The Cheshire Murders (DVD)

Using exclusive interviews and spanning half a decade, The Cheshire Murders reveals the shocking police failures and untold personal dramas behind the notorious rape-arson-homicide case that shook Cheshire, Connecticut in the summer of 2007. In this quiet, bedroom suburb, Jennifer Petit and her two daughters, age 11 and 17, were killed in a home invasion gone horribly wrong; husband and father William Petit was the only member of the family who escaped alive. Framed by the media as a parable of good versus evil, the case and its perpetrators, Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky, became a rallying cry for the death penalty. However, much of the story has been hidden from the general public, and alarming failures in the system reveal another tragedy: this crime could have been prevented at many turns. Told intimately by the victims' and perpetrators' friends and families, as well as the attorneys, journalists, and mental-health professionals involved firsthand in the case, the film takes viewers from the morning of the crime, through the death-penalty trials five years later. Directed, produced and edited by awardwinning filmmakers Kate Davis and David Heilbroner, the film suggests that "eradicating evil" is perhaps not the solution, and that larger forces must also be held accountable -- or else we pave the way for more senseless tragedy.

• documentary