![]() The premise of the tables was simple, even if their execution was arcane: a one-time gift of $5,000 to the woman at the top of a four-tier pyramid would be returned as a $40,000 payout once the initial gifter had recruited 14 other women beneath her. One of the most intriguing dead ends Madison explores, the Gifting Tables emerged in the wreckage of the post-2008 American economy that exploded across the Connecticut coast. By the time Madison resumed working on Murder on Middle Beach in 2016 - it began life as a student film three years prior - one aunt is living in a trailer, another is dead from cancer, and a third is fresh out of jail for her role in the Gifting Tables, a homegrown all-woman Ponzi scheme. Madison’s teenage struggles with drugs and alcohol nearly derailed him, and even a half-awake viewer can’t avoid comparing Madison’s obsessive quest to the family pattern of addiction. Whatever fortune afforded Madison’s childhood a palatial McMansion, trips to Hawaii, and field passes to NFL games evaporated. ![]() Amidst an acrimonious divorce, Barbara’s drinking blossomed into full blown alcoholism - the enduring Beach family inheritance. Then Jeffery lost his CEO job amid swirling rumors of embezzlement, and much of the WASP-y Beach family’s wealth that he was investing vanished. Her warmth emanates from low resolution VHS tapes and, as she plays with her babies, she is cloaked in the questionable fashion and joie de vivre of the early 2000s. She married the successful, charming Jeffrey Hamburg (Madison’s father) and had two beautiful children. ![]() In the prominently featured home videos, we watch Barbara, called Barbie by her family, growing up in a sprawling colonial with five siblings - carousing under oil paintings of patrician ancestors. Just below its humdrum True Crime veneer, Murder on Middle Beach seethes with a palpable sense of American decay. But what Madison has created proves, in its own quiet way, to be a subversive reinvestigation of True Crime’s basic principles. As Madison digs into the clues surrounding his mother’s death, he is led again and again back to his own family: his businessman father, a down and out aunt, an unstable sister who left America and the family behind. That the filmmaker, Madison Hamburg, is Barbara’s son could just be a gimmick - an appeal to our growing demand for entertainment that dissolves the wall between subject and creator. The genre is overfilled with rapes, abductions, and ritual killings that make the violent homicide at the heart of HBO’s four-part Murder on Middle Beach feel quaint by comparison. In the canon of True Crime documentaries, Barbara’s death is unexceptional. At first, they thought they’d found a dead animal. When her sister, Conway Beach, and teenage daughter, Ali Hamburg, found her body hidden under a pile of cushions they couldn’t comprehend the tangle of blood and hair. ![]() She suffered over a dozen puncture wounds. Evidence of a struggle was strewn across the lawn. Here are the facts: on March 3rd, 2010, Barbara Beach Hamburg was beaten to death in front of her modest house in Madison, Connecticut. Billed Into Silence: Money and the Miseducation of Women.Please reach out because we will greatly appreciate, even if it’s just to share how much you loved my mom. “Anybody out there that might remember something, it might jog their memory when they see this, you know, please. “If this series doesn’t solve the case, it becomes a tool to get us closer,” Hamburg said. In the end, he hopes all the hard work and potential family strife will simply help answer the biggest question of his life: Who killed his mother and why? Hamburg said all his family members except his father have watched “Murder on Middle Beach” before its release so they’re prepared for any potential fallout or social media reaction. Part of Hamburg’s journey in the documentary includes secretly recording his father and his interactions with investigators who have yet to solve the killing. “Because, you know, I love my family and it is unconditional, but it’s really hard when a loved one is murdered and it’s unresolved and it’s done in a way that leaves a small percentage chance that it could have been done by a loved one.” resolve some of the lingering distrust,’” Hamburg said. And you have to do it to elicit an honest, truthful answer out of them because this may be your only chance to exonerate people and. And you have to do it for their sake and your sake, bluntly. Hamburg recounted how his crew pressed him to ask, saying, ‘If we’re going to do this again, this might be your only opportunity to ask that question. That question was something he posed to several close relatives after he had been working on the documentary for years and realized they needed to be given a chance to express their innocence.
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