Evidence Of Things Seen · Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil
Plus Erin Lee Carr, Etan Patz, and Emmett Till
the true crime that's worth your time
Hey folks — SDB here, pinch-hitting for our dear ailing EB with what I hope is a compelling midweek menu of links and longreads. Usually the Wednesday edition is paywalled, but it’s too damn hot for that today; grab a popsicle and kick back with this one, on us.
Let’s start with the first part of my interview with Sarah Weinman over at Exhibit B. I got to chat with Weinman last week about all manner of true-crime topics, including the Gilgo Beach case, the Elon Green Best Evidence takeover (…you’ll see), and how Amanda Knox is leveraging invasive attention. Here’s a snip:
So the subtitle, of course, is "True Crime in an Era of Reckoning." Have the conversations that you've had, or interviews that you've done for this one, shifted since Unspeakable Acts and --
Yeah, I would say so.
I mean, that felt like there was definitely a similar focus on accountability in true-crime narrative, but it wasn't as explicit as in this one. I don't know what is cause or what is effect, but do you want to talk a little bit about that shift, in questions you're hearing or convos you're having?
Well, I think the shift reflects the change in focus, which is that with Unspeakable Acts, the first part was sort of more traditional true-crime narratives. The second part was interrogating the genre. The third was, well, what topics do we even consider to be true crime? And how can we kind of explode that out? So Evidence of Things Seen took that third part and made it the whole anthology basically. We gotta interrogate everything, and we have to look at true crime in the most systemic and the broadest possible way – without saying "this isn't true crime." Because I think it's pretty clear that I never want to be the person who says I'm not part of the genre. I've been part of the genre my whole life.
Yeah, don't – don't Berlinger that.
Don't Berlinger that, don't say "transcend the genre," don't do any of that shit. The genre is, but to take it in the most expansive possible way means you can fold in a lot of different topics, and think about them in a much more thoughtful manner. And that also, I think, leads to what I've said a lot on the press circuit, which is that if the genre has been asking, has been looking for answers all this time, now it's time to start asking more questions.
Right.
So if we think about true crime in the context of larger societal stuff like poverty and the unhoused and racism, and systemic communities where people are missing and murdered -- especially those that are particularly marginalized; if we think about how crime works in those contexts, I think we can just ask better questions.
Look out for Part 2 early next week.
And while we chatted, Weinman nicely put her Jane Hancock on every book of hers I’ve got in stock, so if you’re looking to pick up a signed copy, click here. — SDB
Hearsay
The Conspiracy Podcast, one of the fastest-growing podcasts in America, is releasing a four-part series titled “Jeffrey Epstein & Ghislaine Maxwell: The Business of Human Trafficking.” [PR email] // If you can still stomach this particular case, TCP’s mini-season on Epstein’s monstrosities dropped its finale episode yesterday. From the press blast:
Delving into the sinister world of Epstein and Maxwell, this gripping series uncovers their enigmatic rise to wealth and exposes the establishment of an intricate, almost company-like structure designed to exploit and traffic underage girls. Unraveling the web of power and influence they wielded, the podcast investigates how they managed to evade significant penalties despite decades of abuse and compelling evidence against them.
The series culminates with an in-depth exploration of the notorious Little St James island, known for its shadowy secrets and illustrious visitors. The final episode meticulously dissects the timeline of Epstein’s arrest and the circumstances surrounding his controversial death, leaving no stone unturned.
Back in the Garden of Good and Evil (Part 1) [True Crime Fiction] // Our esteemed colleague Tracy Bealer revisits both John Berendt’s book and the missteps of the Clint Eastwood movie.
The first thought you might have is, was Clint Eastwood, native Californian, really the best director to adapt a story that is inextricable from its Lowcountry setting? The answer is no. What I wouldn’t give for a Barry Jenkins, David Gordon Green, or Callie Khouri adaptation of this text. But this is what we have, and there are issues:
Pacing
Rather than cinematically duplicating the book’s slow burn, Eastwood shifts the shooting to the night the Berendt stand-in, John Kelso (John Cusack), arrives in town. So all of the careful work the book does to make the city more than merely the setting for a crime is lost.
I’ve read the book a couple times; I never got around to the movie, and likely never will, for the reasons Bealer lists (the Spacey of it all; the casting of Cusack in the Kelso/Berendt part). I can recommend Berendt’s less-known The City of Falling Angels. I reviewed it here, and I still consider Ludovico De Luigi’s elucidation of the larger story’s “perfect ending” a top-notch rendering of true crime’s enduring appeal.
Biden will designate a national monument honoring Emmett Till and his mother [NPR] // As you read this, the president was expected to sign a proclamation yesterday designating key sites “across three locations in Illinois and Mississippi in an effort to protect places that tell Till's story,” including the Chicago church where Till’s funeral was held; the courthouse where an all-white jury acquitted Till’s murderers; and the spot where Till’s body was believed to have been retrieved from the Tallahatchie River.
I feel like this factoid about the current historical marker at the latter site is in every story about Till and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley; I know it makes me queasy every time:
In Mississippi, Graball Landing will become a monument. Locals believe it is the spot where Till's body was recovered from the Tallahatchie River. In 2008, a memorial sign dedicated to Till was installed near the site.
But over the years, the sign was routinely stolen, vandalized or shot at and forced to be replaced. A fourth edition now stands at the site — this time bulletproof and details the history of vandalism.
“…routinely stolen, vandalized or shot at.” I genuinely don’t mean to make light of lethal bigotry with this observation, but: imagine having this kind of time on your hands, and spending it defacing a commemoration of the death of a child. There’s not a single other thing you could think about, not one cooking show or household project you could interact with instead?
…Good for Biden, and I wish the landmarks commission and their Plexiglas fund the best of luck.
