one of the biggest components of that.

Next season on American Horror Story...

AP: I thought the scene with the little Kardashians was good foreshadowing. Like, you could see Little Kim plotting to become famous somehow. Overall, you could see that the show was addressing the cultural shift.

MC: It certainly did not paint a flattering portrait of most of the LA rich people.

AP: It was kind of the first time there was wall-to-wall coverage of a murder case, and it wasn't because people were interested in it legally or wanted to see justice done, they just wanted to be entertained, and the media complied.

C: Agreed. It seems to me that the big takeaways the show wanted us to, well, take away were the danger in obsession with fame, the problem with putting justice essentially to a public vote, and the very real and very much still pervasive mistreatment of minorities by white people in power.

MC: Absolutely. The whole thing had a "last days of Rome" feel to it.

AP: It was bread and circuses all the way.

MC: Everyone had a stake and an opinion on it. It was like a perfect storm with the race issues, celebrity, and salaciousness. Fo sho

C: I mean, Chris Darden's last speech to Johnnie Cochran even lays it out when he says "[the police] are still going to keep right on killing us." They may as well have had a flash forward to a Black Lives Matter march.

AP: And don't forget the domestic violence angle. Because yes, the cops were racist. And yes, Mark Furhrman is kind of a Nazi. But that doesn't take away from the fact that OJ beat and terrorized Nicole.

MC: Since I didn't follow the actual case closely as a kid, a lot of the facts of the crime were a surprise to me. Like how the LAPD failed at every possible step of the way. The prior beatings and abuse were a shock to me as well. It was so awful.

AP: They completely failed. That was one part of the case I knew about. I knew about that and the glove, and that was about it.

MC: I think the show also worked to keep the focus on the victims, something the trial was not able to do. Like, "hello? Remember the people who were brutally murdered?"

C: But weirdly, we never saw the victims. Which, for a Ryan Murphy show, I was really surprised by given that he never met a bloody body scene he didn’t love to film. We see flashes of two bodies in the first episode, but never their faces. It’s not until the show ends that we even see any representation of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman.

AP: I actually thought that was a good choice. It was respectful to the victims not to cast them as Body 1 and Body 2. It was better to just let the real victims be...the victims.

C: It seemed to me like the show was trying to make a point about how much the actual victims were left behind in this process.

MC: Totally agree. This was actually the strongest Ryan Murphy show I have seen. I think because it was limited run, completely mapped out in advance, and based on real events. Keeping the Dad and sister of Ron (I think?) front and center was smart.

C: Yeah, because he was bound by facts and couldn't throw in aliens in episode 6. Just for funsies.

AP: True or False: Aliens would have made it that much more intriguing.

C: I maintain that John Travolta was playing his character as an alien. It's the only thing that makes sense to me.

MC: False. Truth is stranger than fiction. Also, Hahahaha, word.

AP: I think we may have a solid theory going. I mean, Homeboy is a Scientologist. I'm sure he thought aliens factored into it somehow.

MC: Oh, lord.

C: "Aliens did it" would actually probably make a more believable defense strategy than the one they actually presented.

AP: "If I Did It," by OJ Simpson. 

Please note that this is an actual book. 

MC: So, I have to ask. Do you guys think he did it? I have never expressed an opinion because I never thought I knew enough of the facts.

AP: I still don't think I know enough of the facts, to really say for sure. I would say he probably did it, but I also wonder if there wasn't someone else involved.

C: I think, based only on what I know from reading, that yes he definitely did it.

MC: How about this: do you think OJ believes it was someone else? The way he was portrayed it was like he honestly didn't know why he was there.

AP: Yes. That I believe. He might have done it in a fit of rage, and then honestly blacked out.

C: I think OJ probably doesn't have a realistic impression of his own mind. Which is to say, I think he knows he did it, but in his head the reasoning for it is so constructed and explained away and rationalized that he effectively believes that he did not do something he did.

MC: I would believe that; or convinced himself he blacked out. Right--and justified. Since Nicole was "his." It was creepy how he always called her "my Nicole."

C: That's what makes his whole case fascinating in my mind: I think he's pretty clearly the killer, but the case lived and died on the very real issue of institutionalized racism.

AP: And he really got off because the cops were so incompetent.

MC: It was like, the jury let this one black man go who actually committed it in response to all the black men who were convicted and innocent. And, to be fair, that is a legit reason to get off.

