Film based on a local murder debuts at Macon Film Festival. Behind case that inspired it

A short film documenting one of Macon’s most infamous murderers premiered Saturday at the Macon Film Festival, seeking to unsettle viewers through its subtlety.

The film’s writer and director, Chad Darnell, said he drew inspiration from Alfred Hitchcock. He described the film as “‘Golden Girls’ meets the ‘Sopranos,’” the short film focuses on Anjette Lyles, a Macon restaurant owner who killed four of her relatives between 1952 and 1958.

While many films centered around a serial killer may be tempted to lean into slasher-like scenes of gore and screaming, “Murder Queens” instead focuses on an interview between Lyles and Celestine Sibley, a reporter with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution famous for covering murder trials.

While some filmmakers may have found the lack of blood and guts a hindrance in such a project, Darnell said it pushed him to focus on the characters and conflicts at the story’s heart. A battle of narratives, Lyles talks about her crimes as if they happened in a dream. Her tranquility is unnerving, and puts Sibley on edge as she searches for the truth.

“It’s all about getting a good script and good actors,” Darnell said. “As long as there’s tension, and each character has their needs and their wants and their objective and their conflict, that’s how you tell the story.”

Darnell said he hopes to take the piece further, setting his sightts on eventually creating a full-length feature.

Which Macon case is the film based on?

The story of Anjette Lyles isn’t a new one. Since the murders and subsequent trials took place in the 1950s, the murders have been re-hashed in books, podcasts and news articles.

Lyles was a Macon native who married her first husband, Ben Lyles, in 1947. Together, the couple had two daughters and ran a diner on Mulberry Street that became one of Macon’s most popular spots.

Ben Lyles died suddenly in 1952, and Lyles continued to run the restaurant under the name “Anjette’s.” Soon after, she began dating Joe Neal Gabbert, a pilot with Capitol Airways. They were married in 1955, but Gabbert also died suddenly about six months later, leaving Lyles enough money to support herself, her business and her daughters.

While the death of Lyles’ husbands were initially written off as tragedies, people grew suspicious when the mother of Lyles’ first husband, Julia Lyles, died suddenly in 1957. Lyles presented a will from Julia Lyles that left her a significant amount of money upon her death.

Anjette Lyles was finally caught when her 9-year-old daughter, Marcia Lyles, fell ill in 1958. Marcia was hospitalized because she couldn’t stop vomiting, and began experiencing hallucinations. Anjette Lyles brought her daughter teas and home remedies, but nothing helped. Doctors couldn’t find the source of the illness, and she died after several weeks.

After Marcia Lyles’ death, an employee at Anjette’s sent an anonymous letter to the coroner. The letter alleged that Lyles’ maid said she had been keeping poison at home to deal with an infestation at the restaurant. But the employee knew there was no infestation.

Authorities investigated Lyles, and found that the poison contained arsenic. She had used it to kill all four of her family members. The story spread far and wide, and the trial was covered by newspapers around the South.

But the reporter who really got the scoop was Sibley, known as the Murder Queen because she was one of the few women in the United States covering murder trials. Sibley interviewed Lyles while she was in jail, and detailed the interactions in articles covering the trial and in subsequent books and articles she published.

Lyles was initially sentenced to death, but appealed and had the sentence overturned after being found insane. She was instead sentenced to live the rest of her life in a mental hospital in Milledgeville.

Adapting the unthinkable

Darnell was inspired to create the short film after reading “Whisper to the Black Candle,” a book documenting the murders and subsequent trial.

While Darnell’s short film revolves around Sibley’s interview with Lyles, the book only devotes about a paragraph to the interaction. In order to take the interview from a paragraph to a short film and – as Darnell hopes to eventually achieve – to a full-length feature, he researched Sibley and her work extensively.

In addition to reading coverage of the trial, he also read Sibley’s other work, including an article detailing her conversations with Lyles, and spoke with her former colleagues from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Jessica Miesel, who plays Lyles in the film, had her work cut out for her, too. Miesel said she has always been fascinated by true crime and serial killers. When Darnell brought her the script, she was immediately interested.

“As an actor, I always say that we need to have a lot of empathy and a lot of compassion to do our job,” Miesel said. “I’m fascinated to learn about people who don’t have those things, who can do something so vile and then have absolutely zero remorse. I think it’s a constant study that I’m doing all the time to figure out why.”

Miesel studied Lyles’ life, paying close attention to her conversations with Sibley. Miesel said she found Lyles to be complex and intelligent, and sought to bring her charm and ability to manipulate others to the screen.

The short is set entirely in Lyles’ prison cell, with Sibley sitting just outside the door. The camera echoes back to thrillers by Alfred Hitchcock as it peers at Lyles through the bars of her cell. At times, it stares up at her as if sunken deep into the ground, turning Lyles into a towering, terrifying figure worthy of her serial killer label.

Stephanie Osteen, who produced the film in addition to briefly starring in it, said it was especially important to her, Darnell and Miesel to capture the terror that strikes a community in the face of such a heinous crime.

“There’s the victims, and there is the other victims, the carnage that’s left behind and the people that are still grieving from the violence,” Osteen said.

The film is laced with tension, with the camera closing in on Sibley and Lyles’ faces as Lyles makes her case to Sibley. While Sibley is the journalist, Lyles flips the script at times, asking Sibley unnerving, invasive personal questions that knock even the murder queen off-kilter.

“I think she is incredibly charming, and very manipulative, and I think she’s smart,” Miesel said. “I think that she’s using this interview to manipulate the situation.”

A short film, a long journey

Despite being filmed in a day, “Murder Queens” has been a long time coming for Darnell.

The initial script, which was written as a feature-length film as opposed to a short, was written 24 years ago. HBO was initially interested, Darnell said, but was hesitant because films and TV shows featuring women, particularly older women, weren’t doing well with viewers at the time. The network proposed changing the story to focus on women in their 20s in Chicago, but Darnell declined. HBO was no longer interested, and the project was shelved.

Darnell then embarked on a career in casting, but he hadn’t forgotten Lyles’ story. He connected with Miesel, and the two initially wanted to pitch it as a stage play. After a grant necessary to fund the project rejected the pitch, they pivoted to a short film format.

Once it was decided, Darnell moved fast. He was able to find actors in a few months thanks to his casting connections, and got a crew from Savannah College of Art and Design to assist in the production.

“[Darnell] works at lightning speed,” Osteen said. “We just hit it running, we were going live within a month.”

The film was screened at the Macon Film Festival, and Darnell hopes to continue showing it to audiences at festivals to eventually get the support to adapt it into a feature-length film in line with his original vision. While the script needs editing, he said that seeing audiences’ reception of the film motivates him to get to work.

“As a filmmaker, you’re always like, ‘Is this any good?’ Until you actually hear the response from people that they like it,” Darnell said.