REAL journalists are taught that the worst thing a reporter or documentarian can do is insert himself into a story. It forces a POV on the viewers and clouds whatever truth the photograph, story or documentary tries to show. The documentary becomes about confirming the bias of the reporter and not presenting the facts.
However, the internet, the camera phone and social media have all but eliminated this rule of journalistic integrity. People no longer seek facts from newspapers, but turn to cable news channels that reflect what they want the news to be, not what it is. It has lead to a generation that believes the real world did not exist until they were born, and that, because they are so smart, no criminal case verdict is justifiable until they have investigated it.
In this series, Dave Raccuglia, a hair dresser (you can't make this up), decides to "reopen" a case prosecuted by his father against a man who confessed to the murder of three women in a park in Illinois in 1960. He believes that the killer, a man named Wegler, was railroaded by his father because his father was up for re-election. The hair dresser is deeply invested in absolving Wegler, and, although he has no background in forensics, law enforcement, etc., Raccuglia seems to think that interviewing countless locals for their opinions is the same thing as "investigation." He only interviews the people who agree with him, and the families of the victims are almost completely ignored.
It's bad journalism, bad documentary and bad television. It reminds me of the movement spearheaded by John Waters to free Leslie Van Houten, in which a group of LA hipsters are invested in getting Van Houten out of jail because "she's a delightful person who didn't kill Sharon Tate. She was brainwashed!"
Isn't it always easier to love a former prom Queen? But Van Houten did stab the LoBiancos. She admitted it. And would those hipsters would be spending as much time trying to free Leonard Peltier or any other nonwhite, non groovy, non Manson girl?
My college roommates was Sharon Tate's first cousin. She went to be with her aunt and Sharon's sister every time a parole hearing happened. She said it was, for them, like grinding glass into their hearts to hear hangers on and hipsters explain to her why the Manson family should be freed. What was it like for the LoBiancos? Never mind, she was a prom Queen, you know. She's too delightful to stay in jail.
People, your narcissistic desire to become famous by freeing someone famous may make you feel important but there is no virtue in being an true crime junkie. You are grinding glass into the hearts of the families of the dead. You are a true crime tourist, visiting their pain. The families have to live there.
We have a system of crime and punishment in our country that is imperfect. It executes innocent men and women, and it frees guilty ones. The weight of the injustice can occasionally seem unbearable. But that doesn't mean that all convictions were wrong. Nor does it mean that they were right.
Thee way to change it isn't by making armchair detectives of bored hairdressers. It's by making justice more equal, changing sentencing guidelines, removing politics from the prosecutorial process, and getting rid of confirmation bias.
This documentary series is one of the problems with the system, not one of the solutions. There are better true crime reporters on YouTube, and HBO ought to be ashamed of itself for broadcasting it.
A far better subject here would have been the psychological examination of the problems in the relationship between Dave Raccuglia and his father that prompted him to make this mess. And it would be far better for the true crime aficionados to realize that the crimes happened to real people with real families, and are not cosplay for their own psychiatric problems.
