11 true-crime tales of intimate betrayals

As children, we grow up with warnings about stranger danger. But if true-crime shows teach us anything, it’s that the call is coming from inside the house.  

This July in true-crime drama series A Friend of the Family, co-writers Jan Broberg and her mother MaryAnn Broberg tell the story of how their neighbour and family friend Bob Berchtold groomed, kidnapped, brainwashed, and raped Jan and tried to marry her when she was just 12 years old. The show reveals how Bob won the trust of Jan’s parents within their close-knit Mormon sect, and turned their secrets against them so that he could have access to Jan, even after he’d kidnapped her. And it exposes how insistence on unquestioning faith laid the groundwork for his manipulation.  

It’s just one story of how abusers, killers and other predators have used faith, reputation and, above all, society’s foundations of trust, to mask their true intentions and silence their victims. It’s time to get to know the true face of evil in 11 true-crime documentaries and series on Showmax. 

A Friend of the Family

A Friend of the Family offers up one shocking revelation after the other over the course of nine episodes. In the early 1970s, nobody in his new neighbourhood knew that Bob Berchtold, married father of five, was a convicted child rapist. And the Mormon church didn’t broadcast the fact that their authorities had already “reprimanded” Bob internally for sexually abusing another young girl. Through trial and error, he had learned how to get away with it. 

Bob wormed his way into the Broberg family so deeply that they didn’t report Jan missing for five days when he kidnapped the 12-year-old and took her to Mexico, drugging, sexually abusing and brainwashing her all the way while telling her that they had to have a baby together to save the world. It wasn’t noticeably stranger than anything she’d learned in her church about a woman’s place in life.  

Bob had sexually manipulated Jan’s father, too, and when her parents and the FBI caught up with them, Bob played on her parents’ fears that the authorities would take away their children, and they’d be banished from the church for her dad’s homosexual activities – the same church that just gave Bob a slap on the wrist for child rape. As a result, Bob got away with only a suspended sentence for kidnapping Jan. He moved town, but he kept the Brobergs in his clutches, and when Jan was 14 years old, he struck again. 

Rosemary’s Hit List 

South African serial killer cop Nomia Rosemary Ndlovu targeted those closest to her, from lovers to sisters, cousins, nieces and nephews. And she did it for money. Lax funeral policy checkups turned every death into a payday for Rosemary. With access to hitmen for hire, a thorough understanding of the gaps in an overburdened policing system, and a uniform and gender that allowed her to dance with death unsuspected, Rosemary killed and cashed in … until a determined detective took a closer look at how the people around her were dying.  

Four-episode true crime series Rosemary’s Hit List exposes the patterns in Rosemary’s killings between 2004 and 2020 until you can’t believe that she got away with it. It reveals how she tricked poverty-stricken relatives into giving her all the details she needed to claim insurance on them by pretending she was going to help them get jobs or study loans. And it gets real about the pain she caused, as it paints portraits of the much-loved family members who are deeply mourned and missed – because they were worthless to Rosemary until they were dead.  

At the Heart of Gold: Inside the USA Gymnastics Scandal 

From the 1990s to the 2010s, over 368 women and young girls training to be gymnasts in the United States were sexually abused by gym owners, coaches and staff. At the heart of the abuse scandal was USA Gymnastics National Team (USAG) doctor Larry Nassar, who’d been sexually abusing gymnasts for more than 14 years. When Nasser finally pleaded guilty to child pornography charges and first degree sexual assault, his accusers included Olympians like McKayla Maroney, Aly Raisman, Gabby Douglas and Simone Biles. 

This documentary reveals how the abuse was allowed to continue for so long. It proves that USAG repeatedly dismissed warnings about abusive coaches, refused to report abuse to the police, and actively supported coaches who’d been convicted of sexually abusing gymnasts. This happened in a sport that creates ideal conditions for predators with an appetite for sexually and psychologically controlling vulnerable girls and young women.

Gymnastics subjects young athletes to intense mental and physical demands, along with a strictly controlled diet. Then it takes those starving, stressed young minds and allows coaches to wield enormous control over them, while waving the carrot of Olympic Gold. And it demands career-focussed maturity and a win-at-all-costs mentality. By the time many of the victims were able to process what was happening, they were in deep and damaging trouble.  

