Fruitcake · Serial · Unspeakable
Plus: A victim's perspective
the true crime that's worth your time
Will Ferrell is taking on true crime with a movie called Fruitcake. According to KXTW, Ferrell will play Sandy Jenkins in a dramatic adaptation of the Collin Street Bakery embezzlement case, in which Jenkins was sentenced to 10 years in prison for embezzling $17 million from what Texas Monthly says (in a great longread about the case) is “the world’s most famous fruitcake company.”
Laura Dern was originally cast as Jenkins’s wife, Kay (who got off with probation), but has since left the project. It’s to be directed by Max Winkler in his feature debut (take a look at his photo if you want to remember why The Fonz was considered such a hottie) and is expected to start shooting this spring. — EB
A possible suspect from Season 1 of Serial has been implicated in another homicide. Folks who recall the first season of the show, on the slaying of Hae Min Lee, might recall the name Ronald Lee Moore: He was proposed as an alternative suspect to Adnan Sayed, who was convicted of Lee’s death.
While DNA evidence in the Lee case didn’t support Moore as her killer, it was DNA that was used to link Moore to the death of Shawn Marie Neal, a 23-year-old woman found strangled to death in 1996. CNN reports that advances in DNA testing allowed authorities to link Moore to towels and a bedspread found near the Neal crime scene.
It’s all kind of moot, though, as Moore reportedly died by his own hand while in Louisiana jail in 2008. That means — obviously — that he can’t be charged in the case, but according to a press release from the North Myrtle Beach Police Department, which had been investigating the case, it’s hoped that “the resolution of Shawn's case leads the family to some semblance of closure.” — EB
After you read this Medium post you’ll never consume local-blotter crime the same way again. Emma Berquist is a Texas-born writer who now lives in New Zealand. She’s also, she revealed in a Medium post published late last week, the victim of an unprovoked attack in which she was stabbed six times while walking her dog in a New Zealand park.
Her post on the incident is unflinching and surprisingly funny — Berquist, you’ll likely think, sounds like a friend you'd like to have. It contains a graphic description of her injuries, and photos of her stitched wounds, and might be triggering to some. You can read it here.
Like many people, I suspect, who read her piece, I Googled to try to learn more about the stabbing. I found items like this Stuff (a New Zealand general-news site) report, that gave general details of the attack and the suspect. The same kind of item we see on broadcast news and read on local news sites a jillion times a day.
I don’t have any great Sex And The City overarching point to this, just that reading Berquist’s account felt a bit like that “what seems clearer, one [snick] or two” at the eye doctor. Every story we read of an incident, “provoked” (as the police refer to it) or not, has a Berquist; it’s just that typically, the victim lacks her way with words. It’s worth thinking about. — EB
The subject of The Cut’s “The Stolen Kids of Sarah Lawrence” has been arrested. You likely read Ezra Marcus and James D. Walsh’s excellent longread on Lawrence Ray when it dropped last April. It’s a weird, winging tale of a guy who allegedly took a slew of his daughter’s classmates under his wing (while living in her dorm room!), then reportedly started to control them in decidedly cult-like ways.
According to The Cut, it was Marcus and Walsh’s piece that spurred them to open an investigation into Ray, one that culminated in his arrest last week. According to CNN, Ray was indicted with charges including extortion, sex trafficking, forced labor trafficking, and money laundering. According to Geoffrey Berman, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York, Ray "exploited and abused young women and men emotionally, physically and sexually for his own financial gain," and allegedly extorted $1 million from five victims. He’s currently represented by federal public defenders, and his next court date has yet to be set. — EB
There’s a new podcast that promises to look at “some of Scotland’s most terrifying murders.” The show is called Unspeakable Scotland, which is a name that’s been used by at least one other podcast, so searching that might be a pain. But here’s the scoop: According to the Sunday Post, this Unspeakable is from Janice Forsyth, an arts reporter for BBC Scotland.
According to Forsyth, “How it works is a bit of a reversal for me – usually I’m interviewing people and I do tons of research but with this I don’t do any, I’m hearing the story for the first time,” typically from other writers that have covered the cases in question. The show will launch on February 26 as part of the nascent The Big Light podcast network, a detail I threw in because that might make it a little bit easier to find. You can listen to a trailer for the show here. — EB
Wednesday on Best Evidence: It’s The Blotter Presents, Episode 132, with guest Jeb Lund. Sarah and Jeb will be covering The Pharmacist and the “False Witness” episode of BBC’s Inside Story. Here are the show notes:
The Pharmacist on Netflix
Patrick Radden Keefe's "The Family That Built An Empire Of Pain" for The New Yorker
Inside Story, "False Witness"
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