This four-part documentary manages to convey a few things, one being that the suspect (who has since pleaded guilty) is nuts, and second that most of the people involved with publicizing the case are nuts.
If we have any words for Rex Heuermann, it is that he killed the wrong whores. The media whores are worse than the regular kind. Journalists (AJAB), activists, politicians, and the horrible families of the victims all joust for attention in this four-part series that could easily have been one one-hour segment.
For starters, people almost uniformly have nothing coherent to say; they recite clichés and make appeals to emotion, but other than moralizing about how someone should fix their lives, they give us nothing of importance.
All of the families, for example, recognize that their daughters were working as escorts. Cue lengthy excuses. Then, when the daughter vanishes, suddenly society needs to drop everything and spend all its money fixing the situation.
No one can tell them simply that they are terrible parents and their kids, most of whom are weird spare parts genetics experiments, died as a result of that because they were prostitutes as a result of that.
The two highpoints:
- The nice lady from Long Island explaining how at first the neighborhood was terrified by the killings, but then when it became clear the killer was targeting sex workers (whores, prostitutes) everyone felt better because that meant they were in the clear. Hint: 99% of humanity feels this way about these killings.
- The hilarious squishy and baritone female friend of one of the dead sex workers recalling how she told her friend, “Hey, you like to fuck random people, maybe at least get paid for it.” She delivers this without a shred of shame or remorse.
The families are uniformly horrible, with the single mothers (no fathers are featured except the killer) routinely having trouble articulating simple thoughts, and making lots of excuses for how their kids turned out.
Heuermann is also horrible, since his family seems to live in a different multiverse than he does, and of course the descriptions of his acts make it clear that he is a very troubled man with a good deal of rage.
The secret to serial killers, it seems to me, is how absolutely boring they are. Their lives are boring quiet desperation, so they get a boring hobby, namely acting out the same pathology over and over again in the hops that somehow it will magically imbue their hollow existences with meaning.
Similarly these prostitutes seem like boring people. They have no quest in life except their own pleasure, and they cannot stick to any productive activity, so they are doing dumb whore things and then getting shocked when one of their clients turns out to be every bit as nuts as you expect a john would be.
The kicker of this series is that the death which started the investigation, Shannan Gilbert, does seem like natural causes as the coroner originally stated. She met a john, took some drugs, and ran off babbling into the bullrushes where she got hypothermia, took off her clothes, and laid down to die like a Russian conscript watching the Ukrainian drones approach.
If we never hear anything again from Kristen Thorne, the AJAB who narrates, it would be good, and if Gloria Allred disappeared too, it would be better. Both of them offer a French Revolution victimhood situation that imputes the dangers to these women to the way the world treats women generally, forgetting that most women are not hoors or AJAB therefore have reasonable enough outcomes.
This could have been done in ninety minutes, or better yet, an hour. The forensics and clue-searching is the only interesting part, since serial killers are boring and sex workers are even more creepily fattily boring, but all of the weepy family interviews and bloviating by political figures is empty like your average corporate job.
It is amazing how similar this is to Netflix, NPR, and Hollywood documentaries. Amazon had a chance to break the pattern and pursue quality, but instead they just made the same dreck as everyone else, which gives the film consumer no real options.
It is also amazing how in a broken society full of weird people acting out odd pathologies, a Rex Heuermann did not stand out as a risk; instead, he was just idiosyncratic, at least until dead prostitutes started piling up on Gilgo Beach.
Tags: cinema, documentary, rex heuermann, serial killers
To first contextualise my views, men only spaces/clubs/businesses should be free and legal, and women should be banned from voting as well as from careers in politics, governance, justice, law enforcement, and the military.
And the entire HR superstructure should be smashed to the ground.
But there is nothing wrong with “prostitution” (I have only ever used escorts). In fact, it’s the job they are most suited for. And killing them should be as much of a concern for a healthy community as any other profession. If someone killed my favourite girl, I’d be right to be pissed.
Real Manowarriors raise their hammers high for sex workers.