How far would you go to solve the murder of someone you loved? In the new Netflix original documentary Why Did You Kill Me?, one woman takes the investigation into her daughter's tragic death into her own hands — even if it means breaking the law herself.
Netflix's true crime genre is already stacked with a number of chilling documentaries, and Why Did You Kill Me? is the perfect addition to the harrowing catalogue. This new project explores the police and personal investigation into the death of Crystal Theobald, a 24-year-old woman who was brutally killed in a 2006 drive-by gang shooting in California.
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When Crystal's case went cold, her mother Belinda Lane was beside herself with grief and rage. Dissatisfied with the authorities' efforts, Lane took it upon herself to bring her daughter's killers to justice using a method we now know as catfishing. She teamed up with her niece to create a fake Myspace page for her late daughter under a different name and reached out to the suspects one by one to build her own case against them. Over time Lane's covert probe grew increasingly dangerous for everyone involved; the gang she was looking into may have been fearsome, but the grieving mother was also traveling a potentially lethal path towards vengeance by all means necessary.
"I wanted him to hurt like we were hurting," Lane admits in the trailer. "I told them, 'okay everybody — no violence.' But in the back of my own mind, I still knew I was gonna kill them."
Why Did You Kill Me? follows the shocking progression of Lane's scrutiny of the gang as well as its reverberations on everyone involved in the case. This story doesn't have a happy ending — no amount of catfishing could bring her daughter back — but it does demonstrate just how far a mother's love reaches as well as how limited many official police investigations actually are.
Find out how this tragic story ends when Why Did You Kill Me? hits Netflix on April 14.