Girl Scouts · Crackpots · Crime Seen
Plus BET-CRP planning and your weekend watches
the true crime that's worth your time
Best Evidence plans, God laughs. Or at least that’s how it feels sometimes! It’s me, SDB; Eve’s had a family emergency, so I’m back with a few items from behind the paywall for your Friday.
Want all the items behind the paywall? Great news: 1) there’s a whole passel, and 2) an annual paid sub is still just $50!
If you want physical true-crime items, I’ve got you there too: everything tagged “major case” is 15% off at Exhibit B. Books for the rest of the month!
And as always in the Friday edish, we’d love to hear what you’re reading/watching this coming weekend. I’m looking at Waco: American Apocalypse to review for Monday, and trying to finish Anthony Bourdain’s Typhoid Mary finally. What’s on your true-crime weekend menu? — SDB
The crime
In the wee hours of June 13, 1977, three tentmates — Lori Farmer, 8; Michelle Guse, 9; and Denise Milner, 10 — were attacked and killed at Camp Scott, a Girl Scout camp in Oklahoma. Suspicion quickly fell, rightly or not, on Native American Gene Leroy Hart, a one-time high-school football star who had escaped from prison several years prior and was rumored to be living in the woods and hills near the camp.
The story
I don’t know quite where to begin talking about what a corny, off-tone misfire Keeper Of The Ashes: The Oklahoma Girl Scout Murders is.
I do know that the project’s misbegottenness didn’t take long to become evident, as Keeper packs a bunch of true-crime-series production clichés into the first few minutes: drone shots of the abandoned Camp Scott, montages of the victims’ school pictures, and a teaser reel of sorts for the series in its entirety featuring stagey shots of parents in a cemetery and penetrating insights from “veteran” reporters like “What hit me was … these were kids.”
And then there’s Kristin Chenoweth. I had no kick with Chenoweth prior to watching Keeper, and I still don’t — it’s possible that the story couldn’t get made without her involvement, but that aside, I think she meant well and got bad/inadequate advice from her team about how her participation would land.
Still, her participation is almost unbelievably cheesy and self-absorbed, from the interminable slo-mo sequences of her walking through Camp Scott and wistfully touching trees, to her going back to her old school in Broken Arrow and “surprising” a class by helping with vocal warm-ups, to the overused remembrances of her own planned attendance that summer at Camp Scott, kiboshed by her mom because Chenoweth got sick.
Did she somehow get nauseated by her own future commentary in the series? Because that would track. “I came to learn what murder was”; “music helps you deal with the hard stuff”; repeated assertions that, every time she came back to Oklahoma to re-center herself, she thought about the three victims who never had a chance to etc. and so on — it’s all pretty performative, and utterly saccharine.
I don’t ordinarily have much use for IMDb user reviews, but they nail this aspect of Keeper to the wall, and rightly so. Like, the last episode closes with, basically, a music video/montage as Chenoweth duets on a D-plus ballad about moments in time. I believe Chenoweth is and has been preoccupied with the case, but: just say that, then! Quit trying to dress it up with a bunch of weak coincidences and music-therapy blathering, write the director a check, and get out of the damn way.
Because the thing is, there is a lot to work with here, and the square-peg what-if reminiscences and lugubriously trope-y pacing obscure a real corker of a story. It isn’t just the horrific murder and sexual assault of children and the blast radius of that that scorched parents and siblings and camp counselors, but also a community creating a legend around a lamster; and the issue of whether a Cherokee could get justice “under white man’s law,” probably a 12-part series its own self; and a prosecuting attorney who had to bow out of the case when it became evident he was leaking evidence to journos in support of his book deal; and the death of the prime suspect in prison, which tilled the ground for conspiracy theories; and the evolution of victim advocacy and how the national press conducted and still conducts itself around stories like this, I could go on.
Alas, series director Remy Weber seems overwhelmed by the material, and whenever it seems like the narrative might have found 1) some momentum or 2) a pertinent witness who also has a way with their own story, Weber retreats to the safety of a bereft mother caressing a photo album, or the local sheriff staring wistfully out the window of his radio car. Even the title, which refers to a Scout/Guide camp tradition, is content to gesture at a metaphor instead of ensuring that it works.
If Keeper had focused on one set of parents, or chopped out every filler-y interstitial shot of trees and tried to make itself a feature, or come at the story from some other angle — the racial-justice angle; the “‘forensics’ in the seventies were not it” angle — that respected the families’ grief without undercutting that respect with gimcrack sentiment, it could have worked. …Well, maybe. The Guse family doesn’t figure in Keeper at all, and as a result, there’s an unsettling empty space where their experience should go…until she more or less disappears below the series’s horizon. Yet another aspect of Keeper that more confident storytelling could have incorporated instead of being hobbled by.
As is, it’s slow, sodden, and inattentive to its own rhythms. When the series kind of whistled past the “red power movement” and Wounded Knee, then later almost by-the-wayed DNA evidence strongly suggesting that Hart did commit the murders, I found myself wishing Skye Broberg had had charge of Keeper. Is a Broberg property somewhat manipulative in a by-numbers way? Yes. But a Broberg property is effective because it knows which numbers to use. Keeper, by contrast, is a third-generation mimeograph of what an alien culture thinks non-fiction TV is, based on a quick listen to that gold disc from the Voyager spacecraft.
