the morality of dramatising real life crime

it's been mentioned here in Australia that an unnamed tv network has been sniffing around about making a telemovie about the 1991 kidnap, rape and murder of six year old Sheree Beasley and the trial of her killer. While i doubt the telemovie would show the bit where Sheree's killer forced her to perform sex acts on him, it still makes me uncomfortable, given most of Sheree's immediate family is still alive.


Should there been a law restricting the dramatising of child killings while their close family are still with us?

The interest in the "true crime" drama has always puzzled me. While there's been enough historical Chinese whispers over the years to take enough of both the harm and the fact out of Robin Hood to turn the legend into something basically moralistic, there's been quite enough recorded of the likes of Bonnie and Clyde, Dick Turpin and Ned Kelly to know that they were violent crooks. And that's before you start getting into murderers like Crippen, Fred West etc. At least Stephen King makes it up, but you get magazines over here describing how X really did put Y in the acid bath and poured the remains into the foundations of the conservatory. And people buy them! Human nature can be bizarre...

I believe that the full details of how the little children in the Greenough Family Massacre were murdered have been permanently sealed from the public because they are so gruesome and disturbing.


Of course the police hold back evidence in a lot of cases for two other reasons:


1) to tell the real criminal from a copycat.


2) to weed out false confessors to high profile crimes.


By the way, the 50th anniversary of the Beaumont children disappearance from Adelaide, South Australia is in January next year. Some arsewipe in the media advocates dramatising the Beaumont case.


The other well remembered South Australia child disappearance, the Joanne Ratcliffe and Kirste Gordon disappearance from the Adelaide Oval in 1973 was in the news again in the last year because some arsewipe pretended he knew where their remains were.

There's a TV company here that's been repeating Kojak, an episode of which features someone who's wasting police time claiming to have committed a couple of murders, and they have to work out whether what he knows is only what he read about in the press. The upshot is, you get the feeling of frustration the police feel when they suspect they're having their time wasted by this sort of "witness"; and that the only worthy evidence they have leads to the actual murderer coming within a matter of seconds of killing the man who sold him the faulty murder weapon on his doorstep, and also with the criminal being shot by an officer in self-defence rather than arrested. So point taken.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Leah Betts

Should there been a law restricting the dramatising of child killings while their close family are still with us?

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No, not in my opinion. Making new laws is simply a good way of draining money from the public purse, and those with the right contacts/lawyers will always get around them somehow.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Stuart Wallis

And people buy them!

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This. This is the problem here.

*nods*

Crime Investigation Australia jumped on the true crime bandwagon here in Oz.


The re-enactments are often poor and expose the show's low budget.


take the Beaumont Children episode:


nine year old "Jane Beaumont" is wearing a bright pink "Speedo" little girl's swimsuit.

Was Speedo even around in 1966? And even if they were, did their girl's swimsuits really look like that?

Can't speak for the authenticity of the design, but I gather Speedo celebrated its centenary last year.

Crime Investigation Australia? For half a second i thought it was another CSI or NCIS spinoff...