True-crime series makes murder victims speak

There's a nugget of old pirate-ship wisdom that suggests dead men tell no tales.

The producers of the new ABC true-crime series Final Witness either don't know or don't care how the eyepatch-and-parrot crowd does its business.

It's the dead -- specifically, the victims of the murders examined and re-created in each episode of the series, which premieres tonight at 9 on ABC and Citytv -- who do most of the talking. And it's this narrative choice, and the level of comfort viewers are able to develop about a central conceit that speculates on what murder victims might have thought, felt and said about being killed, that will determine the success or failure of Final Witness.

As a show that straddles the line between factual reporting and dramatization, Final Witness has a lot in common with such U.S. network newsmagazine hybrids as 48 Hours Mystery and Dateline NBC, which also make liberal use of voice-of-doom narration, acted-out re-creations of crime-scene events, amped-up musical soundtracks and commercial-break cliffhangers to drive the drama forward.

But Final Witness adds in this other element, which immediately sets the tone in tonight's premiere (which actually aired a couple of years ago as a sort-of pilot that took this long to become a series) -- as the camera pans over a re-created crime scene in which a bloodied female corpse is lying on a bed, a soft voice with a slight Texas twang breaks the silence:

"That's me, lying there. If you had asked me how I hoped to leave this Earth, I'd have said, 'As a grandmother, with family all around me.' But what you want and what God has in mind for you are two different things."

The "narrator," as it turns out, is 37-year-old Penny Caffey, who was murdered, along with two of her children, in a rural Texas town on March 1, 2008. Her husband, Terry, was shot several times -- including twice in the head -- but survived the attack, which one might conclude would make him a more apt narrator for this story. But Final Witness's producers have decided to go with the voice of the dead instead.

The story of the crime begins with a generic recollection of events, then expands to include the Caffeys' daughter's boyfriend as the killer -- identified to police by Terry Caffey -- and later takes a not-altogether-unexpected turn that suggests that the real culprit, in terms of planning the household massacre, most likely resided under the Caffeys' own roof.

As a true-crime yarn, this initial installment of Final Witness -- subtitled The Kids Aren't Alright -- is reasonably compelling stuff. The story is well structured, and facts are dispensed at a measured pace that allows viewers to feel increasingly drawn into the case as the hour unfolds.

But the corpse-as-commentator gimmick feels a bit forced. With the recollections of the surviving parent available, as well as interview clips with real-life police investigators and friends of the victim family, is it really necessary to put painfully contrived words ("Before they set the house on fire, they checked to make sure we were all dead. But I guess they didn't notice -- my husband just wouldn't stay dead") into the mouth of a murder victim, just for increased drama's sake?

The thinking here is that it isn't, but viewers and their remote controls will be the final judge that determines Final Witness's fate.

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.ca

TV REVIEW

Final Witness

Tonight at 9

ABC and Citytv

2 1/2 stars out of 5

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 27, 2012 C4