Crime Scene: The Texas Killing Fields

Peter McGinn

Another Netflix original true crime miniseries. Like the one about the Murdaugh family, this one spotlights a scandal, but here it is not scandals of a powerful family, but the drawn-out decades-long scandal of small-town police departments that frankly are not very good at solving murders. Not through corruption but from lack of imagination and effort. This follows the families of victims more than the authorities, which ios peopper as they were ahead of the latter for most of the investigations. One fact sticks with me: the over 2000 sex offenders that they found living in this fairly low populated area. Was this part of Texas perhaps like Florida — a magnet for serial killers and sex criminals, despite the two states’ appetite for executing people? What would that say about the attitudes of law enforcement towards the victims of kidnappings and killings? But incompetence is highlighted at times, and the lack of resources, rather than an uncaring approach to reported disappearances. It is a story of intertwined and complicated crimes, and required more than one episode to unfold it all. It was interesting, and the families and victims deserved to have the story told at long last.