C: For me, the show hit it best in the last episode in a scene between Johnnie and his wife. His wife effectively says that OJ very likely did the crime that he was accused of, but the reason why she's proud of Johnnie is because he shined a light on how terribly African Americans are treated by the police in this country. Even if OJ didn’t deserve to go free, the attention his case brought was still a good thing. The case was an imperfect one, but the issue it raised is one that needs to be talked about, basically.

Justice, LAPD-style.

MC: Our justice system is designed around the idea it is better to let 10 guilty men free rather than imprison one innocent man. 

AP: Or the jury may have believed the defense. They might have actually thought that they knew what cops were like, and in their minds, it's totally reasonable for cops to plant evidence.

MC: Which we all know is now how things go down. I totally agree with Clovis. And like we noted, the police fucked this up royally.

C: I don't believe that the jury "threw" the case, for lack of a better word. I'm pretty convinced that the jury members honestly believed that he did not commit the murders.

AP: No, I don't think they threw it either. I think they honestly thought the cops planted evidence. Because the jury was comprised of African-Americans, and cops have planted things on African Americans.

MC: Well, you don't have to believe he was innocent. You just have to have reasonable doubt. I'm not sure I would have convicted. Even if I believe he did it. Reasonable doubt is not that high a bar.

C: Exactly. They had enough experience with the LAPD to easily believe the police were corrupt and that it wasn't beyond reasonable doubt that they could have framed OJ. Hence, acquittal. 

MC: The defense definitely called a lot of the evidence into question; and remember, this was basically the first high profile use of DNA. There was no CSI. People were like, whaaaaa?

C: Also it shows how you have to be careful telling a story, right? "Please listen to this long, droning explanation of science" isn't as compelling for people as "these racist corrupt cops tried to pull a fast one on you."

MC: Exactly. The show did a good job of showing how the jury was totally not getting it--nobody wants to hear 3 days of some scientist blabbering on.

AP: No, if it's not in layman's terms, nobody is going to care.

C: So what do we think were the things the show did best?

AP: THE CAR CHASE. With OJ and the gun and the screaming = Hilarious. You can't make this shit up. That's why it's so good.

Traffic on the 405 this morning: Light with a few backups due to fugitive activity. Normal Tuesday, folks!

MC: It definitely told a compelling story. And I thought was pretty honest while still being dramatic.

AP: The script was compelling, and the cast was committed.

C: I thought they did a really good job of taking a period piece and connecting it subtly but solidly with issues that we're seeing today. And that it didn't have the usual Ryan Murphy hallmarks of weird shit happening just for fuck's sake.

MC: For sure; I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of everything. But it still felt soapy enough that it was entertaining.

AP: It was really quite addictive. Nobody was phoning it in, except Travolta, who was coming to us live via satellite from his auditing center.

MC: He was with his alien overlords so distracted.

C: Travolta's thetans really deserve an Emmy nod for this one.

AP: And he'll have to donate half his Emmy to the church. And Lord Xenu. And Tom Cruise

C: IT'S CALLED TITHING AND HOW ELSE ARE YOU GOING TO GO CLEAR WITHOUT IT?!?

MC: Don't forget Nathan Lane. So random! The casting in this was so weird and so awesome.

C: How much fun did Nathan Lane have playing an uber straight dude? I mean, really?

AP: I loved Nathan Lane. He was basically playing Ken Starr.

MC: But David Schwimmer definitely wins for most random. And great. But I thought he only directed stuff now. He hasn't been in anything for a while. It was a great role too--I found his whole arc about doubting OJ's innocence and struggling with that really compelling. What would you do if you believed your best friend murdered someone? I mean, we're all cool with it because TV Sluts united forever. But it must be hard for normal people.

C: We're going to be blogging from prison, let's face it.

AP: They let you have internet time in Gitmo, right?

MC: I bet Arsenic Pie goes first. She'll get put in the slammer for speeding tickets and they'll ignore all the real crimes you've committed.

AP: FOR THE LAST TIME, PUNNING IS NOT A CRIME! You know I'm going to bust some kittens out of a university science lab and it'll be the big house for AP.

MC: 20 to life, bitch. You'll get your comeuppance.

AP: Fortunately, I learned to fashion a shiv from watching Downton Abbey. Anyway, back to it, OJ didn't seem like OJ, casting-wise. He's supposed to be a pro football player, right? Why was the actor they cast so fucking tiny?

