Some spoilers below.
The figure of the police informant is one that has recirculated on television and in films for decades. It’s often a criminal who flips to avoid prison, like in “The Friends of Eddie Coyle,” or someone with little to lose, like Bubbles in “The Wire.” It’s almost always a man.
Recently, two documentary series on Netflix dispatch these notions, telling the true stories of two women in highly different circumstances who put their safety, their families and their grasp of reality on the line to bring a wrongdoer to justice.
In taking viewers down the rabbit hole of their high-stakes sagas — both share reams of video and audio footage they’d collected along the way — these women, in their own words, vividly capture what it means to stand down the enemy. How and why they stayed the course, helping officials who pushed them to the brink with little to no support in return, is both inspiring and unsettling.
‘Trust Me: The False Prophet’
This four-part series from Rachel Dretzin, who directed this documentary’s predecessor, “Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey,” follows the campaign of Christine Marie, a cult expert, and her videographer husband, Tolga Katas, to hold the leader of a child sexual abuse ring accountable.
The couple infiltrate and embed themselves within an insular and isolated polygamist sect of Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on the border of Utah and Arizona. They were first drawn to the area to see if they could film a documentary to humanize its stigmatized, vulnerable community, particularly in the wake of the arrest and conviction of Warren Jeffs. Jeffs, the polygamist leader of the F.L.D.S., was sentenced to life in prison in 2011 for sexually assaulting an underage follower, leaving behind a leadership void.
Marie and Katas slowly gain the trust of those in the community, but their mission shifts as she homes in on Samuel Bateman and his family, which is made up of a bevy of so-called wives, many of whom are girls. Bateman claims to be a prophet and Jeffs’s successor. Marie was particularly attuned to the dangerous dynamics at play, herself a survivor of abuse when she was a Mormon.
We watch as she endears herself to an oblivious Bateman, largely through flattery and good will, and to the women and girls who surrounded him. Toeing a precarious line over the course of years, she and Katas collect hundreds of hours of incriminating video and audio by convincing Bateman and his followers that they are participating in a documentary about their community and their faith.
The depth and depravity of the sexual abuse exposed is staggering, and Marie and Katas even capture Batman admitting guilt. But as authorities — first local and eventually federal — demand more and more proof, Marie and Katas push the relationship with the family to the limit to expose Bateman and free the victims in his orbit.
“I have to betray them to save them,” Marie, choked up, says of the girls.
‘Should I Marry a Murderer?’
This stranger-than-fiction tale out of Scotland zigged into unthinkable territory every time I expected it would zag. Caroline Muirhead, a forensic pathologist in Glasgow, was just emerging from a devastating breakup when she met Alexander “Sandy” McKellar, a farmer and hunter, on Tinder.
Muirhead dives headfirst into the whirlwind romance, ignoring all red flags — starting with their first date, when he asked her to meet him at the remote, nearly 10,000-acre estate where he and his twin brother, Robert, lived and worked primarily as deer hunters. The new couple party hard together and bond over their niche depth of knowledge about anatomy: his from breaking down deer carcasses and hers from working with corpses.
They get engaged just a couple of months into the relationship, and shortly after, he confides in her that he and his brother, while driving home intoxicated one night three years earlier, in 2017, hit a bicyclist on the road, killing him. He told her that they’d buried his body on the estate. We later learn that the events of this situation were even grimmer.
The bicyclist was Tony Parsons, a cancer survivor on a charity ride. Muirhead digs into the news story online and is crushed to learn how all that was known, after a significant effort to locate him, was that Parsons disappeared without a trace.
She immediately realizes she needs to take this information to the authorities, who urge her to keep pushing for more intel, and she remains engaged to Sandy as she secretly collects evidence. Her effort to glean the exact location of Parsons’ body is particularly harrowing.
But it’s the circumstances that send Muirhead into a downward spiral, as the police make no effort to protect her from the McKellar brothers, and the twists that follow, that feel both beyond belief and deeply human.
Maya Salam is an editor and reporter, focusing primarily on pop culture across genres.
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