Arbuckle · Lindbergh · The French Connection
Plus recent scams, cold-snap litigation, and turtleneck leotards for dudes
the true crime that's worth your time
From this month’s service-y anti-catfishing piece to last year’s Fatty Arbuckle deep dive to Sheriff Bunnell’s nineties cover story, it’s five magazine longreads! I couldn’t always find working links to the pieces themselves, which appear in reverse chronological order from 2022 to 1973; some of the mags don’t exist anymore. But if you have links to share, or supplemental reading on anything I mention below — including the disaaaastrous fashions advertised in 1970s men’s mags! — you know what to do. — SDB
“Scams Are On The Rise” [Consumer Reports, March 2022]
It’s not the most compelling read you’ve ever picked up; for one thing, I strongly suspect that the victim in the piece’s lede got aged (…way) down to 30, the better to reassure CR readers that youngsters also fall for flim-flams.
For another, it’s…for CR readers, so it’s pitched at the real-life inspirations for those Progressive ads about insurees becoming their parents. And I’d have liked to see the role of the pandemic economy in the relative success of scams explored more thoroughly, versus yet another illustrated guide to common cons that doesn’t even use the fun old-timey names for them.
With that said, if you have an older relative or easily startled friend who tends to freak out when they get those faux-concerned calls about student loans or IRS liens, this is a good one to forward.
Fatty Arbuckle and the Birth of the Celebrity Scandal [The New Yorker, 11 October 2021]
Michael Schulman explicates the death of Virginia Rappe in terms of how it “set the template for the celebrity scandal” (and for various “culture wars” that aren’t really about whatever they’re ostensibly about) a century ago.
It’s typical New Yorker — tons of texturing detail (the Orange Blossoms Rappe was drinking the afternoon of the party that allegedly killed her; Photoplay’s meticulous account of Arbuckle’s “ideal dinner”); context for how Hollywood culture was received and analyzed back then; lots of references to further reading, and lots of information that tends to get left out of overviews of the case. For instance:
Arbuckle had already taken a steamship home to L.A. when a reporter informed him that Rappe had died. That night, he attended a midnight meeting at Sid Grauman’s Million Dollar Theatre, along with his Labor Day hotel companions (and soon-to-be witnesses) and, more curiously, Rappe’s friend Al Semnacher. What, exactly, was discussed is unknown, but it’s possible that they were getting their stories straight. In Arbuckle’s initial statements, he insisted that he was never alone with Rappe, which was a lie. Then, on the advice of his attorney, he shut his trap.
Comparisons of Hearst papers to TMZ! Contemporary sources using words like “vulgarians”! A chief complainant herself arrested — for bigamy! Euphemisms! Witnesses climbing out windows! Bladders in jars! It’s eminently readable, and doesn’t lean too hard on the bigger ideas about Hollywood-“vice” crime stories as a reflection of American puritanism at war with itself.
“Were the Texas Blackouts a Crime?” [Texas Monthly, May 2021]
Officially, Steven Napier’s wife, Shirley, died of “hypoxic brain injury due to myocardial infarction” — but Napier “insists it was the brutal cold” of February 2021 that did her in, and wants someone held responsible. Is that realistic?
…Steven, a Democrat, has found himself with an unlikely ally in Galveston County Judge Mark Henry, who in 2010 was elected the first Republican chief executive of the county since Reconstruction. In March, without fanfare, Henry filed a remarkable complaint asking the Galveston County district attorney to open an investigation into whether deaths in the county during the storm might warrant criminal charges against ERCOT, CenterPoint, Texas–New Mexico Power (which serves portions of Galveston County), or “their high managerial agents.”
…
“I have questions. My constituents have questions,” Henry wrote in his complaint. “The dead bodies are being counted and justice is required to answer whether any or all of those who died from this ordeal were the victims of murder, manslaughter, or criminally negligent homicide.”
On its face, the story might seem more tragedy than true crime, but I think we can rightly anticipate, if not attempts to criminalize inadequate disaster response and climate-change denialism, then at the least increased litigation around those concepts — probably in the form of class actions.
“The Lindbergh Case: Is History’s Verdict Wrong?” [Crime Beat, April 1993]
No. …Welp, thanks for reading Best Evidence! Even more penetrating insights like this behind the paywall!
