In the early morning of November 28, 1953, 42-year-old Army scientist Frank Olson went out the window of a room in New York City’s Statler Hotel. Was it an accident, or an assassination?

Wormwood, the new Netflix true-crime documentary re-enactment series from director Errol Morris, investigates just that: Olson’s possible murder, and the conspiracy to cover up the death of a man who may have been ready to reveal government secrets. Among those possibly wishing to silence him: the C.I.A., President Gerald Ford’s chief and deputy chief of staff—Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, respectively—plus a rogue’s gallery of military men, a pseudo psychiatrist, and a magician.

“I sometimes describe Wormwood as a series of Russian nesting dolls—stories inside stories, inside stories, inside stories,” the Academy Award-winning documentarian says of his series, the title of which references both a line from Hamlet and a Bible passage. Two-plus years in the making, this innovative narrative from the director who pioneered many true-crime techniques—including the use of re-enactments and music—arrives December 15, just in time to satisfy our craving for an addictive nonfiction drama to binge during the shortest days of the year.

Morris’s inquiry began with his interest in a secret 1950s-60s C.I.A. program called “MK-Ultra,” which employed drugs and deception tactics—and most of whose records have been destroyed. “What we know about it is limited, and as a result, it has become catnip for conspiracy theorists”—though Morris is not one of them, he says.

Who Was Frank Olson?

Olson, a C.I.A. operative and bacteriologist played in Wormwood’s re-creation scenes by Peter Sarsgaard, may have taken part in secret government L.S.D. experiments—and could have been the subject of mind control. He may have also believed that the U.S used biological weapons during the Korean War, felt that he couldn’t live with that knowledge, and been ready to tell all.

Morris says Sarsgaard was his first and only choice to play Olson: “He jokes how I told him that what I liked most about his performances were his silences, and that is more or less true.” Molly Parker plays Olson’s tightly wound and devastated wife, Alice, whom we also see in archival footage. Having never known much about her husband’s confidential work, she ultimately slides into alcoholism. “My mother always said that the one thing she knew about my father’s state of mind was that he was very upset about Korea,” Olson’s son Eric Olson says in the series, during his documentary interview.

The Obsessed Storyteller

Now a Harvard-trained clinical psychologist, Eric was an impressionable 9-year-old when Olson’s boss and family friend, Lieutenant Colonel Vin Ruwet (played in re-creations by Scott Shepherd)—who may or may not have been with Olson when he died—came to the house early that November morning to inform the family of his death. Eric has been consumed with questions about what really happened to his father ever since. Morris underscores this by interviewing him sitting beneath a static analog clock, stopped precisely at the time his father died. “For me, it was like a bomb just dropped on my head,” Eric says in the series. “I was strongly identified with him at the time. And he just disappeared.”

Everything changed for Eric again after a 1974 New York Times story by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh revealed that the C.I.A. had conducting a secret domestic surveillance program. A subsequent 1975 presidential review panel investigating the C.I.A.’s activities mentioned MK-Ultra—and said that an unnamed and “unwitting civilian” Army scientist had been surreptitiously given L.S.D. at some point before plummeting to his death in 1953. “What the ultimate goal is, is unclear,” Morris says of the panel’s findings. “Most likely the ultimate goal is to save the C.I.A. from itself. You could argue that it’s a kind of cover-up . . . and that’s when our story starts all over again.”