White House Farm – 6 Part Documentary Dramatization = Netflix

Part 3

Ooh, I can feel everything heating up now. It’s not just Cousin Ann and the Sergeant on the case, but others are now seeing the inconsistencies. Part of me wants to say, ‘about bloody time’, while the other part cautions me that cases like this are difficult. I can understand the ‘Miss Marple’ references and how very frustrating it would have been to have someone outside of the investigating team constantly finding new evidence to contradict the conclusion you’d made. But I can also understand how infuriating it would be to see what had happened versus what people think happened.

Watching this crime unfold, it’s easy to see who is at wrong and where the evidence is leading but it wouldn’t have been so cut and dry during the thick of investigation. There are a lot of different aspects that makeup an overall investigation and though this documentary does a good job of bringing some to life, it doesn’t showcase all. It is a ‘documentary dramatization’ after all, so while watching I’m very aware of the differences and the ‘added extra’s’.

You never know what is going on with a family behind closed doors. You can speculate, you can theorise, but you can never know for certain and I think that point is especially crucial in this investigation.

The dramatization plays up Jeremy to be a person of suspicious character and someone who is not what they seem. The Wikipedia pages paints him differently. So, is he a killer in disguise or is he wrongfully accused? I’m not sure I can answer that question at this point in the series, but I have known since the first episode that Jeremy was one to be weary of. Whatever game the real Jeremy was playing, it was carefully concocted.

I keep coming back to the inconsistencies: the crime scene was poorly conducted. The murder scene wasn’t secure or searched thoroughly and the evidence was not properly recorded or preserved. This much has been apparent from watching the 3 episodes so far. The police burned the bloodstained bedding and carpets within a couple of days of the murder – apparently to ‘spare Jeremy’s feelings’. The crime scene workers removed the murder weapon without wearing gloves and didn’t examine it until weeks later. There were very obvious mistakes from the get-go, but I wouldn’t necessarily blame everything on the police force because I feel like certain aspects of knowledge were left out of the conversation by various family members until later times.

It is very obvious that the evidence was not well guarded because it didn’t fit the ‘view’ the commanding officer had labelled the event as, e.g., ‘murder-suicide’. It’s infuriating to watch a justice that you feel is unjust. I can only imagine the thoughts and feelings that ran wild with case and just how complicated it was for everyone involved.

The end of this episode shows the ruling of murder-suicide, but I have a feeling that’s soon to be overturned…