Black British Girl Talks Crime

Black British Girl Talks Crime retells true crime cases one at a time, starting from the first known facts and moving forward in order. The spoken introduction casts a wider net, promising budgeting tips, home ownership advice and talk about Black life in Britain alongside crime. The episodes in this recent run, though, are all labelled true crime. The cases cross the Atlantic. One follows Alexis Patterson, a seven-year-old who went missing in Milwaukee in May 2002 after being walked to school; students had reported a red SUV with tinted windows idling near the school, a sighting police were never able to link to her. Another returns to Louise Woodward, who was 18 and working as an au pair in 1997, prompted by a new documentary. That episode weighs the medical evidence presented at trial and the scrutiny of the three days of training the au pair agency gave her. The Duke lacrosse episode tracks the 2006 party in Durham, North Carolina, the indictments that followed, and accusations that the district attorney, then running for election, pushed the case to win over Black voters. Bryan Pata's episode starts with his family. His mother emigrated from Haiti and largely raised nine children on her own, and he was the youngest, a University of Miami football player with a love of cars. From there it moves to the investigation, where cell phone records and an eyewitness photo line-up pointed toward a man named Rashawn. The Mitrice Richardson episode begins with her birth in Covina, California, and her upbringing in Los Angeles, and its title asks whether the police or someone else was responsible for her death. The host describes the London episode, on the Broadwater Farm riots and the deaths of PC Keith Blakelock and Cynthia Jarrett, as a long-winded story with many undercurrents. Race is part of several of these records, and the show does not step around it. The delivery is conversational. Mostly the host narrates, but reactions break through: when a mother is told to wait a couple of hours before reporting her daughter missing, the host says it sounds like she was being fobbed off. Restraint shows up too. Describing how PC Blakelock was surrounded and killed, the host chooses to summarise rather than dwell, to cause as little harm as possible to those listening. The host also says why a case was picked, whether it was a new documentary or a case that demanded coverage the moment the host came across it. Every episode ends the same way, with a spoken list of sources. Those run from Wikipedia, Grazia and the Daily Mail to ESPN, Vanity Fair, the Los Angeles Times, Reddit and Martin Loney's journal article 'Imagery and Reality in the Broadwater Farm Riot'. Pictures and further material are posted on Instagram. What the show offers is the chronology laid out plainly, with the paper trail named.