Life with Murder

There are telling moments in this documentary where you can see it is also the parents who are scared of the truth.

Denial comes in many forms and this film reveals the weakness and fragility that envelops this family.

3 people made a choice to continue living as if this tragedy never happened. If the mother and father can be so pragmatic then is this about their love for their son or their own selfish needs taking precedence. That is that they made a choice to keep their son in their life rather than face the reality of what he did and it's consequences.

Shamefully, the murdered sibling and how she died has almost become an irrelevance.

At the beginning I felt empathy for the parents and what they must have been going through. By the end that had long since disappeared.

I don't understand how these parents can stand by this idiot of a son... he's a horrible, pathetic, lying monster. So very sad..

My Uncle left for WWI thinking he was off to a great adventure. Like every other member of our family since the Revolution, he wanted to serve his country and his people. However, when he came home, he brought a chest full of the highest military medals and a bad case of PTSD. He was still repeating the aphorism that war was months of boredom interrupted by moments of terror decades later, and he said that, eventually, he only remembered the terror.

In this heart wrenching documentary, the parents of a teenaged boy and girl come home to find their daughter shot to death in their basement. They slowly piece together that their son is responsible, and the rest of the film is how they learn to deal with the new normal.

Never have I seen a documentary that focused on the tedium of despair, but anyone who has ever lost someone to a sudden death knows exactly what that means. The terror of loss is immediate and overwhelming, but then comes the numbing dullness of cleaning up the death site, arranging the funeral, etc. The trouble comes afterward, when there is nothing concrete to do but to mentally break down what happened again and again.

As in war, it can take months or years to break down and understand what happened. When the sudden death is caused by a family member, the denial is so much stronger than reality. It has its own kind of PTSD.

The film maker here spares nothing in showing the audience how a family problem ignored becomes a family tragedy. Parents love their kids, even when their kids are sociopaths. A family will seek some kind of normalcy, even in the agony of loss, and it will do so because the terror is just beneath the surface.

Also, Mason needs to stay in prison.

Interesting but hard to watch crime documentary that starts out with the premise of Mason Jenkins's guilt. He's been convicted and is serving his time and whatever stories he's told over the years, the possibility of his innocence isn't really on the table here. Instead, the documentary is mostly focused on the aftermath of the crime and the relationship of this eviscerated family unit.

I felt somewhat uncomfortable watching this intimate footage of his families pain. From the police interview tapes from the time of the murder to the aunt who wants to support the parents but can't condone their frankly desperate support for their son. Its just hard to watch the two parents clinging to the idea of a family their son already effectively stole from them. The visits in the sad little prison house illustrate this perfectly; it's not a real home the relationships are a performance and murdered Jennifer is conspicuously absent. It's an interesting contrast that the prison guard who has no such emotional investment in Mason's innocence has no time for his lying.

As for the killer himself, I have to say he's frustratingly banal. Not very bright, not ready to take on the mantle of guilt but not able to lie convincingly either. He comes across as a big fat adult baby- childishly dependant on his parents yet frustrated by their enmeshment, narcissistically selfish like a toddler. I feel he can't admit to the murder because of the narcissistic blow that would be to his ego, he'd risk losing the support of his parents upon whose approval he seems dependant. They need him to be their child so they can cling to the family unit idea and he can't handle the withdrawal of their approval so they're all trapped and can only sneak up on the truth in tiny slow steps. The truth being that their son is a killer who feels no real love or respect for them. I can't help but wonder what signs might have been ignored during his upbringing that let him turn into such a monster.

Witnessing a family's pain as entertainment is a pretty ruthless appeal and possibly an insult to an audience, me included, that may have been just as riveted had the tv reporters invited some brilliant therapists, some mental health professionals to accompany and guide these sessions. Without that aspect of compassion that may have artfully demanded logic from the son instead of these ridiculous stories that ignore the room entirely, forget the elephant....where's the road through to healing? Where's the chance of resolution, solace or any comfort at all. Except that's none of our business except it's been made our business by airing and sharing lovely parents in an impossible situation doing the best they can. I just hope they're getting that support from those who might have advised them to skip the entertaining us but just as said near the end, how can we possibly judge what few could likely survive at all-the loss of both children under circumstances that are close to the worst. God bless them. Well done documentary for what it provokes ... a lot of questions.