7 true crime longreads we gulped down last weekend
Nintendo theft, thin blue line flags, crypto disappearances, and more
the true crime that's worth your time
Welcome back from the long holiday weekend. That is, if you’re a reader in the U.S., where we celebrated our independence tried to enjoy an extra day off Monday. That three day weekend meant that I made a to-do list for my home and business then ignored it, instead taking to my bed with a group of dogs, watching TV, and reading.
Much of what I read was true crime, longreads I’d set aside for when I had time to really pay attention. Here are the stories I read this weekend that I thought you’d also enjoy, so hang on to this issue (or just bookmark it) and come back when you’re looking for something to read. — EB
Did This Trump-Loving, Leopard-Hunting Dentist Kill His Wife? [Rolling Stone]
A mid-year contender for the most clickable headline of 2022, this lengthy piece from matt Sullivan might be behind a paywall if you’ve read another RS piece lately and don’t already subscribe, but you’re enterprising people and I suspect you can find a way in.
Matt Sullivan’s report on Larry Rudolph (sadly, not the Larry Rudolph who managed Britney Spears) takes us on a wild ride from strip malls in western Pennsylvania to Zambia, where Rudolph’s wife was fatally shot during a (pretty gross!) big game expedition. Snip:
It was, Larry soon declared, a tragic accident. The local cops agreed and, after accompanying Larry and the corpse to Lusaka, returned his weapon. “They aren’t exactly CSI: Miami,” says Dan Foote, former U.S. ambassador to Zambia.
An intelligence officer from the wildlife authorities arrived on the scene and later shared his observations with fellow investigators: The barrel seemed too long to him for self-infliction. The police had not collected fingerprints. And this American in the golf shirt, his tears dried fast. Under the officer’s questioning, he says, Dr. Rudolph, a renowned hunter, would not explain the operation of his own shotgun. What kind of a husband, the agent asked himself, forgets his whereabouts when his wife of 34 years takes a bullet? What kind of a man was the American millionaire?
“In his eyes, I couldn’t see that softness in him,” says the officer, Musuwa Musese. On the phone from Lusaka, he recalls an instant suspicion: “I could see something in him, and I doubted that look. This was no accident.”
That this yarn was able to keep me despite the photos of Rudolph with animals he’d slain is proof of how compelling it is. As the recent recipient of a very painful (and wildly expensive) dental procedure, I was ready for a story where a dentist is a villain, so that didn’t hurt, either. — EB
A Year of “Protecting” Children in Texas [Texas Monthly]
Sarah dropped this in our budget doc and I clicked through, even though I knew I’d get sad and mad. Report Christopher Hooks does an elegant job of placing a layer of context over the emotional issue, but that doesn’t mean he writes impersonally — in fact, I found the first-person anger that showed through in the piece mildly cathartic. Snip:
Each new revelation of misery brings a new wave of revulsion, but—I hate to say this—as you learn more about how the social safety net works in Texas, that revulsion starts to fade. It becomes a dull undercurrent instead of something sharp that pokes through.
As it fades, so comes the realization that it has faded in the same way for those in power—and that nothing gets fixed because leaders, to an even greater degree, have been immunized from caring. The grid remains unsteady; children in foster care still get abused. Lawmakers make a show of passing partial, temporary fixes. The Legislature, with all its self-regard and jocularity and pride, turns out to be suffused with a very dull and banal kind of evil.
This is a skip if you’re just feeling overwhelmed by mass shootings and the gun crisis in our country. But if you feel the need to intellectually arm yourself against those who believe the greatest threat to U.S. kids are drag queens, this provides you with some ready-made arguments to shut those people down. — EB
Gabby Petito’s Life With—And Death By—Brian Laundrie [Vanity Fair]
I have been thinking about Petito for the last few weeks, as my mom, sister, and nieces and nephew traveled through many of the same areas Petito and Laundrie visited on their trip together, posting photos from the same Wyoming park where Petito was last seen. The case burned so hot and so bright that I’d almost forgotten it, a strange conundrum when it comes to crazes. So much of the Petito disappearance and death was written for the daily, packaged in a heavy coating of speculation or social media punditry. There was no air in the room for a deeper dive.
