TV Reviews : ‘Monsters’: ‘Frontline’ Succumbs to Sweeps

Lest you think that “Front-line,� TV documentary’s Parnassus, is above any concerns over ratings, a glance at its “Monsters Among Us� (tonight at 9 on KCET Channel 28 and KPBS Channel 15; 8:30 on KVCR Channel 24; Wednesday at 9 p.m. on KOCE Channel 50) will wipe away any illusions.

Reporter Al Austin’s investigation into the whys and wherefores of the rise in child sex crimes neatly covers two agendas: “Frontline’s� consistent effort to connect personal narratives with larger political and social issues; PBS’ acute awareness that “Frontline� reports on such arcana as budget battles or bank scandals won’t cut it during sweeps time.

Austin’s is more of a mind hunt than a manhunt, with his starting point the multiple grisly child murders by Westley Allan Dodd. Dodd’s so-called soullessness is the soul of the report, and why it eventually loses its way.

Austin has clearly stumbled upon a remarkable story--not for the lurid awfulness of Dodd’s acts, but for the seemingly unlimited ways in which the judicial system let Dodd off the hook. Despite several confessions (suggesting a recognition of good and bad?), Oregon and Washington judges did not deem Dodd a severe-enough threat to slap him with a longer prison term. By his own account, Dodd’s obsessions with sex, death and children deepened with time, making his autumn, 1989, murders of three Richland, Wash., children the following out of some dark, inner script.

But who--or what--is writing this script? As he explores the various methods Washington state is contending with its rising sex criminal population, Austin finds that there is no pattern of behavior, no one set of clues embedded in the criminal’s upbringing, to indicate who is a real social threat and who is not. Having dropped his story on the court system’s scandalous incompetence, Austin’s investigation crashes on the shoals of murky psychology, where therapists and researchers explore all sorts of unlikely therapies.

Washington’s other means of dealing with the problem is its new sexual predator’s law, keeping offenders behind bars until they prove that they’re no longer a threat. Austin indicates that such proof, despite the array of therapies, isn’t definitive: Can we know, for instance, that the “cured� are unjustly incarcerated while the “uncured� may be unleashed on an unsuspecting world of women and children? You have to wonder, though, if a thorough medical analysis of a man like Dodd, without a personal history of having been abused, might not reveal some innate biological flaw. “Monsters Among Us� leaves us guessing about this, and too much else.