The overabundance of modern works on true crime is, at bottom, a depressing reflection of a world awash in cruelty and injustice. Unsurprisingly, then, Crime Scene: Texas Killing Fields is a portrait of both a chain of puzzling homicide cases and the endless misery they caused the families and loved ones of the victims, who never stopped searching for the truth.

The Last Executive Producer Joe Berliner and Imagine’s Ron Howard and Brian Grazerof the Netflix series (after last year’s Crime Scene: The Times Square Killer), director Jessica Dimmock’s three-part investigation stands out for its harrowing portrayal of those left to pick up the pieces in the wake of a tragedy, which unfolded along a stretch of highway heading south from Houston.

“If you want to commit a crime, do it here, because they sure can’t solve it,” laments Tim Miller of League City, Texas, and the I-45 corridor that runs through it. Eleven girls disappeared and/or were killed there between 1971 and 1977. Sadly, these unresolved stories are just the background to Tim’s own ordeal, which began on September 10, 1984, when his 16-year-old daughter , Laura, never returned from making a call on a public phone booth.

Despite Tim’s desperate attempts to find her and to get the cops to do something, his efforts were in vain. Police dismissed Laura as just a runaway and told Tim to wait for her to make contact. Tim, who was new to the neighborhood, did no such thing, and he soon learned of a similar missing girl who had disappeared around the same payphone: 25-year-old Heidi Fye, whose remains were were found in April 1984 by a dog out of the woods with a human skull in its mouth.

It would be a long 17 months before Laura was discovered – shockingly, in the same area of ​​Calder Road where Heidi had been dumped and where Tim had unsuccessfully tried to get law enforcement to comb his hair deeper . Worse still, she was lying next to a third victim, who had a .22 caliber bullet lodged in her spine that police failed to identify, marking her as a Jane Doe.

Given the heat and humidity of this region, known as the Texas Killing Fields, none of the bodies produced concrete evidence. As a result, the surveys cast a wide net and yet yield little. Still, that didn’t mean Tim and others didn’t have their eyes on some people, starting with Clyde Hendrick, a “Casanova crook” and roofer who arrived in Houston as part of the city-induced migration. . Construction boom of the 70s-80s.

Clyde slept with the mother of a woman who identifies herself here as Marla and tells a disturbing story of Clyde’s creepy and predatory behavior towards her, involving peepholes in her bedroom wall, indecent exposures and drug abuse. That, it turns out, was only half of it. Marla’s father obtained Clyde’s lengthy criminal record, which revealed he had been convicted of ‘corpse abuse’, namely that of Ellen Beason, who disappeared in July 1984 after visiting the same bar, the Texas Moon, where Heidi worked.

Clyde had dumped and hid Ellen’s body in a pile of trash in the middle of nowhere, and claimed he had done so out of panic after she inexplicably drowned during a nighttime swim. Although his guilt seems fairly obvious, without proof he only served a year behind bars and paid a $2,000 fine.

Clyde was a prime suspect in the Texas Killing Fields murders, and that didn’t change when a fourth victim was found on the exact same lot on September 8, 1991. League City Police Department naturally found themselves under increasing pressure to catch a culprit, and they came to believe they had found one, thanks to an FBI profile that matched a local: Robert William Abel, a former NASA scientist who owned the Killings Fields, part of which he had converted into stables.

Abel’s desire to interfere with the investigation only made him more sleazy, and Tim decided he was the demon they were all looking for and, in response, embarked on an all-out campaign for him. prove. This venture, alas, turned out badly, much to Tim’s shame, and it only served to exacerbate the grief and anguish that gripped his soul, prompting him to create Texas EquuSearch (a non-profit organization for missing persons) and to continue to seek answers regarding Laura’s disappearance.

Tim’s furious grief – over his loss, his helplessness and the mistakes he believes he made in the wake of Laura’s death – is palpable in his on-camera interviews, and it’s complemented by the testimony of Gay Smither , whose 12-year-old daughter Laura disappeared in nearby Friendswood on April 3, 1997.

Because she was a young girl from a wealthy family in one of the safest places in America, Laura’s disappearance prompted action by the police and citizens, and her body was eventually found. However, two other young women, Kelli Ann Cox and Jessica Cain, also disappeared without a trace. As Gay admits, “Laura’s murder is also our life sentence”, highlighting the inconsolable pain and suffering caused by losing a child in such a heinous way, then receiving little satisfactory resolution.

Crime Scene: Texas Killing Fields thus becomes a sweeping study of female victimization, parental woes, and systemic apathy and ineffectiveness – the last of which is highlighted by examples of the police failing to preserve evidence, to effectively following leads or showing a required amount of interest and inefficiency. compassion. Director Dimmock tells this horror story in a roundabout way that reflects the struggles of Tim, Gay and others who provide heartbreaking commentary on the depth of their sadness and anger, as well as their frustration with the services of police who repeatedly let them down.

At the end, Crime Scene: Texas Killing Fields reveals that many of these desperate people have achieved at least some measure of justice – thanks to the revelations about the murder of their daughters – but the lingering feeling it elicits is much closer to despair than hope.