Despite the fact that “everyone is over” (as a relative told me) the case, Kathleen Hale still convinced her editors at VF to let her embark on a richly reported reconstruction of Laundrie and Petito’s relationship, packed with details that slipped past me when the story was in the news. It’ll also make you think about how law enforcement officials respond to domestic dispute and violence calls — how lightly so many seem to take intimate partner attacks in the moment. Snip:
Before driving into the wilderness by herself, Gabby asked Robbins if she could know where Brian would be staying that night, since she would need to collect him in the morning. When Robbins said he couldn’t reveal the location of the hotel, Gabby began crying.
“I just don’t usually drive the van so I wanna make sure it’s not, like, far,” she said. Brian had been making Gabby feel dependent on him. The van was registered in her name, but in her mind, she could not safely drive her own vehicle.
Robbins walked Gabby to her van, taking a meandering route so that she and Brian would not interact. In her arms, Gabby cradled the bottled waters that police had given her.
“Something I want you to know,” Robbins said, telling Gabby the location of someplace she could shower, “for like, four or five bucks—it does my wife wonders when she gets stressed out.” He pantomimed yelling at his wife: “It’s like, ‘Get in the shower. Come on, get in the shower!’ ”
Enough time has passed since Petito’s disappearance that this report lacks the exploitative, click-chasing urgency of coverage at the time. It’s a thorough and meticulous look at all the ways things went wrong.
If I were in charge, it would also be required reading for every person as they reach dating age — I know I am not alone here when I say that if I had had an explanation of how coercive control works that was as clear-eyed as this one when I was a teen, I would have been saved a lot of time, unhappiness, and trauma. — EB
Ruja Ignatova: The Crypto Mogul Scam Artist Who Vanished Into Thin Air [Crimereads]
This is an excerpt from The Mission Crypto Queen, Jamie Bartlett’s just-released book adapted from his fantastic BBC podcast on the same case. If you were thinking “do I need to read the book if I listened to the podcast,” the answer might very well be “yes,” based on this excerpt, which held my attention even though it was largely familiar scene setting. Snip:
The crowd went ballistic. The frenzied atmosphere was more like a religious celebration than a sales conference. Anyone who wasn’t cheering was stunned into silence. On October 1, 2016—just over three months away—everyone’s OneCoin would be doubled. And, better still, Ruja promised the value of the coin wouldn’t change. Each OneCoin will still be worth €5.95.
“We love you, Ruja,” someone shouted.
“Thank you,” she replied. “In two years, nobody will talk about Bitcoin anymore.”
With a click of her fingers, Dr. Ruja doubled the wealth of every single person in the crowd. Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of investors who hadn’t made it to London. It didn’t seem to matter that she was breaking rule 101 of economics: that when the supply of something goes up, the price goes down. Nor did it matter that she was breaking her own promise: that there would only ever be 2.1 billion OneCoin in circulation, and that “fixed supply” was the whole point of cryptocurrency. So how was it possible to increase the number of coins by a factor of 50? And without affecting the price?
When Bartlett launched his podcast on Ruja back in September 2019, the crypto world was in a much different place than it is now, and the story of how Ruja built her empire hit very differently — as an outlier, not as a representative of the sector as a whole. These days, I’m not so sure about that! This excerpt sold me on a full read of Bartlett’s book (which is what it was supposed to do, so well done all), and I think it might sell you, too. — EB
Jason Brassard Spent His Lifetime Collecting the Rarest Video Games. Until the Heist. [Vanity Fair]
Y’all, this is a good month for VF, am I right? This piece on a wiped-out collector will make you 1) think about all the “valuable” stuff you’ve donated to Goodwill/left on the street over the years and 2) crave a dramatic adaptation of the theft and investigation.
Jason Brassard was racing 100 miles per hour to Trade-N-Games around 4:30 in the morning on August 16, 2019, a .38 caliber pistol by the cup holder in his truck. The trip was three miles from his condo in High Ridge, a commute that usually allowed an opportunity for his thoughts to drift, work with video games never being something to cause him stress. But he was terrified now, his hand pressed into the car horn to warn other drivers to stay away. A phone call had startled him awake, the Jefferson County alarm company telling him the front door of the store was open. He knew he would beat the police there.
And he knew it’d be the newer games, he could feel it, straight through three consecutive red lights, barely easing off the pedal. It’d be the games arranged on the most prominent rows inside the store. They’d take the PlayStation 4s, and the used Nintendo Switch consoles, and popular games like Skyrim (dragons versus glitches, 2016), like Breath of the Wild (Link of Zelda fame versus his own sense of curiosity, 2017) and Mario Kart 8 (go-karts versus go-karts, 2014). Who would want to take anything else?
