December Bonus: 31 True-Crime Properties In 31 Days

Welcome to the first part of the December 2023 bonus review(s)! This is too long for email and I apologize for that, but I hope you’ll enjoy it anyway — and wish me luck on the back half of my journey! — SDB

1. Looking For Mr. Goodbar

2. Alison
   The crime
   The 1994 carjacking/abduction, rape, disembowelment, and near-decapitation of Alison Botha, which she somehow survived.
   
   The story
   The 2016 adaptation of one of Botha’s books is available on Amazon Prime. It’s a bit amateurish, but it’s also only an hour, and Botha’s straightforward account of the attack that should have killed her five times over, and the stomach-turning struggle to get help, is affecting. (Ditto the corny, yet delightful, reunion bit during the credits.) Doesn’t try to do too much and trusts the subject to power it, and the fairytale framework is really the only one that works.
   
   The case has actually seen a significant update as of the middle of 2023, but if you plan to watch Alison and want to avoid spoilers, don’t click on this link.

3. Murder on a Sunday Morning
   The crime
   The murder of a tourist in Jacksonville, FL — and law enforcement’s subsequent attempts to railroad 15-year-old Brenton Butler for the crime.

   

   
   The story
   It’s kind of shocking that I hadn’t seen this Oscar-winning feature from the same production team that made the original The Staircase. It has the same hallmarks as that other de Lestrade production, mostly good (wise choice of central subject/issue; unparalleled restraint re: letting the story “come to” the camera), occasionally amateurish (melodramatic soundtrack cues and zoom-ins). In both subject matter and construction, it put me in mind of complaining to my mother while watching Citizen Kane, “Oh gee, a focus pull, big whoop” and being informed at zero degrees Kelvin that, actually, Citizen Kane pioneered that and other camera devices — MoaSM can seem a bit stilted in the way it’s asterisking things we take for granted in true-crime narrative (“testilying,” coerced confessions, overreliance on eyewitness IDs), until you remember that these perhaps weren’t taken as read by true-crime consumers back in 2000.
   
   

   It didn’t hurt the film that Butler’s attorneys, Patrick McGuinness and Ann Finnell, craft the kind of cross-examinations and summations so skilled, they seem scripted, but in the end, it’s a solidly built story, not stretched too thin over three hour-long episodes and tempting you to Google the outcome and move on. The aspect ratio on Peacock is a trial of its own, but you get used to it.

4. The Billionaire, The Butler, And The Boyfriend
   The crime
   L’affaire Bettencourt, so, if you’re not familiar: tax fraud (allegedly), campaign-finance impropriety/bribery (allegedly), and elder abuse.
   
   The story
   The sweaty translation of the miniseries’s title — en francais, I believe it’s closer to “The Bettencourt Affair: Scandal In The House Of The World’s Richest Woman” — is emblematic of the three-parter as a whole: overdone, gossipy, and eminently predictable in its beats and structuring, but highly watchable1 as well, possibly for those reasons as well as in spite of them. For every blandly Robin-Leachian assertion that Billionaire and/or coverage of the scandal is “the first time we’ve had access to the secret world of the super-rich” — it isn’t; this is Vanity Fair’s raison d’etre, IMO — there’s an informative and witty assertion about the size of a brick of 500-Euro notes, and a visual to match.
   
   Vanity Fair did in fact cover l’affaire back in the late aughts, coverage that then became one of the few VF-article-based books to warrant the extra length, as I noted in a review. The author of that book, Tom Sancton, gets talking-head time in Billionaire; the book is superior, not least as to timeline clarity, but the Netflix joint is more efficient.

5. Goodnight Sweet Wife is the contemporary take on the Stuart case, starring Ken Olin as Chuck Stuart, various Darren Star-verse day players as detectives and siblings, and B.D. Wong as a reporter. It’s certainly not essential, but Olin does a solid, committed job rendering Stuart’s dismissive self-absorption, and sometimes it’s instructive to see how a previous decade tried to get its arms around a given case.
   

6. Blue Caprice

7. The UnXplained S02.E06, “Leading Double Lives”
   The crime
   Various legendary instances of identity theft, including Ferdinand “The Great Imposter” Demara, Clark Rockefeller, and Anna Anderson.
   
   The story
   I hadn’t dipped into the William Shatner-hosted series since its first season; I had no idea it was still on (there is, as I type this, a sixth-season episode on unbreakable codes set to debut this evening), but the Netflix algo suggested it, so I scrolled through the seasons available on the streamer to find a suitable episode.

