Reviewing Movies

If there's anything that becomes apparent over the course of this movie it's that the casualties in a case such as this are not confined to the perpetrator's victims. When an investigation stretches on for years and decades those who become obsessed with it and the friends and family who surround them are every bit as much victims. The perpetrator can be interpreted as a victim as well though not a sympathetic one. Given the furor that surrounded this case one can understand the motives of the survivor who dropped out of sight but the loss of his witness hurt the case. That the case remains unsolved to this day leaves a void that is not typical of "Hollywood Endings."

Many of the actors who appear here are so altered in appearance I had to check the credits to recognize them. Dermot Mulroney in particular, entering his mid-forties, looks distinguished as the captain with frosting hair.

Another prominent under-current in this movie is the tension between the public's right to know and the need for police to play their cards close to their vests to protect critical evidence that may eventually make or break the case. By playing the press and television this perpetrator craftily complicates the task of law enforcement and the hundreds of copycats and red-herring witnesses bombard police with useless time-consuming dead leads. Turf wars and the failure to share information between various law-enforcement agencies did nothing to help the investigation. The sad thing is that such jurisdictional disputes still hamper law enforcement to this day. The idea that a newspaper cartoonist came close to solving the case of a serial killer or that he uncovered clues that eluded police does not paint law enforcement in a good light.

The ensemble cast do a reasonable job of portraying the process of putting out a newspaper and the plodding nature of a police investigation without making it boring.