TRUE CRIME

The Families That Are Left Behind

Do documentaries help or hurt?

Watch The Crash Documentary Trailer — Netflix Tudum

In my early 20s, I worked in a factory. One of my co-workers was a woman whose sister had disappeared and was presumably dead.

No body had been found. No killer had been arrested. As a result, this woman was left in a never-ending limbo of uncertainty.

And the horror followed her.

Other people at the factory thought she was “weird”. And although she was objectively beautiful, she couldn’t maintain a relationship.

She wanted as much publicity as humanly possible around her sister’s disappearance, but this was before the advent of crime podcasts and Dateline.

Decades later a former boyfriend of the dead woman admitted to killing her and disposing of her body. He was linked to several other murders.

When Bryon Macron died (or was murdered, depending on which side you’re on) in 2016, our county was roiled by gossip, fear, and paranoia.

Several politicians were voted out of office.

My boss still says whacky things about the case I really wish he wouldn’t say based on my own healthy sense of paranoia. I’m not exactly at the pinnacle of governance over here, but I’ve been around a long time.

You hear things. You suspect things.

You try not to think about the date you went on with the prime suspect in the case.

You debate whether you should write a book about the case, or even a thinly-veiled roman à clef, or if doing so will get you killed.

You think I’m joking.

I am not joking.

The Invisible Ships podcast “Murder Lake” (available on Spotify — and I’d like to point out that we haven’t had that many murders linked to Chippewa Lake) dragged the whole affair out until it ballooned into what it is today.

Media fodder.

Last year, BCI was called in again upon the discovery of additional boxes of case files.

It’s never going to end.

I talk to Macron’s wife almost every day.

Bryon’s death is always on her mind.

I’m not sure the media’s constant picking at the wound helps anything.

And now we have The Crash on Netflix.

This is not something I’m probably going to watch.

I interact occasionally with Dominic Russo’s mom, a local attorney, and I’ve known her professionally since my days at the court.

Whether you believe Mackenzie Shirilla intentionally accelerated her car at 100 mph into a brick wall or not, now it’s a Top Ten event on Netflix and everybody is going to relive the nightmare.

The sister of Polly Klaas wrote a 2024 op ed for the New York Times (which you probably can’t read here), saying essentially that “her experience, her sister’s experience, is now commoditized by this kind of uncontrollable narrative.” (Quoted in this 2024 Vice article, How to Make Good (and Ethical) True Crime Shows.)

I assume producers talk people into participating in documentaries like this by using a lot of therapy-speak words like “closure” and “telling your side of the story.”

Whatever it takes to get people talking on camera.

There’s no missing body in The Crash, so it’s not really serving the purpose of “closure”.

The “telling your side of the story” piece is, I assume, the parents on all sides deflecting blame.

You can debate “intent”, but that’s an amorphous legal term that can ultimately never be proven one way or the other, since the answer resides solely in the mind and memory of the accused.

All of which makes The Crash pure “entertainment”.

Thanks, but I’ll pass.