Jailhouse Lawyers · Dead Presidents · Con(gres)s(men)
Plus Episcopaliananigans and college-town dispatches
the true crime that's worth your time
Over last weekend, The New Yorker — inspired by George Santos (snerk) and apparently tipped that a new mini-generation of true-crime consumers is getting into The Imposter — sent out an archival circular headlined by the titular Frédéric Bourdin, whose “work” was the subject of David Grann’s 2008 profile in the magazine. Other stories collected in the email included a 2011 Evan Ratliff piece on FBI informants who “go too far”; Lucie Elven’s “What Lies Do to a Life”; and a St. Clair McKelway classic from the late sixties, “The Big Little Man from Brooklyn.”
McKelway’s piece has that NYer “con men/their marks, amirite” house archness that seems to reach across the decades to today’s iteration of the magazine, even though it now contains swear words — but as with his masthead-mates Grann and Calvin Trillin (and many others), McKelway’s tranquilly dry prose serves the genre well. Here’s a snip in which he talks about the gap between the exhortation to “be yourself,” and the lifelong desire of most humans to pretend:
“Be yourself” is a common command. Sometimes it is addressed to a friend, a lover, a husband, a wife, or somebody else who the person uttering it has cause to think is not being himself or herself. At other times, an individual issues this command to the soul that exists at his very center. In any case, it is an edict that is infrequently carried out. Few people are entirely satisfied with being themselves. The urge to be somebody other than oneself is so universal and so deep-seated that it may well be an elemental instinct of the human species. Many people—and creative people in particular—admittedly spend the better part of their lives trying to find themselves; the inference is that the self they are making do with in the meantime is not their own but somebody else’s. Children as young as three years of age, or even two, enjoy not being themselves. It is only a pathologically unimaginative child who doesn’t try to palm himself off as an Indian or a cowboy as soon as he is big enough to make a horse out of a stick and ride it.
He goes on to talk about the “art” in “con artistry” — and, conversely, the con or imposture that is “an artist”/the creative self. Goethe; Samuel Johnson; the luncheon particulars of the “big little man” with whom McKelway begins the article…it’s stereotypical 20th-century New Yorker, with frequent digressions into related crimes and a pointillist level of detail, but it’s McKelway, so if this is your last pre-paywall piece of the month, you don’t get cheated. — SDB
Keeping it old-timey with our next selection, a DelawareToday.com piece from 2015 on an 1858 campus murder that remains unsolved. Thanks to Heather M. for tipping me to this one, with the note that, in the middle of the nineteenth century, even 20-year-olds looked middle-aged, and: truly. Check out this “Col. Sanders after de-aging CGI” foolishness.
But as compelling as the visuals are, the lede on the story of the unsolved murder of John Edward Roach is even better.
Sending a child to college feels riskier than it should. Despite alcohol, fraternities, drugs and everything else, twenty-somethings are statistically safer on campus than off. Still, things happen and always have. Take, for instance, the 1858 murder of Delaware College student John Edward Roach in Newark. Stabbed in a dorm brawl, Roach bled to death in a crime that was never solved. But, as a sort-of apology, the college went out of business.
Whether it’s “things happen and always have,” the phrase “dorm brawl,” or the college shrugging “sowwee” and subsiding from the scene after failing to ID Roach’s killer, there’s an about-to-giggle snappiness to this intro I really like.
Then, someone insulted the mother of John Edward Roach.
I said I’m in, Mark E. Dixon! …But seriously, folks: Dixon does an excellent job explaining what led to Roach’s dudgeon over the implication that his mother was an orangutan, which led to the “dorm brawl,” which in turn led to Roach getting fatally stabbed in the neck during the “melee.” (Not very long story short: people got very worked up over pamphlets back in the Buchanan era!) Flimsy circumstantial evidence got a fellow student sent to trial, but acquitted, and while the ending to this case may not satisfy, this piquant piece certainly does. — SDB
And since we’re already rattling around in the 1800s, how about a little crackpottery involving the possible assassination by cherries of President Zachary Taylor? “Back up, Buntsy: we had a President Zachary Taylor?” I hear you, it gets pretty fake-sounding between Andrew Jackson and Abe Lincoln. Taylor’s porn-y nickname, “Ol’ Rough and Ready,” also sounds fake, and his entire platform seemed to consist of 1) being a war hero and 2) presenting as an easy mark for the agendae of his supporters.
