And by the time police discovered they had screwed up DNA evidence they had collected from beneath her fingernails, her body had been cremated.īut once Barbara's relatives had finished spilling their guts about Jeffrey, they couldn't stop talking. He upped the ante by disappearing for several days when he reappeared, he was heavily lawyered up and refusing to talk to the cops at all. 1 from the very moment Barbara's battered body was discovered. On the day of Barbara's murder, Jeffrey was in court to face demands that he either pay Barbara half a million dollars or go to jail.Īll of which combined to make Jeffrey Suspect No. She, in turn, threated to have him locked up. The bitter Jeffrey-it was Barbara who filed for divorce-started withholding alimony and child support from his ex-wife, partly to punish her, partly because he didn't have the money his new career wasn't going well. But also, there's a fleeting shadow: "I always knew she had secrets that were dark secrets," says an aunt as a collage of snapshots of Barbara wearing cryptic half-smiles flashes past.Ĭould some of those secrets concern her husband, Jeffrey? The couple broke up after he lost his company vice-presidency and had to start hustling new corporate gigs on the road, keeping him away from home for long periods. Middle Beach starts as a cliché suburban watercolor: well-to-do family summer home near the beach private school nannies handsome (and rich) dad pretty stay-at-home mom who stars in many a home movie with cute-as-buttons babies Madison and younger sister Ali lots of interviews with family members who recall mom Barbara as beautiful and smart and all the stuff you expect. It's hard to say what's more horrifying-that he keeps carving or that you keep watching. Not quite like any other true-crime show you've ever seen, Murder on Middle Beach is like watching a surgeon wield a scalpel on his own body, uncovering new layers of infection every time he cuts. But none of this is to suggest he failed as a filmmaker. And when it's over, if anything, Madison seems even more confused about his family and the murder than when he started. At four hour-long episodes on HBO, Murder on Middle Beach is anything but short. He hoped partly to resolve his own confusion-so far from home, he knew little about what happened-and partly to prod the cops into get back to work on what was rapidly become a cold case. Madison, just 20 and a student at a Georgia film school when his divorcee mother was stabbed and beaten to death outside their Connecticut home in 2010, decided two years later to make a short documentary about it for a class assignment. Imagine putting a microphone in the face of your father and asking, serious as death itself, "Did you murder my mother?" Now imagine doing it again, three or four or five times, with your aunts and your sister, always the same question: "Did you murder my mother?" And now you begin to get the feel of Madison Hamburg's life, and the flavor of the documentary he's spent the last eight years making, Murder on Middle Beach.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |