The best true-crime doc now on TV is…
… The Body Next Door on Sky Documentaries (in the UK) is a well-made three-parter that tells an extraordinary, engrossing story
The Body Next Door has drawn a lot of attention and – for many good reasons – it is deserved.
What starts as a rather mundane police inquiry balloons into an international investigation that unfolds a sequence of family torment and murder. It is chilling, shocking and an object lesson in the harm one emotionally cold manipulator can wreak.
A tightly bound package is found by a block of flats in Beddau (pronounced be-tha, population around 7,000) in Wales. A couple of residents poke and prod it and are disturbed by the contents.
Amid some mucky sludge inside is a skeleton. Is it real, or a medical model? Is this rubbish, or has a crime been committed?
It turns out to be real. But who is it? Who put it there? Is this a murder victim?
It’s a headache for DCI Gareth Morgan. And what could it have to do with Anne ‘Lee’ Sabine, a rather over-the-top woman who recently died of a brain tumour and had been living in the flats?
Sabine was all big hair, fishnets, tall stories and phoney accent. Those who got to know her tolerated her eccentricities, though this indulgence of the colourful neighbour had likely turned to revulsion by the time DCI Morgan’s team unpicked this disturbing, twisting case.
Lee Sabine – who was she?
Sabine has quite the backstory. While police try to identify the skeleton, we learn of Sabine’s life back in New Zealand with husband John and their five children.
The first shattering revelation is that Sabine and John abandoned those children. Three of these now adult children are interviewed by the programme makers. Their accounts are both jaw-dropping and heartrending.
Son Steve condemns Lee as ‘evil’ for abandoning him at the age of six. ‘They dropped us off somewhere and never came back to pick us up.’
That’s it so far as I’m going with the spoilers, but the three-parter is absolutely compelling as it talks those who knew or investigated Sabine, delves into her and John’s past (he went missing in 1997) and finally reveals all about the skeleton.
The Body Next Door grabs us with questions going back five decades. Anyone with a scintilla of curiosity about human nature will be intrigued and dismayed by the revelations in this series.
It is moving, never loses it moral compass for easy salaciousness and is told at pace. It’s only failure is in a rather garbled explanation early on of the events leading to the skeleton’s discovery.
The Body Next Door was discussed above on ITV’s This Morning programme. And it will feature at CrimeCon in London this Sunday (2.05pm). There will be a panel interview with the programme makers and Mary West and Lynne Williams, who both knew Sabine and are interviewed in the series.
In the UK you can watch The Body Next Door here or on Sky Documentaries or Now.
Check out CrimeCon in London here.