Showtime's The 12th Victim Is Great True Crime About the Sickness of True Crime

Even watching The 12th Victim might betray an innocent woman, but that’s what makes it such a fascinating show. A four-part docuseries for Showtime (or whatever Showtime is about to become), it not only recounts Charles Starkweather’s notoriously heinous murder spree in 1958, but also demonstrates how the media’s response to the killings crushed the spirit of Caril Ann Fugate, the teenage girl who was with him while he committed his crimes.

Anyone familiar with the Starkweather case may raise an eyebrow at that framing, since Fugate was also convicted for those Nebraska murders and spent almost 20 years in prison. However, the series persuasively argues that she was railroaded by the justice system, which couldn’t accept that a 14-year-old girl might have been the terrorized captive of a man who bragged he killed those people in order to become immortal. What’s more, it asserts that ever since, the media’s fascination with his crimes has trapped her in his shadow.

Perhaps understanding that an audience might resist this conclusion, executive producer Morgan Neville (who won an Oscar for 20 Feet from Stardom) and director Nicola B. Marsh build to it by degrees. In the first episode, Marsh focuses more on the 11 people who were killed — including Fugate’s own family, plus a dizzying number of strangers who happened to cross paths with Starkweather at the worst possible time. She sketches out enough of the victims' lives to let all of them exist as human beings instead of statistics, and she doesn't shy away from describing the brutal details of what was done to them. If this arouses disgust, then good. That not only underscores the horror of what happened, but also primes the viewer to be swayed by what comes next.

Because as Marsh details the crimes, she layers in the media’s response. This was the first “blockbuster” murder spree to occur when a vast number of Americans had televisions, and news veterans recall how the trial gave many reporters their first opportunity to use their new, state-of-the-art cameras. In other words, when we see footage of Fugate being paraded around for press conferences or trotted out for an interview on the Today show, we’re seeing the birth of true crime TV.

Many of the genre’s tropes were immediately in place, from reporters expressing faux concern to a suspect’s family members in order to milk them for revealing statements to the accused looking shell-shocked as they speak into a camera about their innocence. Even though Marsh has experts explain how this footage manipulates viewers into accepting Fugate’s guilt, its power cannot be denied. It’s quite tempting to look at this sullen-faced kid and think she must be hiding something.

And even that’s not as prejudicial as the avalanche of art that’s been made about the case. As the series moves forward in time, it continues to focus on the real Fugate, detailing her time in prison, her many years in Michigan after her parole, and her eventual, brief marriage. But for every shot of the actual woman, Marsh includes a scene from one of the many films and TV movies that were inspired by her case. There’s footage of Sissy Spacek in Terrence Malick’s Badlands, Juliette Lewis in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, Fairuza Balk in the ABC miniseries Murder in the Heartland, and actresses in almost half a dozen other projects. Over and over, the Caril character is presented as a rebellious nymphette who gets off on watching her deranged boyfriend spread mayhem across the corn belt. There are also references to the many books written about the murders and to Bruce Springsteen’s album Nebraska, whose title song is sung from Starkweather’s perspective. Collectively, the images, words, and music have incredible power. The story they tell -– of amoral lovers looking for blood — overshadows the actual woman.

Fugate’s powerlessness before this narrative is even more profound because she herself kept turning to the media for some kind of forgiveness. In the early ‘80s, she went on Lie Detector, a show hosted by F. Lee Bailey that asked convicted felons to take lie detector tests in order to prove their innocence. In the late ’80s, she went on Hard Copy to insist she never helped Starkweather kill. Decades later, she spent hours on a talk radio show, weeping as people called in to say they believed her. But as the docuseries demonstrates, it was never enough. When her husband died in a car wreck in 2013, news stories (and social media comments) practically said she deserved the grief, because of what she’d done. Or what the culture was convinced she had done.

After all this, the show returns to the facts of the case, laying out once again the many reasons to believe — or at least reasonably consider — that Fugate was a victim, not a villain. By that point, the show’s title seems less like propaganda than an earned statement of fact. The irony is that in making this argument, it perpetuates the cycle. The series is yet another intrusive bit of media that refuses to let this woman recede into the obscurity she has craved for decades. Even though she doesn’t participate, many interviewees are currently in her life, and while they speak about her with love, the fact that they speak about her at all makes them complicit in keeping the frenzy alive. Neville and Marsh are complicit, too. So is Showtime. So is the audience.

Voyeurism is always at the center of true crime, and The 12th Victim does an especially good job of demonstrating the damage this can cause. However, fans of the genre have likely made their peace with this queasy reality. When the story is as juicy as this one, it can feel impossible to look away.

All four episodes of The 12th Victim are now streaming on the Showtime app. On broadcast, new episodes air Fridays at 8:00 PM ET. Join the discussion about the show in our forums.

Mark Blankenship has been writing about arts and culture for twenty years, with bylines in The New York Times, Variety, Vulture, Fortune, and many others. You can hear him on the pop music podcast Mark and Sarah Talk About Songs.