I binged Love & Death on Netflix on a cold weekend. Although, to be fair, every weekend has felt cold lately in all forms including emotionally, existentially, meteorologically. Pick one.

The series, based on true events, opens on something deeply familiar. Two churchgoing couples, suburban Texas, kids, casseroles, routines. The soft hum of small-town life where everyone knows your name and no one really knows you.

Until someone picks up an axe.

And not just once.

And then admits to it.

And then gets acquitted.

I sat there afterward thinking afterwards that I don’t know what to make of this.

Which, honestly, might be the most psychologically honest response.

The murder occurred in 1980, and the defense rested on a dissociative episode. Essentially that Candy Montgomery “blacked out” during the act. Forty-one blows later, she came back to herself.

I don’t know that this defense would fly today.

Or maybe it would. Or maybe it would be crucified on social media before the jury even sat down.

We live in a strange paradox now. We understand mental health more than we ever have. We also forgive far less. We destigmatize diagnosis while simultaneously demanding perfect self-control. We want nuance, but only in theory.

So go figure.

What fascinated me most wasn’t Candy or Betty or the affairs or the quiet desperation of unhappy marriages (suburban ennui with a side of infidelity; ho hum, as tragedies go).

What fascinated me was the attorney.

Don Crowder.

He wasn’t a criminal defense attorney. He had never tried a criminal case like this before. He had no prior playbook for “axe murder meets dissociation.” And yet he pulled it off.

The series touches on this, but it doesn’t quite capture the audacity of it. The psychological chess match. The leap it took to abandon self-defense and instead argue that his client committed the act and wasn’t mentally present for it.

That pivot alone is extraordinary.

Imagine being told by your client:

I didn’t do it.
Then: I did it in self-defense.
Then: I did it but I wasn’t there.

And somewhere between those versions, deciding which story the jury could live with.

Crowder had to hold multiple realities at once that being legal, psychological, moral. He had to translate something profoundly disturbing into something comprehensible. Palatable. Human.

That takes brilliance. And it takes a cost.

Because here’s the part the series doesn’t dwell on enough. Don Crowder killed himself about a decade later.

Which makes you uncomfortably wonder whether this case follow him home?

Did it lodge somewhere in his psyche? Did carrying that story, reshaping it, persuading twelve people to accept it, exact a toll? Or am I doing what we always do. Am I trying to draw a straight line where life only offers jagged ones?

As a psychologist, I’m wary of simple causation. But I’m also not naïve about cumulative weight.

He stepped into the darkest corner of human behavior and made it coherent. He asked a jury to believe that an ordinary woman could commit an extraordinary act while dissociated from herself. He succeeded.

And then he had to live with that success.

The others in the story including the lonely, bored, unhappily married adults, feel almost interchangeable. Their motivations are depressingly mundane. Desire. Validation. Escape. These are not new impulses. They’re not even interesting ones.

What is interesting is how thin the line is between repression and rupture.

A suburban housewife taking out the competition with an axe feels shocking, but it’s also a precursor. A headline before headlines became a genre. A reminder that violence doesn’t always announce itself with chaos. Sometimes it shows up wearing a church dress and carrying resentment that’s been politely ignored for years.

Love & Death doesn’t give us clean answers. It leaves us sitting with contradictions.

Accountability vs. illness
Understanding vs. absolution
Empathy vs. consequence

And maybe that’s the point.

Some stories aren’t meant to be resolved. They’re meant to be held, examined, and allowed to unsettle us.

I finished the series still unsure what I believed.

Which, in a world desperate for certainty, might be the most honest ending of all.