Accused · Neff · Bernie
Plus: The Mountain Goats guy mulls true crime
the true crime that's worth your time
Why did The Guardian’s Luke Buckmaster review Bernie, the 2011 comedy (I think?) about real-life homicidal mortician Bernie Tiede, this month? Great question! It looks like it’s part of a series in which “Guardian staff and writers dig out films and shows now streaming in Australia that you might not have seen – but absolutely should.”
Which raises the question: Isn’t pretty much everything streaming in Australia, or are their options way more limited than they are in the rest of the world? Is Bernie, truly, one of the most marvelous options in the Australian streaming universe? To be fair, it has an 88 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the most recent review from which is nearly a decade old, and says the film is “absolutely worth matinee movie prices, and it may be one of the few true crime murder movies I’d recommend watching with your family.”
The most interesting detail is down toward the bottom of the review, when it notes that director Richard Linklater actually let Tiede come live with him a few years after the movie’s release. I had to learn more! From a 2014 report in Variety:
Less than two months ago, a judge in Panola County, Texas, ordered the early release of Bernie Tiede, the now-55-year-old convicted murderer played by Jack Black in Richard Linklater’s 2012 dark comedy, “Bernie.” One of the conditions: that Tiede live in Linklater’s garage apartment.
“It got reported strangely,” the director admits. “There were headlines like ‘Judge Orders Murderer to Live With Filmmaker.’ There were jokes immediately on the Internet, like ‘Zodiac Killer Crashing at Fincher’s.’
“Austin’s kind of a garage-apartment town, so it’s not a big deal for me to let Bernie live there while he gets back on his feet,” he continues. “(But it sounded) almost as if the judge had said, ‘OK, you Austin liberal, you want to let him out, well, fine. But he’s got to live with you!”
As it turns out, Linklater was part of “a roughly two-year concerted effort” to secure Tiede’s release, an effort led by Tiede’s prosecutor! The story is very strange, and, honestly, that’s the one I want to watch — not Bernie. — EB
This story hung out on our budget doc long enough that its headline — that the new season of Accused is only available to Cincinnati Enquirer subscribers — is not longer true. So, hooray for procrastination!
Accused is the paper’s investigative podcast about long-ago Ohio deaths with conclusions that remain in question. The most recent season runs seven episodes, four of which are available to all — there’s also an eighth episode promised later this year. This season, its fourth, is about “the 1994 fatal beating of 67-year-old Rhoda Nathan, a New Jersey native who'd come to Blue Ash for the bar mitzvah of her best friend's grandson,” and the possibly questionable conviction of Elwood Jones in the crime.
From the Enquirer:
The original investigators and assistant prosecutor on the case are adamant that the right man was arrested in Nathan's death, which received national attention when it was featured in an episode of the true crime TV show "Forensic Files."
"So we didn't have any eyewitness. We didn't have a confession," said Assistant Prosecutor Mark Piepmeier, who handled the case against Jones. "But we had, to me, overwhelming circumstances that pointed to one person and one thing that happened. I like those cases better."
Nathan is on death row, with an execution that was recently rescheduled to Dec. 6, 2023. From the Enquirer coverage of the date change:
The reprieve isn't due to Jones' efforts to get a new trial. Rather, it's because Gov. Mike DeWine has said it’s “pretty clear” there won’t be any executions next year.
DeWine’s reasoning is that lethal injection is out as an option in Ohio, and lawmakers haven’t chosen a different method of capital punishment. He made no mention of the fact that the pandemic has caused utter upheaval in the nation’s courts, making it far harder for defendants who claim they’re innocent to be heard.
Jones is one such defendant. In November 2019, a Hamilton County judge did not dismiss Jones’ motion for a new trial, which is typically what happens when such a request is made. Instead, she agreed to hold a hearing so that Jones and his lawyers could argue for a new trial.
That hearing had been scheduled for the spring, and then postponed because of the statewide lockdown caused by COVID-19. It was rescheduled for the summer, but Jones was told he couldn’t attend it because the coronavirus had hit prisons especially hard, meaning Jones could potentially expose others in the courthouse to the virus.
That Jones’s life hangs in the balance arguably puts greater pressure on Accused to examine every aspect of the case — after all, we’ve seen the impact a well-done podcast had on folks like Curtis Flowers. Will Accused rise to that level? — EB
The end of the month is nigh, and you know what that means…bonus-review poll time! What’s Sarah going to review for you next month?
