My TV-consumption habits for the past several months have been awash in murder, and Netflix knows it—which is how, fresh from binge-watching “Making a Murderer” and hungry for more, I recently came across “Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father.” This odd documentary—which deals with the death of a young physician named Andrew Bagby, who was a childhood friend of the film’s director, Kurt Kuenne—made a small splash when it was first released, in 2008, but it’s worth revisiting now, in the midst of the recent bonanza of true-crime hits. An unusually personal and powerful story of a murder, it may offer something of a counterweight to the forces of bias and prurience that often pull the genre off-track.

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It’s best to watch Kuenne’s documentary without too much background, but the basic setup is this: On November 6, 2001, Andrew Bagby’s body was found, shot five times, in a park near Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where Bagby lived. The apparent culprit was a woman named Shirley Turner, whom Bagby had dated but had broken up with on November 4th, in Latrobe, just before putting her on a plane to Council Bluffs, Iowa, where she lived at the time. On the 5th, however, Turner appeared back in Latrobe. (“You’ll never guess who showed up on my doorstep,” one of Bagby’s friends recalls him saying. “The psychotic bitch.”) The bullets in Bagby’s body were of the same type that Turner had used at a shooting range shortly before, in a gun she had recently purchased. In initial questioning, Turner claimed to have been home sick in Iowa when Bagby was shot, but cell-phone records showed her placing calls along the thousand-mile highway route between Council Bluffs and Latrobe in the days before and after the murder. While the police investigation was still underway, Turner, a Canadian citizen, packed off to St. John’s, Newfoundland. Through a complicated series of delayed hearings and granted bails, Turner remained free for many months while the decision regarding her extradition was in process. Complicating things further, she soon announced that she was pregnant with Bagby’s child. That child was Zachary, to whom the film is addressed.

Kuenne began making “Dear Zachary” before Turner revealed her pregnancy. His goal at first was simply to collect memories and tributes from people who were close to Bagby. He travelled across the country, and to England, to collect these reminiscences, which reveal Bagby to be a caring physician and a beloved and charismatic goofball. (A number of his male friends say that they asked, or would have asked, him to be their best man.) After the pregnancy came to light, the film became a way to introduce Zachary to his father. In the course of the next two years—as Turner’s extradition process dragged on, as Bagby’s parents moved from California to Newfoundland to fight for custody of the baby, and as the case eventually took an even more terrible turn—the film came to be about those events as well. But the tributes Kuenne collected remain the spine of the movie, alternating throughout with exposition of the murder and its aftermath.

It’s a muddled structure, and the film makes frequent aesthetic missteps as well, with frenetic editing, canned music, and heavy-handed imagery. Any reference to Turner as a flight risk, for instance, is accompanied by birdsong and pictures of flying pigeons. When Kuenne narrates the particulars of the crime, the evidence, or the legal proceedings, his voiceover shifts to a stylized, rapid-fire clip, making it easy for the audience to miss key details. Such choices make for a disorienting viewing experience, especially if you’re accustomed to the conventions of slicker documentaries. But they also contribute to the feeling of watching something urgent and unmediated. Kuenne’s fast-talking exposition, while confusing, seems purposeful, as though the murder were a necessary backstory to be pushed through as quickly as possible in order to get to the heart of the narrative: Andrew Bagby’s life and how horrible his death was for those who loved him. (It was announced, in 2014, that the documentary would be made into a miniseries. It’s hard to imagine a well-crafted rendition being as powerful.)

In this way, “Dear Zachary” inverts the usual way of telling murder stories. Typically, we meet the victim not as a person but as a dismantled puzzle to be put back together by the canny viewer, who is likewise appealed to not as a person hearing about a human catastrophe but as an analytical machine capable of sorting and weighing the relevant facts. The victim’s choices, preferences, actions, and relationships are either boiled down to a heap of clues and red herrings, or offered as a backdrop in a spirit of dutiful empathy before getting down to the business at hand. Gruesome details, abstruse discoveries, and personal secrets are examined with a seemingly cold and impartial eye in the light of the promise that, if seen rightly, they can yield up a picture of the truth. And if that picture never reveals itself, it feels like a letdown, not a tragedy.

Kathryn Schulz, reviewing “Making a Murderer” recently in The New Yorker, described how true-crime projects can allow for bias to masquerade as objectivity and for people (particularly victims and their families) to be reduced to plot points. Schultz quotes the brother of Hae Min Lee, the victim of the murder at the center of the first season of “Serial,” responding, on Reddit, to the surge of interest in the case: “I won’t be answering any questions because . . . TO ME ITS REAL LIFE.” “Dear Zachary” avoids the first pitfall by directly confronting the second. It stays so close to Bagby and to the people who loved him that there’s never any question that it’s their side of the story being recounted. Interviews with Bagby’s friends and family take the place of the usual lineup of witnesses—as much attention is given to the fact that he always wore shorts as to the number of times he was shot—and their pain functions as evidence as the film builds a case against the Canadian bail and extradition protocols. Even during his stilted summaries of events, you can sometimes hear Kuenne choking up.

There is a dark pull in watching the Bagby case travel to unanticipated depths, but there are no thrills. Instead, the film’s dramatic nodes are scenes such as the one in which Bagby’s parents, David and Kate, recall going to identify their son’s body. His father says, “I kissed him and held him. And Kate kissed him and held him and kissed him some more. And tears are dropping on him, of course, and Kate went to wipe one of those away off his cheek, and a plug came out, where he’d been shot in the left cheek. Oh my god. She pushed it back in and cried some more.” Far from experiencing the satisfaction of cracking a mystery, the viewer is likely to come away with a feeling of stymied sickness, of hitting the brick wall of a world gone wrong—a feeling which must be closer to the lived reality of violent tragedy. It’s not the sort of true crime that leaves you wanting more.