Judge sentences man connected to overdose death of actor Michael K. Williams to 2.5 years [Gothamist] // I had lost track of this as a criminal proceeding and didn’t realize it was playing out in federal court. The sentencing judge
walked a middle line Tuesday between prosecutors’ requests for a long prison sentence and the actor’s loved ones’ pleas for leniency and treatment.
Judge Ronnie Abrams sentenced Carlos Macci to two-and-half years in prison and three years on supervised release. One of those years will be in inpatient drug treatment.
Williams’ nephew, Dominic Dupont, called it “a challenging day for anybody who loved Michael.”
“There are no winners here,” he said after the hearing.
Macci is the first of four men facing incarceration in connection with Williams’s overdose death in late 2021; he’s also in his seventies, has addiction issues, and is unable to read or write. Samantha Max’s piece goes into some detail about Macci’s background, the idea that a longer sentence could prove beneficial for Macci treatment-wise, and Williams’s family’s take on what these sentences should look like. I can’t disagree with Dupont — himself a “graduate” of the carceral system — that there aren’t any winners in the situation, but it is gratifying to see an update that digs deeper, on an accused’s background and challenges, as well as on a victim’s family’s perspective.
Hulu Orders Sherri Papini Kidnapping Hoax Documentary From ‘Britney vs. Spears’ Director [Variety] // Interesting timing on this exclusive announcement, given another case playing out of late, but a new docuseries from Erin Lee Carr is never bad news:
Hailing from filmmakers Erin Lee Carr (“Britney vs. Spears,” “The Girl From Plainville”), Michael Beach Nichols (“Wrinkles the Clown,” “Welcome to Leith”), and Marwar Junction Productions, the limited series dives into “the six-year journey of Sherri Papini’s disappearance to her arrest and the ripple effect of the case felt across the nation,” per Hulu.
Carr, along with Nick Antosca (The Act), also has a scripted project in the works about the Murdaugh case, but who knows where the strikes have left that one in terms of scheduling.
"Stranger Danger" and the decline of free childhood. [Substance] // We’ve all read a gazillion “when I was a kid, my parents didn’t even know where I was half the time” pieces; hell, I’ve written a couple. Although, real talk: that’s what an old friend of mine calls “youngest-kid shit,” right?
Barb knew where I was, or could have guessed within a block, 98 percent of the time; if she didn’t, she knew I had a quarter in my sock and an eye on the clock. My younger brother at that same age: “Out somewhere.” It’s not that she didn’t care, but parents not paying close attention to your whereabouts, or your bedtime, or whether they could see the floor of your bedroom? Youngest-kid shit. (Or “one of four+ kids” shit.) We broke them in first; you’re welcome.
Back to the point: Tana Geneva’s take on “free-range kids,” the way hands-off parenting is judged, and the relationship between crime coverage and so-called helicopter parenting is super-interesting:
There are many harms that come with rabid crime obsession, chief among them the stigmatization of homeless people and people of color. But another casualty is, well, a free childhood of the kind I—being fully aware of the irony—had in 1980s Communist Bulgaria.
See, an “upside” to totalitarian societies is that the media’s job is to tell the public everything is going great, not that their kids might be abused by Satanists, as American parents were told in the 1980s. Bulgarian adults worried a lot: About the regime, about saying the wrong thing to the wrong person, about surveillance, about being seen in Church—but as far as I can recall, no one was petrified of “Stranger Danger,” the idea that a stranger with ill intent would steal or abuse your child.
And so I had a stereotypical Eastern European childhood, the kind where parents might ask the kids to fetch them cigarettes and then send them off to play outside until it was time to eat or go to bed.
…
[I]t’s not like adults never watched us—Eastern European parents are very neurotic— but the idea that a grown-up would spend their whole day, every day, with a six-year-old just didn’t make sense, for the adult or 6-year-old.
Non-parent here, so, brick of salt, but I don’t disagree with that last bit; pretty sure Barb wouldn’t have either. Certainly I don’t disagree that crime coverage, in volume and tone, can warp our perceptions of how dangerous the world (or our town/neighborhood) really is — I’ve talked about it here many times.
But I think the shift in how we as a society think about “free-range kids” has more vectors than the (omni-)presence of a stranger-danger news cycle. I’m the same age as Etan Patz, so while this is many years pre-internet/social media, we lived 25 miles from where it happened; that case, and other “Gotham is imploding” stories like it, were our local news, too…but we lived 25 miles from where it happened because my parents moved to a leafy suburb to get away from those stories before they had their children. In other words, it’s “we heard less about stranger-danger back then” — but there’s also “we heard that stranger-danger was a city problem” in it too.
Plus, Barb knew where I was because I knew where Barb was, because she was a stay-at-home-mom; and we had way more unstructured time than today’s kids seem to; and and and. Geneva draws a rolled-eye parallel between satanic panic and the ridiculous drag story-hour “grooming” narratives of the last year or so, which is spot-on, but I wonder if the downstream effects of crime coverage don’t have more to do with the way it’s filtered, or not — information is much more readily available, which is good, unless the consumer isn’t media-savvy, which is less good. We understand what qualifies as abuse, or trafficking, far better now, and we can talk about it more openly, which is good…unless legitimate dangers get weaponized into fear-mongering conspiracies, which, you get the point.
I don’t have any neat conclusions here, except that Geneva’s piece has stayed with me, and had me mulling the evolution of crime stories in the last half-century in quality and quantity — and even earlier, as Real Big Detective-type pulps gradually shifted from lionizing law enforcement to fetishizing gore and punishment. Sometimes the “best” questions about this genre don’t actually have answers. — SDB
Tomorrow on Best Evidence: Ironically: answers! To your questions!
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