   

   
   Like most non-UFO-focused UnXplaineds, this one’s fine — like old-school Unsolved Mysteries, but with better pacing and a higher class of talking-head interviewee (here, Nate Hendley, Mark Seal of VF, and the enviably monikered and chyroned “Apollo Robbins, confidence crime consultant” — I would love to believe he consults on committing them, versus avoiding them/reparations after them, but: probably not). The only bum note, IMO, is the inclusion of trans jazz musician Billy Tipton in the ep roster; the clear classification of most of the other subjects as con artists (with one possibly delusional exception) means that grouping Tipton with them…well, “criminalizes him by association” is a bit strong, but it put me in mind of the way Aphrodite Jones’s book on the Brandon Teena case made it about Teena’s “deceptions,” versus that a trans man got hate-murdered.
   
   The episode itself seems to sense, albeit too late, that this “double life” is not like the others, and I guess I can say it’s not handled “poorly,” but it’s more that the ep awkwardly declines to “handle” it at all, really. Just as well, probably, and it’s towards the end and easy to skip.

8. Bad Surgeon: Love Under The Knife

9. The Todd Killings
   The crime
   The murders of Alleen Rowe and Gretchen and Wendy Fritz by the so-called “Pied Piper of Tucson.”
   
   The story
   The Pied Piper of Tucson was Charles Schmid, a teeny-bop guru with a Wikipedia entry that is a veritable blooming onion of crime stories just on the non-fiction side (one of his victims had herself recently gotten expelled from a private school for allegedly participating in an armed robbery; Schmid himself got murdered in prison, and then his body got stolen from the morgue). Like a couple other high-profile weirdos we could name with bafflingly intense charisma, Schmid’s power over Today’s Youth is both hard to understand — his lies were easily seen through; his personal presentation was budge in the extreme — and impossible to deny, because it spawned so many fictional versions of his story, each IMO an attempt to manage a different section of the psychosocial anxieties created or magnified by the real events.
   
   1971’s The Todd Killings (which goes by any number of other titles) isn’t the first fictional “synthesis” of Schmid’s thrill-kills — received wisdom is that Joyce Carol Oates’s legendary short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been,” published in 1966, bases “A. Friend” in part on Schmid2 — but it’s the first filmed take, and it’s very effective. Packed to the rafters with Hey, It’s That Cop-Show Guy!s (Ed Asner; Hill Street Blues’s Michael Conrad), TTK also features a pitch-perfect performance from Robert F. Lyons as “Skipper” Todd, the Schmid proxy. Skipper is immediately exhausting with the long-ish hair, the try-hard neon dune buggy, and the “where it’s at” faux-losophical argot, and Lyons is really good at conveying Skipper’s dim sense that his mother (Barbara Bel Geddes) is right that he ain’t shit, really — and right to spoil him and keep him at a couple arms’ length. (He’s also serving an unsettling mix of Jack Nicholson and James Van Der Beek.) His screechy court of underage jesters is soon joined by recent reform-school “grad” Billy Roy (Richard Thomas), who is shy about his buzzed-short hair, obsessed with sweet dingbat Amata (Sherry Miles), and broken in a different way, whose pieces Skipper can use.

   

   
   Barry Shear’s script and direction show remarkable restraint for a Nixon-era “the kids are very much not all right” picture. The sequence in which Skipper breaks into the bedroom of Roberta (Belinda Montgomery) and assaults her, ending in a murmured “I love you” from Roberta, feels a little self-conscious (and derivative, although A Clockwork Orange came out the same year and may not have inspired the scene’s framing), and sometimes the acting feels mid-century and stagey…but overall, TTK isn’t underlining the generation gap or despairing of affectless teens the way you might expect. The cacophonous soundtrack and weighed-down desperation in the performances create a subtly claustrophobic atmosphere that made me relieved to see the credits roll.
   
   I watched TTK on the Turner Classic Movies app; by the time you read this, it may have left the library, but I think you can still read the production notes, and I’d recommend those too. An unjustly forgotten docudrama, confident and contained, The Todd Killings is worth tracking down.

10. Dawn, a 2014 short directed by Rose McGowan, is based on the same case, according to Schmid’s aforementioned Wikipedia page. I…don’t think so; I had heard McGowan actually wanted to adapt a Flannery O’Connor story for her directorial debut, then lost the rights, and while Dawn isn’t recognizably O’Connor-esque tonally, it doesn’t feel that much like an iteration on the murder of Alleen Rowe, either. There is some overlap between Reiley McClendon’s implacably polite Charlie and Treat Williams’s Arnold Friend in the film version of the Oates story — the pleasantness increases in menace, even as its surface remains unchanged — and Charlie does have a line nodding to the thrill-kill aspect of the murder, but I don’t really see Schmid as the basis. Tara Lynne Barr is good in the title role, and I would like to see a version of this McGowan could have gotten dug in on better, but I don’t think I would have watched it if I hadn’t spotted John Grady in the cast list, and if you didn’t also direct Grady in a play you wrote back in 20043, this one’s a skip.

