‘Dahmer,’ ‘Murdaugh’ And ‘Murder’: Emmy Documentary Contenders On A Crime Spree With A Focus On Mischief And Mayhem

Gruesome tales of grisly murder. Horror stories of kids in cults. False confessions and authentic admissions.

True crime has taken over the documentary space, proving a reliable audience attractor for streaming platforms, network and cable channels. While it’s the most popular genre within nonfiction programming broadly speaking, whether that will translate to success with Emmy voters remains an open question. One thing’s for certain: there’s no lack of contenders — twisted tales dripping with blood.

Netflix leads the way with multiple suitors, among them Conversations with a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes, the grim story of one of America’s most notorious serial killers, built largely around recorded interviews between Dahmer and one of his young defense attorneys in the early 1990s. It’s directed and executive produced by Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning filmmaker Joe Berlinger, one of the leading figures in documentary.

“As a storyteller, I thought the tapes provided incredible insight into Dahmer and this unique characteristic of him actually being very forthright,” Berlinger notes, contrasting Dahmer’s open admission of his lurid crimes to the obfuscation of serial killers Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy, subjects of earlier Berlinger docuseries for Netflix. “Both of those serial killers [Gacy and Bundy] were very unreliable narrators. So, you had to separate the truth from the bravado and the false information.”

Berlinger has directed films on many subjects, from the Armenian genocide to Metallica, but he’s become closely associated with true crime, beginning with his 1992 film Brother’s Keeper, co-directed by Bruce Sinofsky. He sees no reason the topic should be deemed less worthy of serious scrutiny than any other socially relevant subject.

“Unfortunately, serial killing is part of the human condition,” he says. “Doing bad things to other people is part of the human condition. People do wonderful things and people do terrible things, which is why I think we need to tell these stories, and why the criticism about not telling these stories I scratch my head over. Of course, you have to do it responsibly. You have to think about the victims. But greed, love, ambition, killing, I mean, these are all part of the human condition. So, why do we say we can’t tell these kinds of stories? It’s part of who we are, unfortunately.”

The Netflix Emmy contender Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal, might be said to involve equal parts greed, love, ambition and killing. The three-part series directed by Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason takes on one of the most sensational murder cases in recent years, one that saw prominent South Carolina attorney Alex Murdaugh accused in the shocking deaths of his wife and son. In March, he was sentenced to life in prison for shooting his wife with a rifle and blasting his son with a shotgun.

Nason says true crime resonates with audiences in part because of the violent nature of American society.

“Everyone can relate to it unfortunately, with these mass shootings, et cetera,” she says. “I think that’s why true crime is so reliable as a medium of entertainment in the documentary golden age.”

One of the strongest true crime-related contenders comes from acclaimed filmmaker Nanfu Wang, who has twice been shortlisted for the Academy Award. She made her first foray into the genre with HBO’s Mind Over Murder, a six-part series about the ‘Beatrice Six’ who were convicted of murdering a Nebraska woman in 1985. None of them had anything to do with the crime, yet five of the six confessed under pressure from an investigator and a police psychologist who used dubious methods to implant false memories of them participating in the murder. Even after they were exonerated, some of the Beatrice Six still felt convinced they had killed 68-year-old Helen Wilson.

“To me, it has always been a story about the malleability and fallibility of memory,” Wang says. “We’re looking at it through a criminal case where six people were wrongfully convicted for murder, but yet many of them remembered and still have a memory of being at the murder. And we look at how false memory formed and what it takes to change people’s minds.”

MTV Documentary Films competes for Emmys with The Fire That Took Her, the hideous story of Judy Malinowski, an Ohio woman and mother of two who became romantically entangled with a man named Michael Slager. During an argument outside a Speedway station, he soaked her with gasoline and set her ablaze.

Malinowski, horribly burned, survived for nearly two years; Slager is serving a life sentence for killing her, the key evidence provided by Malinowski from beyond the grave. In the film directed by Patricia Gillespie, Malinowski’s mother explains that authorities “approached Judy about testifying to her own homicide. It was a longshot because it had never been done.”

One of the thriving sub-genres within true crime focuses on cults and cult-like institutions. The Netflix Emmy contender Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey documents the case against Warren Jeffs, leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS), an offshoot of mainstream Mormonism that clings religiously to plural marriage. Jeffs himself took at least 78 wives, two dozen of them under the age of 17.

Jeffs assumed command of the church after the death of his father, Rulon Jeffs, and wielded total control over his flock. In the four-part series directed by Rachel Dretzin and Grace McNally, one ex-FLDS woman says, “In our minds the police, even the President of the United States, had no authority over us. Warren Jeffs is our president; he was the prophet. And how could you place a human over god?”

Hulu’s Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence, delves into a bizarre story with origins at the titular elite private college in Yonkers, New York. In 2010, Larry Ray, recently released from prison, moved into his daughter’s dorm at Sarah Lawrence. That was odd enough, but things only got weirder as Ray began conducting therapy sessions with his young dormmates and in no time had gained psychological hegemony over several of them.

Says filmmaker Zach Heinzerling, “Any number of individuals from very different backgrounds and very different circumstances ended up becoming sort of absorbed by his manipulative control.”

Ray convinced one his roomies that she had engaged in an elaborate poisoning scheme. To pay for her ‘crimes’, he induced her to become a high-priced call girl, with him as the main beneficiary of her millions in earnings.

Ray filmed many of his encounters with his vulnerable charges, during which they admitted their supposed misdeeds. He gave the videos to Heinzerling, believing they established his innocence.

“He labeled them as confessions. Actually, they were forced interrogation sessions — a form of gaslighting, manipulation and control which was very obvious to anyone listening to them,” Heinzerling says. “The great irony is that all of these recordings that Larry either made himself or had the survivors make ended up making it extremely easy for the government to convict him.”

True crime docs go over well with viewers, but Emmy recognition has been fitful. Wild Wild Country, the 2018 Netflix multi-parter about a cult-like compound in rural Oregon founded by Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, won Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series. Mega-hit Tiger King two years later earned six Emmy nominations but won zero. It was a similar story for last year’s The Tinder Swindler, a huge success for Netflix, which claimed five nominations but came away empty.

Many true crime films and series get no Emmy love at all. That was the case for HBO’s I Love You, Now Die, a 2019 docuseries about the notorious case of Michelle Carter, a Massachusetts teenager charged with urging her depressed boyfriend to take his own life. The series, directed by acclaimed true crime filmmaker Erin Lee Carr, earned excellent reviews, but that didn’t result in a single Emmy nomination.

“It’s difficult for true crime stuff to get nominated,” Carr acknowledged at the time. “And I hope that that changes.”

Whether it has changed will become more evident once this year’s Emmy nominees have been revealed. Nason, the co-director of Murdaugh Murders, sees no inherent Emmy bias against true crime and believes the genre deserves respect as substantive, not just entertaining.

“A lot of these true crimes have uncovered huge amounts of injustice,” she says. “And these documentaries essentially are challenging the system at play, challenging police departments, court systems, prison industrial complexes, domestic violence. I do think it has a huge part in social justice in a lot of ways, and that is something that really should be honored by any award vehicle.”