Contact The Editor
Articles By This Author
Ofra Bikel, a documentary filmmaker whose work for PBS's "Frontline" investigative series exposed frailties in the U.S. criminal justice system - the coercive use of plea bargains, the failure to consider DNA evidence, the reliance on informants to prosecute drug cases - and helped free 13 people who had been wrongly charged or convicted, died Aug. 11 at her home in Tel Aviv. She was 94.
Her niece and caretaker, Tamar Ichilov, confirmed the death but did not give a specific cause.
As a writer and producer, Ms. Bikel (pronounced bih-KELL) made films that she described as cinematic essays.
Her work came with a point of view, a lesson or argument about public policy or current affairs. But she sought to anchor her films in the stories of individual people - prosecutors, social workers, criminal defendants - and to surprise viewers with an unexpected angle, such as when she chronicled the impact of the late 2000s recession by interviewing clients at an Upper East Side hair salon in Manhattan.
"What I like to do is take viewers by the hand - come with me to this place, I'll show you what I learn," she explained in a 1993 interview with the New York Times.
Before picking up a camera, the Israeli-born Ms. Bikel journeyed from her hometown of Tel Aviv to Paris, where she studied law and political science. She settled in New York in the mid-1950s, when she was briefly married to Theodore Bikel, an Austrian-born actor and folk singer who starred as Captain von Trapp in the original Broadway production of "The Sound of Music."
As a child, Ms. Bikel had dreamed of becoming a dashing, trench-coat-wearing journalist. ("I thought that was a glamorous profession where people dressed nicely," she said.) She became a longtime producer for public television, joined "Frontline" for its inaugural season in 1983 and, over the next quarter-century, became a mainstay of the program, making more than two-dozen films that brought her Emmy Awards, duPont-Columbia prizes and, in 2007, the John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism.
"There is a sort of good, old-fashioned crusading journalism to what she does - a fire in the heart and the brain that says this is an outrage and a wrong that can be corrected," executive producer David Fanning, the founder of "Frontline," said at the time.
In a phone interview for this obituary, he added that Ms. Bikel had a knack for winning the trust of subjects, even as she remained a perpetual outsider to people who marveled at her designer outfits and struggled to pinpoint her accent.
"She had an ability to let people speak and to talk," he said, praising "the way in which she asked questions, the way in which she paused and let them reveal themselves" in interviews that were often as poignant as they were informative.
Although she was best known for her work on criminal justice, Ms. Bikel started out on "Frontline" making documentaries about foreign affairs, including the transition from communism to capitalism in Poland and the difficulties that Soviet émigrés faced in adjusting to life in the United States. Eventually, she concluded that those programs had a limited appeal.
"Americans," she said, "aren't very interested in what happens abroad."
In search of subjects that were closer to home, she traveled to Edenton, N.C., population 5,000. Located on Albemarle Sound, the seaside community had a blissful name and an idyllic reputation. Ms. Bikel recalled reading a guidebook that cited it as a classic example of a charming Southern town.
But by the time she arrived in 1990, the community had been roiled by accusations of child sex abuse at a day-care center called Little Rascals. Ms. Bikel would spend the next seven years making documentaries about the abuse case, which grew to encompass seven defendants, 429 criminal counts and dozens of alleged victims.
Ultimately, she concluded that the allegations were driven by hysteria, in a modern-day Salem witch trial that relied on questionable testimony from young children who spoke of rape and abuse while also offering bizarre accounts of devil worship, alien abductions and perilous trips through shark-infested waters.
Ms. Bikel reported that many of the children initially denied that wrongdoing had occurred at Little Rascals, but began sharing horrific stories after weeks with state-appointed therapists.
Her first documentary about the case, "Innocence Lost" (1991), explored the charges against the day-care center's co-owners, Bob Kelly and his wife, Betsy, while also capturing the fury of town residents who wished the couple would "rot in jail." A four-hour follow-up, "Innocence Lost: The Verdict" (1993), was released after Bob Kelly had been sentenced to 12 consecutive life prison terms, despite no conclusive medical or physical evidence being cited at his eight-month trial.