11. Sound of the Police
    The crime
    Racist police brutality going back to the colonial era.
    
    The story
    I didn’t know what to expect from an ABC News/Hulu project that itself expected to get its arms around centuries of state-sanctioned murder of non-white people, and I don’t entirely know who Sound of the Police “is for” now that I’ve watched it — but it’s good, merciless, with a couple of absolutely savage edits (that montage of Black children through the decades, screaming in terror as police hollered at and cuffed them, cutting to the bathwater-temp saccharine soundtrack of an Officer Friendly film? we have no choice but to etc.). Excellent talking-head interviewees like Jelani Cobb, Al Sharpton, and Amir Locke’s parents; unsparing collaging of bodycam footage, and a cavalcade of Karens, and lynchings…it’s both very watchable and nearly un-watchable at times, which of course is the point.
    
    There is the sense that SotP may initially have been designed for classroom discussion, but as a viewing experience, it’s not like that at all. Very occasional network-y glibness is more than balanced by crisp pacing, forceful outrage, and even moments of mordant humor.

12. Criminal Minds S04.E18, “Omnivore”
    The crime
    The Zodiac killings, but in Boston, and he’s called “the Reaper,” and also he’s caught, and also then he escapes.
    

    

    
    The story
    I recently ran across a previous list of CM episodes based on real cases that I’d linked to, and as I result have made the mistake of engaging with the “Ponyboy Curtis as the Faux-diac” episodes (yes: plural). And…look: I watched Cold Case in its entirety. I watched most of Blue Bloods. I still put old Law & Orders on if I can’t get the Apple TV remote to listen to me; I am not better than anyone and do not judge anyone on their mediocre-police-procedural choices, believe me. But. Every time I consume an episode of Criminal Minds, I kind of can’t believe how bad it is, and it is bad, and it went on forever. I think that, when it first started airing, one of the ways in which it’s bad may have worked better, if not well, because in the mid-aughts, a lot of the profiler-tradecraft exposition — delivered under furrowed brows of concentration by the C-plus cast members most often tasked with it — wasn’t a “yeah, we know” proposition for most of the audience. In fact, this show is probably what introduced most civilians to profiling as a cultural prospect. Most people don’t consume that much true crime, don’t know shit-all about the BAU or Douglas and Ressler, wouldn’t keep up on which aspects of profiles have gotten debunked, etc. etc.
    
    But my impression is that profiling didn’t take long to “go mainstream” as a concept (and had probably started trending in that direction with Silence of the Lambs, Cornwell thrillers, and other fictional materials well before the turn of the millennium), but Criminal Minds, like CSI, did little to update itself in response: it didn’t let characters with in-universe expertise talk to each other credibly; it didn’t presume a baseline understanding of behaviorism. And it probably didn’t need to! The predictability of a procedural’s beats is probably what most of a show’s fans tune in for. But there’s predictable, and then there’s too predictable (I figured out the twist almost immediately), and stiffly acted, and larded with tropey lines like “What’s more important to you, Roy — getting the story? Or getting the killer?” Joe Mantegna does what he can to dimensionalize bathetic scenes, and Howell — who sorely needs a Bet-Crapping; he played Kenneth Bianchi, for God’s sack — is pretty good, given how unworkable his arc is. But I tried to watch his other episodes and I just couldn’t do it. CM is not made for me, and that’s fine, but when some time goes by and I start wool-gathering about trying another RFTH ep, remind me of that fact please.

13. The Bling Ring
    The crime
    As outlined in the subhed of the Nancy Jo Sales investigation for Vanity Fair (which later became a book), maybe the “most audacious burglary gang in recent Hollywood history—accused of stealing more than $3 million in clothing and jewelry from Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and other stars—appears to be a bunch of club-hopping Valley kids, motivated by vanity and celebrity-worship.”
    
    The story
    I can’t decide how I feel about Sofia Coppola’s 2013 filmic version of the story. I don’t feel negatively towards it: although no look back at The Kitson Era is going to age terribly well, it’s fun to look at; that slow-zoom shot on the Audrina Patridge burglary really is a knockout; and the parallel to a previous era’s disaffected crooks and their far more dangerous “creepy-crawling” is possibly unintentional, but still striking.
    
    Coppola’s trademark stylish anomie seems at first glance like a perfect pairing with the subject matter, but the hall of “the pointlessness is the point” mirrors at work here eventually started to give me a headache. Some reviews complained about the film’s repetitive heist/party/post to socials cycle, but I have no kick with that, because I think Coppola’s work is always about the search for meaningful connection, and how often it’s in vain. That the Bling Ringers have (probably) incorrectly attached meaning to burgling gossip-blog mainstays doesn’t mean their quest isn’t real. This is the kind of movie Coppola could make in her sleep, though, so I kept coming back to the intentionality. Is the message that there is no message — it’s just surface, brands, misapprehension of hip-hop tracks as manifesti?
    