Taylor’s successor, Millard Fillmore, got the Compromise Of 1850 passed; this allowed slavery in several western states and states-to-be, a concession to pro-slavery states/politicians that Taylor — himself a slaver — had evidently shown insufficient enthusiasm for, as he found himself sympathizing “more with abolitionists.” This ostensible motive, along with his death from a gastrointestinal ailment that read a lot to more recent physicians like arsenic poisoning, prompted retired humanities prof Clara Rising to try to get Taylor dug up for testing.
…Yeah, I can’t believe authorities went for that either. And testing didn’t go for the aptly (?) named Rising’s theory, either, but I think you’ll go for this enthusiastic write-up by Zachary Crockett, who has a few copy errors (it’s “poring over,” not “pouring over,” unless it’s cold brew) but gets some memorable quotes and delivers a great closer.
The book that sent me down a wikihole of Tayloriana, Accidental Presidents: Eight Men Who Changed America, is how I’ll be spending at least part of my weekend; I’ve got a long car trip ahead, and Arthur Morey’s narration of Jared Cohen’s book is just the sort of sliiiiightly snarkish history that eats interstate. Accidental Presidents also tipped me, in passing, to the sketchy doings of one Rev. Benjamin T. Onderdonk, the clergyman who presided over President Tyler’s second marriage. The Episcopal Church bounced Onderdonk from the New York bishopric (say that five times fast!) in the mid-1840s — according to the Church, because another bishop had received numerous affidavits attesting to Onderdonk getting grabby with lady parishioners. According to Onderdonk, his enemies contrived a scandal because he took the wrong side in an arcane dispute about Catholic sympathies.
Onderdonk’s theory is both exactly the sort of paranoid rationalizing you’d expect to hear from a man accused of sexual impropriety; and marginally credible given the contemporaneous rise of the Know Nothing party, whose nativist anti-Catholic raving is…not unfamiliar to us here in 2023, and I’ll leave it at that. Of course, then there’s the fact that Onderdonk’s brother, also a bishop in Pennsylvania, got suspended at around the same time for alcoholism, so maybe the Onderdonks just had impulse-control issues?
This newsletter isn’t called “Best Eminence” so I’ll move on to something else, but whenever someone’s all “I’m not into true crime” and then says they’re more of a history buff, I feel like hiking a thumb at books like this. Like most history books, Accidental Presidents has crime practically leaking out the spine. — SDB
Anyone got How I Caught My Killer on their weekend watchlist? I might give it a look, but I have a question about the logline:
How I Caught My Killer is an adjudicated true-crime series that highlights the real-life stories behind these unique cases with in-depth interviews, authentic archival material, and cinematic recreations all packaged together into a fresh spin in the genre.
I don’t know how “fresh” I’d call it — it’s basically a small tweak to the “the victim left clues even law enforcement (probably) couldn’t bungle” micro-genre (I’m paraphrasing) — but it’s the word “adjudicated” that strikes me. I know what the word itself means; I’m wondering if this is a new thing in true-crime marketing, to distinguish a series’ cases in this manner up front. Have you guys seen it more often in loglines lately?
So many of the shows in the genre, at least the basic-cable staples that air on Oxygen and ID (or American Greed, etc. and so on), have already gone through the system formally that it seems beside the point to mention — almost as an explicit counterpoint to the disclaimers on, say, The First 48 — that the stories have been “processed” as cases as well as narratives. Is this a prophylactic measure around defamation actions? Is it a fancy word designed to signal…something to high-volume consumers? Is it just one of those buzz-ish terms like “collab” that we’re going to have to endure for a while before the genre’s PR mavens find another one to overuse?
