Lady of the Dunes is ALMOST interesting, by accident

The crime
The mutilated body of a woman was found in the Provincetown, MA dunes on July 26, 1974. Her identity remained a mystery for close to half a century.

The story, including spoilers – but if the series piqued your interest, you probably already know the solution to said mystery; do what you have to do
Oxygen’s Lady of the Dunes: Hunting the Cape Cod Killer came out in late November; as you can see, I didn’t rush to review it – and likely wouldn’t have bothered at all if my cousin, a full-time resident of the Cape, hadn’t texted to ask if I’d seen it. And that text was like three weeks ago, soooo my opinion on whether Lady of the Dunes is essential is probably easily inferred.

Just in case: it isn’t essential, but at the same time, Lady of the Dunes is quint-essential in its mainstream basic-cable storytelling, namely that it has a handful of interesting things going on, and suggests a few larger issues that could be explored…but they won’t be.

Mainstream basic-cable three-parters like Lady of the Dunes want to draw viewers in, but also kiiiiind of don’t care whether we stay, or how closely we pay attention if we do stick around, because it’s purpose-built as video wallpaper.

In other words, Lady doesn’t just not care if we go ahead and look up what happened; it expects us to do that. Which…is fine, I guess, actually! But it’s also a missed opportunity. Several, in fact, including catering to the small but IME quite intense audience that is people who care about Cape Cod crime and history. 

People like me, tiresome know-it-alls on “grandpa topics” — which is a good 80 percent of the Cape’s year-round population. Just saying!

We only have so many cases to think about that don’t involve, like, a lethal tavern brawl over a whale-oil franchise or whatever; we already knew this one. We had already heard that, after repeated exhumations of her remains, dozens of digital and anthro reconstructions of what she might have looked like, and attempts to blame just about every major-case crook in the Bay State, the titular Lady was identified as Ruth Marie Terry in 2022, thanks to a genealogy-DNA site.

We already knew by 2023 that her husband, serial scumbag Guy Muldavin, almost certainly killed her. We also know, in a way Lady doesn’t, the real story or stories here – what a docuseries about a notorious Cape Cod murder could offer, and what this docuseries could have offered but didn’t bother with:

• A deep dive into Guy Muldavin. Lady does take us through his multi-jurisdiction reign of grimy narcissism, and I’m not over here recommending we center killers, but the guy was a legit villain – of the kind that doesn’t/can’t really flourish in the internet age.
• The story of Terry’s “lost” son, Richard. “Lost” isn’t the right word, but I don’t know what else to use; the Wikipedia entry on Terry’s murder notes that she “was unable to care for [Richard] due to financial difficulties. She allowed the superintendent of her workplace, Richard Hanchett Sr., to adopt her son in return for him paying off her expenses,” and “Terry reached out to her son in 1972, but he was not ready to meet her due to a drug overdose which left him in a coma for 18 days.”

  The Richard we see onscreen is unusually raw; his fiancée, Wendy, is clearly uncomfortable with this leg of his journey and wants whatever closure is on offer to hurry up and happen. Towards the end of the series, asked by a central figure in the case how he’s doing, Richard quavers, “I don’t really know?” Not moments you tend to see in these serieses, and Lady is not built to notice or give them space.

• The effects of a case like this on Cape Cod’s particular law-enforcement ecosystem. The aforementioned central figure, Meredith Lobur, got Brady-listed by the district attorney because Lobur tapped the FBI for help and the DA was embarrassed. (“Allegedly.”)

  At a gravesite ceremony* that closes out the series, she’s kind of hanging back from the proceedings, separate from the late former police chief’s son, who’s disappointed his father didn’t see this day; Lady got me thinking about other uniquely Cape angles here. 

  *Norman Mailer is buried in the cemetery just across the street, for whatever that’s worth

  Cape police forces aren’t big, Cape justice systems aren’t built for/used to a “Dateline-level” murder case, the specific challenges faced by Cape l.e. – policing a community that’s 100 times the size in the summer and an LGBTQ+ mecca all year; coping with an opioid epidemic that decimated a generation – are compelling. 

All those factors, and the specific challenges of a case like this for the families of generational law enforcement anywhere, are all good stories. It’s not fair to expect Lady to do more than hint at them, but I wish some production would.

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