Season 1 – The Devil You Know

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Matt R 02/05/2024 Excellent docuseries. I really hope it gets made into a feature length movie or limited series. You could really cast some crazy parts. See more Mikelle C 04/14/2023 First, some of these reviews exemplify the very problem this series sheds light on: societal apathy. If desperate people have succumbed to addiction, then they're druggie nobodies. Never mind that they used drugs during a finite phase of their lives. Maybe some viewers prefers to focus on the sensationalist crimes, but that's only part of the story. The show does its best work when raising broader questions. Could these murders have been prevented? What if the American health care system weren't so tied to our jobs and money? What if the murderer had gotten consistent help since he was first diagnosed? What if police departments got better, more in-depth training and more resources? What if women, especially WOCs, weren't quickly dismissed when delivering important information? The show explores all of this, and details the sensationalist crimes of a mentally ill, substance abusing murderer who engaged in animal sacrifice and allowed his houseguests to poop on his mother's floors. It explores the lives of his friends and his victims' families with insight and empathy. And in my book, those druggie nobodies were compelling and sympathetic subjects. See more stephen c @Bertaut 06/24/2020 A powerful examination of mental illness, murder, a broken judicial system, a sensationalist media, and the rotten, apathetic core of white picket fence America (Thoughts on the first season) In Clemmons, North Carolina, Pazuzu Illah Algarad (born John Alexander Lawson) is a mentally-ill young man who worships Satan, sacrifices animals, and claims he can control the weather. And he murdered at least three people. Although The Devil You Know, directed for Vice by Patricia Gillespie, is an excellent overview of the Pazuzu Algarad case, its real focus is the efforts of local journalist Chad Nance to get beyond the sensationalist media headlines of cannibalism and witchcraft, and get to the issues which gave rise to someone like Pazuzu. Through Nance, the show branches off to examine issues such as addiction, law enforcement, societal apathy, and directionless youth. For Nance, Pazuzu's story isn't about Satanism or animal sacrifices – it's about a broken mental healthcare system that allowed an ill young man to fall through the cracks, it's about an indifferent law enforcement agency that allowed him to act without repercussions for years, it's about the tragedy of one of his victims, Josh Wetzler, and the concomitant pain of Wetzler's wife, Stacey Carter. In this sense, the first episode, "There's a Satanist in the Suburbs", goes into Wetzler's background to a far greater degree than Pazuzu's, which is unexpected – how many documentaries dealing with murder spend more time telling us about a victim than about the killer? A major theme is addiction, with the show being remarkably open about the heroin usage of Nate and his girlfriend Jenna (two of Pazuzu's followers), showing them openly shooting up on-camera. Indeed, directionless youth, in general, is an important theme, as it was this kind of societal alienation that brought so many impressionable young people into Pazuzu's circle. This theme is also touched on in relation to Matt Flowers, an Iraqi War vet and John Lawson's friend before he became Pazuzu, and who was pivotal in Pazuzu's arrest in 2014. What's really extraordinary about how the show presents this part of the story is how guilt-ridden Flowers is at turning Pazuzu in. That he turned on his best friend haunts him deeply, and the heartbreaking self-destructive behaviour with which we see him engage in the fourth episode, "Another Dead Boy", is difficult to watch. It's in the fourth and fifth episode that the show really steps outside the mould of multi-episode crime documentaries and becomes something else – an examination of despair, an unflinching look at the dark underbelly of suburbia. And it's within this general theme where we find the darkest and most heartbreaking moment. During the fourth episode, Nance reveals that his son has started to mess around with drugs, and there's a scene where he describes working late one night when he looked up and saw his son in the doorway – sweating, pale, shaking, his eyes bloodshot. Nance describes, or tries to describe, the emotion of seeing this person who is his son, but who isn't his son. It's his son's body, but it's not his son's soul. It's deeply upsetting and thought-provoking, and it's not somewhere I was expecting to end up with a documentary about a murderer. So hats off to the filmmakers for having the courage to go that far and yet never for one second have it feel manipulative or irrelevant. See more 02/04/2020 Mess of a documentary. Wandering dialogue, repetitious, unreliable witnesses, few facts or insights. See more 01/07/2020 This is a awesome story, hard to believe this could happen in this country. See more 10/09/2019 By turns horrific and empathetic, this series exposes the senseless depravity of a misfit kid whose self-destructive urges manifested into ugly deeds against other disaffected people in a suburban community. It's a good argument for gun purchase background checks and mental health care for people in distress. See more Read all reviews

The Devil You Know — Season 1

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