‘Aaron Hernandez and the Untold Murders of Bristol’ Shows How Hometown Heroes Broke Bad
Any football fan, true crime aficionado or news junkie knows the story of Aaron Hernandez, the prodigiously gifted NFL star who was found guilty of murder and then hung himself in prison. Much less famous are two of his former teammates at Bristol Central High School in Connecticut, Nick Brutcher and Alex Ryng. Like Hernandez, they often led with their helmets, racking up hits and concussions on the field and leading increasingly troubled lives off of it. And, in a tragic defiance of statistical probability, they, too, committed murder. That’s three high school teammates who killed, in a football-mad town of about 60,000.
To its credit, Aaron Hernandez and the Untold Murders of Bristol doesn’t try to come up with a magic bullet theory to explain the carnage. The two-part documentary, premiering on ID tonight at 9 p.m. ET and airing on Max, looks at various common factors among the men, including multiple head injuries, untouchable status as star athletes in an economically depressed community, and, in the cases of Hernandez and Brutcher, sexual attraction to men forbidden in a hyper-macho milieu. Unlike much ID fare, this story, about three pumped-up boys who became damaged men, is less sensational than deeply sad.
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Featuring reporting and on-camera analysis from Rolling Stone senior writer Paul Solotaroff, Untold Murders leans heavily into the Hernandez story, which is understandable. The dominant tight end-turned-sloppy gangster’s saga offers plenty to work with, including his NFL stardom, his conviction for the 2013 murder of Odin Lloyd, and his 2017 jailhouse suicide by hanging. The documentary also features new insights from Alex Bradley, Hernandez’s weed dealer and party pal who was shot in the face by his imposing friend (and who claims he was there the night Hernandez killed two other men in Boston); and Ernest Wallace, Hernandez’s childhood friend and, later, his driver, who was with him the night he killed Odin. It’s Bradley who emerges as the star witness here, a running and thugging buddy with no interest in covering up Hernandez’s psycho traits — or burnishing Bristol’s bucolic image. “That’s a drug town,” Bradley says in the doc, painting a portrait of a place where 16-year-olds routinely did heroin and cocaine. Hernandez, also an avid user of PCP, was a frequent consumer.
Untold Murders makes an effort at socioeconomic analysis, as when Solotaroff describes Bristol as “a vintage snapshot of post-industrial America,” one of countless towns that nosedives when manufacturing jobs go away. The doc could use more of such material to bolster Solotaroff’s observation that “Bristol and Aaron were walking the same path.” Instead the town, best known as the home of ESPN headquarters, remains largely in the background, another hamlet that worships at the altar of high school football every Friday night and lets its favorite sons get away with whatever they want.
The Brutcher and Ryng stories don’t have the gangland glamour of Hernandez’s tale, but they’re much sadder for their relative anonymity. In 2014, Ryng murdered his wife before taking his own life. In 2022, Brutcher killed two police officers after luring them to his home with a fake 911 call, before a third officer took him down. Both men had been in a tailspin, with increasingly erratic and violent behavior. Unlike Hernandez, they didn‘t flame out on the public stage. Though their stories were not quite “untold” — both cases received media coverage — their rage played out away from bright lights and tabloid headlines until it exploded in murder.
Untold Murders never out-and-out blames football for the murders committed by Hernandez, Brutcher, and Ryng, but the implications are hard to miss. Steadily rewarded and adulated since youth for performative violence, regularly sustaining head injuries (Hernandez’s brain showed that he suffered from severe CTE, a degenerative brain disease common among former football players), and encouraged to stifle any signs of vulnerability or nonviolent emotion, they were ticking time bombs reared in the same community. When they detonated, they left a trail of destruction and one horrific legacy.
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