Would You Kill for Me? The Mary Bailey Story (MB Films, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, May 18) I watched two surprisingly good Lifetime movies, both of which definitely transcended the usual limitations of the genre. The first was a 2023 production with the rather clunky title Would You Kill for Me? The Mary Bailey Story, more or less based on a real-life murder case from West Virginia on February 24, 1987, in which Mary Bailey’s mother persuaded her (13 in the movie, 11 in real life) to shoot her stepfather because stepdad had enmeshed them all in a trap caused by his repeated physical and emotional abuse of the three women in his life: Mary, her mother and her grandmother. Would You Kill for Me? was considerably altered from the real-life events, including changing all the characters’ names except Mary Bailey’s own: her mother, really Priscilla Wyers, became “Veronica Bailey Simms,” while her abusive husband, in fact Wayne Wyers, became “Willard Simms” (the genuinely hot Connor McMahon) and the grandmother, unnamed in the two online articles I looked up on the case (one from the Arts & Entertainment Network’s True Crime Blog at https://www.aetv.com/real-crime/mary-bailey and one from the U.S. edition of the British tabloid The Sun at https://www.the-sun.com/news/9431850/mary-bailey-wayne-wyers-murder/, became “Ella Bailey” (Melissa Joan Hart). Would You Kill for Me? was effectively directed by Simone Stock and written by Gregg McBride, whose handiwork had just been shown the previous Sunday in Mommy Meanest. McBride had scripted that story pretty well but Would You Kill for Me? really challenged him, and he handsomely rose to it.

To use their names in the movie, Veronica Bailey conceived Mary out of wedlock from a married man who seduced her into a one-night stand, and her mom Ella never forgave her for it. While doing volunteer church work for Pastor McCall (Pierre Simpson, who’s playing the one actually sympathetic character in this otherwise sordid story) Veronica meets Willard Simms and it’s lust at first sight. Veronica is pretty quickly warned what she will be up against if she takes up with Willard when Willard dares a male friend of his to kiss Veronica, then punches him in the face just before their lips make contact and tells Veronica, “This is just my way of proving that I’ll always have your back.” McBride dispatches Willard relatively quickly – the film opens with Veronica making a 911 call to the police telling them that she’s just shot her husband, the cops send an ambulance team but Willard dies in the E.R., and when they investigate they find both Veronica’s and Mary’s prints on the murder weapon and ultimately decide that Mary killed her stepfather – and for the rest of the film he uses the Rashomon device of having the three Bailey women (Veronica, Ella and Mary herself) testify in court in Veronica’s murder trial. They all tell basically the same story but with subtle differences that reflect each of their attempts to shade the facts in their favor. Ultimately the jury convicts Veronica of murder – the online articles make clear, as the movie does not, that Mary and her attorney got the state to drop the murder charges against Mary in exchange for her ratting out her mom – though they recommend “leniency,” which under West Virginia law means a 10-year prison sentence without possibility of parole (though in fact the real Priscilla Wyers was paroled in 1998) instead of the death penalty. Would You Kill for Me? is actually a quite good drama in spite of the clunky title (the real Mary Bailey wrote a memoir, My Mother’s Soldier, which would have been a better title for the film as well); the overlapping perspectives on the story intermesh well and make a point about how difficult it is for anybody, especially someone outside the case, to determine “truth” based on the parties’ conflicting narratives.

There’s also very real suspense as to how the case is going to turn out and who will be found guilty of what in the end. Also, as often happens when Lifetime bases its movies on a true story, their writers either embrace the multifaceted nature of actual human beings or at least can’t avoid it; try as they might to turn Veronica into an innocent victim and Willard into a monster, Veronica and Willard both have quite a few extra-relational affairs. Veronica believes that as a young and reasonably attractive woman she’s entitled to sex with anyone she wants who wants her, and Willard has an ongoing relationship with Veronica’s heavy-set, dark-haired best friend Susan (Celina Myers) and in one scene goads Veronica and Susan to kiss each other, presumably preparatory to a three-way. Also the crisis that precipitates Willard’s homicidal rage – he threatens to kill all three generations of Baileys in his life – was Veronica loaning his beloved Jeep SUV to a male “friend” to buy cigarettes, only the “friend” crashed the Jeep and when Willard returned home he was super-angry to see his car wrecked. We definitely get the impression that the “friend” who borrowed Willard’s Jeep was one of Veronica’s tricks. Also Veronica makes it clear that one of the reasons she’s staying with Willard was to keep collecting welfare and food stamps on both Mary and the son she had with Willard, Sammy (Luca Thunberg) – though predictably Willard in one of his rages questions whether he’s really Sammy’s biological father. Naturally Ella is badgering her daughter to find a job rather than depend on the government all her life, while Veronica just mopes and goes through life on a tightrope, dealing with Willard’s abuse as best she can.

And when Veronica is finally convicted while Mary, still a minor, is put up for adoption after having lived with a foster family between the murder and the trial, she pleads with Pastor McCall and his wife (whom we never see) to adopt her. McCall explains that he would like to, but the authorities (whom we also never see in this context) have decided she’d be better off growing up in another town where no one will know her or her sordid history. Alas, the post-credit “Where Are They Now?” sequence fudged the truth even more than the actual script had; the fictional Mary Bailey got married, settled in another town and got work as a geriatric nurse while also becoming an advocate for victims of domestic violence. The real Mary Bailey also got married and started a uniform supply business with her husband, and though the real Priscilla moved in with her daughter prior to Mary’s marriage, they didn’t get along and it wasn’t until 2022 that Mary saw her mom again – just in time to have a Mother’s Day together before Priscilla Wyers died of cancer in August 2022. The film ends with Mary (played as a fully grown adult by Megan Jonker) and Veronica reuniting after Veronica’s release from prison but doesn’t tell us the aftermath – but even the deviations from actual fact can’t take away from the sheer dramatic power and point of Will You Kill for Me?