The Coldest Case Ever Solved (2021)

My true-crime interests inevitably intersected with my youtube travels and led me to a type of video that is obviously low-budget and fairly called amateur. The ones I tend to prefer—channels such as Hailey Elizabeth, Stephanie Harlowe, or That Chapter—are basically run by natural storytellers. They do their research and present their findings in narrative fashion (Elizabeth while she is putting on makeup), fortified by available footage and audio that can apparently be found on the internet, some of very poor quality. Most of these videos run 30 to 60 minutes though some can go on for hours if the case is weird and/or complicated enough. Matt Orchard, an Australian (or possibly New Zealander), is one of the best. His channel, Matt Orchard – Crime and Society, has ideas about larger issues like coerced confessions, problems with lie detectors, and other troubled aspects of justice systems (mainly US). These issues make solving crimes tricky business and often exercises in whether we can ever know the truth about some things (and, by implication, anything). Orchard also takes on celebrity cases such as Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard, the JonBenet Ramsey mystery, or Anthony Wiener—probably looking for internet traffic, but his treatment of the Ramsey case is one of the best I’ve seen. As often as not, as in his latest, How Chandler Halderson Didn't Come Close to Getting Away With Murder, he’s riffing on bizarre cases simply for their own sake, and sometimes even indulging a little copaganda, an ongoing pitfall of the genre. Like many youtubers, Orchard has an accompanying Patreon account where even more information and early access can be had for something like $2 a month. The Coldest Case Ever Solved balances a lot of his favored crime elements in one of his best videos, a one-hour treatment. The details are there to be discovered. They aren't what you expect. The case involves a 7-year-old girl who was abducted and murdered in 1957 and the trial of a man accused of the crime 55 long years later, in 2012. A lot of what makes the video work is the case itself. But Orchard’s acerbic recounting has a lot to do with it too, taking us through all the twists and turns. His research feels clinically precise, always—one of my favorite things about Orchard’s videos is the feeling they are authoritative. In that way he separates himself from a lot of the hysterical internet sleuths populating forums and youtube. I like to think Orchard is better than most of them. At the very least, the entertainment value is high. If you like this, try five more.