This week, instead of recapping an episode of Forensic Files, I’d like to explain a bit about the series itself and the genre it inhabits.
Forensic Files executive producer Paul Dowling
Despite that the show has been around for 20 years and is broadcast in 142 countries, a lot of prospective viewers mistakenly lump it in with other TV fare related to crime.
Forensic Files is a straight-up true-crime series as opposed to the wholly fictional crime dramas (such as CSI ) that dominate network TV.
It also differs from made-for-TV movies (Like Mother Like Son: The Strange Story of Sante and Kenny Kimes) that are based on real crimes but also may take dramatic license by making up dialogue and creating composite characters.
Classifying. True-crime shows feature interviews with the real-life investigators and lawyers who worked on the cases and friends and family members of the victims.
These series can’t pack in every element of the story, but they don’t fabricate any either. On the Case with Paula Zahn, 48 Hours Mystery, and certain Dateline NBC shows fall into this category.
Forensic Files belongs to the same genre, but there’s no Erin Moriarty or Keith Morrison hosting the show or appearing on camera during interviews.
Each 30-minute Forensic Files episode is a mini documentary told in a whodunit format with off-camera narration by Peter Thomas. It includes some re-creations of events, but they’re labeled as such and don’t take liberties.
Nothing tawdry. And the producers of Forensic Files have taken pains to make the shows tasteful. You won’t see any interviewees melt down and become hysterical on camera.
And the producers never make viewers wince through oversexualized reenactments with low production values.
“There’s something in TV called ‘permission to watch,'” Forensic Files executive producer Paul Dowling explained an interview with True Crime Truant. “We provide a show you can leave on if your 8-year-old daughter and her friends come in the room.”
If you’ve never seen Forensic Files, you probably haven’t been looking too hard. You can find it somewhere on any given day.
Netflix streaming, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Roku, Apple TV, HLN (which has regular marathon showings), and the Escape channel are a few of the outlets that carry the show. And most of the episodes have been uploaded to YouTube.
Media critic Robert Thompson is a Forensic Files fan
There are 400 episodes of Forensic Files produced from 1996 to 2011. The show is not going away anytime soon, in part because the producers avoided crimes involving celebrities.
“Most viewers don’t know what the cases are, so the Forensic Files episodes don’t get boring,” says Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television & Popular Culture at Syracuse University.
And speaking of gripping content, here’s some exciting news: Next week’s post will be a Q&A drawn from an in-depth interview that Forensic Files creator Paul Dowling gave to True Crime Truant.
Dowling divulges some behind-the-scenes secrets and discusses his relationship with the great and unpretentious voice-over artist Peter Thomas.
Cautionary words. And he offers some safety tips that I’ve never heard — advice that can help you remain a fan of true-crime shows rather than the subject of one.
A Showboating Ax Murderer
(“Family Ties,” Forensic Files)
Last week’s post recapped “Family Ties,” the Forensic Files episode about Christopher Porco, whose flights of fancy and financial misdeeds compelled him to plot the murders of his parents.
Long before the tragedy: Joan and Peter Porco with their sons, Christopher on the left, in the 1980s
A jury convicted Christopher, an academically derelict University of Rochester student from Bethlehem, New York, of attacking Joan and Peter Porco with an ax as they slept on November 15, 2004. The tall, nice-looking 21-year-old had hoped to bail himself out of his financial problems and cadge some disposable income via his mother and father’s life insurance payout.
But, ironically, the lack of diligence that sullied Christopher’s scholarly pursuits also hindered his get-rich-quick plan. His father did not die immediately but rather lived for a few hours after the assault, and his mother survived her wounds and is alive today.
Strange functionality. This week, I’d like to focus on three of the intriguing aspects of the case. First and foremost, the medical one.
After being struck 16 times with an ax and lying unconscious as his son sneaked away from the suburban charnel house, Peter Porco arose from bed, put on clothing, ambled downstairs to get breakfast, went outside to retrieve the newspaper, realized he’d locked himself out, found a spare key in its hiding place, let himself back inside, and died of blood loss.
