True crime is one of those genres that you just can’t look away from. A lot of our favourite shows and movies are based in reality, but the truth can be so much more grim.
Mindhunter (2017)
Netflix’s smash hit is based on the book Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit by John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker. Holden Ford and Bill Tench are based on John E. Douglas and Robert K. Ressler, who both worked for the FBI in the 1970s.
While a lot of the show sticks pretty close to the truth, some of the elements are downplayed. Speaking about the way stress affects the show’s characters, John E. Douglas said that “The anxiety now that Holden Ford is experiencing was me. Because by the time I’m 38 years of age I’ll nearly die on a case, on the Green River murder case, I’ll collapse in my hotel room with viral encephalitis.
“[I was] in a coma for a week and came out of it paralysed and had to go through five months of rehabilitation,”
The Iceman (2012)
The Iceman is based on the crimes of hitman Richard Kuklinski. He was nicknamed The Iceman by authorities after they discovered that he had frozen one of his victims’ bodies in an attempt to throw the police off track. Among the people he worked with, Kuklinski was known as “the one-man army” or “the Devil himself,” so you can just imagine the sort of guy he was.
The film tells the story of how Richard started working for a mobster after he was married, but the real life Richard’s first murder happened when he was just 13. When he died in 2006, the estimated number of victims he had ranged from 100 to 250.
Wolf Of Wall Street (2013)
This was a massive film, because the story it tells is absolutely nuts. Based on the life and crimes of Jordan Belfort, the movie didn’t exactly lack material to work with. Still, scenes like the one where Jordan hits his wife have been downplayed from reality, which was that he kicked her down the stairs while he was holding their daughter.
Also there were no chimpanzees in the office because the real Danny Porush says he would never abuse an animal. He admits that the scene where he swallowed a goldfish is real though, so go figure.
The Act (2019)
This series is based on the bonkers case of Dee Dee and Gypsy Rose Blanchard, in one of the most famous cases of Munchausen by Proxy syndrome. Munchausen Syndrome is where someone fakes an illness for attention, and Jameela Jamil was accused of having it recently. Munchausen by Proxy syndrome is where a caretaker makes up symptoms and illnesses and pretends that the person they’re looking after is sick.
In real life, after years of being forced by her mother to pretend that she was severely disabled, Gypsy Rose Blanchard enlisted the help of her secret boyfriend to murder Dee Dee and escape.
As great as Hollywood is at coming up with weird and wonderful stories, the truth is always stranger than fiction. If true crime is your thing, check out Fremantle Prison’s true crime tour and hear more about some of their most notorious inmates and how their crimes gripped the community.