Final Affair · Prison Radio · Loose Units
Plus: Was OUATIH's "Pussycat" based on a real Manson follower?
the true crime that's worth your time
A book about a famous Orange County poisoning has been picked up by an Australian TV production company. Final Affair: The Shocking True Story of Marriage and Murder details the 1988 murder of Jan Overton by her husband, Richard. Overton allegedly poisoned his ex-wife, Dorothy, in retaliation for what he believed to be an unfair divorce settlement. He was later tried and convicted of Jan’s (his third wife) death. (What about his second wife? Well, he was married to Dorothy and another woman, Karoline Wallace, at the same time, as he stole the identity of a co-worker to make the union “legal.” I’ll bet you’re starting to see why this case is worthy of adaptation, aren’t you?)
Frank McAdams, a writer who is based in the O.C. city of Dana Point, penned his book on the case back in 2002, co-writing it with case homicide investigator Tim Carney. Fast forward to this summer, and Australian doc house White Spark Pictures headed to SoCal for what McAdams tells the Dana Point Times will be an interview-heavy episode of TV. Shooting was expected to begin this month, and a release date for the show has yet to be announced. -- EB
After over 25 years in the game, independent multi media production studio Prison Radio is still going strong. In a recent profile in the San Francisco Examiner, co-founder Jennifer Beach said that the organization has come a long way from the days of recording inmates’ stories via DAT and sending tapes through the mail. These days, the organization uses streaming technology to capture commentary from occupants of prisons across the U.S.
Its most famous correspondent is likely Mumia Abu-Jamal, an activist who was sentenced to death (later commuted to life in prison) in the 1981 of shooting Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. Abu-Jamal has maintained his innocence throughout, and regularly records updates from jail for the outlet, most recently on August 5. The goal of the organization, Beach says, is to cast light on the societal impacts of mass incarceration -- and humanizing inmates is certainly an effective tool toward that effort. You can listen to Prison Radio’s commentaries here. -- EB
No, “Pussycat” from Once Upon A Time In...Hollywood isn’t (exactly) real. Hollywood scion (she’s Andie MacDowell’s kid) Margaret Qualley played the character, a Manson Family member who inexplicably offered oral sex to Brad Pitt’s 50-something former stuntman/alleged wife-killer (he turned her down over fears that she was underage, so, yay, I guess?). But while many of the characters we meet at Spahn Ranch were real, there’s no record of anyone nicknamed “Pussycat” on the Manson roster.
However, Refinery 29 posits that Pussycat was a nod to Kathryn “Kitty” Lutesinger, the alleged girlfriend of Bobby Beausoleil (who was imprisoned for killing Manson associate Gary Hinman on July 27, 1969) arrested during a police raid of the ranch. Lutesinger reportedly helped police build a case against Manson…and yet, she was also one of the women who shaved their heads and kept vigil outside the Los Angeles Hall of Justice during Manson’s trial.
I gotta tell ya, the woman Qualley played didn’t seem like a head shaver. With all due respect, unless you give me something other than a feline connection between the nicknames, I’m not buying theories that Pussycat is the kitty in question. -- EB
A Sydney cop and his son first co-wrote a true crime book, then launched a podcast. Paul Verhoeven (no, not the Starship Troopers director -- I thought the same thing for a second, though) grew up listening to his dad’s stories about life as an Australian police officer, and last year worked with him to turn the yarns into a book called Loose Units.
Speaking with the Sydney Morning Herald, the younger Verhoeven says that “Once we finished the writing sessions for the book, there was so much stuff from that era that we just wanted to show people, and you know, we wanted to go deep. And frankly, there was some stuff that was a bit too grimy and a bit too intense for the book…” The result is a podcast, also called Loose Units, that “is just me and dad in the room, off the cuff, unfiltered,” Verhoeven says. “And the thing about dad is, he was actually there, he's an actual ex-cop. The podcast is him talking about cases that no one's ever heard about. These are the things that cops deal with every day. And I think it's a really intimate, kind of weird, at times voyeuristic look at what it was like to be a cop back then.”
The pod’s 15-episode first season wrapped up this past March, making it eminently bingable. Its second season is reportedly “coming soon,” and is promised to be longer, more violent, and scarier than the first. You can give the first season a listen here. -- EB
Why are people making IMDB pages for serial killers? As you likely know, the Amazon-owned TV/film trivia site is populated by content created by users, basically, like Wikipedia but less self-proclaimedly broke. It’s those users who are making up credit pages for folks like Ted Bundy, Ed Kemper, Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, and a multitude of others.
Most of the pages list mainly documentary properties (credited as “self”), as well as “Did You Know?” sections that detail their crimes. Out of the men I just listed, Dahmer appears to have the most devoted IMDB following, as users have documented 29 “archive footage” appearances as of publication time. Gacy, by comparison, boasts only 17. -- EB
Monday on Best Evidence: I’m working on a piece about the second season of Mindhunder for another publication, and I suspect at least some of my research overflow will end up here. Or not! We shall see.
What is this thing? This should help.
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