Keep Sweet · Catching A Killer · Corruption
Plus Miscavige memoirs, deputy gangs, and the late Liotta
the true crime that's worth your time
The first full week of June really got on one, didn’t it? And not just at Reelz, either! [rimshot] Thanks so much for sticking with us. Reviews and longreads ahead, but if you’re saving today’s edition as a treat for when you finish your grad-gift shopping, do I have some great news for you:
I also have a favor to ask: if you have a preferred read/listen for Jan 6 hearing recaps and takeaways — basically, any summary that gathers highlights and breaks down why it’s significant, with relative dispatch — can you drop them in the comments?
Feel free to take a day or two and see what emerges, but I’d love your recs and your fellow readers would benefit too. — SDB
And since we’ve all got the Watergate hearings near front of mind anyway, let’s kick off today’s longread line-up with a piece from last Sunday’s WaPo that sees Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward comparing Richard Nixon and Donald Trump on a corruption basis. I’ve said in this space a number of times that I’ve found Watergate content comforting during the Trump era, because it took a while, but eventually justice got served. That’s me cherry-picking the situation, of course, because there absolutely is a deceptive quaintness to the proceedings of the early seventies, and listening to the denouement of Graff’s Watergate, I realized just how destabilized and disoriented the country had become — in a way that a variation on recency bias may disguise because it quote unquote all worked out.
But even with the Graff in mind, I waded into the Woodstein piece all “come on, Trump is a power of 666 worse than ol’ Dick,” only to be brought up short by this relatively early graf:
The heart of Nixon’s criminality was his successful subversion of the electoral process — the most fundamental element of American democracy. He accomplished it through a massive campaign of political espionage, sabotage and disinformation that enabled him to literally determine who his opponent would be in the presidential election of 1972.
I picked that snip because I would posit that we don’t tend to think of Watergate and Nixon along that particular axis — that we focus on the cover-up, and use words like “bungled” about the inciting break-in, and don’t necessarily engage with the initial seditious intent (which demonstrably predated the CREP shenanigans). I don’t judge anyone for this, including myself; it’s just interesting, and I think there’s also a knee-jerk response to Trump’s chaotically vulgar presentation that makes him seem more dangerous for some reason, but the Woodstein piece highlights more of the similarities between the two presidents, and it’s a solid read. — SDB
The crime
The so-called Wind In The Willows murder.
The story
Catching A Killer dropped its first two episodes on Topic yesterday, including Ep 02 on the murder of rare book dealer Adrian Greenwood and the theft of his first-edition copy of Wind In The Willows — so I probably don’t have to explain why I chose that one to screen from the ones made available. I’d describe the show generally as, well, less of a “show” per se and more “the British child of The First 48 and PBS’s POV,” but let’s let Catching A Killer’s own PR email give you the official brief:
With unprecedented 360-degree access, this innovative and ratings-winning series, deemed the ‘Real life Inspector Morse’, follows major crime investigations from start to finish. Each documentary film is self-contained and follows the work of one major investigation – covering some of the most serious and challenging crimes facing this tri-county force.
So…what I said. Except not exactly, because The First 48 and its ilk would have a sonorous voice-over re-explaining what you’ve just watched, to make sure you get it (and, not for nothing, to reinforce a particular “it,” the fine/smart/dedicated performance of the detectives on-camera). CAK does not do this.
It does, alas, do a few other things I don’t care for in basic-cable investigation programming — the contrived scene with the prime suspect’s estranged wife and 14-year-old son, the latter of whom is a key witness in the investigation, talking about the son’s feelings around his father’s actions is one — but at 61 minutes, CAK still feels shorter than the average Crime 360. Deft, brisk editing among the search of the suspect’s apartment and a couple of interrogations really moves things along, and the production has a good ear for when to introduce damning evidence (that is occasionally darkly amusing; one of the suspect’s (stupidly unencrypted) kidnap-planning spreadsheets is titled “Silent But Deadly”). And while some of the talking-head interviews seem same-y, a couple gave me pause, like Almost Former Mrs. Prime Suspect sighing that you think finding yourself married to a monster is something that “you think ‘that’s never gonna happen to me’ — and it has.”
