Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Mind Over Murder’ On HBO, A Docuseries About Notorious ‘Beatrice Six’ Murder Case

Mind Over Murder, directed by Nanfu Wang, is a six-part docuseries about the “Beatrice Six” case. In 1985, 68-year-old Helen Wilson was sexually assaulted and murdered in her apartment in the small Nebraska town of Beatrice (pronounced “bee-A-trice”). Six people — Joseph White, Thomas Winslow, Ada JoAnn Taylor, Debra Shelden, James Dean and Kathy Gonzalez — were found guilty of the murder, but in 2008 were all exonerated via DNA evidence.

MIND OVER MURDER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Scenes from rural Nebraska, with ominous music playing over them.

The Gist: Many of the Beatrice Six still claim to have memories of being at the scene of Wilson’s murder, and their memories haunt them to this day. It turns out that the county’s police psychiatrist, Wayne Price, persuaded the six that their memories of the night were repressed.

In the first episode, Wang sets up how shocking the murder was, given how small Beatrice is, and she speaks to a number of Wilson’s grandchildren, now all in their 50s and 60s, about how loving and warm she was. She also talks to law enforcement, who spent years looking for suspects, and eliminated them via the rudimentary blood-type tests that were used in the pre-DNA-testing days. One suspect, Bruce Alan Smith, was eliminated because his B-type blood wasn’t of the non-secretor variety.

She also talks to town residents who are playing parts in a documentary play about the murders, which, yes, sounds pretty strange. Burt Searcey, a former Beatrice cop who investigated the murder as a P.I., thought he had a lead when someone told him that Taylor told her that she, White and Winslow did the crime. But it wasn’t until 1989, when Searcey became a county sheriff’s deputy, that the case gained any traction.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The small-town murder topic has been fertile ground for docuseries producers. Two that come to mind are Murder In A Small Town and No One Saw A Thing.

Our Take: We’re always intrigued at the small town politics that are revealed when a violent crime happens in one of them, and that’s what’s driving the early episodes of Mind Over Murder. But the series is actually more about just how reliable psychiatric methods like hypnosis and recovering suppressed memories are in court cases, and the first episode barely scratches the surface there.

Given the twists and turns of the case, including a civil lawsuit that the exonerated six filed against Gage County, there is a lot of ground to cover in the series’ six episodes. So it’s a bit disappointing that Wang chooses devices like speaking to the townspeople trying out for the “docuplay” and having them read Searcey’s words from police transcripts. There is also some lingering on conversations about Wilson by one of her many grandkids.

What we needed in that first episode was how six people could have been in Wilson’s tiny apartment, when all evidence showed that the assault and murder was committed by one person. The series will get into that eventually, talking about Price’s role in getting all of the suspects to confess. But the fact that they not only all confessed but were convicted seems remarkable. It would have been better if we got to that faster then went back and heard about Wilson’s life and the weird play that is going to be held in Beatrice.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: One of the Beatrice Six, Debra Shelden, sits down to talk. She says people thought, “Nah, you’re too nice. They never thought I could do murder.”

Sleeper Star: Searcey is quite the character, and it seems that his determination to be the hero of the story really affected the narrative and the direction of who was looked at for the murder.

Most Pilot-y Line: “I’m thinkin’. I’m thinkin’. Sometimes I have to think,” Searcey tells Wang when she asks about his meeting with the woman who informed him about Taylor, White and Winslow. It’s one of those “extra” moments that could have been snipped to keep things moving.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The case of the Beatrice Six is an interesting one, and we’re pretty sure that once Mind Over Murder gets into the details of how the six got arrested, convicted and exonerated, it’ll move better. But you may want to have your finger on the fast forward button during the first couple of episodes.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.