To Kill a Stepfather (Hybrid, Lifetime, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s second Lifetime movie, To Kill a Stepfather, was a good deal better: in fact, one of the best things I’ve seen on this network recently even though its credits only said it was “inspired by” actual events rather than “based on a true story.” “Inspired by” usually means no more than that something vaguely similar to the story of this movie more or less kinda-sorta happened to a real person once upon a time. This time the auteur is Peter Sullivan, who co-wrote the script with Jeffrey Schenck and Robert Dean Klein and also directed, and the three of them came up with a story about hot-shot L.A.-based attorney Nicole Ray (Alex Camacho) who’s just won a jury acquittal for a woman accused of killing someone in a hit-and-run accident when she’s on her way back home to the small town of “Eastboro” (a fictional locale so generic that Messrs. Sullivan, Schenck and Klein don’t even tell us what state it’s in). Years before Nicole left Eastboro to pursue a major legal career, going to a prestigious law school and winning a job with a major firm in Beverly Hills, while her sister Riley (Kelly McCart) stayed behind and worked as a nurse’s assistant at the local hospital. On the plane from L.A. to Eastboro Nicole is accosted by a fellow passenger who tells her in no uncertain terms that she thought Nicole’s last client was guilty and deserved to rot in prison, and Nicole did the world an acute disservice by winning her an acquittal. That’s just a foretaste of what awaits Nicole once she arrives in Eastboro: it seems that Nicole’s and Riley’s mother, Kate Rafferty (Elyse Mirto), has been arrested for murdering her second husband, Matthew Rafferty. Just about the whole town thinks Kate is guilty, not only because Matthew was wildly popular in town as a philanthropist and co-owner of a custom distillery but because when he died from a fall down stairs, not only did the autopsy reveal he was first assaulted with a blunt instrument but Kate was in the middle of an alcoholic blackout at the time and therefore she had no memory of whether she killed him or not.

Though Sullivan and his co-writers have assembled their story from familiar elements – the big-city attorney who returns to the small town where she grew up and finds the townspeople unremittingly hostile to her, the defendant who can’t say for sure whether she committed the crime or not, and a whole lifetime of family secrets in which Kate isn’t sure she wants the legal services of her hot-shot daughter even though her only other alternative is an older and typically overworked public defender named Chuck (Ross Turner) – they also put some fresh spins that elevated this movie over and above Lifetime’s usual standards. One of the nicer twists Sullivan and company gave the story is that the prosecutor, Bobby O’Driscoll (Jamel King), is an old boyfriend of Nicole Ray’s, and he’d clearly like to resume their relationship even though she’s focused only on her mother’s case. One thing that convinces Nicole there was a third person present at the time of her stepfather’s murder was that the windows to Kate’s house were all closed at the time the police arrived, even though Kate always kept them open on hot days (which the night of the murder was). Nicole continues the investigation despite the hostility of Matthew’s brother Wyatt Rafferty (Joe Finfera), who at one point tries to run Nicole’s car off the road, and Matthew’s business partner Kirk Holloway (John D. Michaels), who had just been disinherited two months before when, at Riley’s insistence, Matthew changed his will so that Kate would inherit the whole business and, if she pre-deceased him, it would go to Riley. The moment Nicole learns this she starts wondering if Matthew and Riley were having an affair and she decided to off him and frame her mom for the crime to grab the fortune, since the distillery itself is barely making money but a major developer was offering $1.5 million for the land on which it sat.

Nicole interviews two key witnesses, neighbors Harold (Frank Graves) and Helen (Iris Anthony) Mullins, who had called the police on the night of Matthew’s murder after overhearing an argument between him and Kate. It turned out that the argument was about the affair Matthew was having with a local woman who was younger than Kate and blonde – that’s all the Mullinses could recall about her – which apparently Kate had discovered and that had tumbled her off the wagon and started her drinking again. At one point Kate gets so disgusted she actually fires Nicole as her attorney, but Nicole keeps digging on the case anyway and soon realizes Matthew’s affair partner and the real killer was [spoiler alert!] Sadie (Avis Wrentmore), the bartender at the local pub, who’s younger than Kate and blonde, and who killed Matthew when he broke off the affair between them at Kate’s insistence. There’s a nice gimmick in which the love messages Matthew sent Sadie are all quotes of the words to the song “It Had to Be You,” composed in 1924 by Isham Jones with lyrics by Gus Kahn and used as the theme song for the 1939 film The Roaring Twenties, a Warner Bros. production directed by Raoul Walsh with James Cagney as a good-bad gangster and Humphrey Bogart as a bad-bad gangster. Though we didn’t see enough of the movie Nicole was watching on TV in her motel room one night to tell what it was, just that it was a black-and-white gangster film, I’d like to think Peter Sullivan intended it to be The Roaring Twenties to tie in with the allusions to that song.

It also was a nice touch to have the husband of an alcoholic having his extra-relational activities with a bartender, and that the cast features two interracial couples (the white Nicole and the Black prosecutor Bobby, and the Black Harold Mullins with his white wife Helen) without making a big deal about it at all. Though To Kill a Stepfather isn’t exactly the freshest or most original storytelling of all time, and the title’s similarity to To Kill a Mockingbird (a very different sort of story!) bothers me, it’s still a very nicely done work, and among the things it does well is capture the emotionally incestuous nature of a small town, in which everyone knows everyone else’s business and the lead police officer investigating the crime, Charlene McManus (Andrea Pazmino), is herself part of the network of small-town folks who has to work hard to keep her own emotions and feelings about the people involved from interfering with the objectivity of her investigation. The acting in To Kill a Stepfather is also quite good, finely honed and much better than that in Look Who’s Stalking.