Baby God 

Las Vegas gynaecologist Dr Quincy Fortier spent 40 years “helping” women with fertility issues and treating women for a range of gynaecological issues. Some of them thought he was inseminating them with their desired partner’s sperm. Others thought he was just treating them for infections. But behind the scenes, Fortier was helping himself, injecting patients with his own sperm, even those who had no desire to be pregnant. One victim was Connie Fortier, who was just 18 years old when her adoptive father, Quincy, deliberately impregnated her during a gynaecological exam. She was a virgin, and pregnant.

Dr Quincy Fortier had been a predator at home, too, and his son Quincy Junior eventually sued him for sexually abusing him and his siblings when they were children. A jury rejected his claims, but he wasn’t the only one of Dr Fortier’s victims that the legal system silenced.  

Then, when police investigator Wendi Babst retired, she decided to take an online DNA test. The results connected her with half brother Mike Otis, half-brother Brad Gulko, a DNA researcher, and over 20 other half-siblings to date. In this documentary they talk about how they’re coming to terms with the identity of their biological father, and processing the way he violated women’s trust in a medical professional who had intimate access to their bodies. And the documentary explores how the system not only let him get away with it, but even shrugged it off as a commonplace practice, since insemination fraud only started being declared a crime in 2019. 

Sins of the Amish 

In this documentary film, survivors of sexual abuse and molestation within the Amish and Memonite community in the Unites States speak out about how the power structure within the community has turned it into a predator’s paradise, where young women and children are objectified and fetishised. They talk about how the all-male leadership blamed victims for “tempting” men into sexual assault (even creating sex education manuals for 11-year-old girls that explicitly carried that message), accused them of lying, refused to hold abusers accountable, and always took the word of a man over that of a woman or child.  

The survivors also reveal another contributing factor to the rampant sexual abuse within the community – the fact that women’s obedience to men was expected to be absolute, and that their roles within the community were limited to hard labour, housework, childbearing and rearing, and handcrafts. In this structure, any complaint was seen as defiance and rejection of God-given authority. With the police granting the Amish community enormous leeway to self-police, victims grew up believing they would have no recourse … until they tested that limit, and went to the police to beg for justice.   

Allen v Farrow 

In the 1980s, actress Mia Farrow and comedy actor-director Woody Allen were an ultimate power couple. Mia was raising seven adopted children, and Woody bobbed along as the man in her life for 12 years, during which they had a biological child together (Ronan), and adopted another child (Dylan). Then, in 1992, the couple split after Mia found naked photos of their 21-year-old daughter Soon-Yi Previn in Woody’s apartment.  

Soon after the split, Woody Allen publicly announced that he and Soon-Yi were “dating”. He was 35 years older than her, and had met her when she was 10 years old, but by all reports hadn’t played much of a role in her life. Woody and Soon-Yi married in 1997 and as of 2023, they are still together. Whatever had led up to the relationship, the appallingly intimate betrayal caused a public uproar, which increased after Mia accused Woody of molesting one of their other children, seven-year-old Dylan. But at the time Dylan was in therapy for living in a fantasy world … a factor that would make the child vulnerable both to being preyed on, and being manipulated to tell a story.  

In this four-episode documentary series, Mia and siblings Ronan and Dylan Farrow tell their story. Family films show happier childhood days, while phone conversations take us inside the bitter split. And recordings from the audiobook of Woody’s 2020 memoir, Apropos of Nothing, give his version of events, allowing the Farrows to challenge his tales.  

The Vow  

Over two seasons, true-crime series The Vow takes us inside the NXIVM “self improvement” cult and pyramid scheme. Its leader, Keith Raniere, was convicted of sex trafficking, racketeering, forced labour conspiracy, and wire fraud in October 2020. Actress Allison Mack (who played Chloe in Smallville) was convicted alongside Keith for her instrumental role in recruiting actors to the cult via the branch she co-founded, called The Source, and for recruiting women for sex trafficking through the “female empowerment” branch of NXIVM, called DOS, which blackmailed recruits and groomed them to fit Raniere’s sexual ideals.  

Given the sensitive and traumatic material the documentary deals with, the series’ creators worked hand in hand with journalistic ethics groups, and sent episodes to an anti-sexual assault organisation to ensure that they didn’t fetishise the abuse or further violate the survivors. The goal of the documentary as a whole is to expose the mechanisms within NXIVM that were deliberately laid down to groom recruits for abuse, in what they called an “ecosystem of manipulation”. And it does so in direct interviews with people in the cult at all levels, including its original founder, Nancy Salzman. 

• For more sex trafficking, cults, Satanic Panic, and intimidation tactics, watch Devilsdorp, and Fall River. 
  