MC: Well, he HAD been. He was retired at that point.

AP: Right, but he didn't shrink. He was physically too small for the role.

MC: It's pretty common for pro athletes to gain a lot of weight after they stop playing.

C: I thought Cuba Gooding Jr did a good job, but agreed that he never quite nailed OJ. Like, he just didn't quite become the part the way Courtney B Vance did for Johnnie Cochran or Sarah Paulson did for Marcia Clark.

MC: I actually think is a good thing to talk about--because the show didn't seem to want to take a stance on whether OJ knew he did it or not. So I don't know how much Cuba was given. It's hard to walk that line. 

AP: He did a good job being Cuba Gooding Jr. He didn't seem physically imposing at all is my point.

MC: The first few episodes of showing how he could get very unbalanced. I would have like to have seen him rage out.

AP: He didn't go all the way into how scary OJ supposedly could be.

Unclear if this is a compliment to OJ Simpson or an insult to Cuba Gooding Jr.

C: Maybe the reason for that is because the show was trying to be agnostic about his guilt or innocence. I mean, it's notable that we never once see any kind of recreation of the night in question, which would have been easy enough to film.

MC: Agreed. The audience is definitely supposed to make up their own mind. So it's difficult for an actor to play that role when the story never specifically tells him whether he did or not. He has to be convincing both ways.

C: And that fits with the idea that the show really isn't that interested in OJ himself, it's interested in the questions raised by the case (and trial) and what the cultural fallout from it was.

MC: BOOM. NAILED IT.

C: Thanks. I am incredible, aren't I?

MC: It's this kind of hard hitting analysis people expect from us. Also poop jokes.

AP: And Scientology jokes. Cuba did a fine job acting-wise. He just seemed kinda there. Like, he's not as tall as OJ, and not as muscular, and he didn't have that same physicality. Which, even if the focus isn't on OJ, OJ should still have been more of an elephant in the room. He just wasn't.

"Yes, you, young man. Would you mind trying on the gloves of this famous football player?"

MC: Yeah, agreed. The 8 previous calls to the police for domestic abuse is kind of a hard fact to ignore. The whole thing is just awful. Everyone failed Nicole in this circumstance.

C: The thing that was probably most heart-breaking to me was the scene of the Goldman family silently walking back to their car, hearing the news reports of people celebrating throughout the city and then asking "what do we do now?"

MC: Absolutely.

AP: You sue. That’s what you do.

C: Which has always been the thing that brings me back to the guilt or innocence question when you think about OJ. If he didn't do, someone did and that someone has never been pursued. Of course, the reason why is because the LA DA honestly believes that they found the killer and there's no one else to pursue, but hey. Double Jeopardy, everyone!

MC: But then when we say things like that, I want to roll my eyes and be like, of course we know who did it. Which kind of throws my whole "I haven't made up my mind yet' thing out the window.

AP: The defense did do a good job of pointing that out. That no other suspects were ever considered.

MC: Any final thoughts? 

C: I'm interested to see what next season is. This is an anthology series, after all.

AP: I would like to see them do the Steven Avery case, actually

MC: Charles Manson? Lizzy Borden? Good stuff about women in there.

AP: Nothing will top Christina Ricci though.  The Christina Ricci one was such a hot mess!!

C: I would love a season focused on the Chicago Murder Castle and the World's Fair. (Devil in the White City stuff.)

MC: As long as they focus on the murders and not the architecture. Zzzzzzzz

AP: I think this is a good series. So long as they keep attracting high caliber actors.

C: That's the real benefit of an anthology. You can get really good, big names because they don't have to sign away seven years of their lives. It's basically just shooting a big movie and then they can come back next season if they want to.

AP: Yeah, not too shabby to get Bruce Greenwood on board. I have a crush on him.

C: Didn't he play Captain Pike in the NuTrek movies?

AP: YES!

Dreamy

MC: I have a crush on David Schwimmer now.

AP: I'm telling Rachel you put moves on her man. I'll hold her down and shave her head.

C: It's hard to come back from Rachel. She did a number on all of us in the 90s.

MC: Yeah, Greenwood was great as the DA! He's very handsome. Though he seems short.

AP: He's 5'11"

MC: Someone has IMDB open.

