In the fall of 1958, Macon restaurant operator Anjette Lyles became a state-wide sensation when she went on trial, charged with the gruesome arsenic poisoning deaths of two husbands, her mother-in-law and her nine-year-old daughter. And sitting in the brass rail-accented courtroom balcony beside 27 other reporters was Atlanta Constitution reporter Celestine Sibley. By then, she was such a frequent figure at high-profile murder trials, her colleagues had crowned her the paper’s “murder queen.” Even late into her career in the 1990s, Sibley would hold court at Henry Grady’s cluttered old roll top desk in her eighth floor newspaper office, regaling visitors as she recalled some of the most notorious stories of her 60-year career, the Lyles murder case a favorite among them.

And with good reason.

After being found guilty and shortly before she was due to die in the electric chair for her crimes, Lyles consented to a death row exclusive with Sibley in her cell at the Georgia State Prison in Reidsville. After applying some crimson red lipstick, Lyles even smiled graciously, posing for pictures snapped by the Constitution’s photographer. Over 40 years later, Sibley consulted with author Jaclyn Weldon White for her 1999 true crime book on the case, “Whisper to the Black Candle: Voodoo, Murder and the Case of Anjette Lyles.” (Sibley’s dispatches from the Lyles murder trial at the Bibb County Courthouse, along with her death row interview with Lyles are included in “Celestine Sibley, Reporter,” a collection of her 60-year journalism career).

Filmed in a single day last March on location at the Liberty County Jail in Hinesville and using details gleaned from Sibley’s reporting on the case, Atlanta writer-director Chad Darnell created his riveting new Hitchcockian black and white short film “Murder Queens.” The 20-minute drama serves as a crackling verbal tennis match starring Atlanta actress Jessica Miesel as Lyles and Savannah actress Andrea Frankle as Sibley. The film will premiere this weekend with a pair of screenings Saturday and Sunday at the Macon Film Festival. With spellbinding, tension-inducing camera work by director of photography Swen Richter (weaving his lenses between the bars of a real jail cell) and a brilliantly anxiety-causing score by Erick Schroder, Darnell, Frankle and Miesel take the audience on a 20-minute thrill ride as Sibley uses all of her reportorial acumen to coax a confession from the doomed death row inmate while Lyles cunningly parries, using her sociopathic wiles to save her own life.

“What is it about murder that intrigues you,” Lyles asks Sibley at one point in the film. “The truth intrigues me,” Sibley replies. “The truth intrigues me,” Lyles repeats with a laugh, adding, “Come on, old girl, what is it? The violence? We’ve all wanted to kill someone at some point in our lives.” In response, Sibley forces a smile and asks, “Have we?”

Before Darnell, Miesel and Frankle headed to Macon to debut their film August 17 and 18, they sat down with Eldredge ATL for this exclusive interview.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Eldredge ATL: What attracted you to this project?

Chad Darnell: Twenty four years ago, a friend of mine came to me with a book [Jaclyn Weldon White’s “Whisper to the Black Candle: Voodoo, Murder and the Case of Anjette Lyles”] and said ‘I think this would make a really great movie.’ I thought it would be ideal for a Lifetime movie but keep in mind in 2000, people were not making movies about two women like this. But in Jaclyn’s book, there’s a paragraph about Celestine Sibley and I felt like that was the more fascinating story, especially having grown up in Georgia and being familiar with Celestine’s work and reading her columns in the newspaper. I felt like I wanted to tell more of her story and the fact that she was one of the first women to cover trials like this and that she was called the “murder queen.” I felt like there was a dichotomy that would be interesting to explore. Plus, I always love a good serial killer story, especially when it’s based in Macon.

Eldredge ATL: Jessica, How did you learn about the Anjette Lyles case?

Jessica Miesel: I heard about it through Chad, which is surprising because I have a strange fascination with serial killers. Usually, I’m the one at trivia who always knows the answers if there’s ever a serial killer question. Weird flex, I know. I found her fascinating. First, because most serial killers are men and we perceive them to be a certain way. She, to me, is the antithesis of who you imagine when you think about a person who killed four people. Once Chad told me about it, I was immediately intrigued.

Eldredge ATL: When I was interviewing people for “Celestine Sibley Reporter,” Jaclyn Weldon White described Anjette Lyles as “a textbook sociopath.” For an actor, that’s  got to be fun to play, right?

Miesel: Yes. As actors a lot of us are good at having empathy. You have to be able to have that as an actor. It’s so odd then to go play someone who essentially doesn’t have that at all. It was an interesting challenge for sure.

Eldredge ATL: Andrea, what’s the challenge for you playing a real-life person like Celestine?

Andrea Frankle: I’m still plunging into my deep dive on Celestine even now. Chad had given us an excerpt of Celestine’s writing and then he gave me this little jewel, a little snippet of an interview with her from 1980. That was everything for me. It really helped to solidify her for me, especially being able to see her in her later years. Even though we’re playing her in the 1950s, it really personified that type of Southern personality. I think what also drew me to her is that I grew up in Alabama, my first boyfriend lived in Mobile and my mom grew up in Pensacola and now I live in Atlanta. We both lived our lives in a lot of the same cities and that’s one of the things that drew me to her. I didn’t realize until after we shot how funny she was. That comes out a lot in her writing.

