Netflix clearly believes that murder sells.
Despite objections from the families of Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims, who claimed the streamer’s latest fictionalisation of the serial killer’s grisly murders in Dahmer – The Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story retraumatised them, Netflix is showing no signs of stopping its true-crime output.
Now, in its newest deep dive, Crime Scene: The Texas Killing Fields, which was released on Tuesday (29 November), the three-part limited series returns to the cold cases of at least 30 young women who were murdered and buried along the same strip of road.
However, while Dahmer’s victims’ families didn’t consent, despite creator Ryan Murphy’s claims he tried to seek it, photojournalist Jessica Dimmock’s documentary is driven instead by a grieving father who has never stopped hunting his daughter’s killer.
When the bodies of three young women were discovered in the 1980s, and a fourth in 1991, along Calder Road (often referred to as the Texas Killing Fields), other missing girls’ bodies were soon located amidst the 25-acre patch of land.
With the help of the father, the series “delves into five decades of the area’s unsettling history, uncovering a pattern of eerie connections and missed opportunities surrounding the Calder Road cold cases that may, at long last, lead investigators to the truth”.
Although there’s an increasing stigma around true-crime docuseries and their exploitative nature, it can’t be discussed without acknowledging that it’s a double-edged sword.
As long as viewers are interested in these types of shows, Netflix and other streamers’ appetites to release them will only grow larger.
So, until we change society’s rubbernecking ways, there’ll be plenty of true-crime content to feast our eyes on in the future.
Crime Scene: The Texas Killing Fields is now available to stream on Netflix.
