General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez

Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez is a three-part American true-crime documentary series, released on Netflix on January 15, 2020, that examines how the former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez went from NFL star to convicted murderer. Through interviews with friends, players, and insiders, exclusive courtroom footage, and recordings of Hernandez's prison phone calls, the series traces his upbringing in Bristol, Connecticut, his football career, his 2015 murder conviction for the killing of Odin Lloyd, and his death by suicide in prison in 2017.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Release	Netflix limited series, January 15, 2020; TV-MA documentary²
Format	Three episodes of roughly an hour each, about three hours and 20 minutes total²^•³
Director	Geno McDermott; executive producers include Dan Wetzel, Kevin Armstrong, and L. Jon Wertheim³^•⁴
Origin	Expansion of McDermott's 2018 feature documentary My Perfect World: The Aaron Hernandez Story, which premiered at the DOC NYC film festival⁵^•⁶
Signature material	Hernandez's prison phone calls, obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, plus interviews with Dennis SanSoucie, his high school teammate and former lover⁷^•⁶
Reception	68% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (19 reviews) and 80% from audiences; a Metacritic Metascore of 75⁴^•⁸

Spoilers

The case behind the series

Hernandez, then a 23-year-old star tight end with a five-year, $40 million contract with the New England Patriots, was charged with first-degree murder in June 2013 after the shooting death of Odin Lloyd, a semi-professional football player who was the boyfriend of Hernandez's fiancée's sister. He was convicted in 2015 and sentenced to life in prison.³^•⁵ He had also been credibly accused of involvement in an unsolved 2012 double homicide in Boston of Daniel Jorge Correia de Abreu and Safiro Teixeira Furtado; he was acquitted of those charges on April 14, 2017, with the help of the celebrity attorney Jose Baez, and was found hanging in his cell at Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Lancaster, Massachusetts, five days later, at age 27.³^•⁷

CTE findings. After his death, Hernandez's brain was examined at Boston University by Ann McKee, Professor of Pathology and Neurology at BU School of Medicine and Director of BU's CTE Center, who concluded that Hernandez had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, Stage 3 out of 4, with severe tau protein deposition in the frontal lobes, early brain atrophy, and large perforations in the septum pellucidum.⁹ BU researchers reported that his case was more severe than any they had previously seen in a person his age, with an atrophied fornix and enlarged ventricular cavities.¹⁰ Two days before his death, the journalist Michele McPhee had discussed and joked about the rumor of Hernandez's sexuality on a Boston sports radio show; after his death she published a Newsweek article claiming his sex life was being investigated as a potential motive for Lloyd's murder.⁵

Production

Director Geno McDermott began the project in January 2017, before the start of Hernandez's second trial, and self-financed an initial feature film built over about a year and a half with sports journalists Dan Wetzel and Kevin Armstrong, who had covered Hernandez since his high school years.⁷^•⁶ That 90-minute film, My Perfect World: The Aaron Hernandez Story, premiered at the DOC NYC festival in 2018, where Netflix was already looking at it; the partnership turned it into a three-part series of a little over three hours.⁵^•⁶

Prison phone calls. After Hernandez's death, the production filed Freedom of Information Act requests for recordings of his calls from jail and was repeatedly denied before the recordings finally became available near the end of the first film's production.⁶ McDermott said the audio, culled from hundreds of calls, "give everyone a look at who Aaron was", showing Hernandez at turns despairing and jovial, seemingly unconcerned with his crimes.⁷

Sexuality reporting. The 2018 feature had omitted the question of Hernandez's sexuality because McDermott judged the rumor unsubstantiated at the time. For the series, the filmmakers interviewed Dennis SanSoucie, Hernandez's close friend from middle school into high school, who describes having had a relationship with him.⁶ Hernandez's mother, brother, and fiancée all declined to participate; the production reached out to hundreds of people who could speak to his life.⁷

Structure and content

Each episode runs about an hour. The first opens with Hernandez's 2013 arrest for the murder of Odin Lloyd and explores his life and relationships before stardom. The second covers red flags during his college days in Florida, his entry into the NFL, and his relationship with a criminal. The third follows the end of the first trial, his hiring of a celebrity lawyer for the second trial, and doctors' study of the impact of his concussions.²

The series weaves together news footage, trial footage, interviews with friends and former teammates, and the prison phone recordings, and it argues that several forces contributed to Hernandez's behavior: a troubled and allegedly abusive home life, the unexpected death of his domineering father when Hernandez was 16, pressure to conform to a hypermasculine sports ideal, a concealed sexuality, and, posthumously, severe chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).⁵^•⁷ McDermott and Wetzel acknowledged that the series cannot supply a single explanation. "You're never going to know why", McDermott said; "the best we could do was put out the facts of the story and the viewer is going to decide what they think is why."⁷

Reception

Critical response was generally favorable. Rotten Tomatoes recorded a 68% Tomatometer from 19 reviews and an 80% audience score, with a critics' consensus that the series "crafts a compelling overview of a series of tragic events" while feeling "a little incomplete given the circumstances".⁴ Metacritic assigned a Metascore of 75 based on four critic reviews, three positive and one mixed.⁸

Reviewers singled out the prison phone calls as the series' most effective material. Nick Schager of The Daily Beast wrote that through trial footage, archival broadcasts, new interviews, and the phone conversations, the series "persuasively contends that Hernandez was the byproduct of a perfect storm of negative developments".⁸ Brian Tallerico of RogerEbert.com found it "a bit scattershot" but credited the three episodes with "a cumulative power".⁸ Criticism centered on the series' reliance on voices who could only speculate about Hernandez's motivations, its perfunctory gestures at blaming college and professional football, and the fact that much of the underlying reporting had already appeared in the Boston Globe's 2018 Spotlight investigation and Gladiator podcast.³^•¹¹

Legacy

The series is one of several major retellings of the Hernandez case, alongside the Boston Globe and Wondery podcast Gladiator: Aaron Hernandez and Football Inc. and the 2024 FX dramatization American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez, which drew on that podcast.¹¹^•¹² It also contributed to public discussion of CTE in football, a subject reviewers noted had been taboo in the sport.¹³ Legal scholarship has since cautioned against reading the case as proof that CTE causes violence: a 2020 review in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law observed that CTE can be diagnosed only postmortem, that its biological validity as a discrete illness remains debated, and that much stands in the way of using CTE as a defense for murder.¹⁴

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026