RIFLE RANGE BOY: ...and they think they can get away with it!

American Murder series
The Family Next Door (2020)
Laci Anderson (2024)
Gabby Petite (2025)

Watching true crime dramas, I am convinced that there can never be one perfect crime or one perfect murder. The audacity of it all is that people still commit crimes, thinking that they can get away scot-free. Forget the fact that God is watching their every move. Anyway, He is not going to be summoned to give His evidence in the court of Law. Even though we were taught that no one can escape God's justice, every day we are persuaded that justice can be bought with the best money one can afford to lose. In the immortal words of Swami Nithyananda, who was caught on CCTV misbehaving with his female follower, "It is not God that one should fear, my friends, it is the CCTV that one has to answer to!"

In the digital age, one cannot escape being captured digitally. Even if one can dodge the viewfinder of a paparazzi or the mobile phones of friends, acquaintances, or bystanders, one cannot escape being recorded by public monitoring devices. The mobile devices we own make it extremely easy to track our every movement, either to prove our innocence or, conversely, put us in a spotlight moment, caught with our pants down.

Suppose traditional police investigative work involves visiting the crime scene, collecting evidence, and interviewing potential witnesses. In that case, the first thing the police would do when a crime occurs is to seize the hand devices of all involved and review all available CCTV footage in the vicinity.

In the first of the American series, 'The Family Next Door' (2020), Chris Watts called the police, reporting that his wife and two children were missing. He put up a straight face, fooling the police and joining the search team. Unbeknownst to everyone, a mistress is involved, and Chris finally confesses to killing his pregnant wife and his two daughters. The wife's fixation on documenting everything that happened in her life online helped investigators gain insight into her domestic life.

In the second offering, 'Laci Peterson' (2024), an 8-month pregnant wife is reported missing by her husband on Christmas Eve 2002. She had apparently gone to take her dog out for a walk and never returned. The husband, Scott Peterson, was in the midst of things, searching for his wife. His suspicious demeanour alerted the police to probe to discover another woman in the scene. Scott had apparently killed his wife and dumped her in the river. Her decomposed corpse and her expelled fetus were eventually found.

In the third documentary, Gabby Petito and her boyfriend decided to invest all their little savings in a van and go travelling around America. Gabby chose to keep a travelogue, updating it with all their travels. Trouble was first detected when someone in Utah spotted them and reported a physical alteration to the local police. Almost two months into their travel, Gabby went missing, and her mother made a police report. The boyfriend became the person of interest. Gabby's remains were found later, determined by the forensics to have been strangled. The boyfriend was on the run and was later found dead by a self-inflicted gunshot wound, leaving a confession in his notebook.

Two things stand out in the cases above. All that we see on social media is fake. Those seemingly happy, smiley faces that we see are often masks that cover inner unhappiness. We may scream till our throats go dry that we value our privacy and have drafted laws to protect our data and privacy. In fact, we can all be read like an open book. There is no deception involved. As a matter of principle, we signed it all away in the fine print of the online agreements that we never read anyway.