Stream It Or Skip It: ‘How I Caught My Killer’ Season 2 on Hulu, A Docu-Series About The Clue That Dead People Have Left Behind That Help Put Their Killers Away

A text to a friend, a simple photograph, a love letter – each of these things seems innocent enough, but sometimes they can become evidence in an investigation. That’s the premise of Hulu ‘s true crime docu-series How I Caught My Killer , which is now in its second season. In each standalone episode, the personal item of a murder victim is used to identify and incriminate the person responsible for the killing. If you like your true crime with closure and justice in the end, this is the show for you.

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Opening Shot: “When you see a Mennonite woman like 27-year-old Sasha Krause, you might be tempted to judge a book by its cover,” a voiceover says, and we see pictures of Sasha, our first victim of this season, and a montage of the rural community in New Mexico where she lived before she disappeared.

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The Gist: Sasha Krause was, by all accounts, a progressive young woman within her conservative Mennonite community. Though she adhered to most of the rules of community as far as dress and behavior were concerned, she also held a job as a writer and was a poet in her spare time, and she used a cell phone (which is not strictly forbidden and more of a personal choice, though smart phones are less accepted). When she went out one evening to church and failed to return, a manhunt within the community began, and eventually they turned to the mainstream authorities who widened the search for her.

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While at first it seemed like Sasha’s boss at the newspaper where she worked, a man named Sam Coon, was the primary suspect because of his truly odd behavior and faulty memory when he was interrogated by police, it wasn’t until Sasha’s body was found that additional clues were pieced together and led to the killer. Sasha was shot and killed, her hands had been bound by Duct tape, and her body was discovered in remote area in Arizona. Because she carried a cell phone, police were able to track its location and eventually discovered that another cell phone – one belonging to her killer – followed the same route on the night of her death. The show pieces together all of those clues, finally revealing who did this to Sasha and why.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of: There are so many true crime documentaries and news magazines that are similar in tone to How I Caught My Killer (although none have a title quite as catchy as this one). Hulu’s Mother Undercover and Dateline are prime examples.

Our Take : How I Caught My Killer is a straightforward true crime docuseries that rips real murders from the headlines and repackages them with reenactments, interviews with people involved, and a voiceover that offers a narrative of who the victim was and why they were killed. The name of the show comes from the fact that, in each episode, the victims unwittingly did something pretty casual, pretty typical, while they were alive, which helped their killer be brought to justice. In the case of Sasha Krause, it was the fact that she owned a cell phone. That detail alone, which is not that uncommon for people in the Mennonite religion, is played up as the main reason Sasha’s killer was found – and indeed, it was integral to the investigation, but it’s not as if Sasha left a note from the grave pointing police to her killer.

The show is based on real stories that surely gripped the communities where they took place, and in each of the second season’s ten episodes, the murder victims possess something, be it their phone, a photograph, even just a secret, that comes to light and helps reveal the truth about their final moments. The show is based around factual evidence, but for added entertainment value it throws in some red herrings just to throw us off the scent, possible suspects whose alibis eventually check out, that sort of thing, and in the end, it’s a tidy little story that, perhaps oddly, feels almost triumphant rather than sad, because at least justice was done.

Sex and Skin: In this case, there is none, though there is discussion of whether or not a sexual assault took place.

Parting Shot: “This case wouldn’t have been resolved without that cell phone data. If Sasha didn’t have that cell phone with her at the time she was abducted, I’m not sure we’d ever find out who did this,” Ammon Barker, the chief deputy county attorney in Arizona, explains, wrapping up just how Sasha helped catch her killer.

Memorable Dialogue: “In my subjective view, this was a religious hate crime,” court videographer Levi Stallings explains when asked what he thinks the motive in Sasha’s death is.

Our Call: STREAM IT! This style of true crime storytelling is the opposite of something like The Jinx or The Staircase , with their complexities and ambiguities; here, the stories are all complete and fully resolved, offering closure at the end of each episode. Sure, you could watch the first five minutes of each episode and then Google who the killer is and what happened, but what’s the fun in that?

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.

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