Eldredge ATL: Chad, how did the source material help you create the cat-and-mouse game that’s in your script?

Darnell: When you look at the source material, you sense that. Celestine has got to get her story and Anjette has got to sell her story. When you watch it, the two play for those stakes really well. In one of the stories, I think Anjette asks Celestine if she’s married. I figured that was her trying to relate to Celestine. So I have her say, “So, we’re both widows.” I wrote the line where Celestine says, “I’m nothing like you.” It gives Anjette just enough to work with. In Celestine’s reporting she doesn’t get emotional or personal but I have to imagine if Anjette did come at her that way, that’s how Celestine would respond.

Frankle: I love that. I felt that in the moment. It’s a moment where you consider if the bars were not there, Celestine probably wouldn’t have said that. But because the bars are there separating them, you could really feel Anjette pushing the envelope to get to her. And that’s how Celestine would have defended herself. That was such a great line, a great move.

Eldredge ATL: Jessica, one of the great details in Celestine’s dispatch from her death row interview reporting is Anjette’s attire. She’s wearing blue shorty pajamas that were made for her in the prison sewing room. You’ve got to do this entire film in pajamas and a robe.

Miesel: Yes! Which honestly, I thought, fantastic! It was very comfortable. Anjette is trying to present herself in this very specific way. It’s her way of trying to get Celestine to ignore the environment we’re in and try to convince her I am everything but what you see here. It was a fun kind of contrast to play.

Eldredge ATL: You shot this in a single day over 12 hours. How did the constricted time frame help you or present a challenge staying in the dramatic moment and keeping that tension going?

Miesel: It helped in a way, to be honest. I like to operate that way. It might not be advisable for most actors. But I like to go in and just do it, go with my first instinct and see what happens. If I think about it too much, I get myself in trouble. You force yourself to live in this place for a short amount of time. It raises the stakes and puts the pressure on a little more.

Darnell: We couldn’t have shot it like that if they weren’t both classically trained theater actors. There’s 72 shots in this movie. And because they’re theater actors, they nailed it every time.

Frankle: It’s a different vibe when you’re on a set and you can ride the wave of the energy of the moment. It’s more exhilarating. Jessica was also so prepared. She knew all her lines, I did not. I had to really be on my A game. Yes, there were things we discovered in the moment but Jessica came with so much great stuff. You mentioned Anjette is a sociopath and that was so great to work off of. Jessica was so alive and so present in the moment. Sometimes, it was difficult to act off of her and not just watch her as an actor.

Miesel: To be fair, Andrea was also very prepared. I never once had a moment where I was worried that we wouldn’t get this done. I am just an anxious person so I have to come in with everything memorized. Andrea is so grounded as an actor, you can feel her presence every moment. There was an inner thought the whole time. I could feel the struggle in you, trying to be this professional journalist mixed with “holy shit, this is so unbelievably uncomfortable.” I loved working with Andrea.

Eldredge ATL: Chad you mentioned earlier how out of vogue a script with two women leads was 20 years ago. Now, you’ve got producing actors like Reese Witherspoon actively looking for this kind of material. This script feels so of this moment.

Darnell: I’d love to use this as a proof of concept as we play festivals around the country. I’d love to rewrite this script for a feature version.

Eldredge ATL: This is just one scene in what was a “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil”-level of crazy in terms of murder trials. There’s so much material here for a feature. Before I let you all go, I want to discuss my favorite moment in the short which exists in Celestine’s own death row reporting. At one point in this interview, she pulls out a tube of lipstick and gives it to Anjette. Like any good reporter, Celestine is trying to get a source to open up and she’s appealing to Anjette’s well-documented vanity in that moment.

Darnell: I loved that Celestine had to ask the warden in advance and he was only going to allow her to have lipstick. I also loved that she waited until the end to do it which I thought was interesting. She didn’t open with that.

Frankle: For me, that’s such a poignant moment. It was a moment of physical contact between them. Just one woman giving lipstick to another is such a quintessential girlfriend thing to do. And yet, it was between bars. It was really fun to play and unpack.

Miesel: We talked about empathy earlier and in that moment, I had a lot of compassion for Anjette. It kind of broke my heart for her a little bit which is difficult to say given what she’s done. To me, it felt like pure joy in that moment to be receiving this. That lipstick meant so much to her in that moment. It made me sad for her which is bizarre because she’s right where she belongs. But I couldn’t help but hurt for her a little in that moment.

“Murder Queens,” written and directed by Chad Darnell and starring Andrea Frankle and Jessica Miesel will premiere Saturday, August 17 at 2 p.m. and Sunday, August 18 at noon at the Macon Film Festival as part of its Georgia Made Narrative Shorts block at the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame. For details, tickets and more information, visit the official Macon Film Festival website and its schedule page.

To read more about Celestine Sibley’s reporting on the Anjette Lyles murder case and other stories from her 60-year newspaper career, new copies of “Celestine Sibley, Reporter” are available at Ardmore Avenue Publishing’s online store.

You can follow updates on “Murder Queens” via its Instagram account.

Richard L. Eldredge

Richard L. Eldredge is the founder and editor in chief of Eldredge ATL. As a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Atlanta magazine, he has covered Atlanta since 1990.