On March 19 or 20, 1920, Elsa Lemp Wright died of a gunshot wound at 13 Hortense Place in St. Louis, less than two weeks after remarrying the husband she had divorced the year before. The coroner’s report gives one date and other documents give the other. The official ruling was suicide. A group of St. Louis filmmakers has spent years arguing that the record looks more like a murder investigation that someone cleaned up, and they have a list of reasons.

The documented outline is short. Elsa, a daughter of the brewing family, married Thomas Wright in 1910. After the couple lost a daughter in childbirth, the marriage went bad, and she divorced him in 1919, citing “mental anguish and abandonment.” They remarried on March 8, 1920. According to the account on Urban Review STL, she told her husband the night of her death that she wanted a quiet evening to herself. The next morning, the account goes, he heard a sharp crack and ran into the bedroom. Her brother Billy arrived at the house and reportedly remarked only, “That’s the Lemps for you.”

The filmmakers behind “The Case for Elsa Lemp,” directors Franki Cambeletta and Dorjan Javas Williams, told St. Louis Magazine in 2017 that the paperwork has problems. They say the physician examined the body in the bedroom instead of the coroner’s office, that witness statements contain clerical errors and contradictions, and that the driver for Elsa and Thomas, who was in the house, was never interviewed. They also point to a gap of roughly forty minutes, between about 8:05 and 8:45 that morning, before Wright contacted the police. Cambeletta put it bluntly: “If this was a suicide, they sure as hell made it look like a murder.” Their consultants included St. Louis’s chief medical examiner, a crime scene analyst, a Colt firearms expert and two Lemp historians. A five-part series, “Lemp’s Last Wright,” is also in the works.

This is the point to be careful. Consulting on a film is not the same as endorsing its conclusion. The official finding was suicide, and nothing the filmmakers have published has changed it. Colin Dickey, who wrote about the family in Ghostland, offers a plainer explanation for the Lemp deaths: they might have been “entirely a matter of brain chemistry, attributable to nothing other than a lack of timely medical intervention.” The family lost four members to suicide between 1904 and 1949, which makes Elsa’s ruling look like part of a pattern. It is also the kind of pattern that can make people stop asking questions.

Twelve days is not much time. It is enough for a remarriage, and apparently enough for a century of argument.