Mystery, Foreboding in ‘Echoes in the Darkness’ : Two-Part CBS Drama Is Based on Murder of Teacher, Her 2 Children

“Echoes in the Darkness” is complex, intriguing and troubling. CBS’ two-part drama (9 p.m. Sunday and 8 p.m. Monday on Channels 2 and 8) is a knotty, intricate murder story so shadowy, bizarre and unlikely that it simply commands your attention and has you shifting uneasily in your seat, because it actually happened.

The facts of the seven-year case were set out in a Joseph Wambaugh book that has been interpreted for TV by Wambaugh himself in a finely executed production that is mesmerizing, if ultimately inconclusive, about its villains--two educators convicted of murdering a teacher and her two children.

Violence and conflict have become the meat of TV, mostly injected gratuitously and titillatingly for exploitive reasons. But the last few seasons have yielded some excellent book-based TV stories that have related the horrors of actual murder cases in ways that at once probed the homicidal mind and made for fascinating viewing.

Understanding the terror is always easier than understanding the terrorist. Whether Green Beret doctor Jeffrey MacDonald in “Fatal Vision” or serial killer Ted Bundy in “The Deliberate Stranger” or mad Frances Schreuder in “Nutcracker,” the centerpiece villains shared certain traits. They were manipulative, amoral and so sinister as to be inexplicable, almost as if they were aliens from other worlds.

Similar shadows darken English teacher Bill Bradfield (Peter Coyote) and high school principal Jay Smith (Robert Loggia), the evil components in former cop Wambaugh’s story. It begins with an armed robbery in a small town near Philadelphia and then abruptly switches locales to Upper Merion High School. It is here where we find the victimizers--unlikely co-conspirators who are seemingly in conflict with each other--and their future victim, teacher Susan Reinert (Stockard Channing).

You may think that by revealing what happens, this review is leaking too much of the plot. In a sense, that’s true, for producer/writer Wambaugh, with co-producer Glenn Jordan directing, is a crafty storyteller who opens doors only a crack, initially leaving in doubt who is to be killed and whether the Rasputin-like Bradfield and the strange, eerie Smith are involved. However, the actual case is a matter of public record and key elements also have been revealed in advance publicity from CBS and Wambaugh himself.

Even so, “Echoes in the Darkness” projects such mystery and foreboding--and its performances are so good--that little is lost.

Bradfield is slowly and tantalizingly unmasked as a charming predator who collects and dominates such weak, insecure and vulnerable people as his house-mate Sue Myers (Cindy Pickett) and Reinert, who makes him the beneficiary of her $750,000 life insurance policy. And Smith looms in the background, blurry and ominous yet mystifying, so obvious a choice as an evildoer that you immediately discount him.

The discovery of Reinert’s nude body and the disappearance of her children sets in motion a grueling legal odyssey prodded on by state police investigators Joe Vannort (Peter Boyle) and Jack Holtz (Gary Cole, who played “Fatal Vision” murderer Jeffrey MacDonald, ironically).

It’s a chilling, frustrating trail they follow, leading ultimately to a trial (with Treat Williams as prosecutor Rick Guida) on the thick and ponderous side.

Pickett and Channing are especially noteworthy in their supporting roles. But it is Coyote, who makes your skin crawl as the charismatic, deceitful Bradfield, and Loggia, as the enigmatic Smith, who so convincingly occupy the malignant center of this murder epic.

What is never established, unfortunately, is the nature and extent of the curious bond between these two seemingly very different men--a malevolent link that perhaps Wambaugh himself does not fully comprehend. If so, credit him with sticking to the record and not drifting into speculation, a stout choice in an era when so many other docudramas echo in the darkness.