Stream It Or Skip It: ‘At Witt’s End: The Hunt For A Killer’ On Hulu, A Docuseries About How Cold Case Investigators Try To Link A 30-Year-Old Murder To A Serial Killer

At Witt’s End: The Hunt For A Killer , directed by Devon Parks and produced by Ridley Scott’s Scott Free Productions, is a four-part docuseries that follows a team of cold case investigators as they try to follow the leads in the December 1994 disappearance and murder of 19-year-old Melissa “Missy” Witt. She was understood to have disappeared from the parking lot of a bowling alley in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and her body was found in the Ozark National Forest, 50 miles away.

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Opening Shot: As we hear audio from news reports about the 1994 disappearance of Melissa “Missy” Witt, we push in on a wooded scene, and a white car driving on an empty road.

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The Gist: The first episode of At Witt’s End concentrates mainly on Witt’s disappearance, and the sequence of events leading up to it. Starting the day after her parents reported that she never came home, which was very unlike her, Missy’s friends started passing around flyers with her picture on them. The flyer caught the attention of the local TV station and a young reporter named Charlene Shirk. Shirk is one of the people most prominently interviewed in the first episode, as it seems that her reporting on the case had prodded the police to investigate, given the fact that they at first felt that Missy just decided to leave town on her own.

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As the police gather more physical evidence, especially after her car was found in the bowling alley’s parking lot close to three days after she was reported missing, with blood spatters in the vicinity and blood-covered keys in the alley’s lost-and-found, we hear from the cold case team investigating the murder in 2022 to the present. It’s a multi-agency task force, which includes the FBI and the Fort Smith police, and they start to probe the connection between Witt’s case and the case of Morgan Nick, which was the subject of the 2023 docuseries Still Missing Morgan.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? As we mentioned, this is the same director and production team for the docuseries Still Missing Morgan , and they follow the same investigative team as they connect Morgan Nick’s and Missy Witt’s cases.

Our Take: The first episode of At Witt’s End: The Hunt For A Killer is more compelling than we thought it would be, likely because it dives right into the case. We start with Witt’s disappearance, with news footage aided by the requisite interviews and some relatively tame reenactments — like someone handing Witt’s car keys in at the bowling alley. Parks gives some biographical information about Witt, and even get a little bit of Shirk’s background, but he doesn’t linger on those aspects of the story.

His goal in the first episode is to show the small-town bona fides of Fort Smith, which is actually Arkansas’ third-largest city, with around 89,000 residents, but still has the “one street downtown,” according to Shirk. He also wants to show how strange it was for Witt to just disappear, even though she was technically an adult and could have left town without notice if she wanted. Parks effectively shows how Shirk’s news coverage pushed law enforcement during the first days Witt was missing, and how little information they gave the media once they got really involved in the case.

Things get a little confusing with the cold case team, some of whom were involved in the original investigation and some who weren’t. In one case, a Ford Smith police detective talks about what the department did during that initial investigation using the collective “we,” when he clearly states that he’s only been on the force for 17 years. And then when we start seeing footage from Still Missing Morgan being shown, illustrating the connection that’s starting to form between Witt’s case and the case of Morgan Nick, it was tough to figure out just where the linkage was made and where the investigation was going.

We do think that, given that the clunkiness of that connection smooths out by the end of the episode, the other three will follow the cold case team as they try to go down investigative roads that weren’t traveled the first time around, especially given technology and investigative methods that weren’t around in 1994.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: We see reports of a body found in the Ozark National Forest.

Sleeper Star: Charlene Shirk did a great job of talking about Fort Smith’s small-town vibes and just what drove her to stay on the Witt case, despite law enforcement’s initial reluctance to investigate.

Most Pilot-y Line: There needed to be a bit more explanation about the Morgan Nick case, and Still Missing Morgan , for people who are not familiar with either.

Our Call: STREAM IT. There’s a cinematic feel to At Witt’s End: The Hunt For A Killer that, along with a good storytelling structure, makes the docuseries more compelling than similar true crime docuseries. There’s a bit of confusion when the Morgan Nick case is brought into the mix, but that’s more of a hiccup than anything else.

Joel Keller ( @joelkeller ) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com , VanityFair.com , Fast Company and elsewhere.

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