This is an audio transcript of the Life and Art from FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘‘How ‘The Body Next Door’ gets true crime storytelling right’
Jo Ellison
Hello, this is Life and Art from FT Weekend. I’m Jo Ellison, editor of HTSI magazine, and I’m standing in this week for Lilah Raptopoulos. This week we’re talking about true crime, a genre that has been enormously popular in recent years. In the past months, we’ve seen a second instalment of the Robert Durst affair, The Jinx. We’ve seen Jodie Foster in True Detective, which is based very loosely on two real life cases. And right now, a new true crime series on Sky is number one on the platform and getting very good reviews. It’s called The Body Next Door, and it begins with an unidentified body found in a small village in Wales. The Body Next Door has been very well reviewed, but true crime remains a fraught genre, not least because these documentaries, podcasts and books rely on deeply traumatic events whose victims are still often processing the grief of horrible crimes. So today, I’m talking to the director of The Body Next Door, Gareth Johnson, who followed the story of that unidentified victim to reveal a family trauma that spans two continents and draws in dozens of victims. Gareth.
Gareth Johnson
Hello
Jo Ellison
Yeah. Tell me all about The Body Next Door. And what you can tell me and what you want people to know about it before they start watching it. Because I think that’s sort of part of it, isn’t it?
Gareth Johnson
I have a feeling I’m going to really struggle to do this without giving any spoilers.
Jo Ellison
So let’s say there will be spoilers ahead. Otherwise, we’re going to have a very short podcast.
Gareth Johnson
It’s really hard.
Jo Ellison
Yeah, yeah. But in the main it starts with a body basically.
Gareth Johnson
It starts with a body and a total mystery. Nobody has any idea who it is, which I quickly figured out talking to the police when we sort of started preparing the documentary, the pre-production phase was very unusual. You would imagine that happens more often than not. But most times the police, they look into missing person reports and things like that, and very quickly they find somebody that’s last few weeks has disappeared or from a neighbouring community and what was very unusual about this was there was absolutely nobody missing.
Jo Ellison
So your interest was kind of precipitated by the fact that there was a missing body and no one could identify it. And yet at the same time, there’s this parallel story which involves a woman living in one of the flats in the building, having told everybody in the building that there’s a skeleton in the garden effectively. So there’s this truth which is actually there throughout. And yet no one kind of quite knows what to do with it or how to deal with it.
Gareth Johnson
No. Exactly. That’s right. And, yeah, she told a lot of the neighbours, a lot of the people she knew in the village about a medical skeleton, and nobody ever saw it. And she had a bit of a reputation for sort of, telling tall stories. They didn’t take her that seriously. She told him she used to be a nurse. Which was actually true, long, long time ago. So they just presumed it was something she had from her days as a nurse. I think most people who heard about this skeleton didn’t connect it to the package that was in the garden. I think that was only noticed really quite, not that long before it was sort of opened and it was discovered that it wasn’t a medical skeleton at all.
Jo Ellison
It’s an actual body. So let’s talk about the woman at the centre of it all, this kind of strange, chimerical figure called Leigh Sabine, who goes by many different kind of personalities. Seems to be this very flamboyant, eccentric, and very theatrical character, seems to have incredible delusions of grandeur. But in the main, who seems to be a bit of a character around town and somebody who people seem to be quite fond of when they talk about initially, you know, the theories being a bit of personality and an otherwise quite boring, you know, small-town community.
Gareth Johnson
Yeah, I think that’s right. I think it’s fair to say some people really like that sort of flamboyant character that she had, talking to people there as well. There’s quite a lot of people who used to avoid her like the plague, because she’s a bit, she’s a little bit too much.
Jo Ellison
Yeah, a bit too much. So tell me a little bit, it’s a relatively small kind of discovery, which sort of becomes bigger as more of its backstory is uncovered. To what extent were you uncovering a story in parallel then with what was happening, and where did you diverge from, like the police report and get involved in Sabine’s backstory, which involves family in Australia and New Zealand, and like multiple different addresses and previous relationships?
