TV Reviews : Sex and Murder on an Exotic Pacific Lagoon

Mystery lovers can gorge on the true-life, four-hour miniseries “And the Sea Will Tell” (at 9 p.m. Sunday and Tuesday, Channels 2 and 8).

As crime stories on TV go, this production is a feast--tantalizing and suspenseful. Anybody who ever wanted to play Robinson Crusoe and run off to a desert island will relish this story of envy, sex and violence on the shores of an exotic lagoon in the South Pacific.

Paradise was waiting for two couples fleeing civilization, albeit for different reasons. One couple, a middle-aged, wealthy husband and wife from San Diego named Mac and Muff Graham, had it all--a beautiful yacht, staples, brandy. The other couple, footloose post-hippies, an ex-con and his girlfriend, had nothing but carnal love. They lived off coconuts and fish that he shot with a gun in the sea. Some fisherman.

The drama unfolds in the summer of 1974 when the lives of these four people fatally intersect on the remote island of Palmyra, 1,000 miles south of Honolulu. The disappearance of the rich yachting couple, the discovery six years later of the wife’s skull and her broken bones washed up on the beach in an aluminum container, and the subsequent murder charges brought against the younger couple was the biggest crime story in Hawaii since the notorious Massey trial (tried by Clarence Darrow) in the 1930s. So big, in fact, the trial venue was shifted to San Francisco.

The macho, charismatic boyfriend Buck Walker (Hart Bochner) is tried separately and convicted in the middle of the miniseries. (He’s now serving a life sentence in Lompoc.) The thrust of the plot is the later murder trial of his lover, the intelligent, sensuous Jennifer Jenkins (Rachel Ward), whose predilection for dangerous men conceals a dark, ambiguous psyche. Her defense attorney was Vincent Bugliosi of Charles Manson fame, who has turned this case into a recent book and who is portrayed here by Richard Crenna.

The teleplay by James Henerson is framed within the context of the woman’s trial--a crackling courtroom cliffhanger right down to the last rap of the gavel--but, thankfully, most of the story is a dramatized series of flashbacks of love, peril and death on the dark side of paradise.

As intrigue, it may sound farfetched to compare this TV movie to Roman Polanski’s terrific 1962 Polish film, “Knife in the Water,” but the story has that kind of tension. (In that movie, a hitchhiker tragically joins a couple on board a boat.) “And the Sea Will Tell” is classic melodrama.

Director Tommy L. Wallace draws a bewitching performance from Ward, who’s more than just a great face here. We get to know the victims too (played by Diedre Hall and James Brolin). But it’s Crenna’s character who is the show’s rock-solid anchor, and Bugliosi, who maintains that he won’t take a case unless he’s sure of his client’s innocence, comes off looking like a rose.