Off The Fence (OTF), the Academy Award-winning independent producer and distributor, has entered into a development deal with Emmy Award-winning US journalists Gloria Gomez and Robin Carter.

Under the agreement, which was brokered by global entertainment and sports agency Gersh, OTF will co-develop and produce new true-crime series based on the intelligence, access and contacts amassed by Gomez and Carter during their careers as investigative journalists on the US domestic beat.

The first project to come out of the new partnership is Love & Death Row: The Rosalie Bolin Story, a true-crime series based by Gomez and Carter’s investigation into one of the strangest and most complex stories in the history of the US criminal-justice system.

The story starts in 1986, when rapist and serial killer Oscar Ray Bolin was convicted of the murder of three women in Florida. Enter Rosalie Martinez, a paralegal married to a prominent defence attorney, who met Bolin in 1995 when she visited his cell on death row to discuss his case. The meeting left Martinez “breathless” and determined to prove Bolin’s innocence. She left her husband and four daughters, resigned from the public defender’s office and embarked on an intense relationship with Bolin, becoming his wife in 1996 via a speaker-phone ceremony. They remained together until his execution in 2016, since when Martinez has rebuilt her life as a private investigator and death-penalty mitigation specialist.

Gomez, a general-assignment reporter specialising in court cases and the criminal-justice system, has worked with the Tampa Bay FOX 13 News team for the past 20 years. Carter, a photojournalist with three decades of experience at news stations in Virginia, Texas and Florida, joined NBC 5 in 2019. She has worked in all facets of television, including news production, medical reporting, consumer affairs and special projects.

Celine Ritchie, head of development at OTF, said: “The experiences and perspectives of those who have been on the frontline of stranger-than-fiction cases exerts a powerful fascination — and it would be difficult to find a stranger or more powerful story than Love & Death Row, or two more reliable or insightful witnesses than Gloria and Robin. One of Off the Fence’s particular strengths is its ability to forge creative partnerships with people who have great stories waiting be told.”

In another US co-development partnership, OTF has joined forces with Makuhari Media on feature documentary King of Kandahar. The three-part series chronicles the life of Lieutenant Colonel Mohammed Iqbal Selanee, a teenage interpreter for the US forces in Afghanistan who rose to command an elite, CIA-directed paramilitary unit. An unsung hero of modern warfare, Selanee saved the lives of two US journalists and shielded hundreds of Afghans stranded at Kandahar Air Base, jeopardising the lives of own family to ensure the safety of his American comrades.

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NULLfy;">What If Evolution…  will be introduced at The London TV Screenings, alongside OTF’s more traditional slate of premium natural-history programming, which this year includes two new feature docs currently in production. Last Mermaids of Korea looks at the ‘Haenyo’ – female divers who hold their breath for more than two minutes to depths of 20 metres hunting culinary treasures for restaurants. Beavers from Above goes to remote locations in the quest to find out what an invasion of beavers means on the frontline of climate change, doubling their number and taking over the entire western Alaskan tundra in the last 20 years.