Hell in the Heartland: What Happened to Ashley and Lauria (2019– ) User Reviews

Watch ep1 then skip to ep4

[silentbod · 5/10 · 11 November 2020]

Seriously. Save yourself 2hrs. Episode 1 is interesting and tells you all the background you need for the case. Episodes 2 and 3 do nothing but repeat the same conversations over and over. Episode 4 moves the case on.

For a fun game, keep track of how the two 'investigators' choose to sit whilst discussing the case with each other. At one point, one of them was knelt down behind the couch?!?

Good story, terrible cast

[lhmosca · 7/10 · 30 March 2021]

The story is a good one, in the sense that it's a captivating tragedy and I hope this docu helps lead them to discovery. However, the 2 "investigators" spent WAY too much time talking to each other and restating things over and over that we already heard. I just don't know how much they even did except rehash stuff that was already known. The absolute incompetence of the early investigation is appalling and those that ignored crucial tips, evidence, etc. Should be held accountable. It's possible their incompetence led to these girls being killed.

A tragic crime exploited for entertainment

[sacha_brady · 3/10 · 6 December 2020]

The presentation of the timeline is good and there is indeed a story to be told.. The rest felt amateurish and more like an exercise in self-promotion by two women who come across as 'schoolgirl sleuths'. They put themselves at the front and centre to the point that this felt more like a story about them instead of the story of a tragedy and the attempts to bring the guilty to justice.

What we get is a gossipy whodunnit. The pattern is we get introduced to a suspect, our sleuths then lead the viewer along by excitedly throwing ideas at each other on why this person could have been responsible then reveal this person had nothing to do with it. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, and so on.

The perpetrators get revealed in episode 4, but the first thing we are told is how our 'heroines' are waiting with bated breath for the announcements. Shouldn't this moment belong to the families?

There are many good true crime programmes out there. Life's too short to waste your time getting strung along by these two indulging themselves on their little murder adventure. This was a huge wasted opportunity to dig under the surface and provide something informative and enlightening.

Not sure why the bad reviews

[gryffin-88718 · 9/10 · 18 June 2022]

I thought it was well done. Someone said to skip episodes 2 and 3. That makes no sense because there is a process that they are outlining and new suspects come into play during those episodes. I think yoo many people want instant gratification and have no patience.

Talk about milking a story

[mattwoolfrey · 2/10 · 7 February 2021]

Just google the details. And what's w 50%+ of the film being footage OF the documentarians-👎🏼

Skip it...

[nttrocks · 2/10 · 13 August 2021]

What starts out as a really interesting true crime story quickly devolves into an ego trip for the two "experts" shooting this. This isn't a story about the missing girls, it's about two insecure women who want so desperately to be famous that they would exploit a real tragety.

Two Women's Desperate Attempt To Get On Camera

[gentis-72472 · 1/10 · 8 February 2022]

If you enjoy 3 hours of two "filmmakers/investigators" mugging for the camera and stating already stated facts over and over again, with an occasional nugget of useful information sprinkled in, then you'll love this mockumentary. This is a story that could have been told in 30 minutes. I suppose it was. Unfortunately you have to wade through three hours of these women gleefully yammering endlessly on camera to get the 30 minutes of story that had been dismembered and scattered throughout this 3 hour crime scene. Good documentaries do not include hours of the filmmakers on screen. They are obstacles to the story inserted for their own edification and to artificially elongate a story arc. I want my 3 hours back. I feel sorry for the families who had know idea they were being used as bait to entice people to watch the Jax and Sarah (I think that's their names) show. What a sad joke. You are investigators in the same way Geraldo was the investigator into Al Capone's vault. If you ever con anyone else into funding another film, try to put the camera on the story not your own faces. You're really not that interesting.

Quit trying to enhance

[bhugeman · 3/10 · 17 November 2021]

Just finished first episode.

The investigators(?) talk about how cold it was during investigation, but, when showing footage, not a single person is wearing so much as a jacket.

It's mentioned that there was no Amber Alert issued. Amber Alert was not a thing in Oklahoma at the time.

I wish I could give this a zero

[helenahandbasket-93734 · 1/10 · 20 December 2020]

Horribly done-like watching something from ID network- this 'author' who's never done a single investigation, couple with a supposed CI, and they're unbelievably ignorant when it comes to a case. So Shane, who's supposedly a 'good kid' bot in any serious trouble, somehow goes from zero to 60 overnight? Involved in numerous B and Es, GTA, and gets pulled over and we're supposed to suspend reality to believe this kid wasn't going to shoot a deputy? The fact that he's pulling out a shotgun is accepted fact by all parties, but he was doing so in self-defense? You have got to be kidding me.

Every single exposition by these two pseudo-crime fighters is laughable- and after 30 minutes I just shut it off. Save yourself 4 hours and do a Google search, instead.

Don't waste your time

[CaitlinRTodd · 1/10 · 30 August 2021]

I would much rather watch a one-off documentary about this case than whatever you want to call this. The ex-cop/PI (?) is ok, but the author? "I've only ever written fiction, but let me take a stab at solving a cold case!" For real? She's awful and doesn't bring anything to the table. Just look up the details of this case, this "documentary" is terrible and very Oxygen-esque, which is not a compliment.

Repetitive and factless

[ultright · 1/10 · 28 September 2022]

The basic presentation of this story could be done in about twenty minutes. Instead, we get this drawn out drama where everything must be covered six times, and in the end the investigators had nothing to do with solving the case and were unable to find a resolution. This series as a result feels like "much ado about nothing" in a repetead loop where conjecture, innuendo, and supposition are flung about but lead to nothing, and then the whole thing suddenly comes to an end when the local police finally investigate the guy they should have investigated twenty years ago. My true crime tastes run toward "Forensic Files" which is fact-based rather than the drama-based, mostly empty vlog that is this series.