Sandra Harris Writes

  LOVE RATS: THE RISE AND RISE OF ROMANCE FRAUD. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. © I’ve been watching a documentary show on Netflix recently called LOVE RATS, narrated by former EastEnders actress Daniela Denby-Ashe. It features some of the most unbelievable footage I’ve ever seen of real people who’ve suffered through what we now call ‘romance fraud.’ Though it’s only recently that we’ve found a name for it, it’s something that’s probably existed since the dawn of time. The strange thing is that nearly all of the victims- mostly female, but one or two men as well- have such exactly similar stories to tell that it’s like there’s an actual template for this kind of crime. The victims are often middle-aged women who’ve been widowed or they’ve just come out of a long marriage. They may have married when very young and have therefore almost no experience of dating in the modern era. They decide they’re ready to meet someone again and they go to online dating sites like Tinder or Plent...

  THE PEOPLE VS. OJ SIMPSON: AMERICAN CRIME STORY. (2016) BASED ON JEFFREY TOOBIN’S 1997 BOOK, THE RUN OF HIS LIFE: THE PEOPLE VS. OJ SIMPSON. STARRING CUBA GOODING JR., DAVID SCHWIMMER, JOHN TRAVOLTA, NATHAN LANE, SARAH PAULSON, STERLING K. BROWN, KENNETH CHOI AND COURTNEY B. VANCE. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. © I absolutely loved this gripping ten-episode series, only on Netflix until February 28 th , 2022, which forms the first season of true crime anthology series, AMERICAN CRIME STORY. The writing is brilliant, the acting top-notch and the pacing wonderful. The series is based on the real-life murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman by acclaimed NFL (football) player and sometimes-actor, Orenthal James Simpson, better known to the public as OJ ‘The Juice’ Simpson. OJ was Nicole’s ex-husband, with whom he had two children, Sydney and Justin, and Ronald Goldman was Nicole's then boyfriend. After a widely televised low-speed car chase through Los Angeles (‘The J...

THE CONFESSION KILLER. (2019) DIRECTED BY ROBERT KEENER AND TAKI OLDHAM. ‘STARRING’ HENRY LEE LUCAS. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. © This is another terrific true crime Netflix documentary, but your mind will probably boggle, like mine did, at some of the events contained therein. Henry Lee Lucas (1936-2001) was a convicted American murderer, born in Virginia to a prostitute mother and an alcoholic father. Not exactly a promising beginning. His mother, in particular, seems to have abused him physically, forced him to watch her having sex with clients and made him dress as a girl during his childhood. When he was ten, he lost an eye after a fight with his brother. His childhood seems to have been a really bad one. In 1960, Lucas went to jail for killing his mother. Shades of Norman Bates and Ed Gein, methinks. Lucas was released after only ten years due to prison overcrowding. In 1983, he confessed to the murders of an elderly woman for whom he’d been doing some work, and a teenage g...