December Bonus: 31 True-Crime Properties In 31 Days Part II

Welcome to the last part of the December 2023 bonus review(s)! This is ALSO too long for email and I apologize, but I hope you’ll enjoy it anyway — thanks so much for supporting Best Evidence in 2023, and Happy New Year! — SDB

17. Exposed: The Ghost Train Fire — as heard on Crime Seen, but if you don’t have time for our discussion, the short version is that I recommend it highly.

18. Film Threat April 1992
    The crime
    The assassination of JFK.
    
    The story
    Love the title, but Dave Parker’s “Too Many Kooks Spoil the Broth” is awfully smug about the other, more earnest attendees of that year’s Assassination Symposium in Dallas, given that Parker/his editor couldn’t be shagged to spell J.D. Tippit’s name correctly…in the caption of a photo tastelessly re-enacting the scene of Tippit’s murder.
    
    The piece isn’t completely without merit; it includes a couple of interesting sidebar interviews. But it’s snotty, not-as-funny-as-it-thinks zine snark that should get more hits off than it does given how far down it’s punching — and it’s not like I didn’t generate scads of “look at these pathetic weirdos being weird and pathetic” blog “content” of my own in the nineties, and beyond, but that shit didn’t travel well either. I had no luck finding an online iteration of the piece, and it’s just as well.
    

    

19. JFK’s Women: The Scandals Revealed
    The crime
    C’mon, you know this one.
    
    The story
    This 52-minute doc from 2002, which I got only halfway through, is exactly what you expect: repetitive pan/scans of the same 4-6 photos; first-take re-enactments shot to try to disguise that the production could only afford a handful of period-accurate costumes; third- and fourth-hand information from talking heads who, like, waited on Joe Kennedy Sr.’s mistress’s cousin at the Palm one time, or authored mispunctuated niche conspiracy titles. Any intel you haven’t heard a dozen times before in other properties strains credulity, but the main issue here is tedium. The rhythms of the thing are so familiar and featureless, it’s impossible to focus on it — and unnecessary to try, so don’t bother.

20. Dr. Death S02

21. A Promise To Carolyn
    The crime [CW: harm to children]
    The 1955 murder of Carolyn McMorris by her stepmother, who was finally prosecuted in the early nineties.
    

    
    The story
    This is a tough watch, for obvious reasons — this kind of story is never a stroll in the park, but Promise’s flashbacks and testimonials are particularly affecting — and it’s also disorientingly cast; I don’t know how else to put it. It’s good casting, although Swoosie Kurtz and Delta Burke don’t always 100 percent read “sisters,” and both Burke as middle sister Debra and Shirley Knight as present-day stepmother Jolene are working against type. Burke, wardrobed in don’t-notice-me buttondowns and khakis, is quite subdued, but really good and believable, as is Knight, who’s usually at the pitiable mercy of a baddie, not the pitch-perfect passive-aggressive abuser she plays here. It takes a couple acts to get used to. (ER fans may also struggle to assimilate Lawrence “Dean Rollins” Monoson as the detective who tries to help get Carolyn’s death adjudicated. Grace Zabriskie is, well, Grace Zabriskie-ing and won’t require any adjustment.)
    
    It’s an ugly subject, it may trigger some viewers, and I couldn’t help wishing I could see the same cast in a slightly different, more flexible format — Kurtz’s line deliveries occasionally suggested it would work better as a play, for instance — because the performances at the heart of the story are greater than the sum of a mid-’90s teleplay’s predictable parts, not to mention that trying to tell stories of child abuse in a more linear fashion is often insupportable, narratively and emotionally. So…I don’t recommend it exactly, but I don’t think it’s a waste of your time, either. What was a waste: Delta Burke could really do this, and we talked about her weight instead of the things she could give us onscreen, so she mostly went away to do other things and we’re a bit poorer for it. I am not a crackpot.

