Evil in
the Archives

Evil in the Archives was built around a simple question: what happens when you tell a true crime story almost entirely through the footage captured as events unfolded?

Rather than relying on dramatic recreations or retrospective narration, we turned to decades of local television news archives, uncovering original reports, interviews, courtroom coverage, and raw field tapes that had not been seen in years, and in some cases, decades. The goal was not simply to revisit a crime, but to reconstruct the story through the eyes of the journalists, investigators, witnesses, and community members who experienced it in real time. By allowing the archive to drive the narrative, each episode preserves the uncertainty, emotion, and urgency that existed before the outcome was known.

The result is a documentary series that feels less like traditional true crime and more like historical storytelling. Every frame is rooted in the community where the events occurred, revealing how a single crime can ripple through families, neighborhoods, and generations. The archive becomes more than source material. It becomes a living record of real people whose lives were changed forever, giving new life to forgotten footage while preserving local history. The series' debut episode, The Murder of Debbie Dorian, earned the 2024-2025 Northern California EMMY Award for Historical/Cultural Long Form Programming.