Astros Scandal · Sarsgaard · Errol Morris
the true crime that's worth your time
The Astros cheating scandal is getting the true-crime treatment. And from some genre big shots, too; The Hollywood Reporter notes, “To tell the Astros' story, Cadence13 has teamed with Sports Illustrated writer Ben Reiter, who will write and host the show, and Slow Burn co-creators Leon Neyfakh and Andrew Parsons, who will produce via Neyfakh's Prologue Projects shingle.” (Intrigued by the production team’s credentials, but don’t know thing one about the scandal, baseball in general, or why this is such a BFD to sportsball fans? ESPN’s got an explainer here.)
The inclusion of Reiter is, if not a mini-scandal, set to raise some eyebrows itself. Yahoo’s Mike Oz notes that Reiter wrote a high-profile article on the team’s rise, plus a book, but has taken flack for “completely missing” the sign-stealing scandal. Of course, that could make an interesting subplot for the proposed podcast: what Reiter knew, whether he faced pressure not to include it in his writing, and how that relates to MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred’s…reluctance, let’s say? to confront the players (or more to the point, their union) with any kind of directness about the way they compromised multiple championships.
…Sooooo I guess you can tell how I feel about the issue, but then, I’m also the one who’s argued repeatedly in venues internet and academic that Pete Rose belongs in the Hall Of Fame irrespective of his being a D-plus human. Anyway, when the podcast drops this coming summer, I’ll be listening; there’s no date yet set for the companion TV show. In the meantime, if you want to read up on scandals and miscreants of baseball yore, let me recommend Dan Gutman’s Baseball Babylon. It’s a fast, fun read and you don’t have to know much about baseball to dig it. — SDB
Does Peter Sarsgaard have a surprising number of true-crime properties on his c.v.? I started thinking about it in passing as I was watching Interrogation prior to Ep 131 with Toby Ball, because that show is overall a waste of talent and potential, but Sarsgaard’s performance is nearly perfect: a frustrated, ambitious detective we may or may not side with depending on where in the shuffled narrative we are. It didn’t remind me of his performance in Boys Don’t Cry, exactly — that role is very different — but Sarsgaard does have an ability to inhabit characters who seem pleasant, relatable, and reasonable but can flip those masks away to grievous effect. Then I started thinking, is it just those two crime-adjacent projects on his résumé?
It isn’t; one of his first listed roles is in Dead Man Walking, and as well as Boys Don’t Cry, he’s also in borderline exemplars Shattered Glass (plagiarism, and it’s not his character doing it) and An Education (kind of a con artist; definitely a statutory rapist); Errol Morris’s Wormwood, which implies that Sarsgaard’s (real-life) character is the victim of a murder and cover-up; Loving Pablo (he’s a DEA agent on Escobar’s trail, and that reminds me, I need to do an Essential Escobar listicle); and Black Mass, the Depp/Whitey Bulger joint from a few years back.
I haven’t seen either Wormwood or Black Mass, the latter because I find the entire Bulger-verse relentlessly confusing and repeated viewings of that documentary didn’t help matters, and also The Departed is basically the same story but probably better; the former because there’s only so many hours in the day. Should I watch either of them? Or should I save Wormwood for when I’m not feeling so disappointed in ol’ Errol? (More on that in a moment.) — SDB
What is A Wilderness Of Error trying to do?
The crime
On the night of February 16-17, 1970 a person or persons murdered Colette MacDonald and her two small daughters. Nearly a decade later, her husband Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald was convicted of the crime, but has never admitted any involvement; definitive proof of his version of events, involving four Manson-esque hippies, has been…elusive?
The story
Thanks to a three-hour plane ride (and possibly only because it isn’t possible to hurl a book out a window at 30,000 feet), I finally completed Errol Morris’s A Wilderness Of Error: The Trials Of Jeffrey MacDonald on the third try. Regular readers/listeners know my opinion on the disposition of MacDonald’s case, but in case you’re new: he did it. He may well not have received a sufficiently speedy trial; the government may well have acted improperly in the suppression of evidence, in both his original trial and his appeals. But Occam’s razor applies, and Morris’s interrogation of the evidence, the proceedings, and the integrity of Fatal Vision author Joe McGinniss does not convince me otherwise.
I really did try to keep an open mind as I read, or at least to work through why I felt so disdainful of this or that assertion — why my knee jerked in the direction of MacDonald when “unknown assailant” may have made more sense, or at least some sense…and Morris does present material that gave me pause. I didn’t know (or had forgotten) that the manufacturer of Eskatrol, the diet pill McGinniss theorizes may have played a catalyzing role in MacDonald’s lethal actions that night, pulled it not because it was a dangerous stimulant but because it didn’t work. I didn’t realize the extent to which evidence had been suppressed, although in some instances where Morris attributes malign motives to the prosecutors or the judge, I see mere impatience or misfiling. I had an inkling after the flap surrounding the Teddy Kennedy bio that McGinniss was perhaps not the greatest guy, but the difference between his version of his post-conviction interactions with MacDonald and Morris’s does not flatter McGinniss. And Morris gets insightful commentary from MacDonald’s college roommate, Michael Malley, who also joined MacDonald’s defense team during the Army phase; and from an attorney and clinical psychologist named Rex Beaber, among others. His research was unflinching, I’ll give Morris that. Anyone who was alive to talk to, he called.