22. The Wolf of Wall Street
    The crime
    As of when Martin Scorsese’s 2013 movie of Jordan Belfort’s book got made, securities fraud and money laundering.
    
    The story
    Ty Burr noted in his review for the Boston Globe that “It's like ‘Goodfellas,’ only (slightly) more legal, which is very much the point.” Burr really liked Wolf, and I didn’t dis-like it, so it does feel somewhat unsporting to note that GoodFellas already existed, as did Casino and The Departed, so we had more than ample proof of concept already as far as Scorsese’s “world-building in an organized-crime system” abilities. And even if said “point” were obscure to viewers at the start of the film, the gangs (…of New York) parallel is crystal-clear an hour in, and actively chafing at two and a half, which is IMO the outside length Wolf should have run. (Donald Clarke’s reference to Wolf’s “almost Hobbitian…inability to finish a scene” in The Irish Times is right on.)

    

    
    Other reviewers praised the film overall while mentioning that Leonardo DiCaprio as Belfort, while good, is not as interesting as Scorsese believes he is, and this is part of a two-pronged central problem with Wolf for me. DiCaprio’s performance is fantastic overall, although the accent slips a bit sometimes; every other performance is great too, but this isn’t anyone’s first experience of a drug-crazed narcissist, and that Scorsese did the same basic thing so much more economically in the final paranoid “don’t let the sauce stick” sequence of GF doesn’t help. More to the point, this isn’t my first experience of a finance narcissist. Dave Sr. isn’t that, but he worked with a lot of them, I grew up around a lot of them, and I’ve sat through far more tiresome scripted looks at that world — it’s not that Scorsese gets it wrong. It’s that…I don’t know, nobody’s going to accuse Oliver Stone of having a measured take on anything, but one of the reasons Wall Street works for me is that Stone is fascinated by these dickheads without aspiring to them in any way. Scorsese’s iteration is fine, but it needed a sterner edit by someone who didn’t seem to have a crush on Belfort’s sociopathic fearlessness.
    
    Again, it’s not poorly done; I’m not mad. But if you too kept thinking, “I should really get around to that one day,” great news: you saw what you needed to during the Oscars clip packages that year.

23. 72 Hours True Crime S01.E02, “Who Killed Santa?”
    The crime
    The 2001 murder of unhoused Toronto resident Andrew Walker, known around his catchment area as Santa.
    
    The story
    Not to oversimplify unduly, but 72 Hours is the CBC version of The First 48, so while it’s not essential viewing, 1) it shares the predictable structure and soothing aspects (somber narration, here with an Ontario-ish accent; mysteries usually solved thanks to trustworthy law-enforcement personnel) of the U.S. show, so if you’re looking for a marathon-able background true-crime show and TF48 isn’t available for whatever reason, this is perfect, and 2) it’s free on Freevee as well.

24. The O.J. Simpson Story
    The crime
    …Yep.
    
    The story
    This 1995 TV movie, which dropped January 31, 1995, is justly forgotten; you know you’re in trouble when 1) Bruce Weitz “as Robert Shapiro” gets his own title card and 2) this greets you not three minutes in:

    

    The actual director, according to IMDb, is Jerrold Freedman, who also helmed Goodnight, Sweet Wife, but you can’t blame Freedman for bailing. Bobby Hosea as Simpson is also in an unenviable position, obviously, and you could choose to view his opaque performance generously — that he’s trying to portray self-serving narcissism without committing on Simpson’s guilt. You could also conclude that he’s not up to the task of delivering an ambiguous performance, and defaulted to a not especially solid imitation. Jessica Tuck (Judging Amy’s Gillian Gray) is miscast; most of the dialogue is exposition absolutely nobody would have needed at that time; the wardrobe is off by about four years in every direction in the flashbacks; the only compelling thing here is Terrence Howard as young A.C. Cowlings, because he’s digging into the dependency of that relationship going back to the sixties, but of course nobody’s really looking at him because he’s…playing A.C.
    
