A small town, a dark secret, and Bryan Burrough
Plus stolen art, false confessions, a professor loots an estate, and more
the true crime that's worth your time
The crime
Daniel Lee “Danny” Corwin murdered three women in Texas in the 1980s…after serving time for an attack on a high-school classmate in the 1970s.
The story
Audible’s summary of Bryan Burrough’s Audible Original, The Demon Next Door, kind of reads like it was generated by a true-crime bot:
Burrough has a personal connection to Corwin’s crimes — in the course of the narrative, he mentions several people tangential to the cases whom he knew personally back in the day — but overall, The Demon Next Door is a pretty straight-ahead telling of an all-too-familiar story, namely that a boy-next-door-seeming white kid wasn’t spotted as a vicious sociopath because blah blah small-town law enforcement blah no DNA testing yet blah linkage blindness blah blah blah fishcakes.
It seems like the hook, for Burrough, was the “shocking discovery” part, the fact that the swath of predation Corwin cut through that part of Texas basically faded back into the land after he was executed in 1998. Burrough isn’t the only one who finds it puzzling that Corwin isn’t better known, and top Google results for “danny corwin” mostly turn up Murderpedia entries, or references to Corwin’s status as but one dark star in a dense constellation of executions in Texas in the late nineties.
It’s not that complicated, really, though: Corwin wasn’t as prolific as some higher-profile serial killers; his failure to register with the town and local cops as the monster he was isn’t unusual (that’s just how it is with sociopaths sometimes); once the investigation finally found a gear, it proceeded without delay; Corwin was squirrelly about certain victims and aspects of his crimes, but in the end there’s no question that he committed them, and no legal precedents were set or overturned in the prosecution of them. I mean no disrespect to the victims and those who grieve them when I say this, obviously, but as dangerous bad guys go, he’s pretty unremarkable.
In fact, one of the things about the case that is notable is how comparatively inept Corwin was. Not that Temple, TX and the state prison system shouldn’t have come together to shut his shit down in the seventies, and not that it makes it any better for the survivors or the families — again, I don’t want to sound dismissive of Corwin’s level of evil. BUT: the number of times the guy cut a woman’s throat “insufficiently” and then failed to check that he’d finished the job, he more or less needed the sheriff and the parole board and the local faith community to bungle things and/or “oh, he seems fine” his shteez.
Once one survivor got with a sketch artist and that sketch got on the news, Corwin was done. That’s maddening, as one victim’s sister says in so many words to Burrough, and it’s worth cataloging a lesser-known fiend if it reminds us of how often it happened, and still happens, that these guys catch themselves almost in spite of the police. But I don’t know that you need to spend the time listening to The Demon Next Door yourselves to get that point.
It’s a manageable listen at under three hours at 1x speed; the narrator, Steve White, gets some flak on Goodreads for not being a good fit tonally, but I thought he was fine. The sequence in which Wendy Gant, with a slashed throat and unable to speak, and Karen Taylor wrote back and forth to work up the sketch of Corwin is quite good. There is some of that “out where the scrub pines recede into the unforgiving” so-forth you always get in Texas true crime, but Burrough is disciplined about it. But it’s not worth subscribing to Audible to get at, and if you’ve read this far, you probably know what you need to.
Did you listen to this one when it came out? Do you have further suggested reading on the case? See you in the comments. — SDB
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And if you’re still paying off holiday shopping…yeah, us too. We’re glad you’re here regardless of sub level, and telling a friend (or enemy, we’re not picky) about B.E. helps too, plus it’s free. — SDB
And now, a partial budget-doc clear-out! tbh this barely made a dent, and we’re not even three weeks into the year, but…what can we say, we’re genre-story hoarders. — SDB
Spanish law vs. California law in case of Nazi-plundered Pissarro painting [UPI]
“Rue Saint Honoré, Afternoon, Rain Effect” was “expropriated” by the Nazis from Lilly Cassirer “in exchange for safe passage from Germany for her and her family in 1939.” Cassirer’s heirs got a settlement for the painting after the war, but believed the work lost. Many decades later, it surfaced in a Spanish gallery, and now the question is which domain applies:
The Cassirer heirs argue that under California common law, the gallery is unlawfully possessing the painting, since thieves of personal property cannot pass on the painting's title.
But under Spanish law, ownership looks at the physical location of the object. If Spanish law applies, the title for the painting is held by the museum.
The debate over whose laws apply to the Pissarro has gone on for nearly two decades. The piece linked above isn’t a rollicking read, but it’s a solid overview of the legal arguments in play, and the case overall has interesting implications for present-day art-theft/grey-market art cases.
