In Broad Daylight · Leavenworth · Kim Kardashian
Plus: We're gearing up for Meek Mill!
the true crime that's worth your time
Is the original telling of the Ken Rex McElroy killing your best bet? No One Saw A Thing debuts Thursday night on Sundance, and Allison Lowe Huff and I will be discussing it on this week’s The Blotter Presents, but its initial subject is hardly a “new” story; it’s one of those cases that has stuck in the popular mind. McElroy terrorized his tiny hometown of Skidmore, MO for years before fed-up locals shot him down in his truck July 10, 1981, and officially, the case remains unsolved, with no arrests made or trials convened in the matter thanks to Skidmoreans’ collective insistence that, well, no one saw or knew a thing about it. With the exception of a regrettable-looking TV movie starring Brian Dennehy from 1991 (and, fine, an episode of Drunk History from last year), nobody had really taken on the national-headline-making tale of a community that did what law enforcement hadn’t been able to between McElroy’s murder and Sundance’s miniseries…except Harry N. MacLean’s In Broad Daylight: A Murder In Skidmore, Missouri.
I’d had the MacLean on my to-read shelf for years — it’s one of those cases a true-crime specialist is “supposed to” know about — but I hadn’t gotten around to it until last week, and it’s a very good read. IBD was MacLean’s first book, and as if that weren’t challenging enough, he was writing about a killing whose primary point of interest was that the alleged perpetrators had closed ranks and refused to talk about it…and trying to illuminate a whodunnit that was really more of a “jeez, who didn’t,” ergo a whydunnit, than anything else, obliging MacLean to start at the end and work back to how Skidmore had reached this point with McElroy.
MacLean, an attorney, dug in. He basically moved in with a local family and sat around listening to Skidmore…Skidmore-ing, for months. (A 2006 epilogue mentions him dashing into bar bathrooms to scribble down notes, then drunkenly typing them up late at night. Who among us etc.) He got access to files — witness statements; depositions — other reporters hadn’t. And he went back to before McElroy was born to provide a straightforward, evenhanded accounting of all the things that went wrong for McElroy before he even got out of middle school, and all the people McElroy did wrong by, and how, thereafter: the livestock-rustling, the witness-intimidating, and not least the functional hostage-taking and subsequent physical and emotional abusing of the girls who became his wives. Case headlines tend to shorthand McElroy as a bully; that term really doesn’t begin. He was a monster. He was also loved by his children and respected by hunting-dog breeders as a top judge of hound talent, and it’s not easy to let those things co-exist for readers, and not seem like you’re condoning vigilantism when, as Allison crisply puts it in tomorrow’s ep, some people just need killing. MacLean pulls it off.
He won an Edgar Award for his trouble, and it’s deserved. There is a little overwriting when it comes to seasonal mise en scene — pitiless summer sun, that kind of thing — but it’s not condescending about small towns or country people, and after a few chapters, you’ll learn to spot a rumination on crops and skim over it. MacLean is skilled at laying out the town and the scene of the crime, and recreating the tension individual townspeople felt the morning of the killing…and had felt for months and years prior. And although the Skidmore case may have endured in the culture for what commentators thought it capital-S Said About Us, he resists that sort of unqualified pronouncement. It’s impressive work, and I recommend it. (MacLean’s written other books, I’m happy to say; if you’ve read any of them, let me know if I should try them.) — SDB
Steven Soderbergh is producing a true crime docuseries for Starz. The property’s called Leavenworth, and it’s about Clint Lorance, a First Lieutenant in the U.S. Army who on July 2, 2012 ordered his reports to fire on three Afghan men who approached his group’s patrol position.
He was subsequently convicted of murder and sentenced to 19 years in Leavenworth (hence the show’s name, one presumes), and all his appeals to the conviction have been rejected by military judges in the years following. Supporters have since appealed to President Trump to commute Lorance’s sentence, and a civilian court is slated to review the case later this year. According to Deadline, the series will premiere on October 20 of this year. -- EB
Kim Kardashian West was spotted in a Washington D.C. jail last week, where she was working on her upcoming Oxygen documentary. The polymath’s latest TV deal made headlines back in May, when Oxygen announced that she would be the focus of a two-hour documentary entitled Kim Kardashian: The Justice Project.
The doc will reportedly focus on Kardashian West’s well-reblogged effort to become a lawyer, as well as her other work to reform the country’s criminal justice system. WJLA reports that documentary crews were with her last week when she visited the D.C. Department of Corrections to (per a tweet from the agency) “discuss the Georgetown Prison Scholars program as well as criminal justice reform.” According to Page Six, a release date for the doc has yet to be set. -- EB
The Great Hack is a compellingly-told documentary on how Cambridge Analytica worked to manipulate social media users and, as a result, the 2016 presidential election -- but it’s also a great indictment of what dumb, trusting dogs we all are when our screened devices ask us to divulge personal information. By now, we all know that Facebook et al. are not the benign let’s-see-how-shitty-our-high-school-rivals-look platforms many believed them to be, but co-directors Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim have found a unique way to visually communicate how Cambridge and other bad actors since then have exploited our (freely given, as with every good con) data to undermine our liberty and society.
I was so taken by the way Amer and Noujaim were able to animate these concepts that as soon as the show ended, I googled reviews for more. There I found Emily Dreyfuss’s review for Wired, which says what I was thinking but better, so I’m going to bogart it here:
…it’s hard to control a weapon you can’t see, and that's where The Great Hack offers even those very familiar with data tracking, and with the whole story of Cambridge Analytica, something powerful and new. It makes visible the normally invisible data of our everyday lives, and how it is harvested and weaponized against us. Through thoughtful narration and emoji-inspired animations, Amer and Noujaim reveal the digital detritus we leave in our wake whenever we send an email, look something up on a search engine, linger over an ad, make a purchase, or hit "like" on social media. And then, as alarming music swells in the background, the film uses that CGI to show how this data trail is being leveraged against us, every day: to sell us things, get us to vote or to stay home from the polls, to divide or unite us according to the whims of whoever has paid enough to take our digital threads and weave them into a web of their own desires.
You can watch The Great Hack on Netflix here. -- EB
Just a few weeks before Free Meek drops on Amazon, a Pennsylvania appeals court has overturned the musician’s conviction in a drug and gun case that has haunted him for years. Sarah and I will be discussing the upcoming docuseries on the August 7 episode of The Blotter Presents (the show drops on August 9); it’s a Jay-Z produced joint that dives into the dubious 2007 arrest that sent Mill to prison and left him on parole for a decade.
The judicial decision was a long time coming: Back in April of 2018, Philadelphia’s district attorney said that the sentence Mill received in his city’s courts should be tossed out, with a new trial to follow. Not a defense attorney, folks -- the D.A. Last week, a three-judge panel concurred, the AP reports. According to the justices, new evidence undermines the credibility of Reginald Graham, the police officer who testified against Mill and later left the Philadelphia Police department after allegedly stealing money then seeking to cover up the crime. Prosecutors have yet to say if they will pursue a new trial against Mill in the case. -- EB
Wednesday on Best Evidence: It’s The Blotter Presents, Episode 106, on which Allison Lowe Huff joins Sarah to discuss Sundance’s well-promoted docuseries No One Saw A Thing and BBC podcast The Doorstep Murder.
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