Edgar Awards Flashback: Talked To Death · E. Röhm + E. Roberts
Plus the Peabodys, qualified immunity in NC, and the bonus-review poll
the true crime that's worth your time
This week, we wrap up our look back at the 1988 Edgar Award nominees for Best Fact Crime. Our final title is Talked to Death: The Murder of Alan Berg and the Rise of the Neo-Nazis by Stephen Singular. More than any other book in this group, Talked to Death feels extremely relevant for the current times as terrorist attacks by right-wing extremists rise and white nationalists attempt to mainstream their message.
In June 1985, members of a militant right-wing group known as The Order assassinated Denver radio personality Alan Berg outside his home. An irascible yet vulnerable figure, Berg took a circuitous route to talk radio. But once he landed there, it seemed almost predestined. A friend describes him as “a man not even marginally at peace with himself or the world.” Talk radio provided a vehicle for Berg to exorcise his demons, and listeners, who both loved and hated him, wanted to be along for the journey.
The Order (also known as The Silent Brotherhood) emerged from the Aryan Nation movement centered in Hayden Lake, ID where Richard Butler preached of his enclave as “white man’s paradise.” Robert Jay Matthews admired Butler’s message, but felt his tactics too timid. Matthews envisioned gaining control of a small patch of Eastern Washington, purging it of Blacks and Jews and growing a movement. The blueprint for The Order’s goals and activities was the 1978 novel The Turner Diaries by William Pierce — a piece of extremist propaganda whose reach still looms large, with the U.S. Capitol attacks of January 6 as the most recent example. In order to fund the race war laid out in The Turner Diaries, Matthews and his core membership of about a dozen men embarked on a campaign of armed robberies (banks, adult bookstores, and a Brinks armored car) and counterfeiting. Soon the violence escalated to bombings and assassination plans.
Alan Berg became a target for assassination because for years he had clashed on-air with members of the white power movement. Berg was the kind of prominent liberal and Jewish voice The Order wanted to silence (other potential victims on their assassination list included Norman Lear and Morris Dees). Order member David Lane had called in to Berg’s show in the past to set forth his views of a Jewish plot to take over the world.
In its first half, Talked to Death alternates between a biography of Berg and a history of the Aryan Nation movement, which is largely effective. The second half details a wide-ranging investigation of The Order and the pursuit and takedown of its members, many of whom went into hiding after the murder. The book also touches on the rise of white nationalist extremism in post-Vietnam America. By 1984, the federal government identified 75 separate groups committed to a common goal: a white, Christian America, all of Aryan extraction. The reader gets to hear about a few of these other groups, like The Covenant, Sword, and Arm of the Lord, but I wanted more (a great source for this analysis is the extraordinary Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America by Kathleen Belew). Singular also touches on some of the “economic anxiety” factors that fostered indoctrination of these extreme beliefs — particularly the 1980s farm crisis. I would have welcomed more of this content, but for what it’s able to do in 300 pages in telling the life story of Alan Berg and charting the rise of The Order from the seeds of other white nationalist and neo-Nazis group, Talked to Death really delivers. — Susan Howard
The Peabody Awards announced the eighty-first set of winners last week. Probably classless of me to have “hope they don’t get Caliphated again” in my notes (…again), but I can’t be the only one, right?
But looking on the bright side, genre honorees include Welcome to Chechnya; Collective; and several PBS docs and public-service shorts on racial justice. The Peabodys site isn’t the most intuitive at grouping/menus, but if you’re looking to spend the upcoming long weekend catching up on “stories that powerfully reflect the pressing social issues and the vibrant emerging voices of our day,” I can think of worse places to start! — SDB
And now YOU get to pick a winner: it’s time for the July bonus-review poll! This time around, we’ve got a couple recs from the readership, an ID special I meant to watch at the time and didn’t get to, and a UK podcast that just started a season on Fred and Rose West.
The June bonus review of Missing on 9/11 is coming in the next couple of days, but only paid subscribers get to see that one, so if you want to know what I thought…
Anyone can help decide what I review in July, though, so vote early and often! — SDB
The subhed on this Scalawag piece on “qualified immunity” — “Why law enforcement willfully ignores wrongful convictions — for decades.” — is chilling, not least because my knee-jerk response is to grumble aloud, “Racism, what do I ‘win’?” The story Lyle C. May uses to illustrate the principle is sadly familiar (teenagers with intellectual delays bullied into false confessions; law-enforcement intransigence in the face of evidence pointing to someone else, but in case you’re unclear on the broader concept, here’s a snip:
The SBI and the sheriff's department, represented by the Attorney General's' office, claimed that what happened to Henry and Leon was a product of "ordinary police work," and that the doctrine of qualified immunity kept the officers from liability.
