On the evening of December 6, 2014, in the small town of Courtland, Mississippi (population just over 500), Jessica Chambers (19) was inside a car when it was doused in accelerant and set on fire. Despite having third-degree burns to 93% of her body, she was lucid enough to tell multiple first-responders that "Eric" had set her on fire. But who was Eric? Why did he do this? Why would anyone kill someone in this manner? Jessica died in the early morning hours of December 7, but her death was only the prologue to a story which would rip a town apart, destroy two families, expose both investigative and prosecutorial ineptitude, and highlight a dark and dangerous side of social media.
Inspired by Katie J.M. Baker's June 2015 BuzzFeed article, "Troll Detective" and directed by Joe Berlinger, Unspeakable Crime: The Killing of Jessica Chambers aired on Oxygen in North America and Sky Crime in the UK and Ireland. Originally a five-part series (the feature-length first episode was split in two for international markets), an additional episode was hastily added when the story took an unexpected turn in the middle of the broadcast. Despite its title, however, Unspeakable Crime isn't really a deep dive into why Jessica was killed. Rather, it's a courtroom drama, following the trial of the man who law enforcement believes lit the match - Quinton Tellis (26 at the time). It's a solid enough overview of the case, although some of the more interesting revelations are found, strangely enough, only in the accompanying podcast of the same name. A tad repetitive and not especially interesting from an aesthetic point of view, the show nevertheless does a good job of laying out the facts and illustrating just how many lives this horrific crime impacted, and how profoundly it impacted them.
Hosted by Beth Karas, Unspeakable Crime features an impressive cross-section of people involved with the case, giving us multiple perspectives, including those of both the Chambers and the Tellis families. One of the main themes is the pernicious effects of social media. Within days of her death, without a shred of evidence, some amateur sleuths were suggesting Jessica's father had killed her because he disapproved of miscegenation, and at the time of her death, she was dating an African-American. Others focused their ire on her mother's perceived lack of parenting skills. When Tellis was accused of the crime, his family became the target for hatred and harassment. Some even turned on Jessica herself when it emerged she smoked and sold weed, with some speculating that her death may have been gang-related. In an especially lucid example of the toxicity of online herd mentality, Ali Alsanai, the clerk at the local store where Jessica was last seen before the fire, was forced to leave Panola County when he received death threats after right-wing commentators began to accuse him of the murder. Their evidence? He's of Middle-Eastern descent.
Within the trial, the show's main focus is the same thing that Tellis's defence team focused on - the fact that Jessica said that "Eric" (or "Derrick") had set her on fire. This was the biggest hurdle that the prosecution had to overcome; by suggesting that Tellis was the murderer, it meant that they had to discount the testimony of eight first-responders, all of whom heard her say "Eric" or "Derrick". Prosecutors make the case that the proliferation of the name was a kind of inverted Chinese whisper - one first-responder thought they heard something that sounded like "Eric", and suddenly eight people claimed to have heard it. But as Karas points out, when eight of your own witnesses testify that a murder victim gave up the name of her killer, and it isn't the name of the guy on trial, you've got a serious problem.
With that in mind, the show spends a lot of time illustrating the often gaping holes in the prosecution's case and the inadequacies of the police investigation. There's the second-in-command of the investigation, for example, who claims he doesn't know how long it takes to get from his home to work - a journey he's made twice a day for 22 years. The show is also critical of how the police processed the crime scene, arguing that dogs should have been used to search for ignitable liquids, fire-trained CSI officers should have been called in, the car should have been left at the scene for longer, the surrounding woods should have been searched that night, and Jessica should have been examined for signs of sexual assault.
A big area of criticism concerns DNA found on Jessica's car keys. Although the prosecution says on multiple occasions that Tellis's DNA is on the keys, during cross-examination, their own DNA expert, Catherine Rogers, explains that this isn't entirely accurate. In actuality, Rogers couldn't exclude the possibility that Tellis's DNA was present. Which is, of course, a very different thing than saying his DNA is on them. Karas interviews DNA expert Greg Hampikian about this, and he explains that Rogers used a Y-STR test, which didn't exclude Tellis, when a more prescise autosomal STR test (which did) should have been presented in court; "when you have better information, you defer to the better information, and in this case, the better information is the autosomal STR exclusion, not the Y-STR inclusion - in this case, Tellis was excluded by the autosomal test."
The other major area critiqued by the show is the cellphone data that the prosecution argued proves Tellis and Jessica were in the same place at the same time right before she was set on fire. In short, it doesn't. At all. The investigation into the cellphone data was led by Paul Rowlett, an Intelligence Specialist with the Department of Justice. However, according to telecommunication expert Ben Levitan, "if law enforcement had come to me, and said "can you analyse the cell phone data and tell us were these guys together", I would have said "you're shifting the data to make the evidence for your theory. This is not your guy"...for the most part, they were not together, period. Based on science, based on the cellphone data we objectively looked at, what Rowlett said is not true. I cannot put Quinton Tellis in an area smaller than 14 square miles. That's what the data shows. That it was presented to the jury as "irrefutable evidence" that Tellis was with Jessica is completely false."
So, much like the DNA, not only does the evidence not confirm Tellis's guilt, it actually suggests his innocence. Strangely, however, Tellis defence team don't call a single witness, so there's no one to refute or even challenge Rogers and Rowlett's testimonies. This is something the show skims by, disappointingly letting the team off the hook, which is strange when one considers the length the show goes to probe and present the evidence.
The show also looks at some interesting side-issues, albeit fairly superficially - like Tellis telling police that a registered sex-offender named Derrick Holmes was stalking Jessica, or Jessica telling her mother just days before she died that there were rumours going around that she was working as a snitch, or the mysterious black male who was present at the crime scene. These issues are all glossed over very quickly. Some other criticisms I'd have would include how aesthetically bland the show is and its tendency towards repetition, especially from episode to episode, as each episode tends to repeat material from the previous one. Additionally, too much valuable information is covered exclusively in the podcast.
Unspeakable Crime: The Killing of Jessica Chambers isn't so much about the savage murder itself as it is about the reverberations of that murder - race relations compromised, a town torn apart, families destroyed. And problems notwithstanding, this is a decent overview of the subject.
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