The Investigation Discovery documentary The Secrets We Bury is set to tackle the decades-old mystery of a missing father, and the upheaval and suffering that followed as a family failed to unearth the truth behind a disappearance.
Michael Carroll, who was a baby in 1961 when George Carroll, his father, suddenly vanished from his childhood home, dismisses longstanding talk he had walked out on his family in the teaser clip from ID (below).
“What happened here? You know, something happened to Dad. There’s something drastically wrong with this story and somebody’s lying,” Carroll says point-blank in the first look at the ID true crime documentary ahead of a world premiere this weekend at the Hamptons International Film Festival.
The disappearance left George Carroll’s wife, Dorothy, and his four children behind in their Long Island home. Before Dorothy Carroll died in 1998, she maintained her husband left the family and never came back. And his having gone missing was never reported to the police.
The ID doc has the Carroll siblings, haunted by what happened to their father and seeking closure, doing sit-down interviews to make sense of his disappearance. The short teaser clip focuses on Mike Carroll and his quest to bring his family’s biggest skeleton to light.
“The Secrets We Bury is an intimate exploration of memory, family and the lasting impact of generational trauma. By bravely sharing their story, the Carroll family reveals how the past, no matter how deeply buried, always has a way of resurfacing,” Jason Sarlanis, president of Investigation Discovery, says in a statement.
The documentary is directed by Patricia E. Gillespie and was produced for ID by Pyramid Productions. Gillespie and James Buddy Day are executive producers.
The Secrets We Bury will premiere on Dec. 16 on ID, streaming on HBO Max.