AP: LIKE A BOSS. Anyway, overall, very good. Very compelling. A couple casting hiccups, but really well done

MC: I think it's fair to say we all enjoyed the hell out of the show. Both as entertainment and for raising conversations about broader issues. It certainly is a huge flashpoint in American history.

C: Yes. TV Sluts agreement.

MC: TV Sluts hooooooooo!

"I Killed Them All"

If you’re like me and 60 million other people, you spent most of last fall listening and re-listing to Serial, the podcast from This American Life that examined the 1999 murder of high schooler Hae Min Lee and the subsequent trial and conviction of her ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed. The story was riveting, despite being unabashedly reflective of real life police work (an entire episode was devoted to cell phone towers and how they work), eschewing the fancy Hollywood noir for journalistic investigation. And while we’re still waiting for Serial’s second season to come out, apparently sometime this fall, HBO has created a miniseries that may fill the Sarah Koenig-sized hole in your heart while waiting for the next installment. The miniseries, The Jinx, was released this spring and, much in the same vein as Serial, re-examined a long cold murder case with a fresh eye to the potential killer.

Just a guy sitting in a dark movie theatre alone. Nope, nothing creepy here.

The Jinx focuses on Robert Durst, the son of an extremely successful and powerful Manhattan real estate developer, Durst was in line to inherit the empire his family built, but the head position ultimately went to his brother instead.  In 1982, Durst’s wife Kathie vanished after a weekend at the couple’s home in Connecticut. She has not been seen or heard from since and is still missing to this day. Durst was a suspect in her murder and The Jinx follows Durst through the investigation into her death. But just when you assume this is a simple cut-and-dried case of spousal murder, that’s when the other bodies start to appear.

The Jinx benefits from the cooperation of Durst himself. He speaks freely about his past, the investigations he’s been at the core of, his thoughts and opinions of his family and Kathie’s friends. Durst became interested in the project after seeing the 2010 movie All Good Things, a fictitious account of Kathie’s murder starring Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst. Impressed by the lack of sensationalism in the movie, Durst approached that film’s director to see if he was interested in “finding the real story.” The result is the six episode miniseries you see here.

Hollywood turned its unflinching eye on reality and bravely cast this Robert Durst lookalike as the lead. 

So what is “the real story”? The facts, as they say, are these: Sometime over the weekend of January 31, 1982, Kathie Durst went missing around Newtown, Connecticut.  Robert Durst told police that they were in Connecticut at their weekend home and that he had put Kathie on a train back to New York City the night of the 31^st because she had to be back to attend classes she was taking the next day.  Robert said he called their Manhattan apartment and talked to her that evening to verify she made it home before returning to the city himself a few days later.

Kathie never showed up for her classes the next morning, however staff at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine where she was a student told police that she called them that morning to say that she was ill and wouldn’t be in class today.  And that’s when Kathie disappears off the face of the earth. Robert reports her missing on February 6, almost a full week after he says he saw her the last time. He claims the delay is due to her busy schedule as a final year medical student, saying that he would often go several days without seeing her.

I'd say there's some eerie foreshadowing in their wedding picture, but to be honest that's pretty much how all the early 80s looked.

Worth noting that is that in the weeks prior to her disappearance, Kathie told friends that Robert beat her and even sought medical attention for wounds. She claims that he forced her to have an abortion and that she considered divorce but felt hamstrung by a prenuptial agreement. The night of January 31^st, Kathie had been a friend’s party when she left suddenly after receiving an angry phone call from Robert. Kathie reportedly told her friend, “If something happens to me, check it out. I’m afraid of what Bobby will do.”

Kathie’s case grows cold for lack of evidence. Robert’s claims are dubious; he says he called Kathie from a payphone, but no payphone was close to their home; A doorman at their Manhattan apartment recalled seeing Kathie arrive home but admits that he only saw her from the back and it could have been someone else. In the end, there is no body so Kathie is officially a missing person. Durst recedes from attention, selling his home (and many of Kathie’s possessions) and fading from view.

It’s not until a seemingly unrelated murder in Los Angeles happens on Christmas Eve, 2000, a full 18 years later, that the case begins to find life again. Susan Berman, daughter of a mobster and longtime friend of none other than Robert Durst, is found murdered execution-style in her apartment.  And it doesn’t end there. In September of 2001, a family fishing in Galveston, Texas, finds a grotesquely dismembered torso floating off the beach surrounded by the severed body parts. Police are able to identify the body as that of an elderly man named Morris Black. Take one guess as to who happens to be living in the apartment above him. Robert Durst? Actually, a mute woman named Dorothy Ciner, someone Robert went to high school with. Confused? It only gets crazier.

