If you’ve ever wondered if a podcast can be too detailed, please allow me to introduce you to Black Hands. On the face of it, this podcast should be my everything: A whole New Zealand (love NZ so check) family slain in 1994 (my era, check two) in their cluttered and hoardery home (my Hoarders obsession is well-known, check three). There’s alleged demonic possession (check four, duh) and loads of audio (check five) from the two trials of the suspect in the case -- the family’s eldest son (love a shitty kid, check six) -- and yet, when host Martin Van Beynen said that the show would be ten episodes, I had to stifle a groan.

And here’s why: despite all these points in its favor, the show bored me to tears. It’s basically a play-by-play recounting of the information provided in David Bain’s two murder trials, accompanied by lengthy audio clips and actor reenactments of various written pieces of evidence as utilized by the prosecution and defense in the case. It’s not as bad as a full-on audio recording of the entire proceedings would have been, of course -- we’re spared the actual litigation day-to-day. But I couldn’t help feeling that the need to fill ten episodes spurred the, ahem, expansive nature of some of the witness testimony that seemed to add little to the overall narrative.

I’m actually glad that Black Hands is the last of the pods I got to review for y’all as part of this little project, and not just because if we spent one more day in the car it’s likely my dog would have started impeachment proceedings. It’s because it encapsulates a lot of the problems I saw in many of the true crime podcasts I marathoned in these past few weeks. Now I’m going to break those issues down. Let’s rap.

Just because you have a bunch of documents or audio doesn’t mean you have to use it all. I think every journalist gets the urge to include everything because so much of the time when you’re writing a story, you don’t have as much as you’d like and you have to fluff it up a bit. I think several of the pods I listened to on this trip were sort of reverse engineered from a place of having a load of support materials (Cold, Unheard: The Fred and Rose West Tapes), as opposed to being built around an actual fascination with a story. Look, Intrigue: The Ratline had thousands of pages of letters it could have used, but its excerpts were extremely judicious and served to support the story, not fill the space.

Stop wasting our time on dead ends. If you’re making a true-crime podcast, it’s your responsibility as a journalist to go down every investigative path, I get it. But by the time you sit down to record, you know which ones lead to useful information and which lead nowhere. When you spend half an episode on something that could be covered by saying, “It was suggested that X might have happened, but after (talking to witnesses, pulling docs, etc) we learned that that was not the case,” you’re either just killing time between ads or you’re trying to impress me with how hard you worked on this thing. Guess what? I already have an Away suitcase, I don’t need to mount my toothbrush on the wall, and doing this pod is your job so I’m not going to pat you on the back for making a couple calls.

Podcasts should be approached like broadcast TV or print. Again and again, I’ve seen journalists say that they’re so excited to get into podcasting because then they can finally dive into a story in an expansive way that they couldn’t at their newspaper or TV outlet. I agree that this is a great thing, and I also think that the audio medium has a unique ability to communicate a story in a way that you can’t through writing. BUT. I also think you need to edit yourself and/or be edited like you’re constrained by column inches or airtime.

This is something that journalists hand-wrung about at the dawn of online writing, the older folks in the room might recall -- there was this worry that everything might be sprawl across the screen endlessly, as writers were allowed to be their most self-indulgent selves without the worry of newsprint costs. That didn’t happen, because even writers get tired of typing and news orgs don’t want to pay for hella long shit no one reads. But it’s easier to talk -- and harder, perhaps, to edit yourself in the moment while talking -- so we’re getting two-hour stories that somehow slog on for far far longer.

All the that to say that while the above issues plagued Black Hands, and they also plague several of the other podcasts I listened to on this trip (and across the rest of my life). Something I hear Sarah say a lot on The Blotter Presents is that (I’m paraphrasing) a lot of the stuff that might have flown in 2013 doesn’t work now because we’re in peak true-crime. I think to stay competitive, people who are hoping to launch journalism-focused true crime pods (as opposed to comedy or commentary ones like Scam Goddess) need to think about which elements of a story they’d cut out if they were presenting this via their usual medium, and apply that same standard to their pods. -- EB

What I’m reading from…home!

• “Arkansas podcasters teach you 'How to Not Get Murdered.'“ [THV 11] After listening to all these podcasts where people are killed by their nearest and dearest, I assume this show’s first tip is “move far away from all humanity and never talk to anyone ever again.”

• “Bourbonnais resident's book reveals new details in true crime story.” [Daily Journal] Redditors are scratching their heads over the identity of Cherlyn Cadle, a 65-year-old women who wrote to Christopher Watts, the man who killed his wife and two young daughters last year. Watts wrote back, and the two began a correspondence that led to a book (Cadle’s first) entitled “Letters from Christopher: Tragic Confessions of the Watts Family Murders,” a tome that got so much attention that she reportedly appeared on Dr. Oz last week. (I’m not going to look for this clip, I hate Dr. Oz way too much.) Anyway, this article contains some more info on Cadle, whose life has dramatically changed as a result of her relationship with Watts.

• “Mark Duenas' Cottonwood murder case is becoming a true-crime fan favorite.” [Record Searchlight] And you can see why, as audio of his 911 call -- “I got ah, I killed my wife; shit, I’m, blood everywhere” -- is a pretty grabby clip.

Monday on Best Evidence: I don’t know yet, I just know I ain’t driving to get there.

What is this thing? This should help.

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