    This is one of those major-case “somebody had to go first so everyone else could see how not to do it” properties. Everyone involved has my compassion, but: don’t bother.

25. The Roads of Home
    The crime
    In theory, the murder of Baltus Roll, but…
    
    The story
    …the murder of Baltus Roll is just about the only thing that isn’t in the index of Henry Charlton Beck’s late-fifties Garden State travelogue. I can’t imagine why else I might have bought the thing, so not finding that, or Springfield, or “Baltusrol” was an irritant — but Beck1 does get into textured, conversational detail about colonial cases decided by the so-called “law of the bier.”

    

    I can’t imagine anyone gives a tinker’s damn about Roads who isn’t from New Jersey and doesn’t run a bookshop and at some point hasn’t wandered into a small town’s pub or diner and left a book or map pointedly at the edge of her space, in the hopes that one of the know-it-all local old dudes will tell her something helpful about local legends and who used to live where. You used to need that skill, before smartphones; you used to need a day-drinking murder of Duanes to get you to a bygone boat slip or Quaker graveyard. It’s part of the past now, mostly, when people would roll up to me reading on my own in a restaurant and drop free history on me, but I recommend that if you’re not too introverted. The book? Unless you’re in Camden County with hours to kill and no cell service, probably not.

26. The New Yorker’s Most-Read Classics of 2023
    The non-fiction selections here include longread legends we’ve cited many times: 1995’s “Rejecting Gina” (the Gina Grant case); Janet Malcolm’s “Iphigenia in Forest Hills” from 2010, also available as a book; Grann’s 2008 look at Frédéric Bourdin; and one I don’t recall reading before, Alec Wilkinson’s “Conversations with a Killer.” The killer in question is John Wayne Gacy, the conversations took place in the lead-up to Gacy’s execution in 1994, and Wilkinson’s rundown early in the piece of Gacy’s horrific crimes — and Gacy’s feeble denials and rationalizations — is exactly how to center a serial murderer in your writing if that’s the assignment. The cumulative effect of Wilkinson’s list of facts is chilling and nauseating, and legibly disgusted with Gacy’s attempts to justify (or slither out of responsibility for) the killings, and therefore is itself the only responsible way to interact with such a story.

27. The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard
    The crime
    The murder of Gypsy’s mother, Deedee — after years of fictitious-disorder abuse of Gypsy by Deedee.

    

    
    The story
    I’ve watched three of the six episodes provided to critics; because TPC doesn’t come out for a few days yet and I don’t know how much I can say, I’ll confine myself (…mostly) to remarking that, if you followed the case and/or various properties devoted to it, TPC is worth a look. I mean, I think it’s worth a look generally, albeit too long — the three eps I screened could have been two — but I think it’s also pitched at people who will know what it’s about from the title.
    
    One issue I do have with it is what I would call The Real Housewives Problem, namely that events in the non-series timeline have well outpaced what the series “knows,” and there’s kind of no way to reconcile the two stories. Within TPC, Gypsy is about to have her parole hearing; out here, that’s already happened (if you’d like to remain “unspoiled,” don’t mouse over this footnote2). The series could also stand better clarity as to when various phone calls with Gypsy took place, and what its own internal timeline is; producers spent 18 months collecting audio and video footage, and I don’t suspect shenanigans or anything, but knowing where the series is in its process might help with pacing in a handful of places.
    
    But it’s well enough made to give it a try, I’d say. The three-night “event” starts January 5 on Lifetime.

28. Manhunt — The Search For The Yorkshire Ripper
    The crime
    Peter Sutcliffe’s well-documented reign of terror.
    
    The story
    It’s unclear to me why this Yorkshire Ripper doc made my watchlist over other, more recent properties,
    

    
    unless it’s that coverage of this one inevitably mentions law-enforcement interviewees beating themselves up about not catching Sutcliffe sooner. Manhunt is cheap-looking and somewhat crudely assembled, but you might find that…well, not “refreshing,” but the undramatic directness of a 25-year-old property is sometimes just the thing when it comes to a case this 1) gruesome and 2) thoroughly covered, in the UK and here.

