True Crime Nuance: HBO’s “Mind Over Murder”

On its surface, Mind Over Murder – the titillatingly titled six-part doc series that debuted June 20 on HBO – might seem merely the latest addition to a bloated, true-crime juggernaut. And yet in the critically acclaimed hands of Nanfu Wang (In the Same Breath, One Child Nation, Hooligan Sparrow) the Vox Media Studios-produced project becomes infused with an element rarely seen in our current corporate documentary age: nuance. Indeed, this in-depth exploration of a notorious case in which six men and women – all poor and white with two struggling with severe mental issues – were convicted (and subsequently exonerated) for the 1985 murder of Helen Wilson, a grandmother and beloved member of the Beatrice, Nebraska community, contains neither heroes nor villains. Just a lot of sad and tragically imperfect human beings. So what led five of the “Beatrice Six” to confess to a crime in which not a shred of DNA evidence would ever be found to connect them? And why to this day is both the small town and Wilson’s family fiercely divided over their actual innocence? And why on earth would a filmmaker born and raised in China set out for the US heartland to try to understand the motives behind this horrific crime, its unorthodox investigation, and the decades-spanning trials and exonerations (followed by two civil suits)? Not to mention the making of the local playhouse’s production based entirely on court transcripts.

To find out read my essay at Global Comment.