Photos released by police of Benjamin Obadiah Foster during a weeklong manhunt across Josephine County and Southern Oregon. Foster was wanted in the beating and torture of a Grants Pass woman in late January 2023, and is believed to have killed two men while on the loose. The 2006 Phoenix High School grad died after taking his own life during a Jan. 31, 2023, standoff in southwest Grants Pass.

The Netflix series “Worst Ex Ever” comes from the Blumhouse production company, which in addition to other movie and TV shows, is also responsible for several popular horror projects, such as “The Purge,” “M3GAN,” The Invisible Man,” “Insidious: Chapter 3.”

After watching the first episode of “Worst Ex Ever,” titled “Dating the Devil,” it’s easy to forget that this is a true-crime series, and instead consider it a fact-based horror story. “Dating the Devil” tells the story of women who were victimized by accused torturer, kidnapper and murderer Benjamin Obadiah Foster.

The chilling episode includes interviews with two women who recount in horrifying detail their experience with Foster when he lived in Las Vegas, Nevada. One woman describes the violence she says she suffered at Foster’s hands, and another woman remembers being held captive by Foster. She managed to escape, and was brought to a hospital with broken ribs, black eyes and other signs of physical abuse.

Even more terrible is the incident that begins and concludes the episode. Though Foster did face criminal charges for his actions in Las Vegas, he spent a single day in prison for the crime, “as he got credit for the 729 days he had already spent in jail awaiting trial,” as The Oregonian/OregonLive reported.

Foster, who grew up in Oregon, moved to Grants Pass, near where his parents lived, in 2021. Once there, he got a job as a bartender, and, as the “Dating the Devil” episode says, Foster met and began dating a coworker, Justine Siemens.

But Siemens became a victim, as her friend, Angela Milner, recalls at the beginning of the episode. When Milner went to Siemens’ house in January 2023, to check on her friend, she heard screams inside the house, dialed 911, and as she tried to gain entry to the house, she saw Foster, who told Milner that Siemens was having a heart attack.

Milner went inside, as she saw Foster driving away. Then Milner found Siemens, who, as The Oregonian/OregonLive reported, was lying “face down on her laundry room floor, bleeding profusely from head injuries and with rope looped around her ankles and limbs. Pushing aside her friend’s hair, Milner found another rope wrapped tightly around the woman’s neck.”

Police arrived, and Siemens was taken to the hospital. As one of the law enforcement officers interviewed in “Worst Ex Ever” says, in all of his years on the job, he had seen few scenes as horrific and terrible as this one was.

The episode concludes with the nationwide manhunt for Foster, who was wanted on charges including attempted murder, kidnapping and assault, and the revelation of what happened after that.

In our story that ran earlier this year, The Oregonian/OregonLive did not name the Grants Pass woman who was hospitalized, and she did not speak to The Oregonian/OregonLive. But in “Dating the Devil,” Siemens is identified, and interviewed. “Torture is an understatement,” she says, for what she endured.

Milner says that the justice system did a great disservice to Siemens, and that if the women who had been earlier victims had been taken more seriously, Foster wouldn’t have been free to “brutalize my friend like that,” and to be suspected of killing two other people.

That echoes a point made in The Oregonian/OregonLive project, “Ghosts of Highway 20″ and the Investigation Discovery series that it inspired, “Lost Women of Highway 20,” which also noted that if authorities had given more weight to the account of an earlier female victim, a suspected killer might not have been able to commit more crimes.

“Worst Ex Ever,” which follows Blumhouse Television’s earlier true-crime series, “Worst Roommate Ever,” had been the number-one show on Netflix, though it is now in the number-three spot. The most-watched Netflix show as of today, “The Perfect Couple,” is about a murder, though this one is fiction, and stars Nicole Kidman and Liev Schreiber as a wealthy couple hosting a wedding party on their luxurious Nantucket, Massachusetts, property.