A great title for the most compelling true crime television tale since Staircase (2004). And for much the same reason. The main character is tricky. We are accustomed to fictional characters being economical, flexible or downright evasive when dealing with the truth and it seems that trend has spread out to non-fiction.
The odd thing is that this should be a straightforward, if tense, narrative. And it only turns into something else entirely thanks to the central character.
The story beings in 2017 when charity cyclist Tony Parsons goes missing. For some reason – in the dead of night – he’s been traversing the remote twisting narrow roads near the Bridge of Orchy in the Scottish Highlands. Despite a massive manhunt he’s never found.
Fast forward to 2020 and forensic pathologist Dr Caroline Muirhead. She’s in that neck of the woods seeking romance having met on Tinder farm worker and hunter Sandy McKellar, who lives on the private Auch Estate with twin Robert. When not skinning deer they enjoy a party lifestyle. It’s a speedy courtship. After a few months she’s engaged and in the way of many a fiancé wonders if her potential partner harbors any secrets. She’s thinking an ex-wife, maybe a couple of kids squirreled away.
She’s not expecting him to fess up to having mown down Parsons while drunk and then burying the body. Later adding, the victim was still alive, if only briefly, after being knocked down. Fear of drink driving charges clearly were behind the burying.
So now we should be into the straightforward, thrilling, part. How does our heroine impart this information to the cops? Will they even believe her? She’s no idea where the body is buried. Bear in mind, too, she’s still in love with Sandy and can’t get her head round the fact that her handsome kind six-foot Highlander could be guilty of such a deed.
So then we get to the clever bit. She gets him to indicate roughly where the body might be buried – the twins used a digger so a fair amount of earth would have been shifted – and then, inspired, she finds way to roughly mark the spot with an empty drinks can.
But then we get entangled as she gets caught up in her emotions. Instead of running a mile from a callous murderer, she continues to live with him. Sandy is pulled in for questioning but without a body the case is going nowhere. The car that knocked him down is also long gone. The police carry out a lot of spadework and there’s elements of excitement when the cops prowl around the twins’ cottage armed to the teeth like they are breaking into a terrorist stronghold.
Caroline’s parents and the cops can’t work why she hasn’t run a mile. Sandy has no idea who’s fingered him so naturally he welcomes the solace she offers. She can’t explain to camera – and it’s mostly her talking to camera – why she can’t give him up. She’s just come out of an abusive relationship but no idea the previous boyfriend was in Sandy’s league.
Whether it’s fear of Sandy finding out or fear of losing him, she begins to unravel, so much so that she jeopardizes the eventual trial when, as the star witness for the prosecution, she fails to turn up on the opening day. She’s clearly such a liability that the prosecution cut and run, dropping the murder charge in favor of a lesser charge, still a prison sentence but a lot less severe.
And still we never find out what was in her mind. It’s enigma to the nth scale. Certainly, she vulnerable. But despite solving the case and bringing the killers to justice, she’s never hailed as the heroine because the rest of her behavior remains so baffling.
Naturally, this plays like a thriller, with plenty twists along the way, so it’s an easy watch in that regard. But it’s a very difficult watch in another sense, in that plainly someone is taking advantage of a vulnerable woman who wants to tell the story her way and perhaps, as she sees it, clear her name.
Just like Staircase or the recent Michael, you wonder what else might come out if the film-makers were more rigorous in pursuit and not so hogtied to the central character.
She mixes up so much making the right decisions with taking the wrong ones that you half expect there’s going to be a terrible tragic ending.
Certainly riveting stuff and what Netflix does best.
The Magnificent 60s 