Chris Dorner · Cadbury Eggs · Tiki Torchers
Plus: the [noun] And [noun] true crime title trend
the true crime that's worth your time
It’s Friday, and for many folks in the US, it’s a long holiday weekend. That means even more time to consume true crime and other content, hooray, in addition to sleeping in or slacking off or whatever else you do with your holiday time.
In the “other” category, I’m splitting my time between finishing Bret Easton Ellis’s latest book, The Shards, a majorly meta serial killer yarn that’s making me wonder if I have gotten too old to read Bret Easton Ellis. Or maybe, just maybe, I am actually too young to buy into his increasingly early-1980s brand of faux-bloodily-debauched nostalgia?
Is his book a ditto* of a ditto of a ditto of his earlier work? Or maybe the original work was flawed to begin with and I was too green to notice? Anyway, I’m a completionist so I’m riding this one out. Pray for me, please.
With my husband, I’m hoping to finish the available episodes of Physical: 100 on Netflix, a Korean feats-of-athleticism competition series that I can’t recommend enough for its dubbing, alone. It is very silly, and was a really nice break in between episodes of Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence, which I reviewed earlier this week.
Ellis has influenced my true crime tastes for this weekend, though, as his LA-set book has me thinking about the seamy overbelly of the region. So I set aside a newly released quickie from LA’s ABC affiliate, True Crime: The Manhunt for Christopher Dorner, to watch this weekend. It’s only 22 minutes long, and is available on YouTube:
It’s been ten years since Los Angeles saw one of its biggest manhunts, when Dorner, a former LAPD officer, shot and killed four people and wounded three others, across four SoCal counties. The story ended in a standoff in the mountains on Feb. 12, 2013, where Dormer was killed.
The story is packed with notable fuckups, including Facebook’s failed moderation of Dorner’s threatening posts and manifesto, and three separate civilians injured when the cops shot at them because they mistook their vehicles (a very common type of Nissan)‚ with his.
I’m curious how deeply ABC is able to get into the weeds on the botched bits of the story, and the mini-doc’s incessant TikTok suggests that it’s a pretty superficial take:
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But still, it’s super short so what the hey. Still, some supplemental reading is good, so:
Here’s Crime Library’s entry (line that made me clutch my brow: “Throughout the manhunt, Dorner had a loyal following on social media. Pro-Dorner Hashtags like #WeStandWithDorner trended worldwide.”)
And here’s the LA Times’s ambitious and meticulously-reported series on the story, which is probably a far better use of my reading time that that Ellis crap.
So, that’s me. What are you looking forward to reading, watching, or listening to this (long, I hope) weekend? — EB
*credit, please, for the retro reference
It’s time for Friday food crime! You all know that as a food writer, a crime story involving dining is always a treat for me to tackle, as last month’s Kit Kat theft investigation illustrates.
While that one was a fairly standard-seeming retail theft story (albeit, with a seemingly large payload), this one is far more ambitious: per CNN, 32-year-old Joby Pool pleaded guilty in Kidderminster Magistrates’ Court Tuesday to the theft of “nearly 200,000 chocolate eggs, worth around £40,000 ($48,000).” From the report:
Tens of thousands of Cadbury Creme Eggs – a cult British chocolate egg with a white and yellow soft fondant center – were stolen from a unit in Stafford Park in Telford, western England, on Saturday, according to police.
The chocolate was recovered when Pool was stopped by highway police on Saturday, the force said.
Kidderminster Magistrates’ Court was told on Tuesday that Pool used a metal grinder to break into the industrial unit, before driving off with the chocolate, PA Media news agency reported.
According to PA Media, prosecutor Owen Beale said: “This clearly wasn’t spur-of-the-moment offending, if I can put it like that, because he had taken with him a tractor unit and he had to know that the load was there in the first place.
According to the Guardian, “Pool, a self-employed ground worker, used a tractor unit that had been stolen in the Yorkshire area in October to tow away the trailer full of chocolate, which was then driven away, eventually reaching the northbound M42.”
Pool’s defense attorney said that “There has been no interference with the food products that were taken – they will be in a condition that they can go back on the shelves.” Given that the theft went down in October, it’s possible, maybe, that some of the absconded-with eggs ended up at homes across the region at some point thereafter…but it’s more likely that all those eggs melted away at some point between last fall and today. — EB
Journalist Molly Conger dropped an engrossing Twitter thread early this week on the life and death of alleged white supremacist and accused drug offender Teddy Von Nukem, days before a multitude of large outlets picked up the tale.
USA Today properly credited Conger for breaking the story on Von Nukem’s reportedly self-inflicted death the day before his drug trial was scheduled to begin. While his offense was fairly standard stuff — allegedly crossing the US/Mexico border in 2021 with 33 pounds of pills that reportedly contained fentanyl — his virality as the central figure from many photos taken at Charlottesville’s violent and vile Unite the Right rally in 2017 takes his tale from the mundane to the notable. That’s him in the black t-shirt in the photo above.
The 35-year-old, who was married and had five kids, was briefly remembered in an obituary that included passages like “Some people knew Ted and understood he was a different type of fellow and had different views of things, but he would give the shirt off his back if you asked or needed it.” According to the Washington Post, the obit has since been removed by the funeral home that posted it.
Von Nukem reportedly admitted to attacking counterprotester DeAndre Harris at the same rally at which he was photographed, texting that “I’m the guy that cracked [Harris] in the face with the baton.” Despite that, he was never charged for any of the incidents at the rally. — EB
Are true crime content creators running out of ideas for names? I’ve noticed a sort of lazy trend lately: project titles that are basically just “[noun] & [noun],” with the nouns in question being two potentially loaded words that don’t do shit to describe what’s actually in the box.
Two of the latest come from headlines that dropped yesterday, “True-Crime Docuseries ‘Blood & Money’ Set At CNBC From Dick Wolf’s Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television Alternative Studio & Alfred Street” (Deadline) and “‘Love and Death’ Teaser Trailer – Elizabeth Olsen Gets Bloody Again in HBO Max’s True Crime Series” (Bloody Disgusting).
If you didn’t already know from reading Best Evidence that Elizabeth Olsen is starring in the HBO take on the Candy Montgomery/Betty Gore case, would you have any freakin’ idea that the extremely generic title Love and Death referred to that show?
The Wolf docuseries at least has the excuse of being slightly on-brand for the Law & Order creator, though I don’t know that it would really hurt him to move outside that template at this point — maybe to avoid any market confusion over how this time, the stories aren’t just “ripped from the headlines,” they are the headlines?
But despite the title, Blood & Money isn’t about, say, misconduct in the plasma donation industry. Instead, it seems like extremely standard fare, as described by Deadline:
The ten-part series spotlights the detectives and prosecutors as they follow the money and pursue justice. It explores the stories of the most infamous financial scandals that ended in bloodshed including billionaire Robert Durst, the Menendez brothers, notorious mother-son grifters Sante and Kenneth Kimes Jr. and con artist Clark Rockefeller.
At last, someone will bravely take on obscure cases like Durst and the Menendez family! Bold move, I say sarcastically. It premieres on CNBC at 10 p.m. on March 7, if you’re a Wolf superfan, but I’m sitting this one out. In any case, let’s urge the folks who put out these shows to try a little harder with the names, because three paragraphs later, I’ve already forgotten the HBO Montgomery one. Guns and Tubs? Lust and Anger? Sugar and Spice? See, totally gone. — EB
Next week on Best Evidence: We’re off for the holiday on Monday; see you next Tuesday! Uh, so to speak.
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