Four Lives · Theranos Trial Takes · The McCrarys
Plus: Grave-robbing, the Klan, and domestic violence on military bases.
the true crime that's worth your time
Thursday is the new Wednesday. A thermostat issue at Best Evidence’s East Coast HQ means you’ve got me (Eve) today, even though Wednesdays are typically reserved for Sarah’s paid-subscriber-only issues. Expect that paywall to appear tomorrow, just in time for her take on the new season of American Greed, a review you can make sure to get by subscribing today.
Four Lives made its debut Monday. When we started talking about this dramatic adaptation of the Stephen Port (aka “the Grindr killer”) case, the BBC series was called The Barking Murders, but at some point the show’s name was changed to reportedly “honor the victims.” Stephen Merchant plays Port, a one-time on camera kitchen assistant on MasterChef and Barking resident (hence the original name) who was convicted of four homicides and multiple rapes of 11 men, many of whom he met on relationship app Grindr. He is currently serving a life sentence without parole.
We in the U.S. don’t have easy access to Four Lives yet, but all three of its episodes (it ran for three days in a row) are available on the BBC’s website, which means they’ll likely be available on a variety of less conventional platforms shortly. (When announced in 2019, the plan was to drop it on BritBox for global audiences, but I don’t see it there yet, do you?)
So far, the reviews in the UK press are good, if a bit lukewarm. The Guardian likes how much the series leans into the alleged police incompetence that “probably contributed to three of the four deaths,” but says it “never catches fire.” The Independent writes that it’s “hard to take your eyes off” Merchant as Port, and says that “In less sensitive hands, a case like this could lend itself to prurience or melodrama, but Neil Mackay’s script and David Blair’s direction deftly avoid these traps.” And the Standard writes that the show will leave you with “fury that the case was so badly handled from the outset,” and warns that it’s “not pleasant viewing.”
Given the backlog we all have of true crime viewing, if you’re outside the BBC’s viewing area you might be able to wait until it’s legitimately streaming to catch this one — nothing I’ve seen suggests that it’s the talker of 2022. We’ll update those folks when Four Lives drops worldwide, but if you’re in the UK and have checked it out, we’d love to hear your assessment in the comments. — EB
Everyone’s madly scribbling/recording their Elizabeth Holmes trial takes this week. As I enjoyed the days between Christmas and New Year’s last week, snuggled in bed with stollen* and a full DVR, I thought often of the jurors in the Elizabeth Holmes case. While I watched Yellowjackets, they were still in deliberations. As I wandered on the beach, they were at it, still. Civic duties are hard!
Those jurors didn’t emerge until this Monday to announce their verdict: As NPR reports, “after more than 50 hours of deliberations over seven days, the jury of eight men and four women convicted Holmes of three counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.” They declared her not guilty on “our other fraud-related charges connected to allegations that she duped patients who received false or faulty results from tests conducted by Theranos,” and were unable to agree on the three investor fraud counts. (The judge is expected to declare a mistrial in those three counts.)
As soon as the judgements went out, hacks and pundits got to work. Bad Blood author John Carreyrou’s tweet, above, speaks for itself — he’ll presumably publish something on this soonish. Others have already gotten their wrap-ups out the door and online. Here’s some of the best I’ve seen so far, your recommendations are also welcome in the comments. — EB
The Dropout: The Verdict
The podcast went dormant in 2019, then returned last August to cover the trial. Its final episode dropped this morning (I finished it right before I sat down to type) and covers outstanding questions like “How did they reach these conclusions? And what happens next? What will affect Elizabeth’s sentencing, and how will the appeal process work in this case? Finally, what will the ripple effects be for Silicon Valley?” It’s fairly satisfying!
The 10-Point [Wall Street Journal]
The WSJ’s daily newsletter ran down the ins and outs of the trial in what’s ostensibly a play to direct you to past coverage and get those sweet sweet Theranos clicks. But it also serves as a testament to how well the paper’s newsroom (which, I’ll remind you, is separate from its oft-problematic opinion section) has covered the blood testing company’s downfall, long before other pubs got wind of the problematic nature of its founders’ claims. The browser-based version of the newsletter is here.
The Epic Rise and Fall of Elizabeth Holmes [New York Times]
It’s safe to assume the Times had this one on deck for a bit, with tech reporter David Streitfeld leaving a couple “TK”s here and there for the details of the verdict. Drop that in, hoit publish, and voila — here we have a disembowelment of Holmes’s alleged “self-improvement plan” and a perhaps inevitable comparison to the fictional Jay Gatsby. Sure, why not.
The Elizabeth Holmes verdict: Silicon Valley’s reckoning or a single bad apple? [Bay Area News Group]
BANG’s been the local outlet on the case, arguably the most-closely embedded (BANG owns the San Jose Mercury news, for example) publication to cover the case. Unlike a lot of the takes, it leans heavily into what the trials claims regarding domestic abuse might mean for public perception of those crimes. “The guilty verdict could cause society to view her domestic abuse allegations as lies — even though her fraud convictions do not mean the alleged abuse didn’t happen,” reporter Marias Kendall writes. “The trial’s outcome could set the stage for society to doubt women’s statements — about abuse or anything else.”
*it does not escape me that one my my favorite breakfast treats is a crime-related homonym.
The New Yorker just approached a high-profile crime spree from a new angle. Though I can’t find any evidence of it from a fairly thorough Googling, I have a hard time believing the McCrary family didn’t provide any inspiration for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Like Psycho scribe Robert Bloch, TCM creators Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel credit (solo act) Ed Gein. But the McCrarys, a Texas family described in early 1970s news reports as “nomadic” and “backwoods,” seem like they must have provided at least some fodder for the 1974 horror film.
