Fire this one up right now!

I normally don’t watch documentaries about subjects I’m familiar with, but “Variety” rated this the number one true crime doc of 2025 and I needed some gritty reality and WOW!

Yes, they caught the guy, after decades. I hope I’m not ruining it for you, but why would they make this entire doc if there was no conclusion, no satisfaction? Then again, that’s one of the reasons I’ve steered away from recent true crime documentaries, they too often leave you hanging.

But not this one.

Long Island. You’ve got to know, if you live in Connecticut, you look down on Long Island (as well as New Jersey!) Long Island makes no sense, to get anywhere you first have to drive through New York City. And it’s flat and overpopulated and…

When I was growing up, the Hamptons were not a thing. We were aware they existed, we knew Shelter Island, but make a special trip? I don’t think so. But on a clear day, you could see Long Island from our town in Connecticut, from the high-rise my mother lived in in Bridgeport during the last period of her life. It was right there. And, there’s a ferry from Bridgeport to Port Jefferson…which is no great shakes, although it does come up in this doc. And my mother told me that decades ago, my father invested in a hovercraft service from Bridgeport to Port Jefferson, but it failed. And the whole thing stunned me, because that was so unlike my father. Then again, he was a booster of the city he grew up in, he kept telling us Bridgeport was going to come back and it never did. My mother used to laugh about this. But recently, there was this story about the Park City in the “Washington Post”: 

“An old manufacturing city sputters back to life – Once a hub for guns and electrical wiring, Bridgeport, Connecticut, is now home to artisanal manufacturing businesses and a healthy real estate market.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/11/11/manufacturing-innovation-cities-trades/

I forwarded it to my sisters, we smiled, if only my father were alive to see it.

But despite the denigration of Long Island when I was alive, when the aerial shots of the homes came on screen…

I swooned. This was my homeland. Not exactly, but suburbs are suburbs, and those on Long Island were some of the first. I grew up in the suburbs, I could feel the pull.

And then the people! You don’t get people like this on the west coast. It’s subtle, but you can feel the difference. For all the elites, the Ivy Leaguers that consider themselves world-beaters, many of those in the northeast are just surviving. Because life is hard. Because of the weather. Right now it’s sunny in L.A., it’s 65 degrees without a cloud in the sky. In Fairfield, CT, my homeland, they’re actually having a heat wave, it’s 46. But it’s raining. Which means it’s miserable. There’s nothing worse than rain in the winter.

And when the temperature drops the roads ice up (bridges freeze before roads!) and it’s slippery and there are a number of us who live for winter sports, but most people just tough it out, stay inside as much as possible, wait for the renewal of spring. And like Barbra Streisand in “The Way We Were,” I too lament the lack of seasons in L.A… Well, we do have seasons, but you don’t get those feelings you do in the east. That first warm spring day. The autumn one with a slight nip in the air, with leaves on the ground. You need a jacket, but you’re not buttoning down against the cold.

Until November comes along, when the misery season begins, and it isn’t until around the first of April that you know it’s behind you.

So on the east coast you play board games, you drink hot chocolate, which those on the west do not. And it breeds a different kind of person. Yes, more thinking, but not everyone is an intellectual.

Now there are more ethnic groups on the east coast. Most of the kids I went to school with had names that were easy to find in the phone book, because they were unique. Or they ended with a vowel or… Not so on the west coast.

So the people in this doc… The sister with the bad teeth. Her parents probably couldn’t afford orthodontia, but on the west coast, how you look is paramount. And there’s a clear division between those who went to college and those who did not on the east coast, not so much on the west, there are slews of successful, wealthy people out here whose education stopped at high school, or who went to college for only a minute. But if you didn’t go to college on the east coast… It’s like you’re a separate class.

Now most of the houses on Long Island were built after the Second World War, which makes them eighty years old, which seems old, but some of the houses in Bridgeport predate those. I won’t say everybody is living in squalor, but it’s not like the west coast, where almost every house is from the post war era, where everything lasts longer because of the weather. Your car doesn’t rust out here.

So, what you’ve got here is women, really just girls, they’re all young, who turn to escorting to make money. They place ads on Craigslist. And you may abhor this, but how else are these people going to make ends meet? Many already have children. One is on the verge of getting evicted, and if she does she loses her child and…

It’s easy.

And you don’t have to look like a movie star. Not that these women are not attractive. But sex…it makes the world go round, and men will pay for it.

But you might get in trouble.

You watch and you wince. Not because you judge prostitution, but because you realize these women’s opportunities are limited.

And their friends and families… They’re going nowhere fast either.

One girl lives in Norwich, CT, which is in the western part of the state, near the Rhode Island line, her relatives come to the city on motorcycles.

And then you’ve got the group house, with the guy with a long beard and sleeve tattoos, and his buddy with a face tattoo and you know…you can’t look like this and make a zillion dollars unless you’re a pop star, and just like the NBA, very few make it.

So you have the disappeared girls. And no one cares about them, after all they’re prostitutes. But it takes one mother to push and push… If you don’t push nothing happens, the police are overloaded as it is.

And the police… That’s a story unto itself. Are these the best and the brightest? Then there’s the thin blue line and corruption. This is not only a story of finding the perpetrator, but how the system works. And it doesn’t always work so well.

But this is America.

No one wants to believe there’s a serial killer in their midst, because they want to be able to sleep at night.

Musicians are not the only ones who want to become rich and famous. And then there’s the man who hired the police chief because he thought the DA was recommending a credible guy, how could you survive, get this far if you were not honest and trustworthy? Well…

This is not a huge commitment, only three episodes. But you’ll be riveted by not only the story, but the people, the relatives, the officials and…

It didn’t take long for me to be happy I live in California. Then again, there are all these homes on the Long Island coastline. But recent weather events…

It’s a rough life.

But it’s a rough life in general. How do you survive? 

Bad things happen. Who is teaching you values, how to hew the straight and narrow, not to take unjust risks?

Some have parents are riding their kids, keeping them from going off the rails. But it’s a big country, and not all parents fit this mold. And there are uncontrollable kids. But, you could go on an adventure, on a whim and…

Watch this, you won’t be able to take your eyes off it. Even if you think you know the story, you really don’t. 

A+