Basil Borutski's criminal record stretches back to 1977, filled with domestic abuse charges, threats, and drunken violence that mostly got dropped or buried before anyone outside his victims' lives ever saw them. In September 2015, he killed three women within hours of each other near Wilno, Ontario: Anastasia Kuzyk, Nathalie Warmerdam, and Carol Culleton, each of whom had been through his courts before and had reported him for abuse. CBC's the fifth estate, with reporter Gillian Findlay, interviews the victims' families and friends about the warnings that went unheeded and the charges that led nowhere. Findlay also gets Borutski himself on the phone, and the recording is used at length: he admits to the killings but insists he is the real victim, undone by vindictive women lying about him. The film traces how a justice system with every relevant file in hand still let him move from one woman to the next, asking plainly why the pattern was never enough to stop him before it turned fatal.