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Cashing in on the popularity of true crime tales

by Joe Tarr

Celeste Beard had everything she wanted, or so it seemed. After an early failed marriage, Beard married a retired TV station owner, an elderly millionaire who showered his young bride with gifts. Celeste spent a lot of her husband’s money herself, accumulating a few hundred thousand in shopping bills. Steven Beard even adopted Celeste’s twin daughters.

Early one morning in October 1999, Steven Beard dialed 9-1-1 and said, “My guts just jumped out of my stomach.”

It was the beginning of the end of Celeste’s fairy-tale life. Her 72-year-old husband wouldn’t die until a few months later, but the sordid details of the case were splashed across the front pages and on TV screens.

People would learn the Beards’ lives weren’t so idyllic. Celeste regularly drugged her husband to knock him out early in the evening. He demanded a weekly session of oral sex. There was a failed attempt to cook up botulism to poison Beard, a lesbian lover framed for the killing, and several other affairs.

If you want to know the sleazy details—or those of similar cases—tune into Snapped, a new cable TV show produced by Knoxville’s Jupiter Entertainment. The first two episodes premiere on the Oxygen cable channel Friday, Aug. 6, at 9 p.m., with new premieres to come every week.

The local production company is best known for its phenomenally successful show City Confidential, which is now in its eighth year on A&E. Snapped is narrated by Laura San Giacomo, the actress who was nominated for a Golden Globe award for Just Shoot Me and played the floozy bartender in the movie sex, lies and videotape.

The stereotype that women aren’t violent is one the show’s producers try to play off of and poke through.

“There’s this whole myth that women don’t kill or aren’t violent. I really like the show because it shows women are capable of cruel acts,” says Helen Smith, a forensic psychologist who lives in Knoxville and is regularly featured on the show.

The demand for true crime programs has yet to peak, and Jupiter has capitalized on their popularity with City Confidential, which stands as probably the best of the bunch, earning raves from critics around the country.

In a nod to Jupiter’s hometown, an upcoming episode of City Confidential will showcase Knoxville and the attempted murder of Rob Whedbee. He was attacked in his home here by Oak Ridger reporter Michael Frazer, who was having an affair with Whedbee’s wife, Lisa. Frazer attacked Whedbee with a knife. While the two struggled, Whedbee called to his wife for help. She came wielding a bat, but came to the aid of Frazer instead. Whedbee wrestled the bat from his wife and fled, with cuts and wounds.

Wives’s attacking their husbands or lovers is the focus of Snapped.

In developing the show for Oxygen—a cable network that tries to target young, hip women—they were looking to put a twist on the genre.

“How do you make it different from what’s out there?” Stephen Land, Jupiter’s owner and the show’s executive producer, says of the challenge. “Plus we don’t want to compete with our own shows.”

Since women make up a large percentage of the audience for true crime shows, Jupiter tried to tailor the series toward them by looking at why they’re drawn toward gruesome crimes.

“While men gravitate toward the act itself—the crime—women gravitate toward the why, the psychology of it,” Land says.

They decided to focus on women who live a seeming fantasy life but end up throwing it away by killing—or attempting to kill—their lovers or spouses. The show shuns any child-killing cases.

“The challenge was to create a true crime show that doesn’t play to the stereotypes about women. The women aren’t victims, they’re actors, they’re bad guys,” says Zak Weisfeld, the show’s supervising producer (and former Metro Pulse contributor).

“These are women who commit crimes like men. They plot, and they scheme,” Weisfeld says. “We’re trying to pick women who aren’t necessarily rich, but normal, middle-class women who choose to do something heinous. There are no crack addicts.”

The formula for the half-hour program is something like this: In Act 1, the dream life is described; in Act 2 the crime is committed and the investigation reveals the seedy secrets behind the dream; in Act 3 we review the trial and resolution of the case.

Female killers rarely kill strangers, a unique trait that makes for easy drama and entertainment in TV-land. “Women almost never kill people they don’t know. And murder—we’re not the first to find out—is a nice thing to structure a story around. Shakespeare was big on it,” says Weisfeld. He doesn’t hazard a guess as to why female murderers tend to kill those closest to them.

Smith, who specializes in female and youth violence, says killings by women are usually emotional.

“Women are affective killers. That’s emotional killing,” Smith says. She gives the example, covered in a Snapped episode, of Susan Wright, who murdered her husband by stabbing him 193 times. At one point, she stopped the stabbing to put her son to bed, and then returned to stab the body some more. An abused wife, she buried his body in the hole her husband was digging in their yard to build a fountain. “It was sort of an ironic thing to do, sort of a statement—‘How dare you abuse me and make our house look good on the outside,’” Smith says.

In another case dentist Clara Harris ran over her husband in a parking lot after she found out he’d been cheating on her. Their child was in the rear seat. “She tried to say she accidentally hit him, but she was so angry, she just hit the gas and ran him down and killed him,” Smith says.

Cases like these suggest why women are drawn to the shows, Smith says. “A lot of women identified with [Harris] and thought she should go free. It’s sort of a voyeuristic way to sublimate some other anger.

“There are many women who have a tremendous amount of anger, who are fearful of it and don’t understand how to cope and deal with it,” Smith adds.

Other viewers are fascinated because the actions of the women profiled run counter to female stereotypes. “People are intrigued by these shows because they show women as anti-social. It’s terrifying to people because women are supposed to be nurturing and all of a sudden they turn on you,” she says. “I think people might be having a hard time figuring out where these women are coming from. Our society has a really hard time dealing with violence and anger in women.”

But some women do kill, Smith says. About 10 to 15 percent of murders are committed by women. And more than half of all child murders are committed by women.

“Women tend to kill indirectly. They’re twice as likely as men to hire a hitman. Some of these killings are not marked down as a woman killing a man [because they hire someone],” Smith says.

“Women used to kill more in the ’70s. I think that’s changed because women don’t feel as trapped in marriage as they used to.”

Oxygen has contracted for 13 episodes of Snapped. The channel airs edgy programs geared toward younger women—Girls Behaving Badly, a hidden camera prank show, Talk Sex with Sue Johanson, and Absolutely Famous, a comedy about hard-drinking, older British women. Land says the series tested extremely well, and he expects it to get picked up for more seasons.

Much of the production work for Snapped is done in Knoxville, although some of it has to be farmed out to Los Angeles and New York. “As we’ve grown, the labor market here has topped out,” Land says.

Jupiter has also produced shows for the History Channel, A&E, the Discovery Channel, Court TV, Nickelodeon and TNN, among others. Land says the true crime genre will continue to be a big part of Jupiter’s business, but not all of it.

“There seems to be no end, unfortunately, in the subject matter and no end in the appetite of viewers,” Land says. “Creatively we don’t want to just do this—it’s important to stretch. We’d be incredibly bored if that’s all we did.”

July 29, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 31 © 2004 Metro Pulse