Well, that’s a wrap on 2025.
By the time you’re reading this, it’s likely time has already slipped into the new year. It’s been just over two years since we successfully completed a crowdfunding campaign that allowed us to kickstart production on Murdered on the Fourth of July, after about a year and a half of development and pre-production. We’re guessing that if you’ve been following our filmmaking journey from the beginning, it feels even longer.
We started strong with community support and people excited to help bring this tragic but important story to light. Building on the momentum of the pre-interviews and development material we captured prior, we set out with an aggressive timeline to film new footage, gather more visuals, apply for more funding, and start seeking partners for potential distribution. But, of course, we hit the usual documentary filmmaking hurdles along the way.
There were grants and funding competitions we lost. Police officials and retired officers who politely declined participating. Mysteriously locked court records. Hard-to-track-down interview subjects. Ever-shrinking resources. Technological hurdles. Shifting political and social currents.
Despite all of the challenges, however, as we close the doors on 2025 and open them on a new year, we can finally see the finish line ahead.
We’ve now filmed interviews on-camera with almost two dozen individuals, including family, friends and bandmates of Lin “Spit” Newborn and Daniel Shersty, as well as lawyers, academics, activists. We’ve collected more news footage, more legal documents, more photos and fliers, more archival footage, more background information–enough to almost fill an 8-terabyte hard drive.
In October–following a conversation that started almost two years earlier–we were able to finally sit down with former Clark County Assistant District Attorney Robert Daskas during a last-minute, whirlwind trip to film several key interviews. Daskas was one of the prosecutors in the John “Polar Bear” Butler murder case, and was able to speak not only to his role in the state’s trial, but also the arrest, investigation, resulting appeals, commuting of sentence–the whole shebang (as well as why he believed the federal case against Butler’s co-conspirators was doomed from the start).
In this web-exclusive clip, Daskas explains why Butler was the only one initially charged with the murders, and why—despite knowing others were involved— Polar Bear was the only one of the conspirators to be convicted of the crime:
It’s a bit of a cliché to say that this kind of documentary filmmaking (really, historical journalistic filmmaking) is a marathon, not a sprint. But it’s true. Through persistence and patience, we are closer than ever to being able to finish this film and tell this story in an impactful way–and much of that is thanks to our community of supporters who have helped in so many ways, and who keep cheering us on toward the finish line.
As we toast to a new year (mainly to be done with this garbage year), we wish everyone reading this health and prosperity, and look forward to sharing more updates as we target finishing this project in 2026.