The Amazon Review Killer – should we really still be watching this evil nonsense in 2025? | Television and radio

It’s true, you are horrible people. That’s enough seasonal goodwill for you. It’s time to get back to business. Your first new true crime documentary of the year is here: The Amazon Review Killer.

This is the harrowing story of real estate agent, sex offender and serial killer Todd Kohlhepp. He was convicted of seven murders in 2017 and has since said he was responsible for numerous other killings, although he did not provide details to authorities.

Kohlhepp’s story is unusual for the genre only in that his tendency toward extreme violence was recognized and punished early on. At 15, he kidnapped, threatened at gunpoint and raped his 14-year-old neighbor, saying he would kill her family if she told anyone. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison for the crime and registered as a sex offender. At age 30, he was released and unsupervised.

From there, the pattern is familiar to anyone other than the most casual viewer of these documentaries – which is horrible on a human level, but slightly thankless from a “did I just spend almost two hours of my life watching this? level.

It’s not that surprising: the ex-felon lies about his conviction and his status as a registered sex offender, obtains a real estate license and creates a successful business. People remember him as warm and charming. Criminal psychologists are here to tell us – repeatedly – ​​that this is a facade that narcissists and those with the borderline personality disorder for which Kohlhepp was diagnosed in prison, find easy to maintain. Beyond that, he was cold, easily enraged, and prone to taking revenge on those who mocked him or whom he perceived as not giving him his due as a superior being.

When motorcycle store owner Scott Ponder is made fun of (or feels like he’s being made fun of) for trying to return a new motorcycle that turned out to be too much for him to handle , he returns and shoots him, along with two other employees, Brian Lucas and Chris Sherbert, as well as Ponder’s mother, Beverly Guy. That was in 2003. Police compiled a list of recent customers to question but focused on those who had complained about the condition of second-hand bikes also sold by Ponder. They do not reveal that a violent sex offender is among the names.

If it is not possible to have a true crime series without an element of police incompetence to complicate the story, or simply if it is not possible to have a true crime without an element of police incompetence, I don’t know. Given the current headlines, I’m leaning toward the latter.

In 2015, a couple disappeared: Meagan Coxie, a waitress at Kohlhepp’s local Waffle House (where he made the female staff so uncomfortable that his orders were ultimately only taken by male staff) and her husband, Johnny Coxie. The police have no leads and the Coxies have no real connection to the surrounding community or family to make a fuss when the case turns sour.

The following year, a wealthier and better-known local couple disappeared: Kala Brown and Charles Carver. Phone records reveal that Charles’ phone is on Kohlhepp’s property and that he and Brown had sent a message about the couple coming to work on Kohlhepp’s 95-acre farm. Shown in extraordinary footage from the time, Brown is found chained in a storage container. Charles’s body and that of the Coxies were found in graves.

The USP of this tedious and terribly repetitive documentary, which should have lasted 70 minutes at most, is that Kohlhepp habitually posted provocative reviews (at least after the fact) on Amazon about the knives, shovels and locks he purchased to commit his crimes. . “Keep this in the car for when you have to hide the bodies,” “I haven’t stabbed anyone…yet.” When I do, it will be with a quality tool like this” and so on.

But what do we learn from all this? Let evildoers without conscience walk among us as they always have. That they look and act pretty normal — provided we categorize men who sometimes watch porn at work or make waitresses uncomfortable as usual. And we do it. That we can’t count on the police. This evil is as banal as Hannah Arendt said. In other words – nothing new. If there is nothing to learn from such a program, you easily find yourself in exploitative and amoral territory and you have to stop and ask yourself: why are we doing this and why are we watching?