Gareth Johnson
It’s a good question. I think we largely mirrored what the police did. And their investigation from the off we’re telling it really from the police’s point of view is an unfolding story. I guess where we differ from that is when we go and start looking at the backstory around this woman, Leigh Sabine’s family in Australia and New Zealand. We ploughed into a lot of detail there. For us it was interesting because I think it reveals everything about the crime, both who the victim is and the motive for the police. They probably did a more surface-level investigation into that sort of family history and things like that, because that’s all they needed. They didn’t need that wealth of detail, whereas we were interested in it from a storytelling point of view and from a character and emotional point of view as well, really.
Jo Ellison
Well, I think maybe that’s one of the things that people have found unique in the telling of this story, particularly, is that you have taken very much a position of the victims. So the story’s kind of ultimately told through their experiences and their relationship with this woman who, I don’t think it’s a spoiler, let’s say she’s not a very nice person, is she? But rather than focus at all about her and people’s impressions of her, it’s very much about like the aftermath of people’s experiences of being around her and in that orbit many of them are, of course, her family members, several of them her children. Were you conscious when you were telling this story that you wanted to tell a story from a slightly different perspective, or that you were approaching the genre in a new way? Or I know your experience is previously you’ve got quite a lot of history in factual television, and I just wondered whether you were thinking about the narrative in that way.
Gareth Johnson
Yeah, I mean, we were and it was very important to us before we interviewed those family members. You never quite know what you’re going to get, but we had a feeling that they were going to be the heart of the story, and we knew that they had suffered quite a lot. There were a lot, and we had to make sure that they felt in control of them. And because they were dealing with a lot of trauma, and there was a lot of, you know, a lot of conversations that we were having sort of in between takes and things like that. They always had to be comfortable with what they were talking about, and they didn’t cross into things that they didn’t want to speak about or felt pressured into. We didn’t want any of that.
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Jo Ellison
Gareth, what’s your sense of why the family of Leigh Sabine were prepared to take part in the documentary, given that they had suffered so much.
Gareth Johnson
What they felt, I think I’d be right in saying is that they’d been in the media spotlight before, when they were kids and then when they were teenagers, early 20s, and they’d never had any control over how the story was presented. And victims, it was sort of swept along with the tide of that. And so we wanted to allow them to get across what they wanted to get across.
Jo Ellison
I mean, I suppose that also one of the kind of bigger issues now with a real crime as a genre and especially with documentary making, is that the kind of enormous media blitz that follows around these people at the time of a trial or at the time of something happening is so overwhelming. And I think that’s one of the things which still to this day becomes problematic. I mean, you look at, like any of the trials that have happened in the last few years, and it’s still something which, you know, trying to sate the public curiosity and like, you know, the media can’t get enough of it. No one can get enough of it, That way you draw the lines and then where you offer people a bit of a closure, I suppose. Was this what you were kind of hoping to do a little bit? More publicity?
Gareth Johnson
I think so, I mean everything’s a balance because we are also in the business of making entertaining films. We wanted to make three episodes that people couldn’t stop watching. But at the same time, we wanted to give them enough space to be able to tell their stories and give enough space in the films for their stories to really come across. And I think for us, that works. You know it’s the right thing to do, I think. But actually, it also helps the story because they haven’t really, certainly two of the children have never really opened up about it before on camera, and you know, really delved into some of the things that happened to them.
Jo Ellison
One thing I think we’ve just to kind of go back to kind of the sort of the landscape of real crime as it stands. One of the things that I think is quite consistent with The Body Next Door is you’ve got this kind of archetype of the monster at its centre, like, you know, in this instance, it’s a woman who’s, like, slightly mysterious. She’s duplicitous. She is kind of, you know, in some way, shape or form pure evil, which, you know, lots of people like to describe or ascribe to women who were at the centre of crime. But I think what’s really interesting is that a couple of days afterwards, I had to Google her name to remember who it was. So I thought to an extent that was the success of what you’ve done is that you managed to tell a very human story about a family without making her a monster, per se, but at the same time, it kind of did lean on that sort of like kind of trope. How did you kind of how do you balance that? Because obviously it’s a woman there with a fantastically macabre and weird, you know, mind at work, there’s something really kind of nasty going on there. But how do you balance that with I know, as you say, like stitching up everyone else who’s contributing and I’ll just tell some ghastly story.