“A lawsuit against a retired professor is ruffling the well-to-do from Georgetown to Newport, R.I.” [sounds like VF, right? nope! WaPo]
Socialite Jacqueline Quillen’s son Parker is suing the late Quillen’s boyfriend, “Larry” Gray, claiming that Gray “stole art, jewelry and other finery from Jacqueline Quillen. The trove included what the lawsuit lists as a $17,000 diamond ring, a $10,000 Patek Philippe watch and $4,700 diamond earrings.” The suit also claims that Gray was present when cash, jewelry, and art went missing from other ritzy locales, and that Gray refuses to vacate Quillen’s Washington, DC home even though Quillen died nearly a year and a half ago. Gray is countersuing Parker for stealing a $160,000 engagement ring Gray “had once intended to give Jacqueline” — presumably before he figured out he could just steal the milk instead of buying the cow. Um, allegedly.
Anatomy of a Murder Confession [The Marshall Project and the Dallas Morning News]
“Texas Ranger James Holland became famous for cajoling killers into confessing to their crimes. But did some of his methods — from lying to suspects to having witnesses hypnotized — ensnare innocent people, too?”
A Meta-Analysis of 2021’s Top Podcasts Lists [Pacific Content]
It’s the second half of January: time to take down the tree, stop wishing people Happy New Year, and cram the year-in-review stragglers into your newsletter — but Matt Hird’s meta take on trends within best-ofs for podcasting in 2021 is a fun read, and not just for the true-crime bits. The methodology’s easy to grasp, there’s some cool context stuff, and if you think your sense of how popular true crime really is out in the world is maybe skewed by…uh, newsletters like this? Well, you might be onto something:
For all the talk about them, True Crime podcasts make up a pretty small slice of overall podcasts — there are around 8,750 podcasts in Apple Podcasts with True Crime as their primary genre, which sounds like a massive amount of podcasts until you consider that those represent less than half a percent of the Apple Podcasts ecosystem. We aren’t focusing exclusively on Apple Podcasts here, but if the ratio holds true across all platforms, True Crime podcasts are over-represented on the top-podcasts lists by a factor of more than 34 times!
“David Simon Made Baltimore Detectives Famous. Now Their Cases Are Falling Apart.” [New York Magazine]
Lara Bazelon teamed up with the Garrison Project on this piece, which unfortunately kind of boils down to “even David Simon copaganda is still copaganda.” Here’s a snip:
[Oscar “The Bunk”] Requer was later immortalized as a central character in David Simon’s iconic HBO series The Wire. As Simon wrote in the afterword for his acclaimed 1991 nonfiction book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, Requer “lives on in Wendell Pierce’s portrayal of the legendary Bunk Moreland on The Wire, right down to the ubiquitous cigar.” [Thomas] Pellegrini, meanwhile, was the jumping-off point for Detective Tim Bayliss, a character in the long-running television show Homicide: Life on the Street, which was inspired by Simon’s book. Requer and Pellegrini are among a constellation of Baltimore Police Department officers who have, through Simon’s work, defined what it means to be a homicide detective in the popular imagination — and whose biggest cases are starting to fall apart or have been overturned.
'Dead Sea Scrolls' at the Museum of the Bible are all forgeries [NatGeo]
I didn’t realize until I started writing it up today that this is actually datelined March 13, 2020 — so maybe I couldn’t find a mention of it in our archives because, while we DID clock it when it happened, Substack’s search is terrible (and no, neither of us is going to let that go until shit improves), but on the other hand, maybe it’s because it was March 13, 2020. Like, functionally the day The Before Time ended. So it would make sense that we missed it when
independent researchers funded by the Museum of the Bible announced that all 16 of the museum’s Dead Sea Scroll fragments are modern forgeries that duped outside collectors, the museum’s founder, and some of the world’s leading biblical scholars.
Because, couple other things going on that day. But if you like forgery-busting process, this is a great piece to (re?-)visit, and someone needs to make a docuseries about the life and career of the melodically named art-fraud investigator Colette Loll.
Showtime makes Attica available for free until the end of Black History Month [SHO PR]
The Stanley Nelson doc dropped on Showtime last November; if you didn’t get around to it during your last free-trial Showtime binge because you were watching Yellowjackets, 1) word, and also I am so bummed they killed off [character redacted] but 2) now’s your chance, it’s on YouTube/below.
Friday on Best Evidence: Journo heroes get bought out, Keanu In The White City, and more.
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