Best Of 2022: "Vintage" true-crime finds
Plus JFK docs and wine deals
the true crime that's worth your time
A little housekeeping before we turn things back over to our panelists, starting with a leading candidate for metaphorical crime-scene clean-up: Twitter. No judgments if you’re staying, but given recent purges, we’re not about it. Throw us a follow on IG instead — same Best time, same Best handle — and if we end up with an account on Post or somewhere, we’ll let you know! You can let us know if we should investigate B.E. chat for paid subscribers
while we wait for yet another round of social-media dust to settle. Or whether we’re too old to “do TikTok correctly,” lol. — SDB
Happy and merry to all who celebrate; why not give the gift of Best Evidence? This week, annual subscriptions are just $50! (Wellll, fifty bucks and a few pennies; for some reason, Substack only lets you use percentages, so we got as close as we could.)
That’s a year of everything we published; a year of ambling around behind the paywall; and it helps us pay our contributors and ourselves (and the 915 streamers we all have to choose amongst these days).
Buying more than 2 (two) subs at a time? We’ve got a discount for that too!
Don’t miss a single issue of Berlinger-baiting; grab a sub now! …Okay, on with the show. — SDB
For our year-end coverage here at Best Evidence, we asked an esteemed panel of colleagues and contributors for the best (and most disappointing) true-crime properties of 2022; the true crime they look forward to in 2023; vintage gems and underrated treasures they discovered; and their big-picture takes on the genre.
Last week, they talked about the best of the new(ish) true-crime properties in 2022. This week, we’re irising out a bit for vintage discoveries, disappointments, and the state of the genre nation. Let’s see what our panelists unearthed from the past and recommend…
Margaret Howie, the co-founder of Space Fruit Press and editor of the Three Weeks newsletter: “I finally saw Reversal of Fortune, and holy shit. Me and my friend still do the Glenn Close stoned walk. Glam nihilism as the fuel for a theme park for monsters.
It’s not true crime proper, but John le Carré’s The Constant Gardener was probably my favourite novel of 2022, and it’s true crime-adjacent.”
Sarah Carradine, co-host of Crime Seen: “The Painter & The Thief; How To Fix A Drug Scandal.”
Elizabeth Held, author of What To Read If: “After reading and reviewing Who Killed Jane Stanford? I went deep on the university founder’s poisoning. I read Robert W.P. Cutler’s The Mysterious Death of Jane Stanford and Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller, a genre-defying non-fiction book about David Starr Jordan, an early president of Stanford University. (For what it’s worth, my take aligns with Miller’s. Jordan didn’t kill Stanford, but he did cover up the murder and benefited from her death.)
Of the three, Why Fish Don’t Exist has stayed with me in a way the other two didn’t. It’s not a traditional true-crime book, combining memoir, nature/science writing, and biography, but it’s compelling and accomplishes so much in a slim volume.”
Susan Howard, Best Evidence contributor: “I finally read James Baldwin’s amazing The Evidence of Things Not Seen. I’d also point to a couple of Patrick Radden Keefe’s previous New Yorker longreads included in Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks that were new to me: ‘The Empire of Edge’ and ‘The Worst of the Worst.’”
David Bushman, author of Murder At Teal’s Pond: “So many possibilities, thanks to Best Evidence. [Aw, thanks, friend. — SDB] Maybe Amanda Knox. She never gets old. But I am truly obsessed with Tupac-Biggie.”
Mark Blankenship, author of The Lost Songs Project and Reviews Editor at Primetimer: “I read a book called The Strange Case of Hellish Nell, about a British woman who was tried for witchcraft during World War II. Her name was Helen Duncan, and pretty much everything about her life was fascinating. The fact that an eccentric Scottish lady who hosted seances got the entire British army upset is amazing to me.”
I had a bunch of “heritage” properties in my bonus reviews, including Reversal Of Fortune, which sent me once again down a Dominick Dunne wikihole, a side track I also recommend; last month’s subject, Booker’s Place, a top-notch example of a contained and bittersweet doc feature; and the Running From COPS podcast. I also finally watched the original Helter Skelter from the seventies, and found it instructive, although I wouldn’t tell you to pay for the lesson. And a tip of the tam to the “…huh.” materials I found in an old copy of a JFK assassination tinfoil-hat tome back in May.
