First came the book, in May 2023, by Todd Bromley, titled Depravity in the Darkness.
Now arrives the 70-minute documentary A Murder in Mercer, about the abduction at gunpoint in March, 1968 outside of a restaurant in Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania of four college students (two couples). Mike Frick, weeks away from graduation at the Virginia Military Institute, was tortured and murdered in the woods. The remaining three were also held captive in a home and molested, tortured, until the other male student freed himself and escaped along with the two young women (aged 19 and 21). Four local men (Kenny Perrine, Art McConnell, Donnie Hosack, Gary Batley), drunk and-or on drugs at the time of the crimes, were eventually captured, tried and sentenced to life in prison.
"The two most famous murders at that time were the Holcomb, Kansas murders which Truman Capote wrote about and the 1969 Manson Family murders," Bromley told the Armstrong Neighborhood Channel. "This crime falls in between those two and it's just as heinous as those crimes, it really is."
"It involves kidnapping, sexual assault, murder, one of the largest manhunts in Pennsylvania state history up to that time, a police shootout during the capture, a prison escape," he added. "It doesn't need to be sensationalized. It's pretty unbelievable the way it happened."
After premiering in June at the inaugural McDonough Storytellers Film Festival in Georgia, A Murder in Mercer (the title is a reference to Mercer County) is now set for a series of local screenings, beginning with a showing August 15th in Indiana, Pennsylvania. Subsequent events will be held in Worthington August 22nd and Slippery Rock September 17th.
Bromley, who was born in 1965 in the same hospital in Grove City that the victims would be brought to three years later, pitched Slippery Rock University the idea of making a documentary using his book. That led to the A Murder in Mercer film, co-directed by associate professor Brittany Fleming and one of her students, James Cressley. Bromley liked the idea that the university where the coeds were from (then known as Slippery Rock Normal School) wound up being involved in the documentary project.
Bromley, who wrote two previous books about the outdoors and founded a magazine, Crossbow, that he sold to a large New York publishing group in late 2022, said he was struck while researching Depravity in the Darkness by the fortitude of the two young women. Not just during the crimes themselves, but also at the subsequent trial, when defense attorneys went at them in a way that is hard to fathom by today's #MeToo standards.
[A Murder in Mercer official website]
Previously on FilmStew:
Questions About Late 1960s Michigan Serial Killings Continue to Linger
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