Netflix
Skye Borgman has quickly become streaming’s reigning queen of true crime, courtesy of last December’s Dead Asleep on Hulu and this July’s The Girl in the Picture on Netflix—the latter of which remains a top ten global hit for the service. Not content to rest on her laurels, the prolific non-fiction director returns on August 9 with I Just Killed My Dad, a three-part Netflix docuseries about abduction, coercion, domination and murder that shares chilling similarities with her most recent film. Beginning with a seemingly open-and-shut case before peeling back layers to reveal a thoroughly rotten core, it’s a study of silent, invisible abuse and the trauma and tragedy it can bring about, as well as—in a surprising twist for this bleakest of genres—a tale about the criminal justice system actually working as it should.
I Just Killed My Dad makes no bones about the literal guilt of its subject, Anthony Templet of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who on June 3, 2019, shot and killed his father, Burt Templet, and then called 911 and calmly confessed to what he’d done. When police arrived, they found the 17-year-old waiting for them, and in a new interview, Anthony states that he was surprised that he was handcuffed and taken away, since he figured that after a brief conversation the issue would be dropped. That assumption wasn’t the only strange thing about this situation. Anthony claimed that he’d shot his father in self-defense but he had no bruises that would denote a scuffle, and the house was in neat and orderly shape—save for a crack in Burt’s bedroom door, which Anthony said had been caused by his dad trying to break into the locked room to get at him.
If that didn’t bode well for Anthony, the fact that he’d taken out two loaded pistols that evening (both owned by Burt) suggested not that he was frantically trying to save his own life, but that he had deliberate intent to kill—a notion Anthony nonchalantly corroborated, explaining that he wanted both guns in his possession in the event that one failed to work. Assistant district attorney Dana Cummings and Sergeant William Brown both believed the evidence indicated that this was murder, and in his subsequent interrogation-room interview with Brown, Anthony’s flat, emotionless demeanor only further made them think they had a potential sociopath on their hands. Clips from that chat presented in I Just Killed My Dad do Anthony no favors, depicting the kid dully elucidating what occurred and making no pains to absolve himself of his culpability—and, weirder still, not being able to accurately provide his birthday or home address.