In 1981, 17-year-old Anthony Jacques Broussard strangled 14-year-old Marcy Conrad to dying and jettisoned her physique within the foothills of Milpitas, California. The homicide shook up the Silicon Valley metropolis, and made sufficient nationwide noise to be a magnet for Jimenez, a local of the realm who was finding out movie at UCLA. As Jimenez informed Vice in a 2017 oral historical past of the film:
“There was a information story a couple of child who dumped a physique and took his mates to see it. I used to be in a screenplay class at UCLA, and I wrote it for the category. Many of the characters have been based mostly on folks I had gone to highschool with. I believed it spoke to a temper that younger folks have been feeling on the time — feeling indifferent from issues and desirous to zone out.”
“River’s Edge” is bleak, however had Jimenez tried an entirely devoted retelling of this terrible saga, he would’ve wound up with one thing like “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer as a Younger Man.” Two issues the movie will get proper are Broussard’s bodily bearing and emotional emptiness; in line with professional psychological testimony in his 1982 trial, he was an intimidatingly massive child devoid of feeling for different human beings. The protection tried to attract sympathy from the jury by calling psychiatrist Dr. Samuel G. Benson Jr. to the stand, who posited that Broussard’s psychological improvement had been halted by the dying of his mom when he was eight years previous. Benson in the end concluded that Broussard was “a persistent paranoid schizophrenic with transient natural mind illness brought on by drug abuse.”
Provided that he was a minor on the time of the homicide, Broussard couldn’t be sentenced to dying, so the choose hit him with 25 years to life.
“River’s Edge” could be fictionalized, however Hunter and Jimenez have been decided to seize the conspiratorial amorality that led Broussard’s mates to cowl for him. Did they succeed? It is dependent upon who you ask.
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