What Really Motivated the Boston Marathon Bombing?
“There’s another side to people that no one ever sees,” says Boston Police Department Superintendent Billy Evans at the beginning of American Manhunt: The Boston Marathon Bombing—a lesson relearned just about every day in this country, where mass shootings and heinous massacres are committed not by loud-and-proud psychopaths but by angry, disillusioned and deranged individuals who hide their true selves and motivations from the public so they can successfully execute their atrocities.
The monsters are hiding in plain sight, and that was absolutely true when it came to Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the two Chechen brothers who committed the April 15, 2013, Boston Marathon Bombing, killing four and injuring an additional 260+ during their four-day reign of terror.
Arriving on the heels of Waco: American Apocalypse—and timed to the 10-year anniversary of its subject—American Manhunt (April 12) continues Netflix’s effort to build a library of definitive docuseries about modern media-filtered spectacles. Executive-produced by Tiller Russell, director Floyd Russ’s three-part non-fiction investigation strives for comprehensiveness via an array of archival footage and interviews with virtually every principal player involved in the saga. As a three-dimensional account of those fateful days in Boston and nearby Watertown, Massachusetts, it’s about as exhaustive as possible—and, just as satisfyingly, as suspenseful as it is stirring.