Untouchable 

In February 2020, Hollywood film producer Harvey Weinstein was sentenced to 23 years in prison for multiple rapes. It was a crime he’d been accused of multiple times dating back to 1970, but it took more than 80 women coming forward with their stories at once to foil the tactics that he’d used throughout his career to silence accusers. His victims ranged from high profile actresses to people the public had never heard of – for good reason. In Untouchable, they reveal the career-killing penalties of going against powerful men like Harvey, and the public ridicule it exposed them to. 

One of the most valuable things the documentary does when it lets the survivors of Harvey Weinstein’s abuse speak out, is that it re-shapes public perception of how sexual assault happens, and how victims react to it at the time. The women share stories about how they froze, weren’t able to process what was happening, wanted to escape after an assault rather than confronting their attacker, and wound up blaming themselves. They reveal how Harvey set up meetings in which they’d be isolated, used his sheer physical size as a threat, and used intimidation to take what he wanted. He and others like him had created a world where they didn’t need to get consent. Thanks to the existing perception that ambitious actresses were willing participants on Hollywood’s “casting couch”, he could label anyone speaking out against him as just “bitter because she didn’t get the role”, “difficult to work with”, or “looking to get attention”. And Hollywood would fall in line if they kept wanting to make movies.  

Mommy Dead and Dearest 

It was a loving mother-daughter relationship on the surface, but when layers of secrets were exposed, it led to murder. Dee Dee Blanchard and her daughter Gypsy Rose became internet celebrities thanks to a phenomenon that some have nicknamed disability porn. When devoted mom Dee Dee shared stories of her profoundly disabled daughter Gypsy’s brave struggles against leukaemia, seizures and muscular dystrophy, charitable organisations lined up to give them stuff.  

Gypsy looked like a child, and seemed far younger than her 20 years in media interviews.  But the sick member of the family wasn’t Gypsy, it was Dee Dee, who suffered from Munchausen by Proxy syndrome. And in June 2015, when Dee Dee was found murdered at home, Gypsy was on the run with her new boyfriend. Director Erin Lee Carr puts together the puzzle by combining interviews with people who’ve been the victims of Munchausen by Proxy, medical professionals, and Blanchard family members. And she reveals why Gypsy lashed out with murderous fury after she uncovered the truth and broke free of Dee Dee. 

Alabama Snake 

Appalachian snake-handling Christian cult leader Glenn Summerford is in the spotlight in this HBO documentary. In 1991 he accused his wife Darlene Summerford of having an affair with another preacher and forced her, at gunpoint, to stick her hand into a cage full of his rattlesnakes that he’d just agitated. She suffered two bites to the hand and Glenn then kept her at home and denied her medical treatment. During the trial, Darlene claimed that Glenn wanted to get rid of her so that he could marry another woman. The court was inclined to believe her, and Glenn was sentenced to 129 years in prison.  

But the documentary asks how it was that Glenn normally wouldn’t have to force people (including Darlene) to touch the snakes at all, because they’d volunteer to do it as a testament to faith. And it also exposes issues of rural poverty, religious zealotry, along with the local police’s attitude that the people on “Snake Mountain” would take care of their own.  

• For more murder in troubled marriages, watch House of Gucci and The Staircase. 
  

Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst 

Millionaire Robert Durst was born into wealth and power as the son of a New York property mogul. When his first wife Kathleen McCormack vanished in 1982, the NYPD came up blank, despite signs that he was abusing her physically and controlling her financially, thanks to a seemingly slapdash investigation. Robert carried on, but seemed dogged by tragedy. In 2000, his longtime friend, author and journalist Susan Berman, was murdered in an execution-style killing at her California home. Again, the police’s approach to the case seemed shockingly careless. And in 2001 his friend and neighbour Morris Black was slaughtered and dismembered in Galveston, Texas. This time Durst was arrested, but despite jumping bail, overwhelming evidence against him, and the fact that he admitted to dismembering the body, he was acquitted of murder in 2003. 

Then came the ultimate true-crime fantasy – Robert Durst agreed to be interviewed in person about the accusations that people close to him seemed to vanish or die. During the years-long filming of the Jinx series, the filmmakers came across vital evidence incriminating Durst. Then, sensationally, Durst unwittingly made an offhand murder confession (watch and see how it happened, it’s jaw dropping), and the day before the series finale aired in the US in 2015, he was arrested for murder. 

So as we lock our doors and bar our windows at night, maybe we need to ask who we’re locking in with us.  

Read more about crime documentaries on Showmax, and stream more of the top crime series and best true-crime shows now.