Gareth Johnson
No. You know, there’s a couple of lines in the, in the docs where I, I think somebody says, oh, I think she was pure evil. And I was always slight…
Jo Ellison
I think she was a bloody bitch.
Gareth Johnson
And it’s like as well, yeah. We let people lay into her a little bit. But it’s sort of, it’s useful to do it now and again in the film, but it’s sort of like the least interesting part of it.
Jo Ellison
But do you think we are still, as a society, kind of fascinated by these sort of like, you know, strange ladies at the centre of communities who don’t kind of behave. It’s so pervasive as a kind of like cultural trope.
Gareth Johnson
Yes it is. We spent a lot of time while we were prepping and filming this, talking about those sorts of things, and it was a long period where we were debating, like, was she just an outsider and a strange woman in that way, sort of lambasting her and slapping all of this stuff on her just because she didn’t fit in? And maybe, you know, one of her crimes was justified, potentially. You know, maybe. I think the one thing that didn’t come out of the police investigation that strongly was a motive? And the more we looked into it. The more she did come out as the baddie? As it were. She is quite hard to find . . .
Jo Ellison
But also, I think . . .
Gareth Johnson
A redeeming side to her. But on the flip side of that, we were very interested, and we included a sequence about what might have led her to become the woman she ended up being.
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Jo Ellison
And what was the most for you? What was the most challenging thing, apart from obviously having to kind of persuade sort of young people to talk about kind of awful traumas that have happened to their lives, but what in terms of the just sort of broader conversations did you struggle with, like ethically or morally the most?
Gareth Johnson
Well, one thing was certainly the foregrounding of the perpetrator, which I think can be a problem in true crime, certainly in the sense of sort of serial killers. And, you know, people told us in Wales that, oh, she’d love this. You know, she’d love that you’re making a series about this is what she wanted. She had a series of photographs taken when she was in a hairdresser’s and in her flat she told everyone it was for this series that was going to be made about her.
Jo Ellison
Oh, yeah.
Gareth Johnson
Yeah, that wasn’t true. And we think she was actually getting those taken so that we would use them in a programme like this.
Jo Ellison
I think that’s a degree of that kind of mythologising around the serial killer mode. I’m no criminologist, but it does seem this seems to be a kind of element of their later notoriety that really kind of galvanises them, or definitely there’s some sense that they’re creating this kind of killer myth or something like the story of this person will haunt generations to come. And that she leaves sort of strange captions, ‘The only man I’ve ever really loved.’ Which is like such a strange captions right on the back of a picture when you’re living on your own. Like it’s not . . .
Gareth Johnson
I think she was self-mythologising. But no, I mean we were on, on that front, we, you know, obviously I was interested in her as a character and in the persona that everybody knew and liked in Wales, that the sort of cabaret singing glamour queen persona. I was very interested in that but it was just a mask, fairly obviously. And what we wanted to do was to unmask her and to tear that down really by the end of the . . .
Jo Ellison
Which in a way is conversely not what most real crime does. It tends to glamorise, or it tends to sensationalise in a way that this person becomes a myth. So I think what you’ve done is actually kind of unravel that you’ve sort of done with that. Do you think you did that deliberately? Or just . . .
Gareth Johnson
Don’t know, I could just claim it.
Jo Ellison
Looking at it, just oh, you did a fabulous editing job on that.
Gareth Johnson
I genuinely, it was something we talked about a lot and we, we didn’t want, we didn’t want to do that. And I think that although Leigh Sabine would be happy that we’ve made a three-part series, that it’s very much about her in some ways I think she would be extremely unhappy with the results. I don’t think would be a comfortable watch for her, because I think we’ve held up a mirror to who she really was, rather than what the surface . . .
Jo Ellison
Making somebody take responsibility for the things that they’ve done.
Gareth Johnson
Which and she spent her life shirking those responsibilities.