Per a 1972 report in the New York Times, patriarch Sherman McCrary and his family were “itinerants who worked in carnivals and as short‐order cooks and waitresses,” the five or so family members were eventually implicated in (per the Deseret News) “23 other murders, mostly of young women in a series of ‘doughnut shop’ killings in Colorado, Texas, Florida, Kansas City and Utah. The slayings were considered among the nation's first serial killings.”
Despite the arguable landmark status of the case — and its prominence in the headlines of the time, the story isn’t one that we hear about that often these days, and the one book about it has been out of print for decades. Here’s how off-the-radar it is by today’s standards: there isn’t even a Wikipedia entry on the crimes. Maybe that’s because its resolution is fairly unsatisfying: Sherman McCrary and son-in-law Carl Raymond Taylor were only convicted of one of the homicides, Colorado doughnut shop worker Leeora Looney.
McCrary, who was serving a life sentence (he would have been eligible for parole in 1997) in Colorado’s Fremont Correctional Facility, hanged himself at age 62, the AP reported in 1988. ″I’m just old and tired and tired of doing time,″ he said in a suicide note left in his cell. Taylor remains in prison.
In the comments section for a 2010 episode of the Serial Killers podcast, about the McCrary case, someone identifying themselves as BE fave/Texas Monthly writer Skip Hollandsworth posted his details and said he was seeking sources back in 2015. As far as I know, however, that investigation has yet to result in a story. But that same discussion section has resulted in other properties, a spin through the remarks will reveal. Most notably, it provided the sources for a 2015 episode of ID series Evil Kin, the episode page for which reminds me anew that we are living in far, far better true crime days now then we were then.
That same comments section provided the seeds for Ryan Katz’s piece for the New Yorker this month (remember that from the beginning of this item?). His way in to the case isn’t a straight retelling of the strange family tale. Instead, Katz comes at it from the perspective of Regina Alexander, whose mother, Elizabeth Steffens, is believed to be one of the victims. Here’s a snip:
She worked odd jobs until her late thirties, and then she joined the Army. On a tour of duty in Iraq, in 2011, she injured her back, and returned home to north Texas. She had time to sit with her thoughts and to wonder about her mother again. She began visiting Elizabeth’s grave regularly. “I just sit there and talk to her like a weirdo,” she told me. “It’s the only thing I have connecting me with my mom.”
Regina didn’t want her mother’s life to be defined by her death, but she couldn’t help fixating on Elizabeth’s last moments. It was as though each detail were a cell in her mother’s body; assembling them all together might make her reappear.
Regina had often been told how much she was like her mom; knowing more about Elizabeth felt necessary to get a better understanding of herself. She figured that one of the McCrarys could answer her questions, if only she could get ahold of any of them. It bothered her that the McCrary women were not in prison, and, for a long time, she mistakenly believed that Danny was free, too. It wasn’t easy to find information about the crimes online: after the early years of press fascination, the murders faded from notoriety. “Death Roads” went out of print. Many of the original news stories have not been digitized. Much of what can be found online is not accurate.
Katz’s story dropped on January 3, and just a day after that, podcast Families Who Kill: The Donut Shop Murders dropped on Wondery. I haven’t had time to dive into the podcast yet, but the confluence of McCrary-related coverage feels especially telling. Is it time, perhaps, for a more prestige-y take on the case? Shall we brace for Crime Scene: 1970s Southwest? I have a feeling that we’re just seeing the beginning of a new wave of interest in the McCrary case, so buckle up. Until then, here’s Katz’s New Yorker report. — EB
My magazine pile is diminished. Thank goodness for rainy holidays, as a very damp final week of 2021 meant that I had no choice but to hang out reading magazines instead of accomplishing anything outdoors. As I vegged out, I came across several true crime longreads that I think you might like, too. Here we go:
The Billion Dollar Question [Elle]
From the dek: “Why can’t the military fix its violence against women problem? Congress is on the precipice of ushering in the biggest shift in military policy since the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. But would it have saved 21-year-old airman Natasha Aposhian?” I came away from this piece unclear if intimate partner violence is any worse in the military than in other industries, but it seems fairly apparent it isn’t any better.
The Bone Collector [Vanity Fair]
“In 2014, the FBI discovered an entire museum—and thousands of human remains—in the home of a 90-year-old Indiana man who hosted the Boy Scouts and claimed to have detonated the first atomic bomb. Was he a pillar of his community or the most prolific grave robber in modern American history?” This is an interesting one, if a little sad — the suspect at the center of the yarn is clearly proud of the collection he assembled, and is excited to share it. You almost don’t want to ruin his good time until you remember that most of the stuff he’s assembled is critical, and often sacred, to cultures decimated by that same kind of “all this can be mine!” sort of thinking.
He wore a wire, risked his life to expose who was in the KKK [Associated Press]
Fine, this isn’t one from the glossy pile by the bed, but it hung out as a tab on my Kindle for nearly a week, so it’s fair game. This is an in-depth profile of Joseph Moore, the central figure in a lengthy AP report from last July on a KKK murder plot. Moore wore a wire for the feds for a decade, and “has never discussed his undercover work in the KKK publicly” before this piece. (He’s now living in Florida under an assumed name.) It’s pretty engrossing, and if it’s not already being floated as a potential adaptation, it should be. Here’s a photo of Moore; who would you cast?
Thursday on Best Evidence: Sarah, cozy and with a freshly repaired thermostat (I hope!) will unleash American Greed on paid subscribers.
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