As Forensic Files explained it, an injury can damage the brain’s neocortex, which controls reasoning, but leave intact the underlying paleocortex, which guides second-nature habits.
“The neocortex is especially vulnerable to external injury,” according to the Handbook of Affective Sciences (Oxford University Press, 2003). “Wounds or other injury may sometimes destroy a [neo]cortical region without damaging deeper brain structures.”
In other words, Peter Porco’s fleeting transformation into a real-world ghost was haunting but not particularly mysterious.
The book also noted that the neocortex “segregates functions especially well across spatial regions” and that “lesions to the neocortex are more likely to be localized to a single region than are subcortical regions.”
I think all of that means it’s possible Peter Porco had a little help from the reasoning part of his mind post-trauma, but the subsection that enables people to self-identify as injured and in need of help was destroyed.
TV movie. On to the gossipy part of the saga. The Lifetime channel made a movie based on the crimes, Romeo Killer: The Chris Porco Story, in 2013. It starred Lolita Davidovich as Joan Porco and Eric McCormack as “Detective Sullivan” — presumably a composite character representing police who worked on the case.
Up-and-coming actor Matt Barr played Christopher Porco in the Lifetime movie about the case
I was surprised to read that Romeo Killer portrayed Christopher Porco as a charming ladies man with lots of friends. The Forensic Files and 48 Hours Mystery episodes about the case didn’t play up that angle.
The movie got passing marks from reviewers, but the reader comment section was where the really interesting critiquing was going on.
Of the 40 comments posted to writer Nellie Andreeva’s Deadline Hollywood review of the movie, more than a dozen came from readers who identified themselves as neighbors or classmates of Christopher Porco — and disputed the notion of his popularity. A couple typical ones:
Leah Blodget: “Romeo? He was not. I grew up in the ‘small town of Delmar, NY’ and the guy was a clown.”
Josh: “I live [in] Delmar and go to Bethlehem High School [and] teachers who had him said he was insane. Mrs. Porco still lives here and she’s so nice. I feel bad for her that this whole thing is being brought back up.”
Benny1311: “I was a year above Porco in school. I had some classes with him and knew one of his girlfriends well. And I must say [she] along with most of his classmates, believe him to be guilty. Chris has a small group of peer supporters – all female – many younger- who seem to have had ‘relations’ with him. His frat brothers and male friends do not back him.”
So, apparently he did have at least some girlfriends but wasn’t necessarily a full-on JFK (Jr. or Sr.) with the ladies.
Where is he now? Finally, I looked around for the latest news on Christopher Porco’s efforts to get out of jail via a new trial or overturned conviction.
He noted that there were no lights on Brockley Street, where the Porcos lived, casting some doubt on a neighbor’s account of spotting Christopher’s yellow Jeep in the driveway the night of the ax attack.
The behavior of the Porco’s dog, which the prosecution had used as evidence, was also disputed in the appeal. Police had theorized that no neighbors heard Barrister bark that night because the killer was someone (presumably Christopher) that the Labrador retriever already knew.
Kindlon, however, argued that Barrister was known for not barking at visitors, whether friends or strangers.
Sarah Fischer, a Fairfield University senior who was Christopher Porco’s girlfriend, testified at the trial.
The lawyer also noted that Peter Porco sometimes deactivated the burglar alarm when letting the dog out at night and then forgot to turn it back on — another challenge to the prosecution’s assertion that Christopher punched in the code the night of the murder and attempted murder.
Another contention — one that makes sense — was that Joan Porco’s alleged nod in answer to the question of whether or not it was Christopher who had attacked her was unreliable evidence because of her severe brain injuries.
But jurors interviewed by 48 Hours Mystery said that they had dismissed the testimony about the nod for precisely that reason and had instead relied on the prosecution’s crime timeline as proof of guilt.
