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The experience of watching Netflix‘s American Murder: Laci Peterson often feels intensely familiar.
Part of that, of course, is because the three-part docuseries from director Skye Borgman covers a very well-known true crime case. Laci Peterson was first reported missing on December 24, 2002 by her father and step-father. Eight months pregnant with her and her husband Scott Peterson’s first child, Laci was last seen the day before at a salon owned by her sister. Her body would eventually be discovered in a marshy section of a Bay Area park on April 13, 2003.
The case of Peterson’s disappearance and murder made news for a host of reasons. Laci was young, vibrant, attractive, and living the apparent American dream with a successful husband and a child on the way. Perhaps the biggest reason the Laci Peterson case came to prominence, however, is just how transparently guilty her husband Scott was of her murder.
While the Modesto Police Department obviously couldn’t come to any premature conclusions in their investigation, curious onlookers had no such limitations and identified Scott as the prime suspect early on. As faithfully recounted in American Murder: Laci Peterson, nothing about Scott’s alibi ever lined up. Peterson told some people he was golfing the day of Laci’s disappearance while telling others he was going fishing – neither of which would be a usual Christmas Eve activity. He rarely expressed concern over Laci’s absence or grief upon news of her demise, going so far as to turn his unborn son’s planned nursery room back into an office just weeks after the disappearance. And that’s not even to get into Scott’s many affairs.
So yes, American Murder: Laci Peterson feels familiar because you’ve likely heard many of the details before on many other similar documentaries, TV shows, and news articles. There’s another, less obvious reason why the docuseries generates some deja vu, however. That’s because American Murder: Laci Peterson is sneakily the second entry into burgeoning true crime documentary franchise for Netflix.
American Murder: The Family Next Door premiered on Netflix in 2020 and covers a grim case of family annihilation with some remarkable similarities to the Peterson saga. Directed by Jenny Popplewell, The Family Next Door follows the Watts family murders in 2018, in which Colorado oil worker Christopher Lee Watts killed his pregnant wife Shannan and his two daughters. Like with the Peterson case, Watts acted very atypically for a grieving husband upon reporting the news of his missing family. Also like Scott Peterson, Watts carried on an affair in the lead up to his wife’s murder. Naturally, the case became the subject of intense media fascination, culminating with the tragic discovery of Shannan and the childrens’ bodies near an oil storage facility.
If you’ve not seen it already, The Family Next Door should be your next watch after Laci Peterson, not solely because it’s similar but also because it’s strictly better. For all of the media coverage that the Laci Peterson case generated, it is sorely lacking in primary sources for documentaries to draw from. Due to it occurring nearly two decades before the Watts case, the Peterson case features no police body cam footage of Scott twisting in the wind to generate an alibi. Instead, the media-fixated, if not media-savvy, Peterson gets to make a play at controlling the narrative on his own, granting many interviews to support his claims of innocence…even to this day.
Due to the more sophisticated technology and police work at play, Watts has no such opportunity to wrestle attention away from his missing family. The Family Next Door has a wealth of imagery to draw from that allows viewers to see for themselves how Christopher Watts reacts to intense scrutiny. And spoiler alert: it doesn’t go well for him. Body camera footage from police officers on the scene reveal a husband who is remarkably unaffected by the loss of his family. Later on, video from an interrogation room conversation between Watts and his father offers up the smoking gun to end all smoking guns. The Family Next Door is considerably shorter than Laci Peterson but the quality of the footage alone makes it feel as if it has a lot more to say.
Access to compelling imagery isn’t the be-all, end-all for documentary filmmaking. Documentarians has a wealth of tools at their disposal to craft a narrative based on real life events. Still, the gap in quality between American Murder: The Family Next Door and American Murder: Laci Peterson reveals that sometimes seeing is believing when it comes to true crime.
Both American Murder: Laci Peterson and American Murder: The Family Next Door are available to stream on Netflix.
The post The Netflix True Crime Doc to Watch After American Murder: Laci Peterson appeared first on Den of Geek.
