Last month, I got involved in two different true crime stories. They were totally entertaining and thought provoking from beginning to end, and I actually explored each one through two different media formats.
The first was Under the Banner of Heaven, a book by John Krakauer and the dramatic series of the same name on Hulu.
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Krakauer's book, first published in 2003, tells the story of the gruesome 1984 murders of Brenda Lafferty and her 15-month old daughter in Utah. Their killers were two of her brothers-in-law who targeted her because they believed that she was preventing their wives and her husband, their brother, from living the moral life that their fundamentalist Latter Day Saints demanded. Krakauer juxtaposes the murder and its investigation with the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, from its founding by Joseph Smith to the fundamentalist sects that started breaking away from the orthodox Church. There were some fractures within the Church immediately following the death of Smith in 1844, when there were a few men who announced that they were Smith's chosen successor, but there were even more in the late 1800s when the LDS Church leaders agreed to strip polygamy as a tenet of the Church, in exchange for statehood. Several groups condemned this blasphemy and created their own communities in Canada, the US, and Mexico where they continued, and continue to this day, practicing polygamy. These groups have officially been excommunicated and condemned by the orthodox LDS Church.
The Lafferty brothers found themselves drawn to the ideas espoused by some of these fundamentalist prophets, and they began living by what they called the "true" principles of Mormonism. This led them to murdering Brenda and Erica Lafferty.
Both the book and the series were incredibly enlightening and stories well told. It was interesting that the makers took different approaches to telling the story. Krakauer spent a large portion of the book, close to the first third, delving into the history of the Church and of the fundamentalists. The tv series is more focused on the murder and the investigation, but there are flashbacks to moments in Mormon history.
The Staircase is an even more recent story. In December 2001, writer Michael Peterson found his wife Kathleen dead at the foot of the staircase in their Durham, North Carolina home. Police quickly discounted the accidental fall and charged Peterson with murder, theorizing that the motive was Kathleen's discovery that he was secretly having sex with men. The revealed secrets and the murder trial, of course, took their toll on Michael and Kathleen's children. Kathleen's daughter from a previous marriage sided with her mother's two sisters against Peterson, while his two sons and two adopted daughters stood by their father. After his conviction and imprisonment for 8 years, it turned out that a couple of the state forensic scientists who had provided damning testimony were guilty of manufacturing harmful evidence, hiding exculpatory evidence and committing perjury, not just in his trial but in numerous other trials. He was finally freed, pending a retrial, but the wheels of justice turned very slowly over the next several years, and he decided to take a plea that allowed him to avoid a retrial.
So there are two series on the case you can watch and they are somewhat intertwined. During the trial, Peterson agreed to allow a French documentary making team to cover everything. The team followed him around for years and years, and they had access in the courtroom, jail, his home, and prison that no other documentarians have ever had before or since. They interviewed everyone on his side, they filmed defense strategy meetings, they saw everything. And they added more material as events occurred. That documentary can be seen on Netflix.
Just recently, HBO Max has created a dramatic series starring Colin Firth and Toni Collette as Michael and Kathleen. It's obvious that the creators of this series saw the documentary because there are lots of scenes that replicate the documentary scene for scene and word for word. Also, the actors cast to play the real people are dead ringers for those people, with one exception. For some reason, the drama producers cast the part of the defense private investigator - an older white guy in real life - as a young black man. The drama producers also took some other liberties with the story which haven't made the documentarians very happy, and the makers of the documentary have taken to the press to denounce these changes and to demand that disclaimers be added to the series. It's a dynamite story, and I'm still not sure what really happened that night. Maybe we will never be.
