Chester Weger was convicted for the murders of three women in an Illinois state park but he insists on his innocence. In the decades since, a town has been split on what they think really happened
A small-town man, perhaps wrongfully accused. A confession squeezed out of him by an overzealous police department more concerned with tying a ribbon on their case than anything else. A prison sentence served in defiance, as he maintains his innocence over a course of decades. A reconsideration of the facts, exposing the fault lines in the case against him.
With the true crime genre fast approaching the saturation point, this has all come to sound more than a little familiar. And Jody McVeigh-Schultz, director of the new HBO miniseries The Murders at Starved Rock, has seen it all. He knows that simply rehashing the plot beats of Making a Murderer won’t cut it anymore, but he also knows that this savviness can instead be used as a jumping-off point. His new three-episode, two-night event posits the concept of a true crime miniseries for an age it already dominates, in which the parties involved have the amateur-sleuth instincts bred by years of poring over real-life mysteries. The people of La Salle county, Illinois, have spent their lives putting themselves in the shoes of those investigating their homespun tragedy, and now it’s our turn to do the same to them.