That this is the most compelling aspect of the show’s on-stream marketing probably doesn’t bode great for my chances of caring about it, but I could be wrong. — SDB
If you’re looking for one more weekend longread, head to NY Mag for Justine van der Leun’s “Kelly Harnett Had To Get Free.” By turns scathing and hopeful about the carceral system’s particular forms of misogyny, van der Leun’s piece from the January 2-15 issue covers everything from how “jailhouse lawyers” like Harnett earn the appellation; the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act’s effect (or, sometimes, disappointing lack of same) on mis- or over-sentenced women charged as accessories in abusive partners’ crimes; “the ‘sexual abuse to prison’ pipeline” cited by activists; and Harnett’s unique relationship with the prosecutor who put her behind bars.
“I don’t hold grudges,” Harnett said, shrugging. “People have fucked-up jobs, and he’s one of them.”
A wide-ranging and informative read that gives you a sense of the system, and of the city and state at the same time. — SDB
The murders in Idaho have apparently become a mood ring of sorts for the true-crime genre — or a symptom of all sorts of problems with the genre, including bad intel, which Eve talked about earlier this week. I’m of two minds, as I always am when a particular case and the coverage around it inspires more meta discussions about true crime and its practitioners’ foibles. On one hand, you know, great! Let’s get into it about missing-white-girl priorities, copaganda, and junky forensics! Let’s examine the motives behind clickbait and rushed-out product.
On the other hand, interrogating the interests (in various sense of that word) in a given case a) doesn’t IME tend to lead to a ton of change, and b) doesn’t change the fact that it is…of interest. Like, sometimes you just want information and not to What It All Means it all afternoon. To that end, I’ve got two properties of note. The first is from a reliable purveyor of news, 20/20, although I do not love the tack they’re taking with the promo.
That said, while it might not break any ground or set any efficiency records, it’s probably not going to be useless garbage. The episode airs tonight, Friday 13 January, at 9 ET on your ABC affiliate and will show up on Hulu the next day.
Meanwhile, Air Mail’s Howard Blum took his ass to Idaho to get to know the scene and context, and the first part of his investigation, “The Eyes of a Killer,” provides useful background I haven’t seen elsewhere. It’s in Air Mail, so there’s some performative overwriting (“jagged red rivulets” of blood; a reference to a “Persian ziggurat”), but I quite admired Blum’s delving into the controversial role of EMS dispatch:
Later, when it became necessary to fix blame for the initial confusion over the gravity of the situation, fingers in the Moscow police department pointed to the dispatcher. But the truth is, the dispatcher was simply following procedure.
All the town’s 911 calls are routinely routed to Pullman, about 10 miles west in Washington State (and home to Washington State University), where they’re handled by the civilian employees of a municipal agency called Whitcom 9-1-1. The calls come in from the local Whitman and Asotin counties, as well as the city of Moscow, two universities with a total of about 42,000 students, and 70 additional municipal and county agencies. And the dispatch crews, local newspapers report, are severely understaffed. The overtime schedules often add up to a grueling 20 hours each week. In fact, the dispatchers’ guild has complained that “our ability to uphold public safety is at risk.”
And things only get worse on football weekends. Therefore, when the callers are agitated, rather than risk injurious delays by probing for details, the responders swiftly assign a generic explanation. “Unconscious person” is one of the standard catchphrases. It can mean precisely what it says, or it can be shorthand for something more ominous.
Those grafs gave my mind’s eye the best concept of the situation that I’ve read to date. Part II probably drops over the weekend, if you dig Part I and want to keep an eye out. — SDB
Next week on Best Evidence: We’re off on Monday; after that, Martha Mitchell, Jan 6 audio, and much more.
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