Elder Skelter
Season 1 SABC2 (*192) 22:30 Doccie
There is seemingly no age limit when it comes to being a murderer, as revealed in doccie true-life crime series Elder Skelter (2013-now). Each episode has a different narrator but the message is the same: “Model citizens with grey hair and a sweet old smile can be hiding very horrible secrets,” explains Joyce Carpati, narrator of tonight’s episode Unlucky Stiffs.
What drives the elderly to flex their murderous muscles? “There’s no one specific thing,” explains Joyce, who herself is in her 70s. “It’s the same with younger killers – they’re just not good people. They have that instinct in them to do bad things and they believe that they can get away with it because they will never be seen as a suspect.” In Unlucky Stiffs, the episode focusses on Dave and Carol Evans, a married couple who’ve divorced each other three times already, married four times and divorce #4 is on the cards. “They can’t live with each other, but they can’t live without each other either,” says the host, not giving away who ends up bludgeoned to death on the living room floor.
For the show, the producers scour the US courts in search of murder cases that specifically involves people over the age of 60. “There’s absolutely no telling if the sweet old lady next door is chopping up body parts at night or if the elderly man walking his dog has a loaded weapon waiting to fire,” says Joyce, adding that she wasn’t surprised by any of the cases. “If you’re a bad person, you’re a bad person. There is no reason for a killer to hang up their boots because they’re a little greyer. They normally kill because they want to, not because they have to.”