The Cheshire Murders
(eVideo)

English

Originally released by Home Box Office (Firm), 2014.

Streaming video file encoded with permission for digital streaming by Infobase on September 21, 2016.

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Using exclusive interviews and spanning half a decade, The Cheshire Murders reveals the shocking police failures and untold personal dramas behind the notorious rape-arson-homicide case that shook Cheshire, Connecticut in the summer of 2007. In this quiet, bedroom suburb, Jennifer Petit and her two daughters, age 11 and 17, were killed in a home invasion gone horribly wrong; husband and father William Petit was the only member of the family who escaped alive. Framed by the media as a parable of good versus evil, the case and its perpetrators, Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky, became a rallying cry for the death penalty. However, much of the story has been hidden from the general public, and alarming failures in the system reveal another tragedy: this crime could have been prevented at many turns. Told intimately by the victims' and perpetrators' friends and families, as well as the attorneys, journalists, and mental-health professionals involved firsthand in the case, the film takes viewers from the morning of the crime, through the death-penalty trials five years later. Directed, produced and edited by award- winning filmmakers Kate Davis and David Heilbroner, the film suggests that "eradicating evil" is perhaps not the solution, and that larger forces must also be held accountable - or else we pave the way for more senseless tragedy.

11 & up.

Streaming video file.

System requirements: Access Video On Demand playback platform.

Closed-captioned.