The Pet Cemetery Murders: Inside Dorothy Thompson’s Death and HBO Documentary

Stephen King’s horror novel Pet Sematary (1983) was published roughly two years before the real-life death of Dorothy Thompson, who owned and operated the St. Bernard Parish pet cemetery until her 1985 murder. Strangled, suffocated, wrapped in chains, and thrown in the Mississippi River, mere miles from the popular pet burial spot she ran, it would take nearly three decades to catch and convict groundskeeper Brandon Nodier, who in July 2014 pleaded guilty to manslaughter as part of a plea agreement and was sentenced to 10 years in prison for Thompson’s death.

When introduced to Thompson’s story about three years ago by true-crime writer Mikita Brottman, then working on a book about the case, documentarian Philip Cairney was struck by the amount of “historic trauma” that could transpire on one piece of land. “It became a litany of tragedy,” says Cairney, “the more you looked, the more you found.” So begins HBO’s The Pet Cemetery Murders, airing through October 25, in which Cairney unearths decades of death and dysfunction on one plot of rural Southern property.

“The killing occurred after Nodier duped Thompson into transferring possession of the property to him, then feared he would lose it after she sued to have the transaction voided,” St. Bernard Sheriff's Office colonel John Doran said at the time, as reported by Reuters. Police reopened the case in 2009 after a witness came forward saying Nodier had told him he was the killer and that Thompson’s ghost was haunting the witness’s dreams, Doran said in the documentary. “People genuinely almost fall down a foxhole when they become involved with this bit of land,” Cairney says, “because it does seem to suck you in and not let you go.”

Decades before the documentary’s central crimes, the Louisiana land was tied to racial violence—first against the region’s Indigenous population by white colonizers, then the dozens of formerly enslaved Black people murdered by mobs of white men during what became known as the Reconstruction-era 1868 St. Bernard Parish Massacre. “These are America’s original sins—enslavement, Native American genocide, women’s role in society,” Cairney says. “It’s that rich, fertile soil—to use a terrible metaphor—that means any story, if it’s got those layers, is interesting.”

Twenty years after the investigation into Thompson’s death went cold, in 2005, Hurricane Katrina wiped out key evidence from the case and decimated much of the pet cemetery. Touring the resulting land, “you’re forced to look Katrina in the eye,” says Cairney, who says being from Scotland offered him the right amount of distance from and perspective on the American atrocities tangled up with the place. “As an outsider, I wasn’t coming with the same cultural, social, political baggage that Americans might,” he tells VF. “The trauma of America is in the land, and whether that’s a metaphor or a literal fact you can decide for yourself. But the people in these areas with histories of enslavement, colonization, opioids, they’re dealing with the trauma, and it’s getting passed on from generation to generation.”

Even production on The Pet Cemetery Murders faced some paranormal activity, “from cameras jamming during interviews, to ghost sightings,” the director says. “The director of photography, whenever he put his camera on the ground, it would flip between stills and video. When he would pick it up, it would be fine. So you’re forced to reconcile an empirical rationalist worldview with something far more inexplicable.”

There are plenty of spirits who could be lurking around. In addition to the residents of the cemetery (a snake named Sarita that performed on The Johnny Carson Show was among the more famous pets laid to rest), a string of other deaths occurred on the property while Thompson had run of the place with her mother, Grace. As recounted in the docuseries, two men who were married to Dorothy died on the same plot of land—the first was fatally shot by Dorothy in 1970 in what authorities determined was an act of self-defense, and the second death, in 1978 by two gunshots to the back, was ruled a suicide by police.

Cairney was intrigued by the idea of exploring Dorothy as an “imperfect victim” still deserving of justice. “That was really important to remember: You can have a woman who died a horrible death, but she also can be a complicated character, and they can both sit side by side,” he says.

That duality was best embodied by the presence of Dorothy’s estranged daughter Kristine Wood, who was raised by her paternal grandparents in the wake of her mother’s substance abuse issues and is interviewed in the documentary. “We’re conditioned to want, especially female victims, to be ‘pure.’ This is a woman who had a really, really difficult life, and a really difficult death,” says Cairney, “and you have a daughter who’s been forced to reckon with that intergenerational trauma and to stop the cycle of it. That kept me committed to telling this story.”