Netflix has a great catalog of documentaries. From sports, cults, religion, nature (having different focuses from endangered animals to the ocean), and well-known figures of history, the subjects tackled in these productions are vast. However, there has been one subgenre that stands out from the rest, especially in Netflix’s recent years: true crime.
With the true crime obsession that currently involves a very large part of the world’s population, it makes sense that there would be a lot of filmmakers making new productions in the genre. Joe Berlinger is a well-known name in the documentary world, having made the Academy Award-nominated and Emmy-winning Paradise Lost films, along with Brother’s Keeper and Metallica: Some Kind of Monster. One of the most recent releases by Netflix is the third season of his docuseries Crime Scene, this time titled The Texas Killing Fields.
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Here is how the new season of the show compares to the others, and why Texas Killing Fields should be watched by filmmakers that want to produce true crime documentaries.
Crime Scene Docuseries
Netflix
Crime Scene is a Netflix docuseries that has had some success since it aired its first season back in 2021. Crime Scene is a part of the streaming service’s vast true crime catalog, alongside other successes from the same creator, Joe Berlinger, such as Conversations With A Killer. Both docuseries have some similarities, as each season tackles different cases that have no correlation with each other. Nevertheless, the Crime Scene team was very smart and made some compelling decisions that enhance why the show is such a good watch for true crime fanatics.
The first season of Crime Scene was called The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel. This season tells the story of a young adult called Elisa Lamb, who disappeared after spending a few days in the infamous Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles. This season had some mixed reviews, as the focus was too grand on the confusing theories that came from the web rather than actual facts. Nevertheless, the show had another season that tackled a grim case, The Times Square Killer. This one takes the audience back to a sexualized and dark New York City in the 70s. Focusing as much on the gruesome murders of sex workers as what the city was like at the time, the second season had better reviews for its overall better grasp of the story. It also showed how the police department, and society overall, viewed the death of these women — as an occupational hazard that shouldn’t be looked at.
The Texas Killing Fields
The new season of the show premiered back in November. Taking the ‘serial murders’ thread of the last season, The Texas Killing Fields explores a different part of the U.S. Now, the big cities are left behind. Instead, the horrors of small rural towns, created by the promise of work in fast-growing Texas, are the new background for these unbelievable cases. The series starts in the mid-80s as Heidi Faye went missing in 1983, and goes all the way to the present day when the families finally had some kind of closure.
The actual Texas killing fields were portions of vacant land around I-45, which was the perfect spot to dispose of a body; since the early 1970s, 33 bodies were found there, and most of them were girls or young women. Texas Killing Fields focuses more on a particular spot near I-45 called Calder Road Oil field. A mix of found footage, tape recordings, police reports, and interviews tell the stories of the victims, their families, and the suspects. The pace is fast and goes to the point from the very first episode, presenting the landscape and first victims.
The documentary makes it a point to show how missing girls were treated — as runaways or rebellious teens, especially if they had a history of not being (what was considered at the time) a ‘good girl.’ The police started to really pay attention to them only after the remains of a couple of the girls were found. This is still a delicate subject, so much so that the League City Police Department refused to be a part of the docuseries.
The fact that there are only three episodes made the filmmakers decide which cases they would focus on. That entailed leaving some murders and suspects out of the documentary. Such as Brenda Jones, a victim that was murdered and found in the area in 1971, prior to Heidi Faye.
Shining the Spotlight on rhe Right People
One of the reasons why the show is refreshing to watch (as much as these types of criminal cases can be) is that there is a focus on the right people. The families of the victims, especially Tim Miller, are always the center of the episodes. Tim Miller is the father of Laura Miller, one of the first girls that went missing and was murdered in 1984. With the intention of never allowing families to go through what he did, feeling like no one was looking for their kid, in 2000 he funded a search squad called Texas EquuSearch: Search and Recovery. He has then helped numerous families, without ever charging them for his service. He becomes the spokesperson for the grief that these cases generated in multiple families, and remind filmmakers and the audience who the focus of these documentaries should be on, rather than just the killer.
In these cases, the killer ended up being more than one person: Bill Reece and Clyde Hendrick receive attention, but it is fast and to the point. There is no time wasted with their background or any information of that sort, only what is necessary for them to be convicted of the murders. The docuseries paints a very vivid picture of the victims, not allowing them to become just numbers on a police report. A visual element that helps is that every time the victims were mentioned their pictures would appear, not allowing the viewer to forget or mix names and dates. With their living family members telling their own stories, they become an integral part of the documentary, which is part of what makes Crime Scene so great.
