Content warning: sexual assault, murder, child murder.
On Friday, October 10, New York State Senator Lea Webb hosted a screening of Murder Has Two Faces at Cinemapolis. She was joined by Lisa Cortés, the Emmy-award-winning director and producer of the series. Cortés’s previous credits include Little Richard: I Am Everything, a deep dive into the Black and queer roots of rock and roll; The Space Race, which chronicles the lives of the first Black astronauts; and Precious, in which the eponymous main character attempts to turn her life around after a childhood riddled with abuse.
Narrated by Good Morning America co-anchor Robin Roberts, the three-part documentary is a compelling comparison of cases of white women and those of women of color—how similar their stories are, and yet, how inconsistent media and law enforcement responses were. Above all, the series begs the question: why aren’t these women getting the justice they deserve?
The event began with remarks from Kate Donohue, the Executive Director of Cinemapolis. “One of the things that [film] is capable of,” Donohue reflected, “is bringing voices and stories that have historically been kept on the margins […] to the center of the conversation and of our attention.” She praised Cortés’s work on the documentary, citing its importance as one puzzle piece within the larger issue.
Senator Webb echoed this statement, commending Cortés for the documentary and her activism. In 2023, Senator Webb worked with Cortés on legislation to establish the statewide Missing BIPOC Women and Girls Task Force, a nine-person committee dedicated to addressing gaps in the care of missing and murdered women of color’s cases. She called the victimization of women of color a “national epidemic” and stated that “New York is no exception” to the crisis.
The event screened episode three of the series, titled “Good Guys Gone Bad.” As the title suggests, the episode compared the cases of two “unlikely” serial killers. One was the infamous “Craigslist Killer” Philip Markoff, who committed a murder and two armed robberies after meeting his victims on Craigslist; the other was the lesser-known “Tagged Killer” Khalil Wheeler-Weaver, who murdered three young Black women (Robin West, age nineteen; Sarah Butler, age twenty; and Joanne Browne, age thirty-three), assaulted a fourth (Tiffany Taylor), and has been charged with another murder (Mawa Doumbia, age fifteen). Guided by the testimony of Taylor, the only known survivor, and West’s father, Leroy West, the episode weaved a compelling narrative about the biases of responding officers, the failure of the justice system, and the determination of strong communities in the face of police misconduct.
Episode one of the series compared the well-known case of Laci Peterson, a pregnant woman missing from the San Francisco area in late 2002, and the lesser-known one of Evelyn Hernandez, an El Salvadorian woman who, eight months into her second pregnancy, went missing from San Francisco with her young son just months before Peterson’s case hit the news. Episode two told the story of Joyce Chiang, a Taiwanese-American attorney living in Washington, D.C. before her murder in 1999; her story closely mirrored that of Chandra Levy, an intern in D.C. who was murdered two years later.
In a brief talkback after the screening, Cortés emphasized that she wanted this documentary to be different from the “victim porn” that is mainstream true crime. Instead of leaning into tropes and goriness, she asserted, she crafted the series in a way that “centered in the humanity and stories of the victims of their families” and allowed for them to be used as a launchpad for conversation. Cortés expressed hope that the film would allow audiences to, above all, regain our “empathy gene” and show compassion for the victims and the many lives touched by violence.