Clark Olofsson · True-Crime Backgrounds · Drugs
Also: More true-crime longreads we're just getting around to now
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What do Bill Skarsgård and Ethan Hawke have in common? They’re both white men, true, but after that their paths seem to diverge pretty significantly — one’s a slacker-era icon, and the other is, well, Pennywise. But the two meet when it comes to Clark Olofsson, the Swedish bank robber whose heist spawned the now-ubiquitous term “Stockholm Syndrome.”
Hawke, as longtime BE readers might recall, played Olofsson in a well-regarded 2019 movie called Stockholm, a feature-length adaptation of Daniel Lang’s November 1974 New Yorker piece “The Bank Drama.” (That movie ended up on Hulu or Starz, if you want to catch it.) And now, reports Deadline, Skarsgård (an actual Swede) will also play Olofsson, in a six-part Swedish-language Netflix series called Clark.
The show, which was announced Monday, comes from the Scandinavian Content Group, so it’ll presumably be somewhat legit. Skarsgård has a great quote on the project, given the typically strait-laced tone of press releases: “I accept this challenge with delight mingled with terror,” he says. A release date for Clark has yet to be announced. — EB
Accident, Suicide Or Murder sounds like a true-crime version of Marry Fuck Kill, but it isn’t. As it turns out, it’s an Oxygen show that’s just entered its second season, in which “each hour-long episode takes a deep dive into suspicious deaths that were initially suspected as accidents, suicides or murders,” the network says. So, pretty self-explanatory!
It looks like a lot of episodes focus on deaths that family members believe were misclassified by investigators, not (as I regularly worry about in my home) accidents that somehow look like homicide. Season 2 of the show kicked off on Saturday, and Season 1 can be caught up on here. — EB
Our towns are still shut down, but that hasn’t stopped Sarah and me from delivering Best Evidence and The Blotter Presents. Both of us have been sheltering-in-place for decades, so you might think that our lives haven’t changed much during the pandemic — but like everyone else, we feel stressed out, anxious about the future, and worried about our writing careers as media organizations try to figure out if they can stay in business. Having all of you here with us has been such a great, centering, and positive thing for us, and we hope we’ve helped you get through this (or at least helped you kill some time). If you think there are other folks who might get something out of Best Evidence, please do pass it along!
I’m sure you won’t get fired for being a true-crime weirdo if you use one of these vaguely lawless videoconference backgrounds. Oxygen is behind a line of crime-focused backdrops including a flickering-neon In Ice Cold Blood backdrop. There’s also a police-lineup backdrop that I was initially attracted to until it occurred to me that it might somehow signal support of alleged sexual assailant Bryan Singer, whose The Usual Suspects is, branding-wise, quite linked to that image. Maybe I can just pull a creepy image from the internet on my own; what do you think of this one? If that’s too much of a hassle, here are the Oxygen-official ones, for your consideration. — EB
Wednesday on Best Evidence: It’s The Blotter Presents, Episode 143. Sarah and guest Allison Lowe Huff will cover ITV's A Confession and 1991 feature Let Him Have It. Your show notes:
A Confession on Britbox
The murder of Sian O'Callaghan
Let Him Have Iton Amazon
The Derek Bentley case
Pierrepoint family of hangmen (and the tweet thread that opened this wormhole for Al)
Al at MHz Choice
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