In the past few years, there have been multiple documentaries and docuseries revisiting high-profile cases long after the fact: Lorena Bobbitt (“Lorena”), the Menendez Brothers (“Menendez & Menudo: Boys Betrayed”), JonBenét Ramsey (“JonBenét Ramsey: What Really Happened?”), Casey Anthony (“Casey Anthony: Where the Truth Lies”), Jared Vogel (“Jared from Subway: Catching a Monster”), boy band creator Lou Perlman (“Dirty Pop”) , Brian Peck ( “Quiet on the Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV” ), Sherri Papini (“The Perfect Wife”), and Gypsy Rose Blanchard (“The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard”), just to name a few. And the trend isn’t limited to docs — Todd Haynes’s 2023 feature film “May December” offered a fascinating fictional version of the Mary Kay Letourneau story after 20-plus years.
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The most recent entry in the cycle is the Laci Peterson story, which met its 20th anniversary of the trial this month with two docuseries, “American Murder: Laci Peterson” on Netflix and “Face to Face with Scott Peterson” on Peacock. Both shows revisit the 2002 disappearance of the beautiful and beloved Laci Peterson, who was eight months pregnant when she went missing on Christmas Eve. The search for her was a media sensation, which uncovered her husband Scott’s adultery. After the bodies of Laci and the baby, Conner, were found in the San Francisco Bay, Scott was arrested and eventually convicted, though he maintains his claims of innocence. If you weren’t involved in the case as it was unfolding, you might know the fictionalized version told in “Gone Girl.”
The Netflix docuseries, directed by true crime veteran Skye Borgman, is a well-made and emotional recounting of the case that offers new material from Laci’s mother and girlfriends, Scott’s then-girlfriend Amber Frey, and snippets from Laci’s diary. It clearly conveys why the family and police came to believe Scott was guilty after having defended him. The directors of the Peacock series, Shareen Anderson and Po Kutchins, also made the 2016 feature documentary, “Trial by Fury: The People v. Scott Peterson” and produced the 2017 docuseries “The Murder of Laci Peterson,” so they are well-acquainted with the story. Despite the “face-to-face” title and some current interviews with Scott in prison, the majority of the Peacock series is more about alleged holes in the original investigation than him explaining himself. While the series argues there are several causes for reasonable doubt, the biggest doubt comes from the shocking fact that the Los Angeles Innocence Project has taken on Scott’s case.
It won’t hold up in court, but the most persuasive argument that Scott did do it comes from the feeling that he just never seems to react properly. The Casey Anthony, Menendez-Menudo, and Lorena Bobbitt documentaries highlight how strangely people who have been sexually abused will respond to a massive trauma when they’ve learned how to hide their feelings and pretend nothing is wrong as a survival mechanism. Whether those abuse claims change your mind about the culpability of the accused, by the end of those shows, you can’t help but understand how that sort of trauma could result in the tearless, inappropriate reactions we’re baffled by. Scott Peterson makes no claims about past trauma, nor offers any other convincing explanation for his lack of a relatable emotional reaction to the disappearance of his wife and unborn child, let alone to their murders, so his behavior remains an unsettling mystery.
Much of the confusion in big cases is caused by the incessant press coverage, which can become a circus that obfuscates as much as it reveals. However, after 20 years much of the dust has settled and new truths do tend to emerge. At one end of the spectrum, Lorena Bobbitt was entirely redeemed by the “Lorena” series, which brought her husband’s many deep-seated and ongoing problems to light. On the other end of the spectrum, who among us could have fathomed just how dark Jared of Subway had gone until the docuseries explained the charges and how he was caught? Somewhere in the middle falls the late Lou Perlman. He was certainly not innocent of his devastating Ponzi scheme, but the big surprise of “Dirty Pop” was that even some of the victims really liked him and still have some good things to say.
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Some of these true crime docs bring to a wider audience incredible revelations, like that David Berkowitz most likely didn’t act alone (“Sons of Sam”), that John Wayne Gacy may not have always acted alone either (“The Clown and the Candyman”), and that it’s possible that Henry Lee Lucas may not have ever killed anyone (“The Confession Killer”). These Peterson docuseries are not of that sort, so what is their appeal, and that of other shows revisiting cases so long after the fact? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that these national news cases don’t just traumatize the families and friends of the deceased, but the entire country that has followed along and gotten emotionally invested. Whether the documentary reinvestigations are revelatory or not, they serve as a form of therapy in the way they clearly synopsize and allow us to process a story that was unwieldy at the time, then abruptly stopped at the end of a trial that couldn’t necessarily tell us everything.
In his novel “The Outsider,” Stephen King tells the story of a horrible child murder that can’t be solved because it involves a killer who is supernaturally in two places at once. David Lynch also attributed a supernatural cause to his fictional true crime story of the murder of Laura Palmer in “Twin Peaks.” These are artistic expressions of cases like that of Laci and Scott Peterson, where the whole truth is so unknowable that you start to question reality itself. However, the Netflix series does leave us with one provable and terrifying fact: not only does pregnancy increase the chances of a woman being victimized, but the number one cause of death for pregnant women is murder.
“American Murder: Laci Peterson” is now streaming on Netflix.
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