By MIKE COURSON
Great Bend Post
From a high school stunt, a career was born. In 2012, Aaron Mull was a senior at Great Bend High School. He used a weather balloon to send a burrito into space, using new camera technology to film the entire flight. The stunt landed him on national television and kickstarted a career in video. Now Mull has turned his attention to something more serious: a documentary about the double-homicide at the Dolly Madison Bakery store in Great Bend in 2002.
"It's always been a story that obviously hit close to home, being from Great Bend," Mull said. "About this time last year, right after the 19th-year anniversary, I realized I'm about to find myself with enough time to be able to devote to a project like this. I just decided to commit to it. For the better part of the year, I've been flying back here secretly four or five times, collecting interviews and just really diving. To say I'm knee-deep in this is an understatement. I'm fully in it."
Now 29 years old, married, and living on the east coast, Mull made the decision to fly back home for Tuesday's Kansas Bureau of Investigation press conference regarding the case. To him, it's about bringing proper attention to the double homicide, its victims, and the family members left in its aftermath.
"Had it happened today, 2022, I don't think the public would have let it become 20 years old," said Mull. "It really is a story that never got that attention that it would have gotten even 10 years ago, in 2012, with Facebook on the rise. I think this story would have looked a lot different. I'll put as much time as I need to into this to make it good and to get it out there."
Mull already has extensive footage from the area, as well as interviews with many of the key characters in the case, including family members of the victims and law enforcement officers. He estimates he already has hundreds of hours invested into the project and plans to shop it to a major network when complete. It's all done using equipment that allows for unique drone shots from the sky, and for authentic shots on the ground.
"Some of this consumer equipment you can get for a few grand is pretty great," he said. "The drone I have can fit in my camera bag. It's very unassuming. That's what I like about it. My idea is to just blend in with the crowd. I think that's how you get the real reactions with what's going on. If you're there with a camera the size of three basketballs, people turn their shoulders and look at it. If you're there with a camera that no one is seeing, you get their real reactions. I think this documentary, it's very real. I just want to be in the story with these families and try to capture it in the most authentic way."
The new project is a far cry from the earlier videos. First, there was the space burrito, but Mull kept up the hobby with his own YouTube channel, directing an intense zombie attack at Great Bend High School, and using green screen technology inside his own home for complex productions.
"I was that kid in high school that was running around making silly YouTube videos," he recalls. "It's a product of when I grew up. All of these cameras and technology were becoming more accessible and cheaper. I just took an interest early on and ran with it. At some point I thought, let's just make this a job. Slowly but surely, that's what I tried to do."
Upon graduating from GBHS, Mull accepted a job with an agency in Kansas City. He began making a name for himself even without a college education.
"I'm lucky I can tell that story because the landscape of getting into this industry has changed," he said. "It's the college of just doing it over and over again, then having the right people see your stuff. I got lucky enough to be hired out of an agency in Kansas City that quickly became one of the fastest growing in the city. I found myself shooting with Gordon Ramsey and Patrick Mahomes."
Mull spent five-plus years with that agency, then turned to live sports as a videographer at Sporting KC soccer matches. He arrived in that position just in time for the COVID-19 pandemic, which took much of the fun out of the job. He ultimately moved east to pursue freelance and personal projects. Mull has rebuilt his new YouTube channel with 27,000 subscribers.
"The YouTube stuff is interesting," he said. "That's just kind of been on the back burner the last year, just following some of these cases, keeping me in that mindset of the true crime stuff. As I've been working on this documentary, I've been following other active cases, missing persons cases. I have kind of a built-in audience of people who have known I've been working on this thing, and I haven't really said what it is. Now it's public and people know the case. I've had 40 emails in the last week of just YouTube subscribers saying they're looking into this case."
Mull has meetings planned to discuss a possible release of the Dolly Madison documentary. Either way, with a large following on YouTube, he plans some type of release in the near future.