You don’t have to give a crap about old video games to appreciate this story, though it doesn’t hurt. It works just as well with Pez dispensers, or Hummel figurines, or any other collectible item that, outside its niche, has little superficial value. This is good for anyone who likes those Antiques Roadshow-descended DIY channel shows where Lara Spencer and a panel of experts comes in to some borderline hoarder’s house to either validate or destroy their dreams of stored wealth. — EB
The thin blue line flag: symbol of police pride or violent insurrection? [Wisconsin Examiner]
If you just sort of had a vague feeling that thin blue line symbol had crossed the border from folks who just want to say they love cops to folks who hate everyone who isn’t like them, this report will help you get when it jumped the white supremacy shark, and will make a strong argument that people who employ the symbol then claim ignorance of its more nefarious uses might be full of crap.
The Black Lives Matter movement has grown in response to the continued killing of Black people by police officers and the flag’s use has grown alongside as a blue lives matter backlash movement spread.
The flag was prominently flown alongside tiki torches and other symbols of hate at the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va.
“There’s no question that this flag’s political meaning in the Trump era has come to be a direct response to Black Lives Matter and an interpretation of Black Lives Matter,” says Steve Kantrowitz, a UW-Madison historian who studies white supremacy. “So, in this way the thin blue line flag kind of steps into the role played by the Confederate battle flag over the past 70 years or so.”
Henry Redman’s report is a pretty quick read, good for when you’re waiting in line at the DMV or for the bus. If you want a little more commentary on the matter, I recommend pairing his piece with Tim Murphy’s brief article in Mother Jones from just last month, I Can’t Stop Thinking About the Thin Blue Line Flags in the January 6 Video. — EB
‘If you decide to cut staff, people die’: how Nottingham prison descended into chaos [Guardian]
Isobel Thompson’s meaty report on issues at HM Prison Nottingham is going to be though for me to approach as anything but a dumb American who actually chuckled like a jerk when I saw (thanks, Wikipedia) that the 1800s-era prison was located in the “Sherwood area of Nottingham,” like, yeah, where Robin Hood was in action. To all our subscribers from the UK who are rolling your eyes at my Hollywood idiocy, you’re welcome to assume I only wear cowboy hats and that I eat McDonald’s for every meal.
But, for real, reading about other countries’ prison systems is a source of endless fascination for me, as some things we take for granted in the U.S. are unthinkable elsewhere, and vice versa. What we believe to be necessary for humane treatment in what’s an inherently inhumane (by design!) system is something I could think about all day. Snip:
Safe prisons run on routine. When the days were on track, Ward and her colleagues would unlock cells at 8am and prisoners would filter towards classes or work. (Working as painters and cleaners, serving meals and checking in new arrivals, prisoners can earn a weekly salary of about £12. They also earn revenue for the prison. If you’ve ever eaten airline food, your cutlery might have been packed by prisoners.) After work, during a leisure period known as “association”, prisoners could play pool, go to the gym, shower. Then they were locked in their cells until the morning. When this routine ran smoothly, the prison was quiet. Ward once worked a set of nights and the only alarm that rang was the fire alarm when she burned a slice of toast.
As staff numbers dwindled, these moments of calm disappeared. Formerly, officers were assigned to a wing for long stretches of time, so they could form relationships with prisoners, and pick up on when trouble was brewing. Now they became troubleshooters, deployed to multiple wings in a day. According to Albutt, governors were holding daily meetings to decide how to move staff around wings to plug gaps. “We used to call them swap shops,” she told me.
This constant churn didn’t just strain relations between staff and prisoners, it eroded solidarity among staff. Ward remembers a time when she found a prisoner who had a TV in his cell, which he wasn’t permitted. She ended up in a tug of war with him, yelling for help. Her colleagues on the landing didn’t appear. “I reported the two officers. Nothing happened,” Ward told me.
Pool tables in prison! Airlines that serve food! Is this real life? I joke, but in addition to the novelty appeal for folks like me who fly Spirit and haven’t eaten on a plane in years, Thompson’s persistence (“Over the past year, I have interviewed more than 60 people – prisoners, prison staff, lawyers, academics, officials and families – to piece together how the prison unravelled,” she wrote) has resulted in a detailed report that shows, specifically, where things are going wrong at this prison — and how easily (or not) they could be fixed. — EB
Wednesday on Best Evidence: We all know that “best” or “top” lists can be controversial, and this one takes the cake.
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