Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father (2008) began as a home-movie love letter to Zachary Turner, the infant son of Kurt Kuenne’s murdered childhood friend, Dr. Andrew Bagby. Kuenne set out to assemble interviews and old footage so the boy could one day know the kind, funny man his father was.
After Bagby ended a relationship with Shirley Turner, she shot him in a Pennsylvania park in 2001 and fled to Newfoundland. There she was released on bail and announced she was pregnant with Andrew’s child. From that point the film becomes something else entirely: a raw chronicle of a legal system that left Turner free, and of the tragedy that followed.
Be warned that this is not a documentary to watch when you aren’t in a stable mental and emotional state. Viewers who have sat through it know the immense pain the experience carries, and the sadness that lingers long after the credits roll. What starts as a tribute ends as an act of grief and outrage, and as a record of the Bagbys’ campaign to change Canadian bail and custody laws.
Dear Zachary is a piece of work that guts you and stays with you for good.
