circleDetective Inspector Gareth Morgan often talks about murder as a ‘whodunit’ but he thinks a ‘whodunit’ is a more appropriate phrase for an extremely bizarre case that took place under his watch in South Wales in 2015. When a filthy, seeping bundle was discovered in the village of Beddow – a decomposing body semi-preserved within more than 40 layers of wrapping – a woman called Leigh Ann Sabine, who had recently died from a brain tumour, quickly became the prime suspect. The problem was that police couldn’t work out who she had killed.
Ultimately, The Body Next Door isn’t about who the killer is, or even how the killer is, but more persuasively, how the killer is. We first meet Sabine through the eyes of her neighbors in Bedau (the pronunciation of which seems to be a matter of local debate, but the residents featured here insist on pronouncing it “Betay” rather than “Beta”). They know her to be a narcissist and a fantasist, a woman with a hidden past, a heavy accent, and a penchant for fishnet stockings well into middle age, but they fondly recall her eccentricities. But by the series’ end, their affection becomes unbearable, because beneath the layers of this breathtakingly complex investigation lies a more resonant mystery, forcing us to confront characters whose behavior ranges from the ruthless to the inexplicably vile.
Generally, a good true crime documentary needs three things: pace, clarity, and a moral boundary. This three-part drama is undoubtedly fast-paced. The case itself is so complex, unexpected, and far-reaching (it traverses the globe for 50 years) that it doesn’t need frustratingly slow summaries or other filler elements. Woven into the police investigation to identify the victims (a complex task in itself) is a retelling of another, even more astonishing crime. The case made headlines half a century ago in New Zealand, where Sabine and her husband John settled and had five children. One day in 1969, the couple abandoned all of their children at a daycare center, only to return (temporarily) more than a decade later with no explanation. There was a nationwide outcry, but Sabine never showed any remorse. The three children are interviewed at length in the series, and their experiences are heartbreaking, with two of the girls having been sexually abused by their foster parents. It’s so bizarre, even his son Steve sees the whole thing as an absurd nightmare (“I’m sitting at home alone and I can’t believe this happened”).
The Body Next Door stumbles a bit in its timeline of the early stages of the investigation – in fairness, the sequence of events that led to the discovery of the body, a neighbour’s attempt to tamper with a medical skeleton, is so confusing I still don’t fully understand it, even after multiple viewings of the documentary and reading the detailed incident report – but from that point on, the show does an admirable job of jumping between 1970s New Zealand, 1980s Reading and 2010s Bedau without losing track of its strong narrative thread.
Ethically, the show is off to a similarly false start. Early in the investigation, the police arrest the neighbor who discovered the body (not surprisingly, given the mysterious circumstances of the discovery). Though she is later found completely innocent, the series features a fair amount of footage of her police interview, in which she is extremely shaken. At this point, no one could plausibly deny that true crime documentaries are inherently exploitative. By definition, the genre mines entertainment from trauma and tragedy. But more compassionate, victim-centered styles have emerged recently (Raw TV, which produced the series, has a track record in this regard with shows like Tinder Swindler and American Nightmare). The Body Next Door probably wants to position itself in this category. And after this misstep, the series dutifully follows these new rules, giving the Sabine children the space to tell their own stories, resulting in a thoughtful meditation on many fascinating themes (the fundamental horrors of maternal neglect, coercive control, etc.). Intergenerational trauma is troubling in the sense of a psychological puzzle, rather than a jarring discomfort.
That’s not to say Autopsy isn’t nauseating. The eerie packages of bodies flashing on screen over and over in grainy, horror-movie-style footage from an autopsy room are emblematic of the terrible inhumanity at the heart of the story: not just Sabine’s grisly lies and evasion of responsibility, but also her inherent meanness, a darkness perhaps sparked by her own horrific experiences in the care system. The show begs the question of how much Sabine enjoyed the attention; toward the end of the series, a neighbour reveals that she once boasted she’d be “famous when she dies”, but no one, no matter how sociopathic, wants an obituary like that.
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