Not enough questions are asked by this Netflix documentary, which tells the story of female bodybuilder Sally McNeil, who spent 25 years in prison for killing her husband
Another day, another true-crime documentary. This one is from the fons et origo of the genre, Netflix, but exists more at the filler than killer end of the spectrum. Though there is a killer, of course. Right there in the title, in fact. Killer Sally tells the story of former US marine and female bodybuilder Sally McNeil, who was convicted of murdering her husband Ray, another bodybuilder, in 1995. She was released in 2020 after a quarter of a century behind bars.
It is, by the warped standards of these things, a pretty simple narrative. There is no heinous miscarriage of justice to be showcased, like Making a Murderer or The Innocent Man did; no twists and turns that cause us to boggle at the extremes ordinary people are capable of going to as, most recently perhaps, Abducted in Plain Sight did. No reinvestigation or inquiry is likely to be mounted: McNeil says she is not interested in anything other than enjoying her freedom.
Killer Sally opens in what is (again, for the genre) fairly traditional fashion. We hear McNeil’s call, on Valentine’s Day 25 years ago, to the 911 operator saying that she has just shot her husband. We hear the voices of unknown characters – friends, family, lawyers – giving tantalising snippets of the tale to come. And then we are introduced to Sally herself, sitting on the sole chair in a featureless room, alone, apparently honest and fearless, stripped of artifice. Can we trust her? We have three episodes to decide.
Sally and Ray met when they were both in the US Marines, bonding quickly over a shared love of bodybuilding. They married after two months of dating. He first hit her, she says, three days after the wedding. The first time he choked her, she felt sure she was going to die. By the time she shot and killed him, she had suffered eight years of abuse, including rape. The early abuse at the hands of a violent stepfather helped her accept it. Ray would beat the children too, making one watch until it was their turn. “He was like the devil to me,” says her son John now. “I was so broken I didn’t even know I was broke,” says Sally.
The night of “the incident”, as Sally calls it, Ray had been beating and choking her. Shantina, her daughter, heard her gasping for air. It was a familiar sound. Shantina ran out of her bedroom after hearing two shots fired from the sawn-off shotgun her parents kept in the house for protection while Ray was away at competitions. Then came the police, arrest, Ray’s death in hospital and a murder charge. The trial centred on whether it was a rage-fuelled, premeditated murder – because Sally had loaded the gun, because Ray was having an affair and friends said he was planning to leave her – or self-defence while she was in fear for her life.
All of which gave rise to a number of other questions, rarely explicit but whose unspoken answers were almost certainly instrumental in her eventual conviction and long sentence. Can a (literally) strong woman be in fear for her life? Can a volatile woman, a former marine with a less than spotless service record, who was often described as “aggressive” by those who knew her and who often visibly fought with her husband, still be vulnerable? She had beaten up a man who hit John. She had threatened to “kick the ass” of the woman with whom Ray was having his affair. Does that make her a murderer? The waters were further muddied, of course, by the media coverage. The “brawny bride”, “pumped-up princess”, was catnip to the press.
Such questions raise further issues in their turn. How far outside the box marked “acceptable femininity” does a woman have to step before she is punished for that? Does a victim have to be perfect before she can be viewed sympathetically? Can we hold two things to be true at the same time? Have we progressed very far with our thinking about power dynamics, social conditioning, systemic prejudice and all the slanted rest of it in any significant way? In the best of the true-crime contributions, these deeper, darker matters are interrogated meaningfully and give heft to what would often otherwise veer ominously close to exploitation of a victim and the people around them. Here, the makers have been content to give such matters only glancing consideration. It makes the evident ongoing suffering of Shantina and John, in particular, look even more stark and painful. Not for the first time, you feel, they deserve better.
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