STV Studios series director Alana McVerry on the making of The Beauty Queen and the Catfish for BBC Three. When I first started researching the cases behind our true crime documentary series The Beauty Queen and the Catfish, what struck me wasnt just the scale of the story, but how difficult it was to make sense of. Over more than 15 years, a group of women were targeted at different times and in different ways by the same person. The behaviour escalated, repeated and shifted shape, and for the women involved, understanding what was happening was slow, confusing and deeply destabilising. That complexity shaped every creative decision we made.

Very early on, I knew this could not be a conventional procedural led by investigators. For a long time, the women involved were doing the investigative work themselves. They compared messages, checked details, tested inconsistencies and slowly built an understanding of what was happening, often while questioning their own judgement and whether they would be taken seriously if they spoke up. The series is therefore told primarily through the womens experiences, particularly former beauty queen Abbie Draper, because they were the ones driving the search for justice. The series hinges around Abbies experiences, which provide a throughline across the 15-year span of the story, so building a relationship that allowed her to talk candidly about those events was essential.

A defining thread in the series is its focus on why. Catfishing remains a relatively new crime, and this case exposes how limited our understanding still is. Most catfish documentaries are driven by the question of who is behind the deception, with a motive that is often clear and usually financial. This story was different. The deeper we went, the less obvious the why became, and the reveal of who was responsible brought many of the victims more discomfort than clarity. That absence of an easy explanation made it impossible to reduce the behaviour to a single motive, and it became central to how the series needed to be told.

The motives here are not simple or singular. Rather than forcing a neat psychological explanation, the series explores the behaviour through multiple strands: victims experiences, expert insight, and conversations with the catfishs family. These perspectives build understanding without pretending the mystery can be fully resolved.

This was one of the most delicate balances in the production. We were determined to bring humanity and understanding to the perpetrator without explaining away, justifying or minimising the harm that was done. The audience first experiences the story entirely through the eyes of the women affected, before gradually encountering the perspectives of those closest to the perpetrator. That shift is intentional and carefully controlled. It does not ask for sympathy; it asks for an understanding of complexity, while keeping accountability firmly in place.

Visually, I was keen to move away from the default aesthetic of true crime. These women were not living in dark, ominous worlds. They were living ordinary lives: bedrooms lit by phone screens, kitchens where messages were read late at night, workplaces interrupted by notifications. We built colourful, intentional lighting setups to reflect that reality. The series is deliberately bright and warm. That brightness mirrors how these relationships initially felt: reassuring and plausible. It is that ordinariness which makes the eventual betrayal so difficult to comprehend.

That visual clarity also became a storytelling tool. So much of this story unfolds online, across years and across multiple lives. Graphics became a way of carrying the audience through the emotional process the women experienced. Rather than presenting the story with hindsight, they allowed belief, doubt and recognition to unfold gradually on screen.

In terms of storytelling, we were careful not to rely on a single mode. We did use reconstructions and more formal master interviews but also wherever possible, we embedded with the women in their day-to-day lives and encouraged them to talk through what had happened in the spaces where it was felt and processed. Mixing approaches allows the series to feel more intimate and grounded in lived experience rather than hindsight.

Time was a major challenge. The women were targeted at different points across more than 15 years. A simple linear timeline risked repetition and the erosion of individual experience. Instead, the series operates across multiple timelines and different kinds of present tense. There is the past, where patterns are established, and present-tense scenes where experiences are recounted in ways that make clear they are still emotionally alive. There is also the unfolding present, particularly when the perpetrator is released. At those moments, anxiety resurfaces, reminding us that sentences for these crimes are often short, while the impact is not.

The story behind The Beauty Queen and the Catfish was already extraordinary. The challenge wasnt to heighten it, but to guide the audience through it: to let them feel the confusion, the patterns slowly emerging, and the unease as the picture becomes clearer. For me, making the series became less about amplification and more about finding a way to allow an audience to navigate a story that was already stranger, more complex and more unsettling than fiction.

We are living in the golden age of true crime television and, as all unscripted producers will know, the bar for new entrants is high. As this was our first foray into the genre we knew we had to find a story that not only delivered stranger than fiction twists and turns, but offered a different approach. When we came across the case of Adele Rennie one of the UKs most prolific female catfish, who was currently facing her third prison term we saw an opportunity to do just that.

As our development team began piecing together a vast web of victims, two things became clear: this was both a story of an authentic, hyper-local shared experience (many victims came from the same Scottish town) and a story that explored a wealth of universal themes that would resonate more widely. This was shaping up to be an astonishing case, but the dual thread of local-to-UK appeal was what really chimed with us as producers, and what we were keen to land with the BBC.

Feeling confident with our research and the access relationships we had begun to build, we moved quickly to bring this to both BBC Scotland and BBC Docs to kickstart a co-commissioning conversation from the outset. Both parties could see the potential for their audiences, and a collaborative development process began.

Nations to Network synergy aside, what secured the commission ultimately came down to the quality of the storytelling and our proposed approach.

We agreed the narrative should be driven by the victims who, true to life, took matters into their own hands to investigate and reveal their catfish. But as the case was still live, there were still unanswered questions. So we proposed combining the womens retrospective testimony with present day actuality as a means of going deeper and exploring the truth as it continued to unfold.

When we got the greenlight we felt encouraged and empowered by both commissioning teams to make the series we set out to make. Im proud of what the team have produced, never losing sight of our responsibility and purpose now as true crime producers.