Ms. Bikel spoke with parents, defense lawyers and several of the jurors, including three who expressed doubts about the verdict. Her reporting revealed improprieties in the case, including that one of the jurors who favored conviction had been sexually abused as a child, despite saying otherwise during jury selection. She also found that the jury had been influenced by a magazine article, purportedly written by a child molester, even though they were barred from drawing on outside information.
Days before the premiere of Ms. Bikel's third and final film in the series, "Innocence Lost: The Plea" (1997), prosecutors dropped the remaining charges. All seven of the defendants were released or had already been freed, with Kelly's conviction set aside by an appeals court.
"The fact that we fought for them, and were right, and managed to get seven people out of jail was astonishing, intoxicating," Ms. Bikel later said, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. "That's when I realized what power I had in television."
Ms. Bikel continued to focus on criminal justice in "Frontline" documentaries including "The Case for Innocence" (2000), which spotlighted the role that DNA tests were beginning to play in trials.
The program profiled four men who languished in prison despite crucial DNA evidence that had been buried, discounted or simply overlooked. Within about a year of its premiere, three of the men had been released, including Clyde Charles, who spent nearly two decades at Louisiana's Angola prison for rape, and Earl Washington, who had been sent to death row in Virginia for murder. (A fourth man was executed before the film's release.)
Another man, Terence Garner, was freed after Ms. Bikel documented his case in "An Ordinary Crime" (2002), which suggested that Garner had been sent to prison for robbery, kidnapping and attempted murder because he had been wrongly identified by a witness and shared the same first name as the actual culprit.
Her documentary "The Plea" (2004) proved similarly effective. The film was credited with helping secure the release of two more people, including Patsy Kelly Jarrett, a convicted murderer who spent nearly 30 years in prison while insisting on her innocence.
"It's a little embarrassing," Jarrett's lawyer Abbe Smith told the Times, reflecting on Ms. Bikel's legacy as a filmmaker. "I've been a criminal defense lawyer for 22 years, and her work has probably led to the release of more prisoners than mine."
• In search of the next story
The second of three children, Ms. Bikel was born Ofra Yehiely Ichilov in Tel Aviv on Sept. 12, 1929. Her father was an electrical engineer and her mother was a special-education teacher.
Ms. Bikel received master's degrees from the Sorbonne and Sciences Po in Paris, according to her LinkedIn page. She soon moved to New York to join Theodore Bikel, whom she married in 1955 and divorced two years later, according to her niece.
After working as a researcher for Time and Newsweek, Ms. Bikel moved into broadcasting at ABC. She was a producer for public television shows including "The Great American Dream Machine," an irreverent 1970s variety series, and worked as a producer in Israel for a few years before returning to the United States in 1977.
Soon she began collaborating with Fanning, an untested executive producer, making documentaries for a new foreign affairs show called "World." Produced by WGBH in Boston, the series evolved into "Frontline" as Ms. Bikel continued to craft roughly a documentary a year, putting out programs about the Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill hearings, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, the legacy of the O.J. Simpson murder trial and the final days of an AIDS victim.
Another documentary, "Snitch" (1999), about prosecutors' reliance on informants in drug cases, inspired a 2013 action movie of the same name. Ms. Bikel was credited as an associate producer on the film, which starred Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.
Ms. Bikel lived in an art-filled Upper West Side apartment before returning to Israel eight years ago. She had no children, and leaves no immediate survivors.
Karen O'Connor, a longtime producer at "Frontline," recalled that while Ms. Bikel was often hailed for making programs that freed the wrongly convicted, she was hesitant to take much credit for her work. Ms. Bikel would say that while she was certainly a good reporter, she couldn't be that good: If she had been able to uncover so many miscarriages of justice, it was because the justice system was so flawed.
Interviewed by the Columbia Journalism Review after her special on DNA testing, Ms. Bikel noted that was an element of chance in which prisoners got a second look. She had decided to profile Clyde Charles, she said, because he was telegenic, had served in prison a long time and was "a non-murderer with no prior record."
When it came to his exoneration, "I'm proud that I played a role," she added. "But more than anything, I tremble with fear. What if we had decided on another case instead? Charles could have easily been in prison for another five or 10 years. What unhappy family did we just toss aside because the profile was not what we were looking for?"
(COMMENT, BELOW)