The Fear of 13

An Amer­i­can man of about 50, vis­i­ble from about the shoul­ders upward, orates the sto­ry of his life. He does so with a the­atri­cal flair, the words com­ing to him very nat­u­ral­ly, as do fine descrip­tions of very spe­cif­ic moments. He can recall ges­tures, colours, sounds and smells from decades past. His par­tic­u­lar skill for talk­ing and telling makes you pon­der as to whether this is a sto­ry that he’s told many times before. Or, maybe it’s a script that he’s mem­o­rised word for word, nuance for nuance, beat for beat.

The man’s name is Nick Yarris and he is telling the sto­ry of spend­ing 20 years on death row for a crime he did not com­mit. There’s the heart­break­ing notion that this is a sto­ry he’s had much time to pre­pare for, wal­low­ing in his cell or, some­times, soli­tary con­fine­ment. Even so, he’s not so com­fort­able with the events of his life that he’s able to pre­vent tears from burst­ing forth. His ear­ly life was spent boost­ing cars and shoot­ing drugs. He was liv­ing rough, he had been boot­ed out by his par­ents, his prospects were dim. And then in 1981 he found him­self on the receiv­ing end of a bum rap when the blud­geoned corpse of one Lin­da Mae Craig was found fes­ter­ing in the snow behind a garage. The paper­trail (which had been tam­pered with mas­sive­ly) led all the way back to local mis­cre­ant Yarris.

See­ing Yarris sat there now con­firms from the off that he was nev­er actu­al­ly giv­en the chair, but David Sington’s film is a chron­i­cle of the her­culean efforts expend­ed to clear his name. There are twists and turns aplen­ty, though the film in the end nev­er reveals itself as any­thing more more than a piece of high-wire first-per­son reportage. With so much of the detail of the case pred­i­cat­ed by hard evi­dence, the ini­tial notion that Yarris might well be sil­ver tongued huck­ster who talked his way out of the can nev­er comes to bear.