“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.”
HBO
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.”
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