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  Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father Death In The Family
Year: 2008
Director: Kurt Kuenne
Stars: Various
Genre: DocumentaryBuy from Amazon
Rating:  7 (from 1 vote)
Review: Dr Andrew Bagby was loved and respected by everyone who knew him, which made his death at the age of 28 all the more tough for them to bear. What made things worse was that he had been murdered in cold blood, and the experience his parents David and Kate went through when they received that terrible telephone call to inform them of it is not something anyone should have to go through. But go through it they did, hearing that their son had been found dead in a park, shot five times, and if they didn't think it could get any worse, they were wrong...

Dear Zachary was one of those films that quickly gained a reputation for making anyone who saw it shed a tear: if that was an exaggeration, then it would take a heart of stone to be unmoved at least partially by the horrendous real life story which unfolded through director Kurt Kuenne's lens, and through all the archive footage he found and had actually made himself. The reason he began this project was not simply to commemorate his deceased best friend, but for other reasons as well, which became clear the further into this you got. What started as a tribute developed into a protest movie and ended up back as a tribute, though to Andrew's parents this time.

They endured sheer hell over the course of time this documentary took to make, and the first inkling that this will be no ordinary tale of woe is when we find out about Andrew's killer. He had been working as a doctor in a hospital, and by all accounts was a beloved and valued member of staff, but his personal life was not as rosy as it could have been, having suffered an esteem-knocking breakup with his ex-fiancée which had propelled him into the arms of an older woman. She was Shirley Turner, and everyone around him could tell she was bad news, only he couldn't see it until it was far too late.

It's not giving anything away to say that Shirley was Andrew's killer, an unbalanced but devious personality who refused to let Andrew go when he told her it was over. She got herself a gun (remarkably easily) and essentially set out to murder her boyfriend, a task she succeeded in. You would not have thought that anything could be more awful than that, but Shirley was not finished with ruining lives: this was where Zachary of the title entered the story, as he was Andrew's child: his unborn child, carried by Shirley. Here was where it got complicated, as she left the United States to return to her Newfoundland home, and the legal implications of her case were handled with appalling errors.

All the way through this, David and Kate exhibited incredible patience, determined that Shirley should face justice - she was the only suspect, she had the motive, she had a history of mental derangement, yet the Canadian courts had her treated not as a danger to the public in spite of all that, and she was effectively free to walk the streets until the delayed trial occurred. Where Kuenne was strong on rounding up the friends and family for their memories of Andrew, making this film for Zachary to know what his father was like, he was not so clear on precisely why Shirley was shown such leniency: time and again her case was fudged, which led to the worst part of all. There's no doubting this was an emotive tale, which makes it a pity Kuenne chose to give in to a tabloid TV style, complete with overemphatic editing and melodramatic music, but such was the sense of outrage brought out, the story survived his misjudgements. If one person was saved thanks to what happened to the Bagby family and their crusades, then it was all worth it.
Reviewer: Graeme Clark

 

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