Two newer true-crime documentary shows that I have watched recently.
NIGHT STALKER is a pretty brutal, slick, and exploitative examination of the horrendous crimes of Richard Ramirez, who terrified the L.A. area in the mid-80s. As a police procedural and document of the police investigation into the case, it is very good. Where it lacks is in the background examination of Ramirez himself, and what turned him into such a true monster of a human being. His story is mostly relegated to the final episode. I am certainly fine with the series putting an emphasis on the police manhunt and the impact the crimes had on the surviving victims and relatives, but I do feel an additional episode, devoted to the further exploration of Ramirez himself, would have given the series a bit more balance and made it more definitive. NIGHT STALKER features some pretty grisly (though still censored) crime scene evidence, and does a good job of capturing the overall sense of fear that Ramirez spread across the city, a panic no doubt exacerbated by the extreme heatwave that accompanied the arrival of his murder spree. The truly terrifying aspect of Ramirez's crimes is that, while he clearly harboured sexual deviances, he never favoured a particular "type" - male, female, young, old, together or in pairs, everyone in the city thought of themselves as a potential target.
HEAVEN'S GATE: THE CULT OF CULTS is an engrossing, and ultimately rather sad, four-part investigation into the suicide of 39 people outside of San Diego in 1997. Members of a UFO religious sect headed by Marshall Applewhite, the cultists believed that by killing themselves they would gain admission to a giant alien spacecraft which they believed was travelling unseen within the flaming tail of Hale-Bop, a comet that was flying closer to Earth than it ever had. I watched and read all the news items about Heaven's Gate when it occurred, and bought a VHS of the infamous 'recruitment video' from Polyester Books, but hadn't really done a deep dive into the story (the only book I have read on the case was a quickie paperback rushed-out by The New York Post). So a lot of the details of the story were unknown to me, which this series does a terrific job of documenting.
Though the media tied the Heaven's Gate cult to the internet age, the group actually had a history dating back to the early-70s, when former hippies were exploring New Age ideas and philosophies, and books like CHARIOTS OF THE GODS, and TV shows like STAR TREK, had people seriously contemplating the existence of UFOs and their role in our life and creation. By the mid-nineties, however, co-founder Bonnie Nettles had been dead for a decade, and Applewhite was also failing physically, and desperate to find a way to fulfill his teachings and promises.
It's fascinating watching the Heaven's Gate cult develop and change between the 1970s and their eventual 1997 mass suicide. There's a ton of great, rare archival footage of the group and their town recruitment meetings, news reports, etc., along with some very effective, whimsical animation sequences. There was nothing violent or salacious about this cult, they were all clean-cut, polite, and well educated, and lived a life of celibacy. In a way, it makes their final act even more strange and fascinating to ponder.
