ABC News Studios and Hulu are continuing their true crime push with a new docuseries looking at new developments in a decades-old case. In 1994, 19-year-old Melissa Witt went missing from an Arkansas bowling alley. After six weeks of a community-wide search effort, Melissa’s body was found deep in the Ozark National Forest, 50 miles from where she disappeared.
Thirty years later, new developments in the case are being examined in the new docuseries, At Witt’s End – The Hunt for a Killer. Much of the story is framed through the eyes of a local reporter, Charlene Shirk, who broke the story of Melissa’s disappearance in 1994. As is sadly too often the case, the police didn’t take the case seriously enough until it was too late, leaving much of the detective work up to reporters. The investigations from 1994 are interspersed with new developments from a team working on the cold case in recent years.
The docuseries takes a slow approach to telling its story, with the first few minutes of the openjing episode being a slow series of shots recreating some Melissa’s last known moves, in quite the cinematic style. This becomes immediately obvious when you realize the series is co-produced by Ridley Scott’s Scott Free Production, with the acclaimed director (Alien, Blade Runner) serving as an executive producer. The style continues on throughout the episodes, with the discovery of Melissa’s body tastefully being handled at the beginning of the second episode.
Things take an interesting turn towards the end of the first episode, as detectives working on a different case in the same area, receive a tip that actually ends up being about Melissa. The aforementioned case was already covered by the same team in last year’s Still Missing Morgan. The second episode tells the stories of some other murders in the area, which ended up being attributed to a local serial killer. The detectives pursue the lead and peel back the truth about his reign of terror through a small-town Arkansas community before and after Melissa went missing. I was definitely left intrigued by just what modern investigators found, possibly connecting the serial killer to Melissa’s case, and I’m intrigued to see what else is discovered in the final two episodes.
At Witt’s End – The Hunt for a Killer begins streaming exclusively on Hulu on Tuesday, August 6th.