User reviews

A man and his wife are not getting along because of the wife's jealousy and drinking problems. When the wife disappears, her sister begins a vigorous search involving the local police, state government, and a television crime show. What she finds out stuns the entire community. Good drama with lots of fine performances; based on a true story.

My problem is the inability to discern the real characters and the real sentence for the crime committed. The movie clearly showed Ron RicKman as the killer but I had to search to find his true sentence....he died in prison YAY!! For the crime.

This is obviously a low-budget film but one would presumably watch for the content of this case. They portray only actual facts here without embellishing, the way it might be done today. There are few reviews but it's interesting to see how some call the wife things like 'nagging' or 'jealous' instead of acknowledging that the husband was a narcissist who was constantly gaslighting her -- terms we now find frequently but which were not used back then -- and we now are much more aware of how such victims might exhibit frustration and have difficulty making sense of the things their partner is doing or saying. A couple of reviews seem to think there was no 'evidence', but we now understand that things like the purse and items in the loft; the lack of use of social security or bank cards; the lack of eye-witness sightings; and the odd behavior such as insisting the daughter stay home for the shopping trip and immediately telling her that her mother won't be back are all evidence. Add to that his prior crime and his predatory behavior, and it's easy to see why he was convicted. In today's court system the first set of evidence would be enough to convict without a body - it's happened many times since then. It's sad to realize, however, that most of abusers who are convicted is only after they end up killing the women; most other cases where the woman tries to expose the abuser are shamed and disbelieved like AH, having everyone turned against them and perceiving their psychological anguish as some form of co-abuse or even the instigator. Such a sad situation. Most victims don't see it coming.