Qualified immunity, based on the assumption that the officers were working in "good faith" and integrity throughout the investigation, protects law enforcement officers' rights above those whose lives they ruin. "Good faith" is what sustains wrongful convictions like Henry [McCollum] and Leon [Brown]'s—to the exclusion of facts, exculpatory evidence, or any other due diligence reasonable law enforcement officers are supposedly obligated to perform during the investigation of a crime.
McCollum and Brown did finally get out, but not for decades, and while a jury decided last month that the investigating agents had violated the then-teenagers’ constitutional rights and awarded them the largest combined wrongful-conviction settlement ever, $31 million doesn’t change the fact that it took forever to reverse an outcome that never should have occurred. May adds acidly, “Hard-fought exonerations like these are not a sign that the system works, but a snapshot of who it works against: Racial minorities, the impoverished, and those people society is willing to throw away.” And then comes another kicker, which I won’t spoil for you; you should check the piece out for yourselves. May’s headlong but crisp prose takes you through the Reid technique; Jon Burge’s notorious “style” of obtaining confessions; the court cases that undermined the Civil Rights Act by establishing qualified immunity as a doctrine; how the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission, which helped turn over the rock this case was squirming under, “has exposed corruption in the case of nearly every person it helped exonerate”; and numerous links to other/related writings on how North Carolina’s criminal “justice” system is, to use the technical term, fucking up. — SDB
This Killer’s Vault podcast sounds wild, you guys. I’ll let Podcast Business Journal try to explain:
A new kind of true crime show is launching on June 28th. Narrated by Elisabeth Rohm of Law & Order and read by actor Eric Roberts the Killer’s Vault will reveal the contents of never before seen correspondence from famous serial killers.
The Killer’s Vault is the first official release of more than 10,000 never-before-seen personal letters, and hundreds of hours of phone recordings, artwork, journal excerpts, and unpublished books from some of America’s most notorious serial killers, including John Wayne Gacy, Charles Manson, David Berkowitz, Richard Ramirez and more.
That’s all [sic] — the punctuation, the…Eric Roberts of it all, everything.
The piece linked above includes some interesting quotes from Röhm, who…seems to be going through something, via the true-crime genre, I think. Anyway, her grand unifying theory of why we’re attracted to true-crime stories is a few steps away from any of mine, and is also fairly predictable from an actor. The piece also talked not just to Roberts but to his wife, who “would sometimes leave the building when Eric was reading the letters because it unnerved her so much.” Being married to Roberts is already pretty baseline unnerving IMO, probably, but an interesting exchange follows in which, although the article’s author doesn’t do the greatest job plating the word salad, the Robertses talk about trying to find the empathy for a monster who by definition had none. There’s also an interesting quote from Roberts about Star 80, which is an underrated portrayal by Roberts of a certain murderous personality.
The project reads, to me, like a couple of sophomores taking what they think is a new angle on a very old story, but it could be interesting — and it drops today, if any of y’all want to clap an ear on it. — SDB
Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven is headed to series at Hulu. Variety notes that Andrew Garfield and Daisy Edgar-Jones are set to star, with Dustin Lance Black adapting Krakauer’s…hee, Variety calls it a “novel,” but WE know it’s a non-fiction page-turner from 2003:
In the series, a devout detective’s faith is tested as he investigates a brutal murder that seems to be connected to an esteemed Utah family’s spiral into LDS fundamentalism and their distrust in the government.
I’m keen on this one — it’s got a great pedigree — but is anyone else not 100 on Garfield as “an LDS elder who is committed to his Church and family but begins to question some of the Church’s teachings through his contact with a suspected murderer”? I don’t doubt his ability as an actor, and I thought very well of his work in Red Riding 1974, but I can also think of a handful of other actors who have a better “look” for the part (Plemons, Lillard, Gosling or Sarsgaard if you have to have a traditional hottie). Thoughts? — SDB
Documentary 54 and Counting is set to release in August. The press release is a little stilted, but I’d still like to check this one out when it’s available; the topic of bias in policing in New Jersey in particular, and the peculiarities of the criminal-justice status quo in God’s Little Acre, is one that could stand more attention in docs and docuseries.
The documentary focuses on Black officer Nakia McConnell's journey to follow in his father's footsteps as a police officer to change the system from within. In his journey, he encounters more adversity than success seeing Black people being killed daily by police officers and questions his decision to become a cop. The documentary gives a nuanced insight into the complexities of being a black police officer in New Jersey defending your profession while also advocating for reform.
Here’s the trailer:
And if you’re also interested in this topic generally and have never seen it, give Street Fight (directed by an old church-youth-group “colleague” of mine, Marshall Curry) a look in the meantime. — SDB
This week on Best Evidence: Ghislaine Maxwell vs. the prison system, true crime vs. quality TV, and James Hogue vs. everyone.
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