The case of the serial killer couple is so harrowing that everyone involved is still haunted to this day. But is there really any point in making them recall these hideous crimes? And why have crucial details been omitted?
Another day, another addition to the “point and gasp” school of true crime documentaries; one which adds nothing to our understanding of a terrible crime or of those who committed it, nothing to our safety as individuals or as a society, nothing except our appetite for voyeurism and the normalisation of it. Most true crime documentaries are in this school. Fred & Rose West: A British Horror Story is no exception. Perhaps the sordid, exploitative aspects of the genre are felt more strongly here precisely because it is one of our own stories, and one many of us remember reading about in the papers and seeing on the news as the awful discoveries were made at the time. Usually we watch these films at one remove. We can at least feel we are learning about how terrible America can be, or that a victim who would otherwise be forgotten amid the great mass of victims evil people create has been memorialised. Here, we are more fiercely confronted with our complicity and the weakness of the arguments for watching.
The best that can be said about the latest three-part testimony to human depravity is that it is superficial. It does not delve into the one aspect of the 1994 case that has the potential to edify – the backgrounds of the killers, the psychology of their relationship, and whether the world would have been different if they had not met; it also glosses quickly over the system’s failure to prosecute Fred West for rape early on in his murderous career – but neither does it dwell on the baser details of the case, the ones I suspect the officers and relatives interviewed here have in mind when they say how much this experience still haunts them.
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