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Christopher’s case in 2012. He also lost an appeal in 2014, when an appellate court rejected claims that he was denied effective assistance of appellate counsel. (In fact, a number of reader comments posted to the aforementioned website articles blasted Terence Kindlon and Laurie Shanks for defending Christopher so vigorously in court.)
As of this writing, Christopher, 33, is prisoner #O6A6686 at New York state’s Clinton Correctional Facility, commonly known as Dannemora. He’ll be eligible for parole in the year 2052.
That’s all for this week. Until next Thursday, cheers.—RR
A College Kid Turns Homicidal
“Family Ties” (Forensic Files)
This week, it’s back to Forensic Files, with “Family Ties” (no relation to the 1980s sitcom of the same name).
Christopher Porco
The episode was produced in 2009, toward the end of Forensic Files’ run, and delves into the ax attack on Joan and Peter Porco, a couple from Bethlehem, New York.
The story is something of a middle-class version of the Menendez brothers saga.
Flights of fancy. In the case of the Porcos, there was only one bad son, Christopher, a 21-year-old University of Rochester student. His brother, Jonathan, 23, was on a nuclear submarine at the time of the crime and not implicated.
In the years leading up to the assault on his mother and father, Christopher Porco had told his school friends tall tales about having a wealthy family with extensive real estate holdings and vacation homes. He also committed a number of financial crimes against his parents.
He used ill-gotten loans to pay for a $16,450 yellow Jeep Wrangler and whatever other accoutrements one needs to impersonate a scion of landed gentry.
And he neglected to tell his parents that the university had suspended him because of poor grades and he had wasted his $30,000 in tuition money. He needed another $30,000 once Rochester let him back in.
A way out. All in all, Christopher was in the hole for at least $50,000 — a lot of debt, but not insurmountable.
Instead of working out a plan to repay his parents, he tried to avoid them, then decided to kill them. He had his eye on their $1 million life insurance payout, authorities believe.
The victims as a young couple: Joan Porco, a school speech pathologist, and her husband, Peter, a lawyer, were married for 30 years
Here’s a recap of the Forensic Files episode plus some additional facts about the Porco case drawn from Crime Library, 48 Hours, and Albany’s Times Union newspaper.
On November 15, 2004, law clerk Peter Porco, 52, didn’t show up for work, so his colleague Michael Hart stopped by his house on Brockley Drive to check on him.
Peering in the front-door window, Hart saw Peter’s body sprawled on the floor amid a huge amount of blood.
The authorities would later determine Porco had been struck with an ax 16 times.
Apparent burglary. The police found Joan Porco, 54, in the bedroom. Like her husband, she had been hit with an ax, but only three times. The assault had broken her jaw, destroyed one of her eyes, and penetrated her skull deeply enough to expose her brain.
But she was alive and conscious.
Before paramedics took her to the hospital, Detective Christopher Bowdish questioned her about the attacker. In the presence of Bowdish as well as paramedics on the scene, she nodded yes when asked whether it was her younger son.
Police found that someone had smashed the house’s burglar alarm, snipped the phone line, and opened a window and cut a hole in the screen.
The crime scene in Bethlehem, New York
A newspaper reporter first informed Chris Porco about the murder, and he rushed home from Rochester to see his mother in Albany Medical Center, where she had undergone 12 hours of surgery. He told police he was sleeping in the lounge of his dormitory, Munro House, during the time of the attacks.
Mob link. Investigators had a few leads on other suspects. One, an unhappy litigant in a custody case, had vowed revenge against Peter. But the man had a good alibi.
There was also a theory involving organized crime. Perhaps a former loan shark named Frank “Frankie the Fireman” Porco — a great uncle of Peter’s — had been considering ratting out his mob associates, and they killed Peter as a warning not to.
But Frankie was in jail specifically because he refused to cooperate, so that theory evaporated.
Investigators discovered more-compelling evidence against Christopher Porco.
