Girl in the Picture, Netflix’s new true crime documentary, is a challenge to director Skye Borgman’s own crown. In 2017, she made Abducted in Plain Sight, an account of the long-term abuse and kidnapping, not once but twice, of Jan Broberg by her parents’ friend and neighbour Robert Berchtold. In a crowded field, the bizarreness of the almost-incredible tale still stood out. If it had been a novel, you would have thrown the book aside as the work of a fool in a fever dream.
But the story behind Girl in the Picture is, if anything, even sadder and stranger, as it traces the deepening mystery behind an apparently simple hit-and-run case. In Oklahoma, a 20-year-old woman is found, groceries scattered about her, by the side of a road, and dies of her injuries – which, it is noted by staff, are quite unlike those you would expect to find on a car accident victim – in hospital soon after. Her much older husband, Clarence, is under suspicion, and their two-year-old son Michael is placed with a foster family. The deceased is identified as Tonya Hughes and her mother is called. When she answers, she tells them her daughter died as a toddler.
