Who Killed Little Gregory? (2019)

I went digging around at Netflix and turned up this five-hour French true-crime documentary miniseries about a famous case in France from the 1980s. It's pretty good. The case is a bit of a forerunner to the JonBenet Ramsey murder in the US in the '90s, with a bizarrely ritualized and still formally unsolved murder of a young child, tantalizing clues that point to an inside job, and lots of mistakes on the part of law enforcement and investigators. The Gregory Villemin murder in rural France was preceded by years of anonymous threatening letters and phone calls to the boy's parents, specifically calling out Gregory's father Jean-Marie and promising vengeance for reasons known only to the stalker. This stalker and likely murderer became known in France as "the Crow," associated with the 1943 movie Le Corbeau directed by Henri-Georges Cluozot (a good one—worth seeing!). Gregory was murdered at the age of 4, trussed up and thrown in the local river to drown, with one more letter following to his parents from "the Crow," taking credit. There are a lot of moving parts to this case, including an incompetent judge overseeing the investigation and constant media / paparazzi harassment as the case unfolds. It captured the imagination of France, with an absurd number of people wrongly certain they knew who was guilty and innocent, again much like the Ramsey case in the US. The Gregory case has a number of surprises and strange twists and turns—the lengthy running time is justified and I don't want to give too much away. It reminded me of another title that came up in the same Netflix search, The Staircase, another TV miniseries and also coincidentally a French production, though in that case the crime under examination was committed in the US. I like these forensic procedural cases because they are just so chilling and mysterious, so open to interpretation and uncertainty, often feeling impossible ever to find satisfaction from. At the same time, Who Killed Little Gregory? is quite good at raising emotions. Not so much for me because it's a kid's death—though the photos show him to be extraordinarily adorable and it's hard to think of the way he died—but because the perpetrator feels so provocatively close, likely a member of the extended family. Who Killed Little Gregory? is thus often infuriating, and even desolating, but in that righteous, satisfying true-crime way. Recommended.