For one, someone had burglarized the Porco’s house in 2002 and 2003, and Christopher was the No. 1 suspect. He used eBay to sell computer equipment stolen from his parents and a veterinary hospital where he worked part time.
Surveillance cameras. Investigators found surveillance video of a yellow Jeep that supported their contention that Christopher traveled 232 miles from Rochester to the Porco’s house the night of the attack, assaulted his mother and father with an ax, and high-tailed it back to Rochester.
Police couldn’t find any New York State Thruway E-ZPass data on the yellow Jeep, but toll booth attendants at the cash-only lanes said they thought they remembered seeing the car with Christopher in the driver’s seat.
Police found Christopher’s E-ZPass on the floor of his Jeep. He removed it to avoid leaving a digital record on the night of the crime, authorities believe
The video evidence came from the university. It had footage of the yellow Jeep leaving and returning to campus at an interval that fit a realistic timeline for commission of the crime:
• 10:30 p.m. Jeep left Rochester campus • 2:14 a.m. Burglar alarm deactivated at parents’ home • 4:59 a.m. Phone line cut (this was 2004, when land lines were relevant) • 8:30 a.m. Jeep returned to campus
Police believe Christopher cut the hole in the window to make it look like a burglary. Nothing was stolen from the house.
Windfall expected. Jonathan Porco, an officer in the U.S. Navy, said that his brother was one of a handful of people who knew the alarm’s four-digit deactivation code. Christopher smashed the alarm box in a failed attempt to mask the fact that someone had punched the correct code in, investigators theorized.
There was more: Christopher had sought financial advice shortly before the ax attack. He told an investment professional he was coming into some money, investigators discovered.
And of course, they found the evidence about those loans that Christopher had taken out fraudulently — using his parents as cosigners without their knowledge.
Investigators also thought Christopher chose an ax as his weapon in the belief it would divert all suspicion to his mob-involved relative “Frankie the Fireman.”
Buddies no help. The trial took place in July of 2006 with Chief Assistant District Attorney Michael P. McDermott leading the prosecution and lawyers Terence Kindlon and Laurie Shanks defending the accused.
The prosecution had no forensic evidence, except for a New York Thruway ticket that allegedly carried Christopher’s mitochondrial DNA. Investigators theorized he wore scrubs from the veterinary office during the assault and then destroyed or hid them.
A colleague testified that Christopher had experience cleaning up after surgical procedures.
Nine of Christopher’s fraternity brothers refuted his story that he was asleep in the lounge at Rochester, and a neighbor driving by the Porco’s house claimed he glimpsed the Jeep in the driveway on the night of the attacks. Still, there were no eyewitnesses placing Christopher directly at the crime scene inside the house.
Here’s the heart-breaking aspect of the trial: Joan Porco stood by her son through everything. She accompanied him to court and testified for the defense.
Mother’s love. She told the jury she didn’t recall implicating Christopher the night of the attack and that her child would never commit a heinous crime like the one that killed her husband and disfigured her.
She maintained that while Christopher’s financial misdeeds angered her and Peter, they all loved one another and wanted to work on their relationship.
In fact, after Christopher’s 2005 indictment for second-degree murder and attempted murder, Joan had scraped together $250,000 for his bail. The two walked to court with their arms linked.
Joan Porco, seen here offering support to Christopher at the trial in 2006, remembered nothing about the attack. She declined to be interviewed for a “48 Hours” report on the case
None of that helped. A jury quickly convicted Christopher on the strength of the timeline the prosecution constructed.
He got 50 years to life and is at the Clinton Correction Facility in Dannemora, New York.
That’s all for this week’s post, but I’d like to continue next Thursday with a look at some of the other interesting parts of the Christopher Porco drama, including the way his doomed father “woke up” after the attack, the conflicting tales about whether Christopher deserved the “Romeo Killer” nickname a made-for-TV movie gave him, and his recent efforts to exit his maximum-security residence.