Keeper Of The Ashes is a gloopy mediocrity that misses every possible opportunity to enlighten, testify, innovate, or avenge. Watch something else. — SDB, 10/31/22
Welcome to Exhibit B. Books, where time-machine trips back to the mid-seventies paranoid headspace are complimentary! …Okay, I don’t offer them every day, and some of the marginalia/abandoned bookmarks are more random than provocative (although the NFL trading card stuck in a copy of that execrable Brandon Teena book by Aphrodite Jones was really something), but a recent arrival sent me on quite a journey down the 1975 JFK-conspiracy rabbit hole. The book: George O’Toole’s The Assassination Tapes: An electronic probe into the Murder of John F. Kennedy and the Dallas coverup. If you couldn’t tell from the sweaty design of the subtitle what you’re probably in for,
the publisher information might hint at it. The previous owner, a South Jerseyan who decamped to North Carolina but is from what I can tell still with us at 91 years young, seems to have taken the title as license to repair the dust jacket with tape, but that’s an entry for another day. Today, let’s talk about the syllabus I found stashed in the back of TAT — for a conference on “THE POLITICS OF CONSPIRACY,” presented by the Assassination Information Bureau of Cambridge MA at Boston University. TPO scribbled a few notes about contributors “Ted suggested Look up + get together,” and initialed the sessions he attended; conference sessions included, but were not limited to
Mark “Whitewash” Lane’s keynote address
“Workshop on ‘dirty tricks’ and assassinations as means to perpetuate political power”
“Workshop on organized crime and the economics of conspiracy”
“General session to discuss possible courses of action to resolve these crimes.”
The speaker-bio section that follows is an astounding document and I may have to do mini-bios of my own about each one of them (c.v. items like “a monthly newsletter entitled ‘Counter-Spy’” and the architect who mimeograph-published his book on Chappaquiddick fairly beg for further research). For now, I’ll confine myself to the AIB itself, which was founded by Carl Oglesby after he got forced out of SDS for being insufficiently pinkoid, and which according to Oglesby’s Wiki is credited with forcing the House to convene the legendary subcommittee on the JFK assassination.
Googling around to see if the AIB still exists (apparently, no; Oglesby died in New Jersey in 2011), I found a “review,” I guess, of the conference from the 2/21/75 Harvard Crimson that notes the con’s significance thanks to an enhanced print of the Zapruder film,
certainly the high point of the conference in that it was convincing enough to give the entire event some legitimacy, and afford it some protection from charges of conspiracy, paranoia and opportunism--charges which are frequently leveled at assassination researchers. Not that everything said at the three-day extravaganza at B.U., which also dealt with the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. among other subjects, rang true, or even made sense. In fact, a great deal of what was said was totally incoherent. But the Zapruder film raises problems which cannot be resolved without a new investigation.
The author of the piece, Eric M. Breindel, goes on to unpack various conspiracy theories attached not just to the murder of JFK but also that of his brother Robert, Martin Luther King Jr., and others, and to discuss the significance of fully investigating “official” stories of assassinations as a means of holding official power to account. It’s a remarkably thoughtful and unsnarky take from an Ivy 20-year-old — I would have snarked the living shit out of “The Politics Of Conspiracy” at that age — so I hopped into another tab to see what Breindel ended up doing with himself, and the late (uh, spoiler) Breindel’s Wikipedia page is not what I expected to find, to say the least.
Breindel, who went on to Harvard Law and befriended RFK Jr. at some point in his Cambridge tenure, headed into politics after graduating, but got fired from his job as an aide to Daniel Patrick Moynihan when an undercover cop busted him buying heroin. (Breindel, n…ot Moynihan.) Forced by that stain on his record (…I don’t think it’s prohibitive, obvs; I’m paraphrasing the wiki) to abandon his political ambitions, he…became a neocon editorialist and fixer despite bold-type progressive associations in his earlier life? I mean, these things happen, but talk about a full heel turn:
During the last year of his life, Breindel worked as a senior vice president of News Corporation and the host of Fox News Watch on the Fox News Channel. He also continued writing his weekly column at the Post.
It’s not just me who found it striking; Spy had Bruce Handy write it up in 1988. Ten years later, Breindel was dead, his obit a veritable who’s-who of late-20th-century NYC names and bold-type media folks — with no mention of the cause of death alleged by Michael Wolff, specifically that Breindel’s “liver ailment” proceeded from HIV/AIDS.
How much of this is germane to the genre? Not much — but what a ride, and this should hold you reading-wise until Eve gets back and yells at me for sniffing binding glue. — SDB, 5/16/22 (but EB should still clock me for sniffing binding glue in this timeline, lol)
I talked about The 12th Victim on Episode 50 of Crime Seen earlier this week. It’s always such a pleasure to dig into series I thought I didn’t like with Sarah C. and Mari; this one’s still imperfect, but we have fixes/suggestions in our discussion. Listen below! — SDB
It’s probably about time for another BET-CRP, but my list of prospective Bet-Crappees (?) is looking pretty sausage-y. Which is to say that the only ladies on it at the moment are Donna Mills and Sissy Spacek, and furthermore, it’s white as hell. [kicks Johnny Depp off the list because F that dude; adds Michael Kenneth Williams] …Okay, that’s a little better (so to speak).
Here’s my future-BET-CRP list as it stands today:
Rob Lowe
Judd Hirsch
Donna Mills
Treat Williams
Lee Tergesen
Anthony Hopkins
Ron Silver
Al Pacino
Colin Firth
Jason Robards
Sissy Spacek
Michael K. Williams
The list of all Bet-Craps to date is right here, for reference; anyone springing to mind that I should cover next? — SDB
Next week on Best Evidence: Waco, wilderness cold cases, influencer litigation, and much more.
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