Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Dawson County Montana Correctional Facility/Warner Bros.
A murder trial in a small Montana town took a Hollywood turn when a 2010 crime thriller starring Ben Affleck and Jeremy Renner was cited as key evidence.
Isaac Carrier was in bed, likely asleep, in his apartment in Fallon, Montana, on Jan. 23 when he was shot in the back of the head and left to die in a blazing inferno. And prosecutors say that the two men who allegedly carried out the shooting, and lit his apartment on fire, communicated about the deed beforehand by discussing a video of the movie “The Town.”
The accused are 21-year-old Jake Burghduff and 30-year-old Sterling Brown of South Dakota. Brown, whom prosecutors believe fired the shot that killed Carrier and whose trial is scheduled for March 2024, maintains his innocence. But Burghduff offered up a confession to investigators and a jury convicted him of deliberate homicide in August. He faces a maximum sentence of 100 years, with a minimum of 10 years, and is set to be sentenced on Oct. 17. The two men are being held in the Dawson County Correctional Facility in Glendive, Montana, on bonds of $250,000 and $1 million. They are kept in separate pods to ensure they do not interact.