The Jinx dives deeply into this story, one that spans multiple decades and the length of the United States. Durst himself comes off as unsettling at best. His voice is odd, his facial tics like something that an actor would create in order to appear mentally unbalanced. Durst has a way with words that  is unpolished and strangely refreshing, particularly for someone who has been through so much media and legal questioning. When asked, for example, why he told police that he had talked to Kathie when she arrived back in New York the night she was last seen given that there was no other evidence of her ever even making it on the train back to the city, he says, “I was hoping that would just make everything go away.” An odd sentiment for a man whose wife has just gone missing.

Definitely not a murderer. Can't even see how you could go there.

For all it traffics in the hugeness of the story, The Jinx strives to approach Durst with objectivity as well. It explores his childhood, humanizing him without apologizing for him. Durst tells a story about being woken in the middle of the night when he was seven years old by his father and brought to a window in their mansion. Durst's father told him to look to the roof where he saw his mother in her nightgown standing by herself. Durst says his father made him watch as his mother fell or was pushed to her death. The series establishes the myriad ways in which Robert was made to understand himself as not like his other brothers, the ones who had earned their father’s favor. To say that the Durst family dynamics were complicated is, obviously, an understatement.

In the end, The Jinx makes its biggest splash when it uncovers evidence not previously found in the original police investigations. The day before the final episode aired in March on HBO, police made a high-profile arrest based largely on evidence that the filmmakers uncovered. The filmmakers made clear after the fact that they turned over all evidence to the police upon finding it. The arrest was certainly well-timed from a ratings perspective, but unrelated to the production schedule of the show.

In that sense, The Jinx manages to do what Serial did not – figure out what really happened. And while that’s no detriment to Serial’s production, it does give The Jinx the kind of closure that you may find yourself craving after all this true crime hullabaloo. The Jinx manages to come off as a more interesting 20/20.  It doesn’t sex up the effects or take any questionable licenses with the topic, but it is engaging, fascinating storytelling. It’s the perfect thing to take up your time until the world’s most favorite podcast comes back. Get on it, Koenig! 

The Scariest Thing on Television

You guys.  I was seriously just about to post my promised review of Gotham (coming right up, I promise!) when a quick cursory fact check via Twitter informed me that Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, creators of Nip/Tuck, Glee, and, my personal favorite, American Horror Story are spinning off the latter show into a new franchise that just may be the scariest thing on TV; reality television.

And by that I mean actual reality television, not the scripted Kim Kardashian stuff.  The new series? An anthology in the same vein as American Horror Story that will try to do for the weekly true crime genre what AHS has done for the weekly horror show.  The new series will be called, seriously, American Crime Story and season one will be the O.J. Simpson story.

Terrifying!

I'll be honest that I thought this was some kind of April Fool's Day joke when I came across it, but low and behold it is, in fact, real.  The creative team behind AHS (season four debuts tomorrow.  Jesus, I have a lot of writing to do...) have been "looking for the right property that could serve as an extension of the American Horror Story brand."

This may not be a crazy idea.  An anthology series about America's most notorious crimes would certainly fit the bill in terms of expanding AHS's franchise brand.  AHS has already shown itself to be very willing to tell stories in multiple time periods and presumably the format would allow Murphy et al to visit any significant true crime from all of American history.

That's the good news.  My worry is that we're going to get a series about stories that are already overly sensationalized by the team that brought us Glee.  Subtle is not their bailiwick.  And while I don't think a poorly filmed take on O.J. Simpson is likely to do anything like, say, restart the L.A. riots, I do worry about how well the show will be able to present these stories, especially if the aim is to do them as true crime and not as the kind of "true crime" we saw in season one of AHS with the Black Dahlia.  As dramatic as murder is in real life, Hollywood has typically felt for some reason that it isn't sensational enough. That kind of sexing up of history will be harder to pull off in cases like O.J. Simpson, which is a story that existed in the era of modern news, but it will be significantly harder if season two is the Lindbergh Baby.

American Crime Story will air on FX sometime in 2015.