What oldies but goodies in the genre did you guys discover in 2022? — SDB
Thank me very much for that segue into our other-stories round-up for today! Said round-up begins with last week’s JFK-assassination document drop, which, like the ones before it, is incomplete. Per the Beeb,
On Thursday, President Joe Biden issued an executive order authorising the latest disclosure.
But he said some files would be kept under wraps until June 2023 to protect against possible "identifiable harm".
The US National Archives said that 515 documents would remain withheld in full, and another 2,545 documents would be partly withheld.
The BBC piece goes on to talk about what assassination historians/crackpots had hoped to find in this cache — primarily, it seems, more intel on 1) Lee Harvey Oswald’s stint in Mexico, and 2) what the U.S. government (and other governments) might have known about Oswald’s plans ahead of November 22, 1963.
I’d guess there was something in the trove last week, if only because I walked through the living room and saw a JFK-historian talking head in progress on MSNBC Friday evening…but the entire file was supposed, by law, to get released in 2017. My esteemed colleague Craig Calcaterra has a theory on what the hold-up is:
What “identifiable harm” could possibly still exist nearly 60 years after the fact is positively baffling. I can’t think of a single notable person who had any position of prominence at the time of the assassination who would be personally harmed by anything that is learned because they’re all, you know, dead. Maybe there are figures who were tangential to the investigation who are still lingering on in their late 80s or early 90s — some CIA or FBI operative, long-retired, who got name-checked — but that seems like a matter of redacting, not withholding records.
I am not a conspiracy theorist so I doubt that there is anything in the records that would blow people’s minds or change the way in which history will judge the killing of JFK. But I bet that this continued withholding of records is centered on institutional reputations of the CIA, FBI, Defense Department or whatever. Something in the records that is deeply embarrassing to them that would lead to new looks at all manner of things those agencies were up to in the 1960s and, perhaps, more recently.
Emphasis mine. With recent books out on J. Edgar Hoover and the history of the Secret Service — the dark “stars” of my own theory (via Mortal Error) on any JFK cover-up, to wit: a hungover Secret Service agent accidentally discharged his weapon, and the resulting burial of this circumstance has made Oswald look like a pawn, when he in fact did what he set out to do — the feds should probably acknowledge that enough damaging information is already out and well beyond their ability to control it that they should just furnish the rest of the documents, or at least explain with some specificity why they’ve chosen not to do so.
But: feds gonna feds.
Elsewhere in the genre-verse:
Surviving R. Kelly’s last installment has a premiere date [Realscreen] // I don’t think I remembered that this was in the pipeline, but in any case, it emerges on Lifetime starting January 2.
As of this writing, authorities don’t know what caused the fire. (Andrew Seng / New York Times) The “untold loss of DNA evidence” from a recent NYPD warehouse fire [Gothamist] // The sirens and chopper blades were ringing through the air most of last Tuesday thanks to a raging evidence-warehouse fire in Red Hook, Brooklyn — which isn’t especially close to me, so the audible response was particularly remarkable (read: “led to a lot of pearl-clutching on Nextdoor,” but then, what doesn’t). The warehouse held “decades' worth of DNA evidence and thousands of seized motor vehicles”; criminal-justice commentators expressed, well, nausea to Gothamist’s Gwynne Hogan and Jake Offenhartz about what that could mean for various proceedings, and had “particular concerns about potential exoneration cases.”
“Rigged: The undoing of America’s premier bodybuilding leagues” [WaPo] // For those of you who wished Killer Sally had taken more time with certain sketchy aspects of the bodybuilding world, Desmond Butler and John Sullivan’s deep dive into bodybuilding’s “premier” amateur federation’s ruling family, the Manions, is a must-read. Tax fraud, ballot box-stuffing, aspirations to organized crime, and extremely muscly dudes in bellbottoms and ringer tees: there’s a little something for everyone.
And finally, if your giftee list is more about booze than news, Luekens Wine & Spirits has a $9.99 BOGO deal on 19 Crimes Martha Chardonnay while supplies last. This is not spon-con, for the record, but if you need a home-goods or true-crime gag gift (or just want an affordable “Chardo for people who don’t usually like Chardo” bottle or two for yourself), this one’s a solid choice. — SDB
Tomorrow on Best Evidence: Hidden true-crime gems of the past year!
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