Police Said This Teen Killed a Cop. Was It All a Lie?
Given that its stories often involve mysteries that are unsolved or were improperly investigated and prosecuted, the true-crime genre routinely paints unflattering pictures of law enforcement and the criminal justice system. That’s absolutely the case with Trial 4, an eight-part Netflix docuseries (premiering Nov. 11) about Sean K. Ellis, who in 1993 was arrested at the age of 19 for the murder of Boston Police detective John Mulligan. Ellis was tried for that slaying three times in 1995, and following the first two mistrials, he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. The problem being, as argued by Remy Burkel’s non-fiction effort (executive produced by The Staircase’s Jean-Xavier de Lestrade), he was an innocent man—and the victim of some very bad individuals.
In the early morning hours of Sept. 26, 1993, detective Mulligan was shot five times in the face (including once directly up the nose) while sleeping in his SUV on a security detail in a Walgreens parking lot. Everyone agreed, at first glance, that it was an execution-style hit. However, despite following a few early leads, the focus quickly shifted to Ellis, courtesy of his admission – while talking to cops about the double-murder of his cousins, which had just occurred—that he had been buying diapers at the Walgreens in question around the time of the murder. Though Ellis was engaged in low-level drug dealing, he and the friend who drove him to the pharmacy, Terry Patterson, had no motive for killing Mulligan. Nonetheless, the Boston Police Department soon came to the conclusion that Ellis and Patterson (who were Black) had assassinated the cop (who was white) because they wanted his gun as a trophy.
That both the murder weapon and Mulligan’s firearm were later found in a lot near Sean’s home only reinforced this theory, as did later testimony against him by his girlfriend and uncle. Nonetheless, something reeked so badly about this flimsy case that the first two juries that heard it came away deadlocked. Only on the third try did the district attorney’s office get what they sought, thereby triumphing in a cop-killing saga they were determined to resolve.