Online Sleuths Strike Again in Riveting True Crime Drama

 

Is this a fitting blog post to mark the end of 2019? The true crime drama in this blog title is the Netflix TV series Don’t F**k With Cats. It’s a three-parter which I had to — just had to — binge-watch.

Initially, I thought I should write something weightier for the last blog of the year; something summarizing my journey along the road to being a published author again. But no, 2019 was pretty much of a waiting game for me.

Waiting to sign up with a new literary agent ; waiting after submitting revisions to said agent; waiting again after re-submitting said revisions because the first batch got lost in cyberspace.  You get the picture.

Binge-Watching

So, 2019 was more about waiting, and reading — and watching. As in TV watching; as in binge-watching. So, yes, there was Game of Thrones. Yep. Binge-watched those eight seasons over three months. Takeaway? I would have slit my wrists if I’d invested eight years of my life only to arrive at that sorry conclusion!

 

There was Succession, also  on HBO — a story about a Rupert Murdoch-type media mogul and his squabbling children — which I watched as each episode became immediately available on Sunday evenings . Takeaway? Succession patriarch Logan Roy never really seems as cool or sanguine or knowledgable as Mr. M seemed to me in real life when I worked for him in the 1980s!

Then, there was the long Spring where I turned to a — gasp!–medical drama, Grey’s Anatomy. Can’t believe I took away some life lessons from that sappy — yet gripping– series. But I did.

There was also the best of Netflix in You and Unbelievable — which were so good I had to blog separately about them here and here. You has a second season which was just released on Netflix, but if you haven’t seen the first season please watch it, or you will be missing out big time.

Movies Galore

 

Then, came a week in Palm Beach when the skies opened up and we had nothing but rain and rain — and more rain. It happened the same week that the oaf from the Oval Office jetted to his Florida residence so schadenfreude more than made up for cancelled tennis games. Anyway, there was plenty more to catch up with on TV.

Netflix released movies galore. There were the ones from eras and societies where men held and hold a controlling grip: The Irishman had Robert De Niro navigating perilously between the Mafia and his work for Jimmy Hoffa and the unions; and The Two Popes was an interesting, fictionalized story about a  meeting between the current Pope Francis ( a reformer) and the retired Pope Benedict XVI (a clueless conservative.)

Then, there were the movies which portrayed women floundering in our patriarchical  world.  There was Marriage Story, directed by Noah Baumbach, starring Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson. It tells the story of wife vs. husband where the lawyers essentially win –and have the best parts, and best  lines  in the movie. Worth watching for Laura Dern’s brilliant, incredible monologue on how mothers are viewed in our society!

And, there were the Netflix series about women who come face to face with, and succumb to  good-looking, smooth-talking psychopaths. Dirty John tells the real life drama of a smart, beautiful, wealthy Californian interior designer who became the prey of a serial stalker and abuser. Meanwhile, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile was yet another look at serial killer Ted Bundy (played by Zac Efron) from the viewpoint of his longtime girlfriend.

Takeaway? Are there really women who are smart and beautiful, but who still (after all these Netflix movies) just don’t pick up on that psychopathic vibe?????

Gory and Nauseating

Finally, there was Netflix’s gory offering  of a three-part true crime docu-series titled, Don’t F**k With Cats. While there was much about this one that could actually make a viewer physically nauseous, it was also an incredible insight into the very best of online sleuthing.

Prodded into action by a horrendous home movie of two kittens tortured to death, Deanna, a data analyst from Las Vegas and John from Los Angeles join forces to unmask the depraved perp who goes on to torture more kittens before moving on to killing and dismembering a male student who he picked up online.

I don’t count myself among those who have led sheltered lives but the opening scenes of this docu-series had me wondering if this was really for real, or whether it was an over-the-top, grotesque, this-could-never-happen-in-real-life crime fiction drama. I had to pause the first episode to google the facts before I was convinced that the events had happened, and that some sick bastard had actually, really, in fact, vacuum-sealed two kittens in a ziploc bag.

Small wonder that these two online sleuths became determined to take down this lunatic. It was a joy to watch them: zeroing in on details of the crime scene; determining that the vacuum cleaner was an expensive model only sold in North America; tracking down sales sites for a bedspread that appeared in the sick torture video; zooming in on a cigarette pack which had a North American health warning stamped on it.

I’ve had nothing but admiration for online sleuths ever since reading I’ll Be Gone in the Dark — the online investigation by Michelle McNamara which eventually led to the apprehension of the the Golden State Killer. In Deanna and John we meet another pair of sleuths who determine to leave no stone unturned in their search. They are aided in their sleuthing by the fact that the perp seems to be taunting them to come and find him by posting hundreds of photos on the Internet.

In one instance, they zero in on a more precise location for their quarry by zooming in on traffic lights in the frame of another photo he’s posted online. The lights are black and square (not yellow and cylindrical as in the U.S.) and they determine that such traffic lights are found in Canada. They narrow down the search further to Toronto.

Another photo of their perp shows him on the balcony of an city apartment building. A PetroCanada gas station, also in the frame, leads them to narrow down his location to six possible locations where those particular gas stations are located in metro areas in Toronto. Using Google street views they pinpoint the apartment balcony, and hence the apartment number.

Then, the perp shows up in a photo in an unidentified city square, sitting on the steps of a distinctive building. Deanna and John use Google Earth and Street Views to walk up and down the streets of a city centre until they find a match for the building which turns out to be at McGill University in Montreal.

By this time, the cops in Montreal are also alerted to the perp, having found a suitcase with a torso dumped outside an apartment building in the city. From this point on, the parallel investigations of the Canadian cops and our online sleuths merge somewhat — and the eventual arrest becomes inevitable.

Sometimes, the journey is more interesting than the destination, and that’s the way I felt about this Netflix docudrama. The online search for this perp was riveting, more so perhaps than the scenes of his actual apprehension — although the concluding scenes linking his obsessions to the 1992 Michael Douglas/Sharon Stone movie, Basic Instinct did send a final frisson up my spine.

Takeaway? There are good people who are becoming more and more adept at using the Internet to bring down the worst humans in our society. All power to them.

Wishing all my readers and subscribers the very best in 2020. Happy New Year!