ID's Evil Lives Here: The Killer Speaks Does More Harm Than Good

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Evil Lives Here: The Killer Speaks holds itself up as an altruistic venture. Title cards claim the Investigation Discovery spin-off seeks to "confront a killer" in order to "get answers" for family members searching for the truth about the tragic deaths of their loved ones. The filmmakers belabor this point in interviews with convicted murderers: When a subject becomes uncooperative, a producer tells him she's merely "speaking for" his daughter, who is eager to learn the details of his crime. "I'm just doing what she's asked me to ask you," the producer says. "It's not me wanting to know; it's your daughter."

But can a docuseries told from the perspective of the perpetrator really be considered a genuine humanitarian effort? As a genre, true crime has attempted to move away from this kind of framing, instead preferring to platform victims rather than foreground the criminals and their heinous acts of violence. (Indeed, this is why Ryan Murphy's Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story was criticized by the families of Jeffrey Dahmer's victims and many viewers.) Even ID, which tends to focus on the more sensational aspects of brutal crimes, has acknowledged this shift: Parent series Evil Lives Here, currently in its 14th season, features family members who discuss what it's like to live alongside a killer, any red flags they may have overlooked, and the impact of the murder (or murders) on their lives.

[Editor's Note: This story contains graphic descriptions of violence.]

The franchise's implicit acknowledgement that perpetrators should not be at the center of these stories makes The Killer Speaks all the more retrograde, which is probably why the premiere, "Body in the Barrel," bends over backward to suggest producers are actually helping Michelle Fogt move on. In 1998, Michelle's father Michael Fogt murdered her mother, Martha "Marty" Behymer Perry, and because of her age at the time (she was 14 years old) and the associated trauma, she blocked out much of the period surrounding Martha's death. Now, Michelle wants to know what happened, as she believes it will provide her with "some closure and clarity on the situation," but when she's tried speaking to Michael about the case — and the 2003 murder of his girlfriend Cynthia Pickens, who became a mother figure to Michelle — he's refused to discuss it.

That's where The Killer Speaks comes in. The show's producers, who play an active role in each episode by asking follow-up questions and dictating the direction of interviews, have reached out to Michael on Michelle's behalf in hopes of getting a detailed account of Martha's murder. Michael initially claims he "[doesn't] exactly remember," but after some pushing — "I think you do," chides the producer — he lays out the sequence of events with a chilling remove. "I killed her. I drug her to the bathtub. She was dead for sure. I took her and put her in the drum, put the lid on the drum, put the band on the drum, and bolted it down tight," he says.

The final act also aspires to answer "the one question that still haunts Michelle about her mother's murder ... Why did her father do it?" Michael claims he was in a bike gang at the time, and when he learned "Marty was snitching" to avoid a drug charge, he had no choice but to "take care of it." He adds, "I don't particularly know that I planned on killing her, but I killed her."

But even though Michelle has expressly asked producers to uncover the how and why of Martha's murder, their methods feel exploitative. Early in the episode, Michelle implies that she's avoided watching her father's confession to the police for nearly 20 years; when a laptop is placed in front of her and she's told to press play, Michelle can barely look at the screen as Michael answers graphic questions about Martha's cause of death. Only after Michelle tears up does the interviewer ask if she "regret[s] watching that," as if it was a decision made by Michelle alone.

The Killer Speaks' second episode, "He Said He'd Kill Us All," also begins under the pretense of goodwill. The opening sequence shows Cheri Altemoos reckoning with her complicated feelings about the death of her daughter Elisabeth Bell, who was doused with accelerant and set on fire by her boyfriend Frank Bredt, Jr. (Frank was convicted of murder in 2022, but continues to maintain his innocence). Producers tell Cheri that their goal is to present all the evidence and "show the world that [Frank] did it," but when the grieving mother begins to muddle that narrative by admitting she struggles to "make anybody 100 percent guilty," they quickly step in to shut it down. "Why are you defending him?" a producer asks off-camera. "I want to know why."

Clearly frustrated with the conversation, Cheri gets up and leaves the room, but her microphone remains on. "He's guilty, but my brain can't be 100 percent. I'm so sorry. Goddamn it," she's heard saying. "Because if I think he's not guilty, then my daughter's guilty. F*ck it."

But that interaction, or any references to Cheri's doubt over what happened the night of the fire, are nowhere to be found in the rest of the episode, which details Elisabeth and Frank's volatile relationship and Cheri's immense guilt over not stepping in sooner. Cheri is clear that if viewers take only one thing away from her participation in the docuseries, it's that they don't need "toxic" people like Frank in their lives. "That is the most important thing about this whole interview," she says. "Get rid of the trash — get rid of it! You don't need it, and you can find somebody else or be by yourself, and not be f*cking burned to death."

"He Said He'd Kill Us All" also abandons the suggestion that producers are speaking to Frank "for" Cheri, who clearly believes Frank murdered Elisabeth, even if a small part of her acknowledges that it's impossible to know the precise sequence of events. In fact, Frank's testimony only further enrages Cheri, who preemptively asks for Tylenol to keep her headache at bay. As Frank waves off the ominous threat he made just hours before the fire — a friend testified that Frank told him, "I'll burn her whole f*cking fat family down" — and claims Elisabeth hit him in the head before starting the fire herself, resulting in his severe burns, Cheri gets progressively angrier. "I hate him. I absolutely just hate him to my core," she says. "I don't want him to ever get out. I want him to die in jail — looking in the mirror, and seeing what his face looks like, seeing what his hands and stuff look like, and know how much more she suffer[ed] while she was burning from the inside out."

What purpose does allowing Frank to weave an elaborate tale of his innocence — one that seems less convincing with every new denial or justification — serve? Unlike Michelle Fogt, and despite what the opening sequence would have viewers believe, Cheri doesn't have any lingering questions about Elisabeth's death; although she confesses she never thought Frank could have been capable of something so horrific, she's confident in the evidence and the jury's verdict. Forcing her to relive this experience via Frank's interview only retraumatizes her, all while giving a convicted murderer a platform from which to spew what appear to be lies.

If Frank's testimony reaffirms Cheri's belief that justice has been served, Michelle has the opposite reaction watching Michael's interview back. She says it's "even harder to realize" that her mother's murder was "more deliberate" than she has always believed, and she admits that after going through this difficult, emotional experience, she still doesn't have the "closure" she so desperately wanted. "I feel like [it's] an answer for why, but it's still not good enough to be why," says Michelle.

She's even more horrified to witness her father claim to have committed 20 additional murders. "That's kind of f*cked up to say that you may have killed 20 people, and sit there and laugh about it. It's f*cking disgusting, for one," she says. "Not only throw your life away, but throw that many other people's lives away."

Michelle's honest evaluation of this experience reflects how little healing can actually be achieved within the constraints of Evil Lives Here: The Killer Speaks' format. Producers can claim they're operating on behalf of these family members all they want, but ultimately, giving the microphone to the people who've hurt them benefits no one but the murderers themselves. It's commendable that the show's subjects want to confront their complicated emotions and deep-seated traumas, but in its current form, ID's docuseries seems to be doing more harm than good.

New episodes of Evil Lives Here: The Killer Speaks air Sundays at 9:00 PM ET on Investigation Discovery and stream on Discovery+ and Max.

Claire Spellberg Lustig is the Senior Editor at Primetimer and a scholar of The View. Follow her on Twitter at @c_spellberg.