<em>Where the Crawdads Sing</em> Author Wanted for Questioning in Murder
Updated on Monday, July 18, 2022, at 6:18 p.m. ET
On March 30, 1996, the ABC news-magazine show Turning Point featured a documentary about a pair of American conservationists titled “Deadly Game: The Mark and Delia Owens Story.” The show’s co-anchor Diane Sawyer introduced the broadcast this way: “They went halfway around the world to follow a dream. An idealistic American couple—young, in love. But a strange place and time would test that love.”
The “strange place” was the south-central African nation of Zambia, a former British colony once known as Northern Rhodesia, and the documentary is in many ways a typical white-savior story, an emotion-saturated tale of two telegenic Americans on a mission to save elephants from poachers and corrupt African officials. What is most notable about the documentary, though, is that it is also—and I write this without exaggeration—a snuff film.
ABC producers included in this documentary the filmed murder of an alleged poacher, executed while lying collapsed on the ground after having already been shot. The victim is not identified by the story’s narrator, the journalist Meredith Vieira. Nor is the identity of the person or persons who fired the fatal shots off-camera disclosed. There is little in the video to suggest that the person killed was a poacher, and indeed, the ABC script refers to the victim as a “trespasser,” though it is also unclear where this trespassing might have taken place.
I missed this episode when it was first aired, but received than .
