Why A Greenhill Grad Took Another Hack at Candy Montgomery’s Sordid Saga

New true-crime miniseries ‘Love and Death’ directed by SMU alum Lesli Linka Glatter

In 1980, Collin County housewife Candy Montgomery bludgeoned to death her lover’s wife, Betty Gore, with an ax.

The creators of Love and Death acknowledge that viewers of the upcoming HBO Max true-crime miniseries will already know that ending — and it doesn’t matter.

The show delves into the characters and the fabric of Wylie more than four decades ago, when a high-profile killing and subsequent trial exposed a scandal and tore apart a conservative churchgoing community.

“If this story wasn’t true, you couldn’t make it up,” said Dallas native Lesli Linka Glatter, who directed all seven episodes. “This is about a Texas town and its characters — I fell in love with all of them, but there’s also a deep hole inside of those characters. It was a mile wide and unfulfilled, so that intrigued me.”

The show immerses us in a community where loneliness and mundanity give way to obsession and lust for Candy (Elizabeth Olsen) and timid businessman Allan Gore (Jesse Plemons), the husband of Candy’s friend, schoolteacher Betty (Lily Rabe). Behind the idyllic façade of faith and family was a secret that became too difficult to conceal and spiraled into madness.

“This was a family and a community that I felt I knew,” series creator and writer David E. Kelley said. “Mining that town completely changed the pathology of the characters.”

Based on two 2013 Texas Monthly articles, the series reunites Kelley with producers Nicole Kidman and Per Saari after their Emmy-winning collaboration Big Little Lies.

“It’s not often you find a nostalgic, warm community series that ends with an axe murder,” Kelley said during the SXSW Film & TV Festival in Austin.

While developing the show, Kelley approached longtime television director Glatter, who graduated from Greenhill School and SMU. Production took place around the Austin area, wrapping in April 2022.

A primary goal was “to be honest to the story and the characters and have empathy for all of them,” Glatter said. “They had an affair, but they just wanted to be seen and heard.”

The series provides the first major role for Dallas-born Plemons since his Oscar nomination for The Power of the Dog. He plays a supporting role in the upcoming Martin Scorsese epic Killers of the Flower Moon.

“I’m always drawn to characters that don’t reveal themselves immediately, and it takes time to understand them,” Plemons said. “The idea that seems prevalent with all of these characters is that there is no hiding from what is true in yourself. It was a lot of fun to explore.”

While the series fits the true-crime mold that’s enjoying a resurgence in popularity — the Montgomery case also provided the basis for a miniseries on Hulu just last year starring Jessica Biel — Glatter said the approach here is different.

“You have to dig deeper to see what’s really going on,” she said. “We tried to look at the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ rather than the ‘what.’”