“The police were really easy for me,” he says without pause. (In addition to being a person of interest, Jeffery was accused of not paying child support and depleting his children’s trust funds.) I ask how he weighed the ethics of doing so in both cases. The other is his father, Jeffrey Hamburg, who barely had a relationship with his son in the years following the divorce. The first is the Madison, Connecticut police. There are two parties in the docuseries who were surreptitiously taped without their knowledge. “I think they all wanted me to understand who my mom was and to fill in some gaps that they were protecting me from to have some tonality to her death and hopefully some closure.” How was Hamburg able to convince his family to take part in this? “At first, I don't think anyone thought that this was going to be on a national stage,” he says. And there is a strong mystery undercurrent, as he unflinchingly asks many of his family members if they killed his mother on camera. The story unfolds in captivating layers cloaked in suspense, like when it’s revealed that Barbara was a prominent member of a pyramid scheme known as “gifting tables” that, after her death, was prosecuted in the state of Connecticut. (Her sober anniversary is Valentine’s Day, Hamburg tells me, and he still goes to meetings every year to pick up her chip.)īut it never completely escapes the true crime label. The story is told through interviews with his family members, as they build a portrait of who Barbara was: a loving mother, a strained divorcée, a recovering alcoholic who found community and purpose in Alcoholics Anonymous. “Naming that was really important for me.” It has the potential for a lot of destruction,” he says. “While my intentions were good, it could be destructive for my life and my family's life. Hamburg also frequently breaks the fourth wall as he grapples with the ethics of what he’s doing. Murder on Middle Beach is infused with humanity, and is a deeply personal, heartfelt journey of a son looking for answers. He’s adamant that his docuseries subverts the traditional trappings of the genre, and in many ways it does. “I think the fetishization and focus on killers and the crime and brutality of it is really harmful to the families that are left in the wake of these things.” There’s been increased critique of the sorts of victims it focuses on and those it ignores, for its macabre obsession with grim details, for its inherently exploitative nature. What is the line between tragedy and entertainment? How complicit is the audience in consuming someone else’s pain? Murder on Middle Beach is premiering at a time when the genre is both more popular than it’s ever been-and more scrutinized. This gets to an inherent tension of true crime, which is made even more explicit when the filmmaker is as close to the subject as Hamburg is. It's not amazing, it's actually heartbreaking.’” I now remember we're talking about your mother's death. “We'll learn something and we'll say ‘Oh my god that's amazing.’ And then we'll go, ‘I'm sorry actually. I say that with the awareness that to call somebody's tragedy a good story is a little callous,” Nyswaner says. “I don't speak like that, I don't text like that.” “I rarely do this because I find it annoying when you're on a call, but I kept texting things like OMG,” she tells me. I decided, if I was going to accept a world without my mom, I was going to make the absolute most of it that I could.”Īrmian recalls the first time she heard Hamburg’s story over the phone. “I chose to get sober because I was going to die. “I was a drug addict, and I ran from accepting a world without her,” he says. It was 2013, and he was newly recovering from an opiate addiction and freshly grieving his mother. Hamburg, now 29, started the documentary as a class project while he was a student at Savannah College of Art and Design. “Leading up to this release, there's a lot of relief because I feel whole again.” I wanted to avoid pity, but mainly I wanted to avoid assumptions,” Hamburg tells me in a Zoom call from his Brooklyn apartment, a few days before his docuseries, Murder on Middle Beach, premieres on HBO. “There's shame attached to what happened to me. He also hadn’t told most people that he’d spent much of his time since then working on an extensive, revealing documentary about his family in the aftermath of her death. For 10 years, Madison Hamburg has been leading what he calls a “double life.” He hadn’t told most people he knew that his mother Barbara Beach Hamburg was found murdered in the backyard of her Madison, Connecticut home back in 2010.
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