The Truth About True Crime · SundanceTV and Sundance Now

Killing for Love: The Black Box

June 26, 2019·42 min·3 clips

Months before her parents were murdered, Elizabeth Hasem wrote letters fantasizing about their deaths in chilling detail.

The words arrive loaded. Elizabeth is handed a stack of labels, and pretty quickly she starts sounding less like a person than a theory someone already likes. The host does not let that slide. She hears the labels as warning lights because she knows how fast they stick. In her own case, she says she occupied the same kind of role: the woman made readable through suspicion, sexuality, and manipulation. That makes the interview feel less like spectacle and more like a check on what happens when a person gets flattened into a type. Jens gets pressed on it. The host asks about Elizabeth as a femme fatale, and about the story that turned him into a male puppet slave under her control. She does not hide her discomfort, especially around the language of voice magic, which she says made her inwardly cringe. Other people sound much more certain. The prosecutor, the media, and Martin Sheen are brought in as voices that paint Elizabeth as disturbed, false, and unable to face what happened. The host keeps tugging at the problem underneath that certainty: nobody can simply climb inside Elizabeth's thoughts, especially when those guesses become the basis for judgment. Jens then offers his own counterfactual. If Virginia had only had life imprisonment instead of the death penalty, he says, Elizabeth could only have asked for help avoiding jail, and he would have visited her instead of taking the rap. The point lands quietly. The episode moves from labels to damage, asking how one story about one woman can become part of another person's wrongful imprisonment. By the end, the next suspect is not another person. It is us.

As heard by us

A sharp chapter about labels, coercive pressure, and how character judgments can harden into a story that feels like proof.

The Black Box turns Killing for Love toward the language wrapped around Elizabeth: psychopath, femme fatale, disturbed young woman, the kind of labels that can start to feel like proof if they are repeated often enough.

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Why you'd press play

When you want a true-crime show that interrogates the labels people pin on a suspect.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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