TV Reviews : Tragic Murder Story Retold in ‘Betrayal’

Two troubled, arrogant school chums kill a New Jersey couple in a tragic teen-age story that faintly echoes the notorious Loeb-Leopold case in NBC’s “Deadly Betrayal: The Bruce Curtis Story” (at 9 p.m. Sunday on Channels 4, 36 and 39).

Based on the sensational, 1982 New Jersey murders and subsequent trial of boarding school youths Bruce Curtis and Scott Franz, this Canadian production (originally aired over CBC in Canada last fall) is a gripping study of intelligent, twisted kids hurtled into a tragedy that’s almost fated from the beginning.

Like the infamous Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, Curtis and Franz are brainy, iconoclastic kids who live under the illusion that they are different and superior to the rest of the world. One of them (Simon Reynolds as the bookish, Angst -ridden Curtis) studies the stars and reads Kafka. The other (Jaimz Woolvett as the reckless, adventurous Franz) is a charismatic, congenital liar.

Their double crime, however, unlike the Loeb-Leopold murder of Bobby Franks in 1924, is not meticulously plotted but rather the result of a stepfather’s abuse in one case and sheer accident in the other. The subsequent trial and its outcome was highly controversial in Canada, where the Curtis youth and his affluent family lived and where the boys met at a Nova Scotia prep school.

The owlish Reynolds as the moody, sensitive Curtis, who is the misunderstood center of the story, is particularly sympathetic. His clash with reality and the startling betrayal by the plea-bargaining Franz in the courtroom are charged moments under director Graeme Campbell from a taut script by Keith Ross Leckie.

Be sure to stay tuned for the end-roll, which reports on the subsequent destinies of the chief characters.