Pretty Baby: The Tragic Death Of Marion Parker

Synopsis

In December 1927, young Marion Parker was taken from her school by an unknown man. Days later, her body parts were found scattered across Los Angeles. After a nationwide manhunt for her killer, police arrested an aspiring religious student, teenager Robert Edward Hickman. Found guilty of brutally murdering Marion despite his plea of insanity, Hickman was executed a year later. With that, the horrific ordeal was over, and the country moved on to other tragedies.

For the Parker family, however, the loss of Marion was a wound that never healed, especially for Marion's twin sister Marjorie, who but for a trick of Fate would have been Hickman's victim. After years of quietly dealing with her grief, Marjorie is horrified to discover that Richard Cantillon, one of the lawyers who defended Hickman, is soon to publish his own version of Hickman's crime, a version that paints the murderer in a sympathetic light.

Refusing to allow Hickman to be exonerated, Marjorie embarks on a crusade to write her own book, one that will refute Cantillon's biased view of Hickman. With a family friend filming her work, Marion interviews the major players involved in the circumstances surrounding Marion's brutal death. Despite the heartbreak she relives through each interaction with various lawmen, legal experts, and even her own family members, Marion continues to plunge deeper into the past, into the horror that Hickman brought to her life.

But with each new lie of Hickman's exposed, Marjorie's fragile emotional state makes those around her wonder: is she trying to affirm that the guilt in Marion's death is Hickman's... or does it belong to someone else?

Based on the book "Butterfly In The Rain", James L. Neibaur's meticulously researched account of the true story behind the kidnapping and killing of Marion Parker, "Pretty Baby" dramatizes the incredible crime that shocked the country, and explores the emotional toll it took on the people involved.