![]() ![]() ![]() The Wilson case was still sensitive and traumatic for many in Beatrice, and mutated by a thousand different personal versions – as one community theater actor puts it: “Everybody knows somebody, everybody is connected to something somewhere and knows some extra piece of information that they think changes the narrative.”īuilding relationships with participants and townspeople took numerous off-camera meetings, with Wang explaining the concept: a series exploring memory and belief, about “something that really haunted the community for the past 35 years and there is no real sense of closure. “It was the psychological stories of why people believe in things, why people remember things, why memories stay with us and could be false.” “Initially what attracted me was not the crime story at all,” she said. Wang did not enter Beatrice as a fan of true crime she had not seen or heard any of the landmark series of the past decade and a half – The Jinx, Making a Murderer, The Staircase, the podcast Serial – before embarking on the project. Beatrice residents, especially Wilson’s family, were desperate for answers – for closure – after four years with no leads. Some had suffered sexual or physical abuse, struggled with mental illness and intellectual challenges or faced the stigma of being bisexual in a small town in the 80s. (Searcey, a main subject of the series, maintains his methods were sound.) The group was particularly vulnerable to manipulation: all six were poor with little social clout. (White, who always maintained his innocence, filed the 2009 civil rights lawsuit that led to their exoneration.)Īs captured on video and in police records, lead investigator Burdette “Burt” Searcey and others from the Gage county sheriff’s office intimidated witnesses, supplied false or leading information to aid the confessions and convinced the group that their lack of memory of the murder was actually repressed trauma. All except one of the six, Joseph White, had confessed to committing the crime or being in Wilson’s apartment during the murder – though, as Mind Over Murder details, the interrogation methods were suspect. The case was a prime example of the plasticity of memory, the power of suggestion and the fallibility of eyewitness testimony, a leading cause of wrongful conviction. Wang first heard of the Beatrice Six, who collectively served 70 years in prison, through a 2017 New Yorker article that focused on how some of them still remembered scenes from the crime they did not commit. ![]() And it modeled the central questions of the series: what makes people change their minds? For those who held on to the belief that six people had raped and murdered a grandmother in her apartment and left no DNA evidence, Wang wondered: “if there’s enough empathy that’s brought into the story, if they could step into the shoes of the ones who were in the story, would that challenge them to rethink?” The play offered a chance for “everybody in the same room for the first time, people who hated each other”, Wang told the Guardian. Thirty years after Wilson was murdered, many in Beatrice, including Wilson’s family, still believed that the so-called Beatrice Six – convicted in 1989 and exonerated based on DNA evidence in 2009 – were guilty. The play, conceived by Wang and developed by the Beatrice (pronounced bee-AT-tris) community theater using trial transcripts, court records and input from the all-local cast, confronts a painful rift within the town of about 12,500 people in rural south-eastern Nebraska. ![]()
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