Unreliable Sources, Unreliable Narration


I am so disturbed by this documentary. Considering the access the makers had to so many people involved, I'm really not convinced they got any closer to the truth of it.

There are layers of bizarre motives here: "lies to instigate" and "lies to protect" and it doesn't just apply to Cherie. Many of those implicating Cherie seem to have more than enough motive to both instigate and to protect themselves. There are times where I believe the film-maker actually downplayed this, or perhaps didn't want to muddy the waters any further because they wanted to create their own preferred dramatic narrative. Of course there's a chance that they were just completely manipulated by the stories they were given (like the police may have been), but they also could've been incredibly lazy when researching the case (like the police may have been). This is a poor attempt at representing a case if I can find more out in an hour of googling than the film-makers did in their entire time of researching the case.

I only watched the documentary today, so I googled to see what had happened in the interim, found some pages on social media, and those let me straight to personal (and public) pages of people involved. Gina Lopez is the first inconsistency I found - and on the surface she originally seemed to be one of the least likely to be complicit as she was portrayed as having escaped or fled the bizarre situation. She is presented as someone who had a relationship with Garth, got pregnant for Garth, and became uncomfortable with how the Brooks family treated her during her pregnancy. On her Facebook it names another person as the father of her baby at that time, and even uses the same picture used in the documentary.. although it doesn't mention the miscarriage. Chuck Brooks comments on it. It also shows that around the time of Vera's murder, she was in a relationship with ZACHARY Brooks, and had gotten some pushback from people who felt that was a bad idea after how things had gone with Garth Brooks. There is one clear comment on Zachary's page too when he says (four months before the murder) I need a girl and Gina tells him that he has her now. She also tells him that she doesn't know about a baby as she wants to go to job corps first - a free education and training program.

Why wasn't this mentioned? Strange Gina did not mention that she was seeing the guy who was implicated in the murder of the mother of his child around the time she was seeing him. And from social media, it looks like this was going on for a few months and they had considered having a baby. I feel that was a strange omission. I'm almost afraid to see what else i might dig up if I look into this any further.

Edited to Add: She also has a picture of Vera's daughter up saying RIP Vera three months before Vera's death?

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Really interesting finds! Did you discover any other inconsistencies?

I just watched this the other night and was equally as disturbed by the interviews. I also felt similarly however about the content and felt that perhaps the film was so low budget that they could not afford an independent editor as the narrative is a little all over the place.

I completely agree with you on the lies to instigate and lies to protect notion.
It was quite obvious with some of the family members that they were clearly only saying enough to implicate Cherry and remove themselves from responsibility... such as Shannon suggesting that although she was there she couldn't do anything due to her phone dying and fear of retaliation... however that excuse is absolutely ridiculous! It bothered me how they could all clearly recollect how poorly Vera was treated with such clarity but could not give any clear answers as to why they just let those things happen around them, or why they wouldn't go to the authorities to report Vera's mistreatment. I can only assume that judging from their cracked teeth, they were all constantly high.

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