The Beauty Queen Killer's surprising take on trauma and forgiveness
the true crime that's worth your time
[CW for sexual assault, harm to children]
The crime
In the spring of 1984, Christopher Wilder – known as both "the Beauty Queen Killer" and "the Snapshot Killer" thanks to his m.o., rolling up to teen girls and young women with a camera and offering to jump-start modeling careers for them – capped a multistate kidnap/murder spree by taking 16-year-old Tina Maria Risico as a sexual hostage in Torrance, CA.
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Wilder, who is thought to have raped and murdered many more victims than authorities could tie to him conclusively, then obliged Risico to "procure" another victim, Dawn Wilt, from an Indiana shopping mall.
The story (spoilers past this point; for my recommendation, please scroll to the end)
The Beauty Queen Killer: 9 Days of Terror dropped last week on Hulu; I took my time screening it for two reasons. First, I'd just watched an ABC News Studios product for an episode of Crime Seen that had notably underwhelmed.
Second, I knew the case primarily as the subject of one of those "bad penny" books at my shop that seems to turn up in fully three quarters of inventory lots, but will most likely never sell. Hard to say exactly why, usually. Maybe bad writing; maybe case fatigue; maybe nobody made a three-part streaming-service docuseries about the case to remind readers the case existed, and that last thing is evidently the deal with Bruce Gibney's The Beauty Queen Killer, which has finally lit a fire under copies I had had in stock since lockdown. Point is, a semi-forgotten file, from a production outfit I expected "mid at best" from, didn't seem like a priority.
Well, I don't love the the unwieldy title or what the series put before the colon, and it's not a legendary doc, but The Beauty Queen Killer is compelling and worthwhile. Director Alexandra Meistrell has years in the field with skippable-for-me genre TV fare like Hard Time and Dark Net – but also with the Stayner project Captive Audience. Captive Audience looked at the kidnapping of Steven Stayner, as well as the murders committed by his brother Cary, and tried to unpack how narratives about one family's multiple horrific tragedies shaped the true-crime genre, and vice versa. From my review:
How much Meistrell had guided Captive Audience is hard to gauge – executive producer can mean a lot of things, or nothing – but Beauty Queen is well built. The '80s b-roll from California malls is very evocative, and the doc doesn't lean too hard on "cute" VFX to underline contemporary clips of Peter Jennings and others updating the country on Wilder's itinerary of horror, or law enforcement reminding us of the challenges of a pre-internet interstate manhunt. It brings forward the details of a case that has fallen below the horizon, and the geography of the titular nine days, without dwelling on them too pruriently.
It's also good at suggesting, without blame, how the Wilders of the world lure their prey – and how the socialization of girls and women to make nice to men who say they're pretty helps predators like Wilders, as well as how said predators can often sense "targets" who have survived abuse. Targets, as it turns out, like Tina Risico, and the fact that that isn't made explicit until fairly late in Beauty Queen's runtime could feel manipulative – but the series is trying to make a point about the ways everyone misunderstood Risico's behavior and "role" in the case, so it is manipulative, but not in a cheap way.
Beauty Queen also features excellent access. Risico has never really spoken in depth about her experience, and the doc gives her plenty of room to talk about her turbulent childhood and the coping mechanisms it unfortunately created for her when Wilder took her – not to mention how Wilder leveraged her survival instincts to take Dawn Wilt. Wilt also appears, and is extremely insightful in her talking-head interviews about the judgments passed by civilians after she came home; she notes that whenever people start questions about her ordeal with "why didn't you 'just,'" Wilt is like, "Why don't you 'just' shut up until you're in this precise situation," which, seriously.
She's just as perceptive about the "relationship," such as it was, with Risico during the kidnapping – "it wasn't a shared experience" – and as good as Beauty Queen is at conveying that the framing of Risico as an accomplice is wrong and that individual surviving/processing of trauma is as individual as fingerprints, it's just as good at understanding that, for Wilt and for some family members of other victims, that doesn't help. As a viewer, you want Wilt, or the grieving grown daughter of Beth Dodge (Wilder shot Dodge after jacking her car; Risico was present), to "forgive" Risico, to "see" that anything she might have tried to do would have only ended in more deaths. But you also understand why they can't get there – and how the victims of a murder multiply through the families and friends of the dead.
Beauty Queen has a handful of over-directed re-enactment sequences, and despite the doc's responsible take on closure and reunion – i.e., it's a mirage – the ending feels like the network insisted on a hopeful button. But it's more or less the right length, and while it's occasionally difficult to watch, it strikes the right balance between trying to de-center Wilder and trying to explain why his lethal scumbaggery is not Risico's "fault" just because she's still alive.
Not essential, perhaps, but much more thoughtful and watchable than I expected; I recommend it. — SDB
I liked it as well, SDB. I wasn’t familiar with the case, but the leniency with which the court system treats creeps like this is all too familiar - at least until they go on a murderous rampage and everyone has shocked Pikachu face. The reverberations of the original trauma continue to extend past that crime, and I found those interviews compelling as well.