On March 15, 2011, 16-year-old North Port High School student and star quarterback Marcus Freeman died in a puzzling car accident following a visit to the dentist. Over the next few weeks, two of his classmates, 16-year-olds Wesley McKinley and Brittany Palumbo, killed themselves. Occurring in such short succession, these tragedies rocked their close-knit neighborhood in Sarasota, Florida, and it wasn’t long before questions emerged about what, precisely, was going on at the high school.
The answer, it turned out, was hypnosis—conducted by none other than the school’s principal, Dr. George Kenney.
The latest installment in SundanceTV’s True Crime Story series, Look Into My Eyes (June 15, also on AMC+ and Sundance Now) is a four-part investigation into a story whose sensationalistic accusations transformed it into national news. For years, Kenney had been practicing hypnosis on students both in psychology class and in one-on-one sessions held in his office, which he recorded. By all accounts, he believed hypnosis was a therapeutic tool capable of alleviating pain, stress, anxiety, and other conditions (such as Tourette’s-like tics), and kids flocked to him for help; he hypnotized more than 70 students during this five-year period. Those included Freeman, McKinley, and Palumbo, and when the strange circumstances of their deaths came to light (including Freeman freezing up behind the wheel, and McKinley and Palumbo hanging themselves without a struggle), attention shifted to Kenney and his unusual behind-closed-doors activities.
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Featuring interviews with Palumbo and McKinley’s parents, journalists, lawyers, Kenney’s fellow educators, and numerous students who attended North Port at the time, as well as copious archival footage (including Kenney’s self-made hypnosis session recordings), Look Into My Eyes provides a comprehensive account of this wild tale. At the center of it is Kenney, who in its latter half participates, offering up his version of events, all of which can be summed up by his statement, “I was treated very unfairly in this situation.” There are those who vehemently agree and disagree with that notion in SundanceTV’s docuseries, and director Brent Hodge affords ample space for both sides (almost to a fault; a bit more concision would have benefited the proceedings). It’s hard to imagine many viewers staying neutral through the series’ finale, which is punctuated by a sly gesture that implies Kenney isn’t as trustworthy as he projects himself to be.
In Kenney’s new chats and clips from his January 2014 deposition, as well as via others’ commentary, Look Into My Eyes explains that Kenney had a lifelong attraction to hypnosis, and was inspired to pursue it following a post-NPHS graduation festivity that featured a hypnosis comedy performance. He subsequently attended a five-day course at the Omni Hypnosis Training Center, and that was enough to motivate him to start trying out his skills on students, be it in class, at ROTC gatherings, or in his private quarters. In those meetings, he sat closely across from kids and, with carefully modulated suggestions, put them into a trance, their heads falling forward to rest on (or very near) his lap. Once they were in this state, Kenney implanted techniques for calming or focusing themselves (say, blinking their eyes or squeezing their hands), and sometimes had them revisit past incidents (i.e., hypnotic regression).
The thing was, Kenney wasn’t a licensed therapist or medical professional (his doctorate is in educational leadership), and the permission slips he eventually sent home to parents didn’t make that clear. Moreover, he was conducting this work on school grounds without any apparent serious oversight. Thus, when Freeman, McKinley, and Palumbo passed away, Kenney quickly came under suspicion. Look Into My Eyes doesn’t make that seem unreasonable, given that he was an amateur who was tinkering with teenagers’ minds. That he was doing this without knowing anything about his subjects’ underlying emotional or psychological conditions only further indicates that he was engaged in careless behavior. As NPHS graduate Arianna Wallace says, what he did was “wrong and weird.”
Criminal negligence, however, was a different matter, and Look Into My Eyes lets Kenney (and his defenders) make the case that his intentions were good and that there’s no way to conclusively link his hypnosis to the three students’ deaths. Whether that’s true or not remains open for debate, since Kenney—facing felonies for practicing medicine without a license—chose to avoid prosecution by pleading guilty to lesser misdemeanors, and a later civil trial against the school district (for allowing Kenney to do all this) ended in a settlement. The inability to have their day in court still angers McKinley and Palumbo’s grief-stricken mothers and fathers, and rankles some NPHS alums, who slam not only Kenney’s hypnosis but his pattern of lying about what he did, and when, and with whom, in order to protect his job—something Kenney himself admits during his deposition.
Nonetheless, multiple voices stand up for Kenney in Look Into My Eyes, claiming that his hypnosis was beneficial, that he did nothing inappropriate, and that “they used Dr. Kenney as a scapegoat” for fatalities that were out of his control. There’s no smoking gun that definitively proves Kenney was responsible for Freeman, McKinley, and Palumbo’s deaths, and yet the docuseries paints an unflattering portrait of the former principal as defiant and unapologetic, refusing to admit that his actions were unsuitable—something that fails to ring true. Even if Kenney isn’t a “narcissist” (as Peggie McKinley asserts), it’s difficult not to see him as an individual who was reckless with impressionable kids whom he was not qualified to counsel in this manner.
Most damning of all, though, is a late scene of Kenney visiting NPHS for the first time since 2011. At a memorial erected in Freeman’s memory, Kenney pays tribute to the deceased teen, and as he does, director Hodge crosscuts to an earlier Kenney interview during which he describes Freeman using the exact same words. The implication is obvious: Kenney’s comments have been carefully rehearsed, and are therefore unreliable. Look Into My Eyes may be even-handed, but that’s not the same thing as having no viewpoint.
