Shadow of the Assassin

While the major failing of this investigation into the world of the assassin is its reliance on "criminal profilers"--the same legion of experts who were sure that 2002's notorious D.C. area sniper was a lone white man when in fact the perp was neither--the individual vignettes are nevertheless riveting. After a table-setting bit about Gavrilo Princip and friends (who lit the fuse that started WWI with the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo), the program settles into profiles of the likes of Sirhan Sirhan and Byron De La Beckwith, among others. Details about Sirhan's paranoid state include a discussion of his notebooks (“RFK must die, RFK must die, RFK must die…”) and his fascination with the Rosicrucian Order, rather an unlikely fixation for an avowed Palestinian nationalist and defender of Islam. But it's the examination of De La Beckwith's paranoid existence that sets this program apart; his killing of Medgar Evers triggered an age of assassination that begat successful or unsuccessful hits on Malcolm X, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Jr., George Wallace, Gerald Ford, and others. Speaking of Ford, one of his would-be assassins, Squeaky Fromme, is also limned here, and there's nothing quite like an interlude of twisted Manson-worshipper meanderings to invoke the darker, violent underside of the ‘60s. Offering an absorbing look at a group of genuinely scary malefactors, this psychological portrait of assassins is recommended. Aud: C, P. (M. Tribby)