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Comments about this movie
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◊ 2011-03-06 07:23 |
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◊ 2015-10-14 14:33 |
This film was about Betty Anne Waters and her fight to have her wrongfully convicted brother released from prison. Betty Anne's brother, Kenneth was wrongfully convicted on the 11th May 1983 for the murder of Katharina Brow who was stabbed and bludgeoned in her house in the small town of Ayer, Massachusetts on the morning of the 21st May 1980. After Water's conviction, his sister, Betty Anne went through law school and decided to take her brother's case and fight to have his conviction overturn and found out from Water's ex-wife, Brenda Walsh that her boyfriend, Robert Osborne had alleged that the police offered him money if he implicated Waters in the murder and she also stated that police threaten to charge her as an accessory and have her kids taken away if she didn't back up her boyfriend's story. Another witness who confirmed this was Water's former girlfriend, Roseanna Perry. In her statement that she gave to Betty Anne, Perry had provided a statement to police that Waters was with her on the night of the murder, but the police then threaten to charge her as an accessory as they did with Brenda Walsh. With these statements and the DNA results excluding Waters from the crime scene, Kenneth Waters was released from prison and was exonerated on the 15th March 2001 and later died on the 19th September 2001 from injuries sustain from a fall. In 2009, Betty Anne filed a civil suit on the behalf of the estate of Kenny Waters against the city of Ayer and the Ayer Police Department for wrongful imprisonment and was settled out of court. Due to the Massachusetts' statutes of limitation, the cops who were allegedly involved in paying or threatening the witnesses to set up Kenneth Waters for the murder were never demoted, dismissed, charged nor convicted for this unethical conduct. The children of Katharina Brow had criticized the film makers and Hillary Swank for not consulting them on the portrayal of their mother, while Martha Coakley who at the time of Waters' exoneration was the District Attorney for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had said the film was good but had a few legal inaccuracies including the portrayal of the way she handled the Waters' case. Katharina Brow's son, Charles Brow died in 2019 at the age of 65. In June 2025, through the use of genealogy DNA testing conducted by genetic genealogist CeCe Moore and her team at Parabon NanoLabs, the real killer of Katharina Brow was identified as armed robber Joseph Leo Boudreau. Born in 1943, Boudreau was originally from Massachusetts before moving to New Hampshire where he was convicted of armed robbery in 1975 for which he served five years in prison. At the time of the murder, it was suspected that Boudreau had returned to Massachusetts after his release from prison and was working odd jobs in and around Ayer and was suspected that on the morning of the 21st May 1980, Boudreau went to the Brow family home. Whether the intentions were to rob the home remains unclear, but it is believed Boudreau had either confronted Katharina Brow first or that he begun to rob the home and that she caught him in the act, resulting in a struggle between the two and leading Boudreau to overpower Brow and stabbed and beating Brow, resulting in her death. Since the killer sustained injuries in the attack and left blood at the scene, the method of genealogy DNA testing conducted by Moore and her team had identified Boudreau as the source of that blood. After the killing of Brow and the wrongful conviction of Kenny Waters, Boudreau had left Massachusetts and moved to Maine in 1987 where he remained there until his death in 2004 at the age of 61. Since Boudreau was identified as the killer, the Middlesex County District Attorney's Office had concluded that Boudreau didn't have any associations with Kenny Waters. -- Last edit: 2026-01-21 17:45:35 |
