High Crimes

The shocking story of how a megachurch Pastor turned a brutal murder into millions. Inspired by true events.
HIGH CRIMES is a one-hour serial drama telling the multi-layered and unbelievable true-crime story of how motiveless murderer Donny Moore climbed the ranks of church employment to become an adored, multi-millionaire megachurch pastor.
On a sunny day in 1975, Donny Moore decapitates innocent Sunday school teacher Joann Emory. In prison, Donny’s inexplicable charm and wit earns him the approval of the warden, and when he claims he has undergone a religious jailhouse conversion earning him God’s forgiveness, he is released after serving just seven years. He climbs the ranks of church employment to become the highly-paid pastor of a megachurch, exploiting fraud, sexual abuse and even Congress in his quest for success. Meanwhile, Joann’s son Alan lives a very divergent life, grappling with depression, cancer, poverty, unresolved grief, and a desperate, often delusional thirst for justice. We follow the stories of Donny and Alan, two vastly different lives inextricably bound by tragedy and injustice, as they navigate the world after Joann’s murder – and ultimately meet again.
On the surface, the eight episodes tell the devastatingly contradictory and shocking life stories of both Donny Moore and Alan Emory, but the real, underlying subject of the story is the corruption and danger of politically-driven religious fanaticism. HIGH CRIMES employs a unique and bingeable story structure, intertwining multiple time periods, deploying unnamed characters and dropping “Shyamalan-style” twists every episode. Used to expose the disturbing ego of the megachurch and the deep humanity of grief, these story devices serve a level of character nuance and sophisticated storytelling rarely found outside of theatre or literature.
A cross between THE PEOPLE V. O.J. SIMPSON: AMERICAN CRIME STORY and TRUE DETECTIVE, yet a unique and groundbreaking story of its own, HIGH CRIMES leaves our audience to ask themselves the unanswerable question: can injustice and God co-exist?
HIGH CRIMES is an analogue to the real-life murder of Jo Ella Liles at the hands of megachurch superstar Maury Davis. While much of the public domain information about the case (court and case files, news articles, etc.) is word-for-word in the story, the bulk of the dramatization is fictional and names have been changed to protect the victim’s memory and family’s privacy.