Domestic abuse has been and continues to be the one of the most widely existing crimes in America and abroad with no end in sight. Armand Mastroianni’s Cries Unheard: The Donna Yaklich Story shows a famous true crime case whose core goes the domestic abuse of a housewife by her husband with tragic consequences for both sides.
The TV movie from 1994 starts with the meeting between a young Colorado woman Donna (Jaclyn Smith) and a tough cop Dennis Yaklich (Brad Johnson), a widower ready to tie the knot again. Their love story doesn’t take long to fall apart as Dennis’s dark side starts showing in their domestic life. Scared but determined to stop her abusive husband from battering her endlessly, Donna decides that her best bet is hiring someone to kill Dennis.
Cries Unheard shows the story from the female protagonist’s viewpoint and raises questions about the fairness of the judicial system that ignores the context of a criminal act and follows the book of law rather blindly without regard for the particular circumstances of a subject. As shown in the movie, Donna was sentenced to 40 years in prison for her crime. She explains to her son, raised by her younger sister after she went to prison, why she did it while acknowledging that she took his dad away from him.
Jaclyn Smith and Brad Johnson have both delivered credibly in this adaptation of the real-life crime that got significant media attention at that time. On IMDb, Cries Unheard has a TV-PG rating for a number of scenes in the movie, those showing the abuse, are deemed intense (or were at that time at least) for minors.
In real life, Donna Yaklich was released in 2005 and moved to a halfway house. The two men who murdered Dennis Yaklich were sentenced to 30 and 20 years – much less than Donna. In 2017, the blog Dailycrime wrote about Donna’s story and briefly mentioned alternative accounts of her character.