    That I still can’t decide is, I think, a point in the film’s favor.

14. The Snowtown Murders
    The crime
    The 1990s hate-crime murders perpetrated by John Bunting (no relation) in South Australia.
    
    The story
    I’d had The Snowtown Murders — also known as Snowtown in some places, I believe — on my list for ages, and like a lot of the other one-of-these-days-ers on said list, I looked forward to crossing it off at last. But this one reeeeally made me work for it; even for a property in this genre, based on a series of crimes I knew going in were horrific, Snowtown is an endurance test.

    

    
    For starters, it’s ugly to look at. Everything is grimy, crooked, stretched at the neck and fogged by the smoke of cheap cigs; the sun seldom seems to shine in this place. Nor is the audience spared much of the various horrors, including the main character’s mother’s boyfriend Polaroiding him and his brothers in their undies; the murder of a pet dog as a loyalty test; and Bunting himself (Daniel Henshall), making a woman dance for her sexual supper while the sandwich he’s eating perches in his beard.
    
    Henshall, a genial presence in American properties like TURN: Washington’s Spies and elsewhere, expertly curdles that moon-faced benevolence in Snowtown. The script just…conjures him, and there he is, making breakfast, joking warmly with the whole family, slowly turning up the water under Jamie’s (Lucas Pittaway) frog. Pittaway’s performance is even more impressive, conveying the helpless emotional exhaustion of a boy who has absolutely no concept either of how to expect better, or that he even should.
    
    Merciless without being monotonous, compelling without being enjoyable, Snowtown utterly deglamorizes Bunting’s monstrosity4 and in that way is an object lesson in how to portray serial murderers and/or “famous” perpetrators. These are horrors; make them horrible.

15. Murder in Boston
    The crime
    The 1989 murder of Carol Stuart and her unborn son.
    
    The story
    The real crime is, of course, racist policing, and how ineptly Boston PD went about “investigating” the so-called carjacking of Stuart as reported by her husband Chuck. I remember the case well — it was a disgusting vanguard in a certain kind of deceptive #justgetadivorce murder case — but I don’t want to say too much more in the event that you plan to see it and don’t want to get spoiled.
    
    You should plan to see it; it’s well made, striking, rage-inducing. The footage of Dereck Jackson listening to his 17-year-old self reading from a cop script and implicating an innocent man; one of said cops, the only one who would participate, bemoaning the loss of “his” old city from back in the day…like other excellent genre docs, MiB is about much more than a single case. It’s about place and time, and unhealed wounds. I might have led with the “ohhhh, that’s how it is” event a few months after the shooting and then doubled back, but other than that, very few notes.
    
    Jack Hamilton’s review for Slate is also fantastic (that too spoils things right in the subhed, so caveat lector): “I don’t live in the Boston area anymore, but have spent the majority of my life there, and in recent years have found myself bemused and a little unnerved by the glut of Boston-based, gritty, and vaguely noirish entertainments that have proliferated through 21^st-century American popular culture. Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone, The Town, Killing Them Softly, Black Mass, City on a Hill—the list goes on and on. The sheer quantity of these kinds of works suggests some collective fantasy of Boston as a last bastion of a particular sort of hard-boiled whiteness, a place where Caucasian men with pahk-the-cah accents are always at the top of the transgressive heap.”

16. Chicago 10
    The crime
    Conspiracy to commit a riot.
    
    The story
    Chicago 10 is one of the rare properties that I will recommend despite not being able to get through it myself, because that’s almost certainly a me problem and not a problem with the film. Director Brett Morgen’s (The Kid Stays In The Picture; an OJ 30 for 30) signature stylish ellipsis here takes the form of animated adaptations of Chicago 8 trial transcripts, voiced by heavy-hitter actors (Liev Schreiber as William Kunstler, for just one example), blended with archival footage of Yippie meetings and courtroom-steps press conferences. It’s a smart, innovative play, and turns just enough of the “narration” over to the case figures themselves to give texture.
    
    The issue for me is that I’ve spent an awful lot of discretionary reading and listening time in the last few years marinating in analyses of the Nixon White House, not just the more overt crimes pertaining to the Watergate cover-up but the cynical leveraging of anti-war sentiment, racism, the Southern strategy, etc. etc. to pit the American people against themselves — a game we’re seeing played/losing at today as well. It’s worthwhile intel, and I’m not warning anyone away from the topic; I’m saying that one of the net results is to make me impatient with/worn out by accounts of turn-of-the-1970s cultural-war criminality. C10 got great reviews from critics I respect, and I think it’s worth your time. I just happen to be in a place where the sight of one more midcentury racist turnip in horn-rims blatting about the silent majority is going to make me break something large and expensive, but that’s not on Morgen, whose work I always admire. — SDB

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    Nos. 17-31 coming soon; if you’ve got suggestions for me…
    

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