This article contains spoilers for all three episodes of The Pet Cemetery Murders: A Ghost Story.
It’s not every day a ghost helps solve a murder. But in HBO‘s The Pet Cemetery Murders: A Ghost Story, the two men whose accounts finally cracked the 1985 killing of Dorothy Thompson both swore her ghost made them come forward. One said she appeared at the foot of his bed wrapped in chains, just like her body was when it was pulled from the Mississippi River.
According to director Philip Cairney, they weren’t the only ones with strange stories about the pet cemetery, a haunted piece of land in Toca, La., with centuries of trauma buried in it. “There were multiple ghost sightings on the land, more people dying in strange circumstances there, cameras jamming when interviews were happening, literally so much of it that it became kind of ridiculous,” he tells Gold Derby.
The three-part docuseries wrapped Sunday with Brandon Nodier pleading guilty to manslaughter in Dorothy’s death and a shocking twist about her mother, Grace Wynne. Below, Cairney reveals whether Nodier is still behind bars, whether he believed James Tregler’s eyewitness account, what he uncovered about Grace’s violent past, and whether he thinks Dorothy’s ghost was real.
What happened when the crew got to the pet cemetery?
The strange things started on Cairney’s very first scouting trip to the property.
“The DOP, the director of photography, every time he put the camera on the ground, it would switch between film and stills. And every time I picked it up, it was fine. And he kept saying to me, ‘I don’t know what’s going on in here, but there’s something weird in the land.’ So that was him, not me,” Cairney says. “So there was so much like that, and it was really difficult to then go, ‘You’ve got to remember that these are real people living real lives,’ because the facts of the case became increasingly wild. You were trying to always remember that this is a story about a woman, Dorothy Thompson, who owned a pet cemetery, who died in a horrible way.”
Does the director believe in ghosts now?
Cairney says he went in a skeptic.
“I didn’t believe in ghosts. I kind of liked a ghost story like everyone does, but I didn’t believe in them. And then the more I talk to people here, it’s just really difficult to… The pile up of coincidences, you just start to at least question what is actually happening there,” he says. “I would say that I believe that a place can hold the memory of the things that’s happened there. Whether it makes you do more evil things there, I don’t know, but there’s certainly something in that place that can’t be explained, or I can’t anyway.”
He felt it most on that first visit. “After that, not so much, but the first time I went there, definitely, and I was there at least a dozen times,” he says. “It’s a strange place and it’s a very, very strange case as well.”
Was it really Dorothy’s ghost, or guilt?
Jose Cruz and James Tregler both said Dorothy’s ghost pushed them to come forward, and Nodier’s wife, Bonnie, even claimed the ghost pushed him off a roof. Whether that was really Dorothy or guilt depends on who you ask, according to Cairney. Either way, he says the case doesn’t get solved without those stories.
“What was so interesting about it was everyone we talked to had a different interpretation of what the ghost was. Some people said it’s guilt. These people knew what they were a part of and they are haunted by what happened on that night. For others, they genuinely believed that this was her ghost coming back for vengeance, and then other people just kind of laughed it off,” he says. “But one thing is certain: The case would not have been solved if it weren’t for the fact that these men claimed to be visited by Dorothy’s ghost.”
Did he believe Tregler?
In the series, Tregler says Nodier picked him up at midnight and asked him to come along for a ride. He says he didn’t know why or where they were going until they pulled up to Dorothy’s house at the pet cemetery, where Nodier choked her to death. Tregler got immunity in exchange for his testimony, but not everyone bought his story. Nodier’s defense attorney, Pat Fanning, calls it “bulls–t,” and even the detectives were skeptical.
“Sitting down with him, I didn’t know what we were going to get, if I’m being honest,” Cairney says. “I had read the case file. I knew what he said. I knew the arguments for and against the legitimacy of his testimony and whether to believe it or not. But in the end, he believed what he was saying. That’s all I would say. Whether that is what happened that night or not, I don’t know, but he certainly believed it.”
Why didn’t police catch the property dispute sooner?
Before she disappeared, Dorothy was locked in a lawsuit with Nodier and his wife, Bonnie. The couple had convinced her to sign the pet cemetery property over to Bonnie, then never paid her what they’d promised. The case was set to go to trial 10 days after Dorothy vanished. It was an obvious motive, but Det. John Doran, who reopened the cold case in 2004, didn’t find out about the lawsuit until a state police report landed on his desk years later. Cairney says the original investigation was split in two.
“When you talk to police about it, they used to say, look, it’s easy with hindsight,” he explains. “But the thing was that St. Bernard Parish did an investigation into the disappearance, but not into the murder. So they initially were just looking at where she might have gone, but then when she actually was found in the Mississippi, a different set of police took over. So they never knew about that until Doran found out about it later.”
Where is Brandon Nodier now?
Nodier pleaded guilty to manslaughter in 2014 and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Under the law at the time of the crime, he only had to serve half that, and he got credit for the time he spent awaiting trial. “He’s out,” Cairney confirms. As for whether Bonnie is still with him, Cairney doesn’t know. “We reached out to the Nodier family, but they didn’t want to take part.”
What about Dorothy’s mother, Grace?
The third episode’s reveal that Grace shot her ex-husband’s wife in Kansas City in 1934, then fled to Louisiana and started the pet cemetery, turns the whole story on its head. Cairney says Grace became its central figure.
“That’s the thing, for me, that was so compelling — the two women at the heart of this,” he says. “So often with a crime series, you’re focusing on the perpetrators and the victim gets forgotten. And here, once you start to pull on the thread, as one of the contributors says, this whole new kind of story unravels. And I think Grace becomes really the dominant figure in the series, both in terms of this kind of will to power and starting the pet cemetery, but also in terms of what she definitely did in Kansas City in 1934, and then subsequently the questions around what she did or didn’t do with regards to Dorothy’s husbands.”
He adds, “Even though all the stuff with the Kansas City mob happened almost 100 years ago, you get this sense of a woman with this life force and this drive to get a place at the table in a male-dominated world.”
Archival footage of Grace almost didn’t make it into the series. Cairney’s archive producer turned up the interview, plus footage of the cemetery in its prime, at the Louisiana State Archive. “Initially we didn’t think there was anything at the pet cemetery,” he says. “So can you imagine the series without the Grace interview and all those shots of the pet cemetery with the wisteria and the drive and the gravestones? If we didn’t have that, it would be a very different series.”
Photos of Dorothy were even harder to come by. “Every photo of Dorothy that we could find is in the series,” Cairney says. “As a filmmaker, you do need to become a detective in your own right.”
Is Patricia reopening the pet cemetery?
Not yet. “No updates at all,” Cairney says. “We interviewed Patricia Newman several months ago, so it’s relatively recent, and we only finished the series a week ago. The pet cemetery itself is as you see in the series. It’s completely derelict and there’s just these bits of graves. At the moment, we don’t know what’s happening with Pat Newman’s plans to reopen it as a pet cemetery in Grace and Dorothy’s honor.”
What stayed with him most?
It wasn’t the ghosts. It was Hurricane Katrina.
“Everyone that we spoke to said the same thing. They all ended up talking about Katrina, whether it was Doran in relation to losing the case files in Katrina, or there was another contributor who they all lost their homes, they all lost everything,” Cairney says. “It was a real epiphany, because you really feel how this one place has been so traumatized by many things, going back to enslavement and the Native American genocide, but also most recently, probably Katrina. That is the thing that really stayed with me, that this is a place that still bears the scars of the trauma of that event.”
