Ashley Steiner is a real fan of crime. She also has a place in the front row of two real crime stories in her own family.
Her father is a kidnapping victim of the two-part television movie Steven Steiner, I Know My First Name Is Steven, which aired in 1989. Her uncle is Carrie Steiner, the serial killer who is currently on the run. on the death penalty for the Yosemite Murders, which have been featured in numerous real crime programs such as American Justice, FBI: Criminal Prosecution, How It Really Happened, and others.
“I grew up learning all about my father and his whole story through the media,” Ashley Steiner told the Guardian. Her attachment to the real crime continues despite the exhaustive and invasive focus on her family’s trauma. “It’s just interesting to know how the human mind works and how the environment can turn someone into who they are,” Steiner said. genre. “I think the real crime is showing the different side of what people can be.
Steiner, 36, spoke to the media from her home in Atwater, California, as she prepares for her own real crime debut in Captive Audience: A Real American Horror Story. The multi-layered and consciously limited three-part series, directed by Jessica Dimok and produced by the Rousseau brothers, returns to the stories of the Steiner family as it deconstructs how they were told and processed; how authorship, artistic license, and true criminal trails will play in the television movie, and how the media will package Kerry Steiner’s horrific deeds in direct contrast to his younger brother’s earlier persecution and heroism.
Stephen Steiner was seven years old when he was abducted in 1972. He was held captive in a remote cabin and sexually abused for seven years. In 1980, Steiner’s abductor, Kenneth Parnell, abducted a second child, five-year-old Timmy White. Refusing to let White suffer as he did, 14-year-old Steiner fled with the young White. He was praised for his courageous actions, reunited with his family and became a long-standing media mania as he dealt with the trauma he could barely speak to. He died tragically almost a decade later in a crash and a run.
Ashley Steiner, who was in preschool at the time of her father’s death, has only faint memories of him. Steiner explains that she spent most of her childhood unfamiliar with his story because her family avoided discussing it. “It wasn’t until I was in seventh grade that I really began to understand the complexity of everything,” Steiner said, referring to the period in 1999 when her uncle Kerry Steiner killed four women in Yosemite National Park. His heinous crimes brought her family’s history back into the public consciousness.
The captive audience will naturally do the same.
“Here’s a story that was told,” says Dimok, acknowledging where her series stands in a long line of media that covered the Steiner family’s trials. I just added to the pile.
But her experience is the first involving family members, including Stephen’s mother and Carrie Kay Steiner. The latter provides profound and devastating details of the years in which her younger son disappeared, recalling, for example, how she would never leave the house unattended just in case Stephen called home, or how her husband Delbert would search for soil that looks freshly dug, or will chase some strange-looking vehicles he saw on the highway, desperately hoping to find his son.
Family photo of Steiner. Photo: Hulu
“I’m always really attracted to things that are as close to the skin as possible,” says Dimok. “I knew I wanted to honor that this happened to a real family and that there was a lot of torture out of the media spotlight.
As he captures these intimate testimonies, Dimok also draws attention to himself and the storyteller designed to record, edit and frame the people in Captive Audience. It includes pieces that usually remain on the floor of the cutting room, such as Kay Steiner, who seeks a comfortable position under studio lighting as she emotionally prepares for a long and test conversation with Dimok, or her relaxing sigh after the interview as if she could leave. to protect. These are Dimmock’s reminders that she also played a role in packing Stayner’s story. And she asks questions about how this story was shaped before.
Captive Audience’s core resources include recorded conversations between Stephen I Know My First Name Is JP Miller and network executives. Excerpts from these conversations are an eloquent peek behind the real crime curtain, explaining the elites, rearrangements, cliffhangers, massive facts, and outright fabrications that the narrators introduce into the narrative to attract the audience’s attention.
In her series, Dimok asks to see the Steiner family as part of the audience, the most captivated, which adds another layer to the show’s commitment to real crime as a genre. Rarely do we see the consequences of how a family copes and struggles to adjust after a traumatic event that has caught the attention of the national media, and how they also absorb these screen images and stories. In the series, Ashley Steiner admits that she would connect her father with Corinne Nemek, the actor who plays him in I Know My First Name Is Steven. “That’s how your father was introduced to you,” Dimok said, speaking directly to Steiner. “I found these items interesting.”
The family also had to take on the particularly busy media stories of Kerry Steiner’s crimes. Journalists have been impatient with the theory that Kerry Steiner committed murder and wanted to be caught because he was both jealous of the attention Stephen had received decades earlier and hurt by his parents’ neglect.
Stephen Steiner moments after reuniting with his parents in 1980. Photo: Hulu
Dimok explains his sensitivity to changing sympathies, responding in particular to the ways in which the story throws Kay Steiner in a different light, from the mother of a young hero to the woman who raised the perpetrator.
“I never thought about what was happening to the perpetrator’s families,” Dimok said. “What are they feeling? what are they going through And honestly, I’ve never wanted to talk about this before, because why would I want to know that? But in this situation, I care because I know they’ve been through something really difficult. Don’t they deserve our sympathy? ”
Dimmock handles Kay Steiner’s story with a level of care not usually given to subjects in real crime, a genre that can often be exploitative. A section in Captive Audience very briefly offers a history of mental illness and sexual abuse in the Stayner family, without going into more detail. After Kerry Steiner’s crimes, details emerged about his mental illness, the alleged ill-treatment he suffered from his uncle, and that his father allegedly harassed his daughters.
“I didn’t feel it was an opportunity to challenge anything,” Dimok said, explaining his decision to omit seemingly pertinent revelations of sexual violence, denying the public the details they would normally expect in a real crime.
“I had the opportunity to sit down with the Stayners and hear their point of view. There was a moment when I asked Kay Steiner if he wanted to talk about Kerry, but she said no. I shouldn’t have included that. I wanted the audience to be aware of the border.
“Kay says no and we’re not going there.”
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