It’s not related to the 1983 Stephen King novel or the excellent Mary Lambert film from 1989 that traumatized pretty much all of Gen X, but the clunkily titled “The Pet Cemetery Murders: A Ghost Story” definitely traffics in the unexpected and the supernatural. It may not be a King tale, but it seems like one he would like, especially in how it centers real-life oddballs, some of whom earnestly believe a woman’s ghost helped solve her murder.
Like most HBO projects, this isn’t your typical product of the streaming-service true-crime factory that has dominated the market over the last decade. If anything, it sometimes feels like it takes a bit too much time—three episodes over three weeks instead of a more effective feature-length—but that’s because director Philip Cairney lets his interview subjects linger in their conflicting beliefs and memories. The lead officer is the kind of guy who believes in indisputable evidence, but New Orleans will make you question whether something unknown in the swamps is guiding the world toward justice.
Dorothy Lou Thompson owned a pet cemetery in a bayou outside New Orleans. One can hardly conceive a place more haunted, but it gained a new spectral resident when Thompson herself was murdered in 1985, her body discovered in the Mississippi River with 200 pounds of metal chains wrapped around it. Thompson herself had a life marked by violence, including two questionable deaths in her past, including one that was quickly closed as a suicide … by two bullets to the deceased’s back. Did Thompson’s past catch up with her? Or what about the violent guy who lived nearby?
Like a lot of cases in rural sections of this country, the murder of Thompson went cold until a detective named John Doran reopened it in 2009. That same year, a man came to the police station with a story. Someone had come to him with information about the case: Dorothy Lou Thompson. Her ghost flung open a heavy door and pushed him to come talk to the cops. Sounds crazy, right? It happened again three years later with a second witness, and this one had more than a ghostly presence to talk about with the cops.
When it’s done, “The Pet Cemetery Murders” feels a bit thin for three episodes of television, but that’s almost a testament to how much Cairney keeps it moving before then. This case has little meat on the bones, so the director is free to lean into the setting, local legends, and the atmosphere of a place that feels more like a novel than reality. Anyone who’s been to New Orleans will tell you it has a different energy than anywhere else in the world. It’s one of the few places where I might take someone seriously if they claimed a ghost solved a murder.
Ultimately, “The Pet Cemetery Murders” reminds you how much range the True Crime genre has. One could easily see the cheap Investigation Discovery version of this story, filled with cheesy recreations and heated music cues. Cairney and HBO go the other way, producing something that feels closer to one of those multi-episode podcasts that allows interview subjects space to breathe and feel. You don’t have to believe in ghosts to appreciate it.
