We've been waiting for this a long time: “MSNBC's popular behind-bars reality show Lockup Extended Stay debuts tomorrow at 7 p.m. Pacific Time.” In case the name of the program doesn't ring a bell, you've probably seen it while flipping the channels some evening, trying to find actual news, and instead watching a soft-spoken, bespectacled man in a prison uniform apologetically describe how he killed his parents and ate their brains for breakfast.
Yeah, that show.
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The show's producers spent more than 50 days inside the OC Jail system, which houses roughly 7,000 inmates, making it one of the nation's mega-jails. They filmed enough material to produce six one-hour episodes, the first two of which were previewed last December. The remaining shows will premiere on four consecutive Saturdays beginning on March 19. Not surprisingly, the description of the six episodes sent out by the network read like something out of OC Weekly's Scariest People edition, or maybe just our Navel Gazing archives.
First, there's Clarence Butterfield, the straight-up wackjob who tortured and killed his daughter, and then stuffed her naked body into an ice chest in his trailer, where it remained for two years. According to MSNBC, Butterfield denies any wrongdoing and “claims to be a devout Christian and says he was hoping a miracle would bring her back to life.” In episode two, we meet Daniel Wozniak, the student actor who went batshit loco and killed two friends, dismembering their bodies before tossing one of their torsos in a theater where he once performed, all in order to steal their money and “pay for his upcoming wedding and honeymoon.”
The series doesn't just focus on nutjobs and accused murderers, however;
it also includes some sobering profiles of folks who are behind bars
thanks to addiction, including 38-year-old alcoholic Ryan Abbey,
serving time for drinking on probation and resisting arrest. You can
watch a clip of his interview here.
And what would this show be without a peek at the folks involved in the bloodiest murder ever to take place behind bars in Orange County? On April 2, we'll meet Jared Petrovich and Stephen Carlstrom, two defendants in the October 2006 murder of John Chamberlain, whom they and other inmates believed was a child molester and who died at the hands of dozens of prisoners. You can read my stories based on exclusive interviews with them here and here. It'll be interesting to see if the words “Deputy Kevin Taylor” come up in that episode. Presumably, he wasn't available for an interview, since unlike the prisoners charged in the crime, Taylor, who allegedly outed Chamberlain as a suspected child molester, just lost his day job.
Award-winning investigative journalist Nick Schou is Editor of OC Weekly. He is the author of Kill the Messenger: How the CIA’s Crack Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb (Nation Books 2006), which provided the basis for the 2014 Focus Features release starring Jeremy Renner and the L.A. Times-bestseller Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love’s Quest to bring Peace, Love and Acid to the World, (Thomas Dunne 2009). He is also the author of The Weed Runners (2013) and Spooked: How the CIA Manipulates the Media and Hoodwinks Hollywood (2016).