If this were a fictional story, you’d never buy it. It’s too improbable, too fantastical. There are too many times where you’d say to yourself, “no way!”
But the so-called Beatrice 6, who were all convicted of murder in Beatrce, Nebraska in the mid-80s? Well, what if every one of them was innocent of the crime – even though most of them actually confessed to it?
These real people populate the true story in the new documentary Mind over Murder. Director Nanfu Wang (HBO’s “In the Same Breath”) introduces us to the small Midwestern town not far from Lincoln, but otherwise just a cornfield with a town square (slight exaggeration) and a courthouse.
A kindly old woman, Helen Wilson opened her door to strangers who proceeded to brutally rape her before killing her right there in her front room. A shocking crime no matter the location, but the blue skies and shiny silos and perfectly clean streets of the small town stand in such stark contrast to the crime, that it’s almost surreal.
Wang resists making caricatures out of these corn-fed citizens and somehow gets the subjects, even the ones convicted of murder, to relax and be themselves and tell their stories in a most cogent way. There really would be no film without them – there’s the flamboyantly gay man, the woman who surely has some mild mental disabilities, the one lone suspect who refused to admit guilt, and so on. We get to know them and their versions of events.
It’s been described as a “bizarre and psychologically complex story,” which perfectly encapsulates the six individuals who were convicted for the 1985 murder of that beloved 68- year-old grandmother on a cold winter night.
Despite five of the individuals originally confessing to the crime, the “Beatrice Six” as they became known, were eventually exonerated by DNA evidence in 2009, after years of incarceration. Those being relatively early days of DNA evidence, many of the locals were skeptical that so many “guilty” people could have simply made up their confessions. Nobody is happy – not the people who lived for years in the penitentiary nor Helen Wilson’s survivors .
And questions still hang in the air
There is a side story in which local theater players put on a production using the case transcripts as their script. It’s an unneccesary device that starts off distracting, but has a bit of a payoff and, fortunately, doesn’t overshadow the story at hand.
In the end, Wang forces us to ask ourselves how the “truth” can shape-shift so dramatically and why peoples’ inaccurate memories are at the heart of so many crime cases.
Mind over Murder is streaming on HBO Max and is perfect for fans of True Crime
