PRESS DEMOCRAT: Did 2 North Coast sisters just crack a 4-year-old murder case in their new documentary?
Journalist Phil Barber of The Press Democrat features "High Country Murder," the new investigative documentary short directed by Keely Brazil Covello and Michaela Brazil Gillies.
Before he drove them to a somewhat sketchy corner of the Emerald Triangle, the Mendocino County sheriff gave Keely Brazil Covello and Michaela Brazil Gillies a quick briefing.
“If it looks like there’s gonna be any issues, I’ll just give you guys a head nod and that means it’s time for us to go,” Matt Kendall told them. “There’s a bulletproof vest in the back of the truck. If it gets real hairy, take my truck and drive on.”
Not that the two young women didn’t know what they’d signed up for. Covello and Gillies, known in the Potter Valley area as the Brazil sisters, had returned home not for a vacation or a family reunion, but to investigate a murder that had rocked their tight-knit but increasingly wary rural community.
The result of their work is “High Country Murder,” a 21-minute documentary about the killing of Richard Drewry, an 85-year-old rancher who was found dead in his truck on Bell Springs Road in Humboldt County — the Drewry ranch straddled the Humboldt-Mendocino line — in January 2021.
As the fourth anniversary of Drewry’s death approaches, his killing remains unsolved.
For Covello and Gillies, the project was personal. They had grown up knowing members of the Drewry family. And though they live in Orange County now, they feel a deep connection to northern Mendocino County, and a compulsion to portray the lives of the people who live there with honesty and depth.
“There’s been kind of a spate of rural-centric media recently, TV shows and this type of thing. There’s a renewed interest in the American West,” Covello said. “But often told from an outsider’s perspective. And you can tell when you watch it, it feels very ‘outsider looking in.’ They really like the way this lifestyle looks, but they don’t really understand it.”
Those portrayals have included the Mendocino-Humboldt area, where coverage has tended to focus on the modern back-to-the-land movement and gripping accounts such as “Murder Mountain,” the 2018 Netflix documentary series about disappearances and deaths related to the cannabis trade.
“High Country Murder” certainly shares thematic elements with “Murder Mountain.” The Brazil sisters focused on rising tensions in the hills of the North Coast, where multigenerational ranching families are adjusting to an influx of large cannabis grows — many of them illegal, and allegedly run by organized crime syndicates from Mexico, China, Bulgaria and other far-flung locations.
Click here to read the full article on The Press Democrat website.