Swamps are the new New Jersey in terms of a new reality star of reality TV shows.
In New Jersey’s place have come Southerners who live small, think outside the box and never seem to venture far from the swamps they call home (see “Duck Dynasty,” for example).
Every bit as strange — if much more real than the New Jersey half-wits seen on shows like “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” — swamp people live by their own rules and enjoy normal, everyday things like alligator wrestling and catching catfish with their bare hands (see “Hillbilly Handfishin’ ”).
So it was only a matter of time before we got ID’s new series, “S
wamp Murders” — and we ain’t talkin’ alligators and ’coon dogs.
Tonight’s series premiere, right up my swamp-loving alley, is focused solely on the the murder of a 19-year old girl in Chesapeake, Va. named Kathy Bonney, who was found in the 100,000- acre Great Dismal Swamp by a man who — yes — went to read his bible and cast his sins away by throwing rocks into the muck and mire.
Of course, the cops assume he’s the murderer, but since the young woman has no identification on her, they are as stumped as anyone in the swamp.
Next day, however, a distressed father, junkyard owner Tom Bonney, comes weeping into the police station to file a missing persons report on his daughter Kathy — who had gone for a test drive with a man named “John” and never returned.
Although dad brought Kathy to meet the man, when she didn’t return to the spot, he figured the test drive was extended, went home and went to bed — only to discover that she hadn’t returned by the next morning.
This is truly one of the stranger cases I’ve seen in my dozen years of being a true-crime TV junkie.
And that’s saying a lot.