On Oct. 24, 2001, two men broke into Sandra Stotler’s Conroe, Texas home to steal her new Chevy Camaro and take it for a joyride. She was baking cookies when they entered the house. They murdered her, stole the car and then came back, murdered her son and his friend, Jeremy Richardson and dumped the bodies in a nearby lake. All for a car that was in their possession for less than 72 hours.
The primary perpetrators — Michael Perry and Jason Burkett — spent several days taking their friends on rides in the Camaro and bragging about the crime, believing it made them “real men.” They were apprehended by police after a shootout in which both received multiple gunshot wounds. Burkett received a life sentence; Perry was sent to death row to await execution.
Werner Herzog (Cave of Forgotten Dreams) interviewed both men less than a week before Perry’s execution, which was carried out on July 1, 2010. Although Perry and Burkett blame one another for the crimes, there is never any real question of their innocence. They are not sympathetic. They are monstrous.
The question in Into The Abyss is: does Perry deserves to die? Although he is first introduced beaming, saying he knows he’s going to heaven (although he also says that he has been suffering from clinical depression), Herzog goes through great pains to establish the irredeemable cruelty of what he’s committed.
He shows us the footage of the crime scene shot by the police. We see Stotler’s blood splattered on the walls of the home. He interviews the family members of the victims, who, 10 years after the fact, still can’t talk about their loss without breaking down. It’s gut-wrenchingly painful to watch, and establishes beyond a doubt that Perry and Burkett are capable of unequivocal evil.
But while Herzog refuses to absolve Perry and Burkett of their sins, he isn’t afraid to argue against the injustice of Perry’s execution, either. “I do not have to like you,” he tells Perry. “But you are a human being and I respect you.”
He explores the world that they came from, establishing Conroe as a world of trailer parks, illiteracy, abandoned gas stations, laconic menaces, backward notions of masculinity and a constant threat of violence. He interviews Burkett’s father, Delbert, himself a (apparently non-violent) career criminal who spent more time inside of jail than out and is so institutionalized he answers all questions with “Yes, sir” and “No, sir.”
(Delbert Burkett also provides one of the most emotional moments in a film full of them, when — recollecting on how he could’ve been a better father to his son and perhaps prevented the crime — chokes up saying, “I wish he could’ve played baseball.”)
This paints Perry and Burkett as products of their environment — although it never uses that as an excuse for their actions — and, more importantly, hints that capital punishment itself is just another act of murder in a violence-prone society.
Herzog furthers this allegation by interviewing those involved with executions, including a “Death House Chaplain” and a corrections officer who oversaw dozens of lethal injections. And, strikingly, they sound a lot like the family members of the murder victims. They all tear up, talking about the unfairness and pain of it all, trying to find a way to come to terms with the horror of violent death. It’s a stunning, deeply affecting indictment of an immoral system.
So while Herzog refuses to forgive Perry and doesn’t shy away from the hatefulness of his crimes, he still treats him as a human, and can find the tragedy in his statement that “In eight days, these people want to murder me.” Because a life is a life, and no one, not Michael Perry, not the State of Texas, has the right to take a life.
VERDICT: Haunting and even-handed, Into the Abyss is a masterful rejection of capital punishment from one of the world’s foremost documentarians.
