They Confessed, But Weren’t Guilty: HBO’s True Crime Series ‘Mind Over Murder’ Documents Strange Nebraska Wrongful Conviction Case

deadline.com:

In June 2017 The New Yorker magazine published a piece under the evocative title, “Remembering the Murder You Didn’t Commit.”It told the story of the “Beatrice Six”–three men and three women sentenced to lengthy prison terms for the 1985 rape and murder of a grandmother in the small Nebraska town of Beatrice (pronounced bee-AT-trice).

Five of the accused had confessed; only one had steadfastly maintained his innocence. More than two decades passed before DNA testing revealed none of those convicted had been present at the crime scene.Among those who read The New Yorker article back in 2017 was filmmaker Nanfu Wang.“I was immediately intrigued,” Wang recalls. “After reading [the article], I knew that I wanted to explore it in the form of a film.”That exploration evolved into the new six-part documentary series Mind Over Murder, for HBO.

A new episode premieres on the cable channel each Monday through July 25 (episodes 1 and 2 have aired so far; episode 3 debuts July 4).

Underpinning the series is a perplexing question: how could five people admit to committing a heinous crime, despite not being involved?“To me, this has always been a story about the malleability and fallibility of memory,” Wang tells Deadline. “We’re looking at this through a criminal case where six people were wrongfully convicted of a murder, but yet many of them still have a memory of being at the murder.