Jo Ellison
As we were getting ready for this episode. My producers and I wondered whether there might be a kind of reckoning happening in true crime at the moment, especially because there’s been such a glut in the genre. I personally think that probably there’s always been a huge number of people who find it very distasteful to see these things on screen. But do you think, particularly at this moment, there’s an added impetus to be extra diligent and kind of look at things very differently when you’re approaching them?
Gareth Johnson
I think maybe that has gathered pace a bit. I think probably because of the volume of stuff that’s come out over the years. There’s this varied, there’s various sort of criticisms, I think, of the true crime genre, one of which is the truth.
Jo Ellison
Which very often goes out of . . .
Gareth Johnson
. . . Goes out the window. You know, we had lots of conversations about that and tried not to do that. It’s tricky when you’re compressing decades of story into, you know, 2.25 hours. But, you know, I think we’ve tried very hard not to distort any truths and certainly exploiting other people’s pain, really, for your own, sort of for a business model, I guess.
Jo Ellison
And their experience, but they don’t know what they’re doing necessarily when they speak to somebody, friendly chat. Just as journalists go and knock on doors of, you know, parents whose children have just died and have gone since but don’t have time and it’s just not knowing. That is supposedly an agreement. It’s like, well, no, they didn’t have a clue what was happening. I guess it’s about not being duplicitous as well.
Gareth Johnson
Yeah. Not being duplicitous and making sure that they genuinely want to do it for a reason. That’s a valid reason. And they are not just twisting somebody’s arm who’s been through something deeply, deeply traumatic. I think the distasteful celebration, certainly of serial killers and it’s, you know, nobody would ever. Consciously celebrate as serial killer. But yeah, there’s choices you can make when you’re making something like that I think can, that can get you into tricky waters. I remember one Netflix series starting with a shot of a bloody hammer hitting the floor in slow motion. Took about 30 seconds or something for this hammer to fall and splatter blood everywhere. And that was sort of pretty much the opening image of episode one. And yeah, that sort of thing out there, just stay away. To be honest, I’d stay away from it as a filmmaker and I’d stay away from it as a viewer, really. I don’t really watch too much straight sort of murdery…
Jo Ellison
Well, the dramatisation element, I suppose as the other one, you’ve got something like The Staircase, which started off as a very popular documentary series that then went on to become a Colin Firth starring vehicle with Toni Collette. I don’t think the viewing figures went down when it was dramatised. Is that IP thing as well, isn’t it? There’s a story that exists already. Audiences are already familiar and comfortable with it. They’re kind of intrigued to know who will be cast and how much they’ll look like them, and kind of whether they’ll change their opinion and how they’ll play it. I mean, I think just in general murder and kind of female sexual abuse are so commonplace now and like popular culture that it’s kind of almost unavoidable. I’m amazed at how quickly I see a naked body on a television show nowadays. So I think it’s just part of a kind of more general, slightly correcting moment where it’s like, oh, do we need to see this? And then the viewers say, yes, please.
Gareth Johnson
Give me more.
Jo Ellison
Yeah, exactly. So I don’t know whose responsibility is to like monitor the viewing numbers. But anyway, it’s an it’s an ongoing . . .
Gareth Johnson
Yeah. I mean, our show is called The Body Next Door for a reason, because we felt like that was what would get most people to watch it purely in terms of a title, but, yeah, it’s where you go from it from there, I think is.
Jo Ellison
Exactly.
Gareth Johnson
Is the important thing.
Jo Ellison
Well, thank you so much for coming to talk to us. It’s been a pleasure and a delight. The Body Next Door is on Sky at the moment. Please go find out. The story of Leigh Sabine all for yourselves. Thank you very much.
Gareth Johnson
Thank you.
Jo Ellison
That’s the show. Thank you for listening to Life and Arts from FT Weekend. I’ve put some relevant links in the show notes, and those will get you past the paywall onto FT.com.
I’m Jo Ellison, and here is our team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco, with original music by Metaphor Music. We had help this week from Jean Marquek. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer, and Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. Have a lovely week and we’ll see you on Friday.
