August 12, 2024

3 things that set Taken Together: Who Killed Lyric and Elizabeth? apart

the true crime that's worth your time

The crime
You may recognize the case from the docuseries' title; if you don't, you might get more out of Taken Together if you go in "cold." To do that, scroll down to the rec summary at the bottom!

…On July 13, 2012, cousins Lyric Cook-Morrissey, 10, and Elizabeth Collins, 8, went for a bike ride in Evansdale, IA and never returned. Searchers found their bikes later that afternoon; hunters found their bodies in a "wildlife area" later that year. Despite strikingly similar abductions elsewhere in the state and region, Lyric and Elizabeth's murder remains unsolved.

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The story
Taken Together: Who Killed Lyric And Elizabeth? premiered on Max August 8, and I hadn't heard much about it or the case(s) it centers on – which is perhaps part of what made the three-parter compelling, for me. I didn't know what had happened, or would happen; I had no preconceived ideas about the girls' abduction.

Now that I've watched the doc, I think it's mostly that Taken Together is well-proportioned, doing some of the things we've come to expect from a prestige docuseries, but doing others things differently enough to keep the viewer's attention. Directed by Dylan Sires, a former news cameraman who started filming talking-head interviews for the project in 2015, Taken Together also benefits from having a "local" behind the camera.

I wouldn't characterize Taken Together as enjoyable, certainly, but it's effective, at conveying the various twists and turns in the case, and other cases tangential to it…but also at conveying the blast radius of grief and regret that a violent death sits at the center of, and what it's like to keep living in that circle. Sires is good at listening to the testimony his subjects deliver, and at making sure viewers listen instead of Googling. 

Three aspects of the series set it apart.

The collaging of interviews over the years

The girls' parents, siblings, and grandparents get older, cycling through hairstyles and sleeve fashions, while their profound sadness and longing for these lost children remains as close at hand as ever…and the case remains open, slowly growing cold. It put me in mind of the time jumps in Longtime Companion, that the story would pick back up and one or another of the characters would just…not appear, anymore; that's not a great comparison, really, but both properties remind you with a weary matter-of-factness that we can't keep everyone we love with us.

It's not done tricksily or melodramatically, either. Time just passes…except for the girls.

The real people, who have made more mistakes than money, seen and heard without judgment

This is something I've always admired about Life After Lockup – that incarceration is not the only thing an incarcerated person is – and Taken Together shares that approach, but doesn't draw your attention to it explicitly. It takes a while to notice that interviewees aren't filmed in the customary antiseptic Airbnb; they sit where they live, among their dinged-up shelving units and worn-bald recliners. They wear sweatsuits to the cemetery. They have parole officers, some of them.

Lyric's parents struggled with meth, which, along with the timing of a rejected plea deal for one of them, raised eyebrows among law enforcement and therefore complicated the investigation, not to mention the relationships among the sets of parents. The straightforward presentation of that information doesn't condemn anyone involved, and subtly reminds us that substance misuse and all the garbage that comes with that for the 99 percent – custody issues, the quicksand of law-enforcement contact, etc. etc. – is just a part of life for millions of Americans. (The knee-jerk "allegedly" from Lyric's father, Dan, when Sires mentions Dan's addiction issues speaks volumes.)

We don't get a sanitized family of perfect victims; Taken Together understands that nobody deserves to have a horror like this befall them, and tells its story accordingly.

The way it depicts trauma

It's a true-crime documentary about, in the end, multiple horrific crimes, so it's not surprising that Elizabeth's father weeps repeatedly. That the Waterloo police chief cries about Elizabeth's father is somewhat unusual. So are the witnesses to Lyric and Elizabeth's last bike ride, expressing tearful regret that they didn't stop or say hi, or somehow change the course of the day.

A victim of a different Iowa double abduction, Dezi Hughes, agrees to relive the unspeakably awful events of October 2013, in which a notorious predator grabbed her and her best friend Kathlynn, but only Dezi escaped. Dezi does so in interviews spanning half a decade, and talks through a trembling chin about hating herself for fleeing and not "helping" Kathlynn, and that kind of painful testimony isn't uncommon in the genre – but feeling like perhaps I shouldn't be witnessing Dezi's pain, or that perhaps Sires shouldn't have filmed it, is somewhat rare.

But in a good way, I think. As tough as Dezi's survivor's guilt is to watch, it's worth remembering that the traumas radiating out from almost every true-crime story do not end when the story does. They're not turned off or put away for a documentary's subjects. And here again, Sires isn't leading us to that idea by the hand; it's just assumed by the doc, for us to see or not.

Taken Together isn't an easy sit, and it doesn't have a "satisfying" ending. It's probably a little too long; there's probably too many drone shots; the secret-recording op near the end felt a little out of place. But it's made with care and curiosity, about people and places who might not usually get that courtesy.