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lLong Island grandmother Dorothy “Dottie” Carroll was on her death bed in 1998 when her second-youngest child, Mike, made a last-ditch effort to find out what had happened to his father.
Dottie, 64, had been telling family since the 1960s that Korean War veteran George Carroll had gone out for a cigarette one day and never returned. She kept telling his four children for years: “Don’t even think about him. He wasn’t a good boy.”
However, as time passed, the couple’s two sons and two daughters began to question that vague story.
“I asked her, ‘Mom, can you tell me something about this? Can you tell me something about this before you go?'” Mike Carroll says in the new ID/HBO Max documentary, The Secrets We Bury, which explores his family and the mystery.
“April 17th, I remember, 1998. My mother literally turned her head, winked at me, didn’t say a word, then passed away. Whatever secret she had, she took it to her grave.”
Mike was still grieving when, just a few months later, he was called into work as a respiratory therapist in the middle of the night – and found himself caring for a patient who announced he was his uncle. George Carroll’s family has, for decades, apparently had their own theories about the giant’s disappearance.
“He says, ‘He would never have left four kids,'” Mike says in the documentary. “‘We suspect that something strange happened. There was construction going on there at the time, and we believe, because there was a chance, that he was actually buried under your house.'”
His uncle starts talking negatively about Dottie, so Mike ends the conversation. But the coincidence and the information troubled him. At the same time, his siblings were also pressing for answers – especially the eldest, Gene Kennedy, who was seven years older than Mike.
He realized that his father had never been reported missing. He never picked up his last pay cheque. One detail after another seemed to point towards dishonesty.
Jean convinces her brother to see a mental patient, who spends the first hour talking about other family matters and makes the suspicious Mike even more suspicious. He said through the medium that he was dissatisfied – and that he only wanted to know about his father.
“She says, ‘Oh, when it comes to the “M” word, [I] Usually don’t say anything unless you give me permission to do so,” Mike says in the film. “I said, what’s the “M” word?”
“Murder,” the psychic replied.
He told the siblings that their father was murdered and buried in the family basement – pointing out the exact location and describing the gun-practice target on the wall that Mike remembered from childhood.
After this Mike started digging. He bought the house from his mother while she was still alive, and he began dismantling the basement piece by piece. The rest of the family, except Gene, thought he was “crazy” – but both of Mike’s sons agreed to help him. They also brought in a ground penetrating radar company, which discovered a five-foot-five-square-meter void beneath the floor. But on digging there nothing was found.
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Nevertheless, he continued digging several times a week and sometimes even at night. Eventually, they discovered a wall and then a safe. The night before Halloween 2018, he searched for clothes. And bones.
The next day, he called the police. The discovery of George Carroll’s remains and the investigation surrounding it were soon covered in local newspapers.
Reading the news was director Trish Gillespie, who had recently finished filming in Canada and was looking for a new project to work on. She was living in Brooklyn—about 50 miles west of the Carrolls’ home—and, about a week after the search, she met Mike at the local Dunkin’ Donuts.
“We drank one cup of coffee for five hours,” he said. Independent. “And then, at the end of the evening, [Mike] Said: ‘I want to show you something.’ And he took me back to his house and down to the basement.
“And I remember standing there over this huge hole in the basement and saying, ‘I’m really lucky this is a good guy,'” she said. “It’s something I wouldn’t do now; I was in my 20s then. I’m not sure I’ll trust anyone that much again, but I’m glad the person I trusted so much was Mike. And that’s kind of what inspired this years-long project.”
Mike and the rest of his family also trust Gillespie. So much so that, after years of searching, he felt ready to make a documentary. Filming began about two years ago.
“They were kind of reflecting on the mystery that had come out of the mystery,” says Gillespie. “One of the things that’s so compelling about this story to me, [is that] …Like half of the murder cases aren’t actually handled or decided. There are many unsolved cases like this.
“And as media consumers, we don’t really feel that way, because the stories that are told to us usually don’t end up, or they end up in court, or … at least the court of public opinion is able to convict somebody. And this is really an example of a story where that doesn’t happen.”
As time goes on the Carroll family begins to uncover more secrets. Dottie had remarried after her husband’s disappearance and welcomed a son with new husband Richard Dares. The siblings discover that Carroll had been living in the house and helping with construction work before his disappearance.
After Darius and Dottie divorced, they learned unpleasant things about his behavior – and before that secrets about his behavior with Carol’s children also came to light.
But by the time the discovery and the documentary came to light, Darius, like Dottie, was dead. His son and the Carrolls’ half-siblings are also interviewed in the film – and he grapples with what he did and didn’t know about his father.
Gillespie says, “Many times, we may think we’re looking for revenge or justice or answers and that will fix things for us – but often, even when the case may be adjudicated, that’s not true.” “Reciprocating those feelings of sadness or loss isn’t really justice – it’s more like love, understanding and acceptance.
“And I think, because of the nature of the story, you see this family dive into a lot of deep secrets after the initial secret is revealed — and go through the process of learning through those secrets how to listen to each other, learning to love each other, learning to accept differences, learning to change their minds.
“And that, to me, was the most compelling part of the story,” she told. Independent. “There’s definitely a twisted true crime drama here, but what’s very interesting to me is the family drama.”
The family felt a sense of isolation after learning that Carroll had not abandoned them – and that he had always been with them.
“The truth is, this whole thing is about loving something we didn’t know existed,” Mike says tearfully in the film. He was only four years old when Carol disappeared from his life.
“My mission was to find my father, and that mission has been accomplished,” says Jean, who has taken ownership of her father’s ashes.
“My dad is with me all the time,” she says. “I think about him every day. I talk to him every day. It’s great to have him with me.”
Her brother Steve has buried the shoes found with Carroll in the basement.
“I don’t have anything that my father actually owned or gave me,” he says. “I think the shoes give me a certain amount of connection. That’s all I have. The idea that he wore these shoes when he was in that hold and they were in the ground for 55 years is hard to get my mind around.”
It is also difficult for him to understand why his mother insisted that his father leave them voluntarily. The question also remains unanswered as to who actually murdered the body before hiding it in the basement.
“I’ve often wondered, if my mother knew, why didn’t she tell us when she finally got sick?” Steve says in the movie. “But now that I think about it, I don’t think I would have told my kids.
“I think if my mother considered telling us what really happened, it would cloud the way we thought about her, and we thought very well of her. We loved her.”
Gillespie has called the film “essentially a love letter to this family” – and hopes audiences will learn lessons relevant to their own lives.
“I hope it will serve as encouragement to people who have some skeletons in their closet or ghosts that they need to lay to rest in their family — that it’s okay and it’s safe to have these conversations,” she explains. Independent“And if you come from a loving family, even if you have to say things to each other that are hard to hear, it will be OK,”
She reiterates, “Healing grief” is really about telling your story and making sense of it, integrating it, and being able to connect deeply with the people in your life about it.
Her “dearest hope” is, she says, that other people will see how “a tough guy like Mike” can open up – “and also that people will consider: Hey, maybe I won’t get the answers I think I need about this unresolved thing in my life – but maybe that’s not the point.
“Maybe the way I behave or interact with people will be the answer to that problem.”
ID’s The Mysteries We Bury premieres tonight at 9/8c on ID and will be available to stream on HBO Max.