…Just kidding, obviously. I will get to the Lindbergh article, but first, a little background: I got a fat stack of Crime Beats into Exhibit B. inventory recently, and of course this one caught my eye first because of cover boy Sheriff John Bunnell.
I texted the photo above to esteemed B.E. tipster Tara Ariano because we’ve spent many years with Bunnell’s work, and even had a bit in the Television Without Pity book where we theorized that Bunnell narrates every single aspect of his life the way he did World’s Wildest Police Chases, including opening a jar of pickles and making out with Mrs. Bunnell…but the mag’s choice of cover subject suggested to me that the contents would be stereotypical nineties copaganda scare-mongering, so I wasn’t planning actually to read the thing, BUT the cover layout accidentally juxtaposing the Jamie Fuller steroids-murder case with a Lindbergh piece caught my attention. Here’s another angle:
I don’t have a ton of patience with justice-for-Hauptmann material, and when I spotted “Tony” Scaduto’s byline, it didn’t exactly buoy my hopes; Scaduto, of course, wrote Scapegoat, the mid-seventies book on the case that argued, as the CB article does, that Hauptmann was the innocent victim of law-enforcement politicking, anti-German public sentiment, and a crazed media environment that made a fair assessment of the facts impossible.
I don’t disagree that Hauptmann was treated poorly by the police, was represented by an apparently drunk attorney, and shouldn’t have been executed if the then-governor had serious doubts about the facts as presented at trial, and it seems clear that he ended up a fall guy of some sort — but the idea that Hauptmann had nothing to do with the Lindbergh baby’s death is ludicrous, I don’t care how sentimentally persuasive Hauptmann’s elderly widow was. (I did learn from the CB article that Anna Hauptmann’s campaign worked on Anthony Hopkins, who played her late husband in a TV movie about the case.)
Still, it’s an interesting read, if only because of the way it parallels so many crackpot theories, about this or the Kennedy assassination or whatever patent foolishness QAnon is retailing: correlation mistaken for causation; witnesses who supported Hauptmann’s threadbare alibi given the full benefit of the doubt, with others who placed him near the estate the day of the kidnapping sneered down; the difficulty of proving a negative leveraged to create what the arguer believes is reasonable doubt, but is actually just static.
As laughable as I personally find the “Hauptmann, victim of corrupt circumstance” line of thinking, the fact is…this all went down in New Jersey. I have no doubt that something got bungled, then covered up. Another fact is that we should interrogate how Hauptmann was treated, by both cops and press. We should pay attention to the effect jurisdictional disputes, celebrity victims, and the pressure of the headlines all have on investigations. We should remain aware of our biases, confirmation and otherwise.
I don’t see how cynically dingbatty assertions like Scaduto’s let those conversations happen, not really. And Scaduto maybe didn’t as much about those conversations as he did about squeezing some coin out of becoming the go-to guy on that side of the case “debate,” such as it was. Not to speak ill of the dead here, but this too makes the article noteworthy — that a true-crime content creator’s “brand” isn’t going to allow for any nuance.
“Buntsy: it’s Crime Beat. You want nuance, try a Norton Anthology.” …Fair point.
“The Biggest Heist In History Was In The N.Y. Police Headquarters” [Argosy, June 1973]
Written by Milt Machlin, Argosy’s editor, it’s about the “bold-faced [sic] heist”of more than $70 million in heroin from the NYPD property office — including the French Connection “stash.” Machlin collaborated with French Connection author Moore on, among many others, a book about this case, which won an Edgar in 1976. Here, he’s trying to do a jazzy non-fiction-novel thing that doesn’t quite go. If you want to refresh yourself on the IRL French Connection deets, I think we’ve linked to this one on CrimeReads before.
But the previous piece should win some kind of production-design Razzie. In a Jack the Ripper overview by James Stewart-Gordon, nestled beneath a pungent description of “the double event,” is an ad for Cruex medicated spray that proclaims in all-caps, “JOCK ITCH ISN’T SOMETHING TO BE TREATED LIGHTLY.” I suppose I should feel relieved that the Lew Magram “Great Fashions For Great Guys” spread didn’t get the nod for that page. Terrifying.
Friday on Best Evidence: Staircase stills, Broberg casting, and more.
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