Review of the Hulu docuseries Little Miss Innocent: Passion, Poison, Prison ****
In John Grisham’s latest book about wrongful convictions, Framed, there is a story about a woman who contacted the police because she felt she had some information that might help them solve the crime. Instead, the police zeroed in on her as a suspect and ultimately tried and convicted her. This story has a similar trajectory.
The premise of this three-part docuseries is whether Kaitlyn Conley is guilty of the crime for which she was convicted. Just as the filmmakers let viewers know from the beginning that a jury found her guilty, I will say from the beginning that I believe they convicted the wrong person.
The crime involved the poisoning death of Dr. Mary Yoder from a rare medicine known as Colchicine. Once the police learn this information, they focus on finding the person who purchased it. Kaitlyn worked for Mary and her husband, Bill, at their chiropractor practice. She had also dated their son, Adam. That was her connection to the victim.
This is one case where three forty-minute episodes aren’t enough to get the whole picture. I wanted to see more of the trials. I wanted to hear from more of the witnesses. I wanted the filmmakers to ask more questions.
If you look at this story from the outside, as most people whose only exposure to it is this documentary, it screams tunnel vision by investigators and prosecutors. Once investigators come up with a theory of the crime, they spend all of their time looking for evidence to support it. Evidence that points away from their theory is discarded or explained away.
The tunnel vision by the police begins when they learn that Kaitlyn was the author of a letter that pointed the finger at the victim’s son as the most likely person to have been the killer. The filmmakers ask Kaitlyn about the letter but never get a definitive answer about whether she wrote it. It’s evident to me that she wrote the letter, where she pointed a finger at her ex-boyfriend Adam and provided incriminating evidence against him.
At this point, the police do the right thing and question Adam. The viewer doesn’t learn much about this interrogation other than that he was shocked. What viewers do get to see is what happens when they turn their focus on Kaitlyn and jump to conclusions based on nothing more than their gut feelings. Rather than probe why she felt it necessary to write an anonymous letter instead of coming straight to the police with what she suspected, they concluded that she was trying to frame her ex-boyfriend. The possibility that she wanted to remain anonymous because she feared for her safety never crossed their minds.
To tie Kaitlyn to the crime, investigators conclude that Kaitlyn had access to Adam’s Gmail account and laptop. This requires Kaitlyn to guess his password. To muddy things up even more, they have to come up with a motive as to why Kaitlyn, who was no longer involved with Adam, would want to kill his mother. All they could come up with was that she was so in love with Adam that she killed his mother in hopes of getting back with him. As ludicrous as that sounds, it does fit a motive for someone else to have committed the murder.
There may be valid reasons why the filmmakers did not ask Kaitlyn more questions about the digital and DNA evidence found on the Colchicine packaging. There were one or two times when she looked off-screen as though she were seeking advice from a lawyer. However, by not going after the primary evidence used to get a conviction, they didn’t give her a chance to offer an explanation or even deny the allegations.
Police and Prosecutors described Kaitlyn as a psychopath who was cold and calculating, planning the murder months in advance. That is an apt description, but not of Kaitlyn. It is a description of the person responsible.