We are always aware, I think, of man’s inhumanity to man. The latest true-crime documentary from Netflix is here to remind you that this is an umbrella term. It is undoubtedly rarer, though precisely why is unclear, but women can inflict the most awful suffering too – and here, a pair of them do so on children.
Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story is the latest offering from Skye Borgman, who is the undisputed queen of the genre, specialising in high-end takes on the most extreme, the most only-in-America stories of depravity you could (not) hope to find. She made her name with 2017’s Abducted in Plain Sight, about the case of Jan Broberg, who was kidnapped not once but twice by Robert Berchtold, a close friend of the Brobergs and a sexual predator who effectively groomed the whole, spectacularly naive family. The Girl in the Picture, five years later, tells the story of a young woman known as Sharon Marshall, found after her death in a suspicious hit-and-run accident to have been living under multiple aliases as the kidnap and rape victim of a fugitive on the run from the FBI for decades. I Just Killed My Dad completed an unholy trinity of films from Borgman, with an examination of why 17-year-old Anthony Templet shot dead his apparently loving father and waited calmly outside for the police to arrest him. Spoiler alert: Templet’s father was nothing like the man he seemed.
