Some news items, which go almost unnoticed in the media, nevertheless have the makings of real detective thrillers. Producer Guillaume Lespérance, who has been introduced to true crime stories in recent years with The last night, knows how to smell them. This time, it’s in a column by Patrick Lagacé, signed in Press in 2010, that he found material to produce the television series The persuit, which will soon be showing on ICI Télé.
The persuitis the story of a serial criminal armed to the teeth who broke into residences and who terrorized in 2006 and 2009 various neighborhoods in the west of the island, leaving in his wake at least one dead and several wounded. The man, who acts coldly, with astonishing calm, prefers to enter the houses when the residents are there. Thus he can, by threatening his victims with his weapon, take them to the ATM to seek more funds.
At the time, the criminal was “a ghost”, recalls Patrick Lagacé. We didn’t know his name. He also completely escaped the police in the middle of an intervention in which he had taken a child hostage.
“For years I would raise Patrick, until there was an arrest and a trial. But it is really there, in a news item, that this series was born, ”Guillaume Lespérance stressed to journalists on Wednesday.
Masked up to the eyes, the criminal is difficult to recognize, even by his victims. And he leaves no trace behind, except, over the years, a strand of wool pulled from one of his gloves and a ladder left at the scene of the hostage-taking. Ultimately, the man, Septimus Neverson, was arrested in 2015 in Trinidad and Tobago. He was ultimately taken to court and sentenced to life in prison, in a case he recently appealed.
Good and not so good days
In the docuseries, journalist Patrick Lagacé meets both victims and police, as well as the informant who ultimately helped uncover the identity of the criminal.
On screen, the victims’ point of view is exposed at length. “We asked the victims to tell the most traumatic event of their life,” said director André St-Pierre on Wednesday, who says he must have been very delicate in the process. But for Guillaume Lespérance, The persuit tells the story of a “police success”, even as victims continued to pile up during the long and frustrating investigation. A good thriller, he believes, is built on the failures of the police.
Here, their work is precisely analyzed. “The police gave us privileged access to investigators and to the protagonists of this adventure”, indicates Patrick Lagacé.
And these police officers do not always appear there in their best light. The first episode of the series tells how two policewomen let the criminal escape when he was practically within reach. But the first three episodes also show that a complete genetic portrait can be found in a lost strand of wool.
We are promised that the last two episodes, which are not yet ready, paint a more complete portrait of the criminal, whose motives and psychological profile are difficult to grasp, which also makes police work complex, and the series , panting.