When married couple Carol and Steven Baxter are found dead at their home in Mersea, Essex, by their adult daughter Ellena, police are puzzled. “It was almost like they were asleep in their chairs,” notes DI Lydia George, in episode one of The Essex Millionaire Murders, ITV’s latest (and compulsively watchable) true crime offering.
With no signs of a break-in or injuries, there’s initially little to go on – but as officers dig deeper, it’s clear that things are more fraught than the Baxters’ veneer of suburban bliss might suggest. And while they await results from toxicology, it’s Carol’s mysterious health problems that pull the officers’ interest.
Despite a longstanding diagnosis of Hashimoto’s disease, Carol’s frightening symptoms – including periods of losing speech and lapses in memory – had baffled doctors for years. Could she finally have had enough and decided to end things for good? In an initial conversation at the crime scene, recorded on an officer’s bodycam, Ellena certainly fears her vulnerable mother has “done something silly”.
Luke D’Wit (Photo: Candour Media/ITV)Things only get stranger when, combing the Baxters’ phones and laptops for relevant information, DC Kerry Turner unearths communications between Carol and one Dr Andrea Bowden, an American endocrinologist promising to cure her. With her sending multiple emails every day, addressing Carol as “honey” and laying out ever more elaborate regimes, it’s clear that Bowden is no normal doctor – but also, that an increasingly desperate Carol had put more and more of her life in this mysterious stranger’s hands.
True crime has been a TV staple for decades – think of campy 20th century classics like Forensic Files or Unsolved Mysteries – but in recent years, it’s been subject to a serious slickening. Largely, that’s thanks to our lives’ increasing surveillance – every cloud, eh? – amassing reams of footage and correspondence just waiting for someone to arrange it.
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Where once, producers had to patch stories together with blurry photos of suspects, bad B-roll, or worse, hokey recreations, today it’s increasingly possible to stitch together jaw-dropping raw material and watch an investigation unfold in real time.
And from Carol’s video check-ups filmed for Dr Bowden to police bodycams and Ellena’s initial, harrowing 999 call, The Essex Millionaire Murders definitely capitalises on that wealth of resources. Spliced with talking-head interviews, the documentary skips seamlessly between someone’s recollection of an event and video taken of it at the time, making for uniquely absorbing storytelling.
What’s more, the circumstances are as bleakly compelling as the way they’re recounted. When toxicology eventually reveals fatal doses of fentanyl in both Carol and Steven’s systems, the investigation becomes a double homicide – and then, when an ersatz document naming Ellena and family friend Luke D’Wit as the beneficiaries of the Baxters’ estate is found in the house, it gets its first clear suspects.
Ellena Baxter (Photo: Candour Media/ITV)With Luke and Ellena taken into custody, The Essex Millionaire Murders again makes masterful use of footage from their arrests and police interviews. Seven months pregnant and grieving her parents, Ellena’s dejection is especially heartbreaking. Luke, on the other hand, is suspiciously calm. And when a search of his bag turns up fentanyl, there seems to be no question where the blame is pointing; as DC Turner puts it, “fentanyl is not a drug you can get very easily, yet he’s got a holdall full of it.”
With the first episode coming to a close, The Essex Millionaire Murders has plenty of cliffhangers left dangling. What did Ellena know? Who really is Dr Bowden? And what could have motivated Luke (if it was him) to kill two gentle sexagenarians?
Catapulting viewers into the story’s most breathless moments with real-time footage, and packing all the intrigue of a classic whodunit, The Essex Millionaire Murders is about as good as terrestrial true crime gets. ITV have hit the jackpot.
‘The Essex Millionaire Murders’ continues tomorrow at 9pm on ITV1
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