Scène de crime: Les champs macabres du Texas

This is no "making a murderer".

Starts slow, becomes intriguing, but by the final episode you'll be saying "huh?" "what?" " wait..". Because the storytelling is so convoluted.

By the end you'll be slightly confused and wondering why the story wasn't just told in a straightforward manner, as opposed to "drama" and "suspense" being artificially and unnecessarily imposed by withholding so much key information until the end.

So many times Necessary Information is doled out long after it is required. You'll be asking obvious question as it goes along that won't be answered.

Re: the skull fracture: "we have technology now that we didn't have then"...huh? You mean like...eyes? Was this just an interrogation technique? Oh no photos from '85? That's interesting ...so Where was the info about the '85 pathologist who presumably was incompetent or corrupt and botched the whole case? There's none!

The wrap up texts at the end felt tacked on and raised so many more questions. (24M lawsuit, the story of the final confession, the crime that he plead out to, the other girls, all were glossed over. The final 10 min could have been properly told in a whole other episode.

All in all a good true crime story very poorly told...the final outcomes were interesting and complex but it all wrapped up far too quickly in a way that makes you think they pretty much botched the whole story from the start.

After three episodes each nearly an hour long they finally get to a conviction and just roll it as text at the end of the series. It was about victims and a suspect we hadn't heard about since previous episodes. I was waiting for 3 hours for closure and I barely got it. Anyways, they do a good job of showing the perspective of some of the family members, but it's mainly the same few people talking about the same few victims for three hours. There were dozens of bodies found and they only focused on a few. Overall it would have been much better if it was half the length and they did a better job with the ending.

I agree with most of the critiques. Lots of unanswered questions. I also had a problem with them saying the killer "had sex with" their victim and then killed them, implying possible consent? They were RAPED and then killed. That was unsettling. The ending was confusing to me, and I forgot about Reece, who apparently confessed to the initial couple of murders. Very disjointed. What's strange is that I grew up in that area during those years and really never heard a thing about these murders. Just maybe how someone went missing, but there wasn't very much publicity. I wish they would have stressed more how the small town cops totally bungled the investigation. It all seemed to wrap up very tidily and let the League City police off the hook. I wished it was them who were sued for $24M. I give it a 6, because it kept my interest, but if there were supposedly tens of victims, why not mention them too instead of just focusing on three families?

The 1970's saw a boom in Houston, Texas, construction grew, people flocked in, and a stretch of waste land was used to dump the bodies of several young women.

It's a very well made documentary, it's insightful Nd thought provoking, looking at several of the victims, the fact that they were largely ignored, and the potential suspects.

Very powerful interviews from those that were affected by the deaths, acts that still haunt people to this day. I thought Tim Miller in particular was a hugely impressive man, his words hit home.

Some pretty horrible crimes are explored, over a long period of time. What struck me was the way in which The Authorities jumped into action over the death of one young girl, the fact that it took that tragedy before anything really happened.

I liked that it was over three episodes, and that it wasn't stretched out into six or seven, Netflix does have a habit of fleshing things out.

Texan laws, insane or what.

8/10.

Obviously a hideously horrendous story, in terms of the victims and family left behind. However, this actual documentary... I don't feel it did any of that justice.

Sooo many shots of photos on a table, random streets, woods, the sky, etc etc. Genuinely in every five minutes of screentime, three minutes of that are just random scenery shots or the exact same repeated shots of headstones/photos.

I also felt it was really quite disjointed and jumped about on the timeline and victims with no real cohesion.

A LOT of time is spent with one of the victim's fathers. Of course the viewer feels deeply for him, but so, so much time is spent with him with not a lot of information gleaned from it. He seems incredibly miserable and I wanted someone to just say to him, "you can stop." The documentary also kind of jumps over the fact that he harassed and possibly drove a person of interest to suicide as he became obsessed with him and pinning the crime on him. That was... unsettling.

In relation to that, there's very, very little actual critique of the police department and the absolute farce of so much of the initial investigations. It's again kind of mentioned then glossed over.

And a more nitpicky critique - when they're talking about the court records and it's stated that the murderer "had sex with and then murdered (victim)" - Jesus wept, he did not 'have sex with', he raped her. A huge difference.

Again; a horrific story. Just... very poorly documented.