But it was around page 43 when it first occurred to me that A Wilderness Of Error would have worked far far better as a book of straight interviews, letting the interviewees bring their own textures and perspectives (and argot) throughout — or as the documentary about the case that Morris apparently originally planned and couldn’t get funded. As it is, AWOE reads as though his editor at Penguin suggested he turn it into a meditation on the unreliability of evidence, or something…but then either Morris forgot this brief, and set out to prove that MacDonald is innocent; or failed to apprehend that, if your larger point is that “evidence” often comes down to whose “story” is crafted better, you then have to include all the evidence, inventory it clearly for the reader, and then set up that argument from there.
This does not occur. Morris gets off to a rough start, with me at any rate, by asserting on p. 13 that the case is “once well-known but is quickly lapsing into obscurity,” which even in 2012 I don’t believe was true. He then starts in on how psychopathy is a “myth” on page 29, and never really lets that go. As the text goes on, cherry-picking which pieces of proof it would like to engage with — times I used the phrase “cherry-picking” in my margin notes: three; times I used the words “specious” or “disingenuous”: four — it becomes clear that Morris wants it both ways. Evidence that was excluded from use by MacDonald’s defense is seen as exculpatory, its excluders as corrupt; evidence emphasized at trial is cast as compromised; if this is Morris’s point, that everyone from judges to juries to readers to murderers can and does decide on their own versions of events regardless of “fact,” he doesn’t make that apparent. Also not apparent: allegations and evidence, often in Fatal Vision, that do not favor MacDonald — his almost compulsive cheating, including with a minor. The myriad provable lies about his relationship with Colette on the tapes to McGinniss. The suitcase in the Castle Drive bedroom that suggested a plan had been made to flee, then abandoned. That his supposedly almost-lethal wound, one which even a cardiac surgeon wouldn’t have attempted in order to fake a struggle, wasn’t on the same side of MacDonald’s torso as his heart. That his performance under cross-examination was a disaster. Morris doesn’t shy from the idea that MacDonald was “a complex, often annoying person” (382), and yet his sulky, snotty testimony on cross isn’t even mentioned.
Some of the intel Morris smugly presents as probative ends up as bad luck for Morris, like the Britt affidavit, which wasn’t fully debunked until after the book had gone into paperback, I think. And some of the intel left out is perhaps left out because it comes from Fatal Vision, and Morris considers it and McGinniss unreliable. (It does seem like he feels towards McGinniss the way MacDonald feels towards Brian Murtagh; he calls pro-MacDonald book Fatal Justice “valuable,” and dismisses FV as “a bad book that sold millions of copies.” Another example of whose story you want to go with, I guess.) But again we come back to the difference between an exploration of “evidence,” of how variable “truth” can be when you look at accepted “facts” closely, of the inevitable influence of subjective feeling on criminal-justice proceedings; and an attempt to exonerate Jeffrey MacDonald — because, as Morris says in the text and on the back cover of the hardback, “I wondered if people needed him to be guilty because the alternative was too horrible to contemplate.”
…At this point, 50 years later? Maybe. Now that he’s behind bars, has been for decades, and won’t even apply for parole because it would mean admitting guilt? Maybe. But I think what’s “too horrible to contemplate” for Morris, as it evidently was for Janet Malcolm — who chose to focus on the high crimes committed by McGinniss in misleading MacDonald, instead of examining the gory trial evidence or interacting with the concept that the accused could be both charming and a monster — is the only version of events that we can really come close to proving, or making sense of, to wit: for whatever reason, and proceeding from whatever flashpoint, MacDonald killed his wife and two children. Messily. Violently. And was content to let Helena Stoeckley think she might have done it.
Not that McGinniss’s theory of the crime is watertight, but then, sometimes a killing isn’t going to make sense to the consumer of its narrative, because that consumer isn’t a killer. Morris’s narrative is well enough written, but it’s also littered with illustrations that add nothing and border on the cutesy, and it’s either disorganized and flawed in its inception, or deliberately dishonest. Perhaps it’s both. I don’t regret finally completing it, but I’m relieved it’s over, and I can’t recommend it. — SDB
I’ve said a mouthful! I’d love to hear what you have to say about today’s discussion topic, so head over there and let me hear from you — and why not recommend a subscription to a friend or colleague who’s also obsessed with baseball and/or the MacDonald case?
Coming up next week: A&E is at it again, plus Unabomber longreads and Gabriel Fernandez.
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