Hot Picks: The Flight Attendant Murders

“Buyers like true-crime shortrun series to have a bit of cut through. The bar is higher now. You can’t just make a normal whodunnit,” says Holly Cowdery, head of sales at BossaNova Media, which is launching The Flight Attendant Murders at Mipcom.

This docuseries re-examines the murders of four Texas flight attendants in the 1970s and 1980s, who were all employed by the same airline and whose killings share eerie similarities. Despite Jonathan Reed, a convicted rapist, being found guilty in 1979 of the initial murder and being held on death row for decades, three further murders occurred during his imprisonment.

Produced and directed by Jasleen Kaur Sethi (Death In Bollywood) for UK indie Flicker Productions, which is behind Channel 5 true-crime doc Wayne Couzens: Killer In Plain Sight, the series reassesses the evidence available and traces the timeline of each case to ask if they are individual crimes or could potentially be linked.

“The 1970s and 1980s was a period that seemed like a very liberating time for women and being a flight attendant was the epitome of the idea that women were finally getting their freedom,” Cowdery says.

“At the same time, serial killers were on the loose in America, travelling around, living in different apartments and preying on women. Our story is a collision of these two events retold by placing both in the context of the era’s attitude to women.”

Over four hour-long episodes, Kaur Sethi re-evaluates the evidence and assesses different perspectives on Reed’s innocence or guilt in interviews with, among others, immediate family and best friends of the victims, the original prosecution and defence attorneys, the Dallas police officer who arrested Reed, a journalist who attended the murder trial, and a crime scene investigator.

Its coup is its extensive interviews with Reed – now 71, and still incarcerated in a Texas maximum security prison – who is next eligible for parole in 2025.

 “It was a shockingly sexist era and The Flight Attendant Murders exposes this by looking at the attitudes and morals of ’70s society, which still have an undercurrent today”

It also uses dramatic reconstruction, contemporary court footage and archive TV ads to paint a picture of how women were objectified in the media. This includes a commercial for an airline company in which the hostess removes articles of her clothing as she travels from economy to business class.

“Air hostesses had to have the exact same measurements for some airlines,” says Cowdery. “It was a shockingly sexist era and The Flight Attendant Murders exposes this by looking at the attitudes and morals of ’70s society, which still have an undercurrent today.”

She adds: “We know it will resonate with buyers. It’s about a serial killer, set in the US, amid the so-called glamour of airlines. It’s a potentially jaw-dropping miscarriage of justice with lots of solid eyewitness contributors, plus Flicker as producer.”

Financed by AMC Networks streamer Sundance Now in the US (where it debuted in September) and Channel 4, with release scheduled for this autumn, BossaNova has already sold the title to Foxtel in Australia and into the Nordics.