If this film wasn't based on true story

I was having this thought. If this film was not based on real life events and the writer wrote the entire story completely from his imagination, do you believe this film would have been this success? Don't get me wrong, this film is so well made and I thoroughly loved it, but if the story was not adapted from real life, I'm sure people will have hard time believing that this kind of thing actually happen in the time we live in.

If you take what actually happened into consideration such as Irresponsible and incompetent way police handled the case that led to the contamination of real evidences, all the Kafkaesque situations the parents had to go through, the absurd way of ascribing typographic error to changing evidence and so many other things.

The point being the story is well received because it's backed by real life occurrence. I was not familiar with this murder case before, so after watching this film i have gone through the wikipedia page of this case and to my surprise i found out that everything that was shown in the film actually happened.

So this might be an important note for any story writer that if story is not based on real life event,the audience will always have a boundary to which extent they are willing to accept the story being "Plausible"

So truth is stranger than fiction is surprisingly a true statement.