Classify this under the same “true crime in fiction” category that Only Murders in the Building occupies so well. Real life indie rocker John Darnielle — he’s the frontman for The Mountain Goats — has written a novel called Devil House with a true-crime writer at its center, and the process of covering crime as its central plot.
His main character, Gage Chandler, is, like Darnielle himself, a chronicler of pain. But unlike his creator, who has spoken publicly about a past that includes abuse, self-harm, and troubles with drugs, Gage seems to have little to no personal experience with his material. He is a true-crime writer with an extremely active imagination and a deep sense of ethics. He takes pride in working thoroughly and methodically, and in trying, as he puts it, to "honor the dead in my books." Darnielle casts no doubt on Gage's efforts or intentions: he is doing the best he could possibly do, and yet, over the course of the novel, he realizes that the very nature of his profession means he is doomed to fail.
At Devil House's start, Gage's literary agent pitches him a project: there's a house on the market in Milpitas, Calif., where a grisly, still-unsolved double murder took place. How about Gage buys the house and writes about the killings?
The book has garnered a load of glowing reviews: The New York Times provides a solid paragraph of blurb for the paperback edition, writing that the novel “is terrific: confident, creepy, a powerful and soulful page-turner. I had no idea where it was going, in the best possible sense.”
Slate’s Laura Miller initially sneered at the idea of a musician trying fiction, then moved into praise, saying it “can be read as an indictment of the true crime genre, specifically of the way stories are concocted to explain often-unfathomable tragedies, and of how some stories take precedence over others regardless of their truth.”
The AV Club echoes Miller, saying that the “brilliant novel” poses “a question about the nature of true crime and whether it’s possible to write it ethically and with real compassion for the victims.”
(I’m still on the reserve list for it at my local library, but I’m looking at a weekend where I’m basically on needy dog-related house arrest, so I might break down and buy the Kindle edition. If so, I shall report back.)
Devil House is currently available via hardback, and if you’re an audiobook fan, that version is read by Darnielle and includes “original music from the author and his bandmate Matt Douglas.” — EB
You likely read Sarah’s review of Inventing Anna already; now here’s the real Neffatari “Neff” Davis to tell us all what the Netflix series suggested — that her relationship with fellow Sorokin pal Rachel Williams was very fraught.
This, from a Q&A with Davis published on Vanity Fair this week:
Oh my gosh. I know, they dragged her. I really think it’s because. . . I have not been a fan of Rachel’s since her media and book and all of the bad stuff happened. With Paper magazine, I say I feel bad for Rachel that she got scammed out of money. But when Rachel started promoting this book she wrote so fast and then talked about me in the book, didn’t even send me a copy of it, I’m like, “Wait a minute, so people about to profit off of Anna? Oh, okay. And you got the money back on your card?” You make your $750,000. You’re selling your book for 30 bucks. I don’t feel bad for you anymore. [Asked for comment by V.F., Williams said she “made nowhere near this amount,” and reached out to Davis before publishing her book but did not hear back.]
Davis again:
I mean, I don’t know. But hey, her dad has a beach house in Massachusetts. [Williams told Vanity Fair her family does not own a beach house.] Your life isn’t that bad. I know that Rachel makes it seem like she was just down and out. Like, you come from money. You’re not from the struggle like me, where I literally had to use Anna’s tips to pay my rent.
“[Williams told Vanity Fair her family does not own a beach house.]” seems like the kind of insider t-shirt statement that a brand reliant on Instagram ads might make, that said, now I kind of want to make that t-shirt myself! The full interview is quite engrossing, as like Davis’s character in the series, the real-life Davis clearly has significant affection for Sorokin. — EB
And speaking of Inventing Anna…
Backstory, some of which y’all know very well: Pressler is the journalist who wrote the New York magazine story that inspired Inventing Anna; she also wrote the story that would be Hustlers. And yes, she wrote a story that was revealed to contain false information, and yes, that scandal cost her a job at Bloomberg. “The Hustlers at Scores” was a year after that, and the Sorokin story ran in 2018.
Jerry Saltz, the quote tweet author, is New York’s art critic, and he is very intent on explaining what the show got right and wrong, including what Pressler — who worked with him! — was thinking and feeling, across multiple platforms. It appears that by Wednesday, Pressler couldn’t take it any more, and the above tweet is the result. It is hard not to admire how deftly she skewered Saltz who, from what I know from many a former colleague, could really use some skewering. — EB
Monday on Best Evidence: Our end-of-February budget doc cleanup!
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