29. Life Magazine, 11 August 1972
    I picked this up for the shop a couple months ago, for the cover story — a meditation on the rash of skyjackings then plaguing air travelers, and what law enforcement ought to do about it. Unsurprisingly, the FBI, the FAA, and other l.e. organizations felt it was time to “get tough” with hijackers, while a psychiatrist Life consulted didn’t think that would do as much good as non-violent measures like passenger pre-screening or sealing certain doors on the aircraft…measures many of us don’t recall ever not existing as part of a plane trip. (The idea that sensationalistic media coverage might encourage copycat-jackers was evidently not seriously entertained as an action item.) Between that, coverage of the tennis craze, yet another attempt to rehabilitate Bobby Fischer’s image, and the ads for iconic Volvo station wagons and every possible sort of cigarette, the magazine is almost a quaint read — except for the fact that we still see variations on this longform discussion about prescriptive reactions to crime trends. It’s dispiriting, kind of, because the true “root causes” inevitably get looked past, but not irrelevant.

30. Who Is The Black Dahlia?
    The crime
    Pretty sure you know this one too.
    
    The story
    I put on 1975’s TV-movie take on one of the City of Angels’s major-est cases to clean my office by, and it’s very good for that, or to craft by, or to have on in the background of…I don’t know, an L.A. Confidential theme party. It’s not per se “very good,” mind you; despite a chyron locating Elizabeth Short and her “grandmama” in Portland, ME, everyone’s trying it with southern accents for some reason, and even without pronunciation struggles, Lucie Arnaz as the titular Dahlia is overmatched (not least by a wig that looks snarly and cheap even in the crappy print on YouTube).
    

    She does get a better handle on the role as the runtime wears on, but the production generally is doing too much with moody sax on the soundtrack, noirish (but network-safe) observations about the overlap between sex work and acting, male eyewitnesses who remember little about the gal and everything about the car…but every now and then, it hits square on something, like Grandmama sighing to an L.A. cop, “Too many ways to go when you’re 18, these days.” The movie just…goes right along, especially if you’re straining to figure out who Arnaz reminds you of under that heap of inky Barbie hair (I settled on “the love child of Molly Shannon, Carrie Fisher, and Madeline Kahn in Clue”; let me know what you come up with!).
    

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    Almost everyone is in it — Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Tom Bosley, Ronny Cox, a barely-grown Donna Mills whose handful of scenes made me wish the movie were about her character — and you soon realize it’s not going to be able to match its own ambitions, but it’s reasonably diverting.

31. Ice: A Memoir of Gangster Life and Redemption — from South Central to Hollywood
    The crime
    Pulling “licks” in L.A.
    
    The story
    Is Tracy “Ice-T” Marrow’s memoir reeeeeally true crime? Well, no. But he does describe various crimes in it, including how to pick or smash a jewelry case; “rule number one” of a mall job (don’t use your own car); and how the Army helped him maximize getaway mapping for his crew. And then of course there’s the kerfuffle around “Cop Killer” and how many times he’s had to explain art to people as a result, using small words.

    

    
    And it’s really good! It sounds like him, nice and sweary and with that exhausted AYFKM tone he rolls out every week on SVU. The pairing with his co-author, Douglas Century, is excellent, because Century stays mostly out of the way and lets Marrow compose a conversational, paced-up oral history of his own life. Another one I only grabbed because it tangentially involved my hometown, but this one is a fast, fun, quotable read that lets me end the year in B.E., and this deranged project, on a high note.

Thanks again for being here and supporting Best Evidence; not sure where we’ll be in 2024, but we hope you’ll be there too! — SDB