The crime was haunting: In 1985, in the small quiet town of Beatrice, Nebraska, a 68-year-old grandmother named Helen Wilson was sexually assaulted and brutally murdered in her apartment. The unthinkable tragedy rocked the community—but the crime’s aftermath, which is still unspooling nearly 40 years later, may be just as traumatic.

In the years following the murder, after speaking to local detectives and a police psychologist, three Beatrice misfits became convinced they had raped and killed Wilson, even though they couldn’t remember being in Wilson’s apartment. (The psychologist explained that there was a natural reason for that: they had likely repressed the traumatic memories.)

Ultimately, six innocent people (including the three above) were convicted of Wilson’s murder. They collectively spent 77 years in prison until 2009, when DNA evidence exonerated all of them. A decade later, in 2019, the community was further rocked when the county was ordered to pay a $28 million civil rights judgement to the wrongly imprisoned, who had come to be known as “The Beatrice Six.”

The crime and still-simmering aftermath are the subject of HBO’s upcoming Mind Over Murder, a six-part docuseries premiering June 20 that gives thoughtful new dimension to the well-trod true-crime genre. To make it, Peabody winner and Macarthur Genius grantee Nanfu Wang embedded herself in the rural community for 100 days—gaining the trust of and eventually interviewing Wilson’s grandchildren, several former cops who worked the case, and four of the five “Beatrice Six” who are still alive.

She also called on locals to audition for a documentary-style play based on the Wilson saga that is intercut in the series—a clever conceit that helps unite the still-stricken community in real time.

In an interview about Mind Over Murder, Wang tells Vanity Fair that she learned about the Beatrice Six case in 2017, through the New Yorker feature, “Remembering the Murder You Didn't Commit.” At that point, the Chinese-born filmmaker was already interested in exploring memory. 

Her interest began in 2016, when a strange thing happened after finishing her first feature documentary Hooligan Sparrow. Wang says that she was startled to talk to the film’s subject, activist Ye Haiyan, after Haiyan had seen the finished project because “I caught her remembering the events [depicted in the film] wrong. She recognized the film’s version, but then I was like, ‘Wait, I switched this chronology to make a more clear storyline. But in reality, those two events happened in the opposite order. And she was like, ‘No way, this is how I remembered it.”

By that point, Wang had spent countless hours in the edit room watching Haiyan describe the original order of events. But even after making that point, the filmmaker was still unable to convince Haiyan that she was misremembering events according to Hooligan Sparrow.

“That was the moment I realized the power of narrative, and how even as a storyteller with the film I made, I was able to change her memory. She no longer remembers the real version [of what happened],” says Wang. “From now on, the whole world is going to remember those events as the film’s version. There is no one else who would know the real details of that life experience. So I was very surprised and amazed, but also horrified by the power of suggestion and how malleable our memory is.”

“I started to question what kind of false memories I might have held and was not aware of,” she continues. “Memory is such a fundamental part of our identity. How we remember the past defines who we are as a person, a community, a nation.”

The Beatrice Six crime seemed like the perfect lens through which to explore that concept.

“I was intrigued by how three out of six people, even at the moment of exoneration, still had doubt about their own innocence. One of the six still has memory of being at the crime scene, which she wasn’t,” says Wang. 

While investigating the story, Wang learned just how polarized the Beatrice community still was.

“Most of the people in the community still believed that the six were guilty,” says Wang. “It was a goal for me to capture that community story. They all have different versions of what they believe. All versions are strong and have been deeply-rooted for decades.”

Wanting to integrate that community tension into her docuseries, Wang hatched the plan of staging a local play within her project. But to get the production off the ground, the filmmaker needed to convince the Beatrice community theater on her idea: auditioning locals to play real-life people, including the Beatrice Six, in a play scripted from trial records, police investigations, and interviews.

“It took a long time to convince them to collaborate on this, because this is such a contentious issue in the community,” says Wang. Eventually, though, she won over the board. “The reality is that they all have to pay this settlement of $28 million and it affects everyone who lives in Gage County. We wanted this project to bring people together—to be an opportunity for reconciliation and healing, because it’s still an issue that divided so many people there. I think, by the end, they understood our intentions and that they were good.”

“I was talking to the play director the other day, and she said, ‘In theater history, I can’t think of another play that was being performed by the local people, for the local people, about the local people, that eventually had an impact on the local people.”

Wang says that she ended up being pleasantly surprised by her time in Beatrice.

“I realize[d] that no matter what they believe on either side, no matter what their political views are, those people are all nice and intelligent and kind. And it reflects our current society that you have people on the left or right who have very different political views,” says the filmmaker. “But if you get to know them as friends or family members, you see them as human beings that ultimately have a lot of good qualities.”