Catching A Killer is done well, then — but is it done well, or differently, enough to justify a subscription to Topic? …Not quite. It’s good; it’s fine; it’s a cut above the American version of what it does; as hotel TV, it’s top notch. But part of the appeal of hotel TV is that it just…comes on, with the room, and you don’t have to do anything. Topic is very possibly worth a sub for B.E. readers just on its own genre-focused merits, but Catching A Killer alone isn’t the show to put that rec over. If you already have said sub, check it out; if you don’t, you’ll live. — SDB
I didn’t know the late great Ray Liotta’s last role is in an Apple+ true-crime limited series. I did in fact know most of those facts, but the “true-crime” part escaped my notice. In any event, Black Bird
is adapted from the true-crime memoir "In With The Devil: A Fallen Hero, A Serial Killer, and A Dangerous Bargain for Redemption" by James Keene and Hillel Levin.
When I saw that logline, I thought, didn’t I stock that at Exhibit B. recently? Sure enough, I did, and here’s my logline of the book:
Son of a cop Keene, sentenced to 10 years with no parole, is dispatched to get info from suspected serial killer Larry Hall in exchange for Keene's release.
Taran Edgerton plays Keene, Paul Walter Hauser plays Hall, and Liotta is cop/dad Keene Sr. You can watch the Black Bird trailer below. — SDB
The silver lining to the on-one-osity of the week: I’ve made a sizable dent in the magazine pile! Still facing down a mini-heap of Consumer Reportses I feel both obligated to and repelled by, but that’s a matter for my therapist. Here’s a few New Yorker matters for your to-read list:
from the 5/9/22 issue: “Dark Lady” // This is the Elisabeth Moss profile, and the true-crime connection is tenuous, I admit — although Michael Schulman does get into the Scientology of it all, and tries to get Moss to talk about the incongruity of her image and the “dangerous cult” allegations against the Church — but primarily I mention it because it mentions a book I feel I’ve got to track down: “Moss’s … father, who comes from England, once played in a jazz band with Ron Miscavige, whose son, David, is the current head of the Church. (Ron Miscavige, who died last year, later published a damning book about his son, titled “Ruthless.”)” On the other hand, based on Vulture’s lowlights reel from a few years back, maybe I don’t want to know.
from the 6/6/22 issue: “Above The Law” // The same issue that brought us that Harvey Weinstein takedown went directly from that piece into Dana Goodyear’s Letter From Los Angeles, whose subhed asked, “Are there gangs operating inside the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department?” It’s clear not too many grafs in that there are, and that Alex Villanueva — former deputy and current sheriff who ran on a promise to fight corruption, but is alleged to consult his former-deputy wife on hiring and discipline decisions audibly during proceedings, among other things — is, if not a major part of the problem, then doing little or nothing to combat it. (Per the L.A. Times, recent defensive maneuvers involving FOX News and cowboy symbology have not helped his electoral profile.) Goodyear’s piece captures Villanueva, in response to video evidence that would seem to implicate an already problematic ally of his, Carl Mandoyan, in felony harassment, in a blithering rant that includes the sequence “anti, woman-hater, hashtag MeToo hashtag cancel culture hashtag whatever.” Just once lately, couldn’t these guys pick “incompetent” or “venal” instead of going for the two-fer?
from the 6/13/22 issue, “King Josh” // Joshua Schulte, a former CIA hacker accused of dumping a huge trove to Wikileaks, is not going down quietly; investigators also found a massive cache of child porn on his (hilariously easy to break into) “protected” hard drives, but Schulte seems to feel that he can leverage the mutually assured destruction to get himself a better deal. Patrick Radden Keefe does his customary outstanding job capturing, among other things, 1) the layers of Gorilla-strength red tape that make investigating an inside job like the one alleged here such a Joseph Hellerian prospect; 2) the opportunities a secondary-school system or peer group has to ID and possibly help, or at least neutralize, guys like this, but chooses to boys-will-be-boys it instead; and 3) the…tireless shunning of responsibility of a certain personality type, and how it can wear law enforcement or governing bodies down to the point where getting the antagonist to just fuck off already — whether or not he’s punished/corrected — becomes the priority. This is how Trump continued to make deals. This is how H.H. Holmes constructed his murder castle. They don’t give a shit, and they will just keep filing motions and stiffing contractors until one of you is dead. — SDB
The crime
Human trafficking in the guise of “religious freedom” and Warren Jeffs’s prophet privilege.
The story
Before I even started watching Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey, I triple-checked: haven’t we done this before? Like, exactly this, and it’s just gotten acquired by Netflix?
We haven’t; the property I reviewed late last year was a feature doc on discovery+. Netflix’s new four-parter shares a main title with Keep Sweet — and it’s hard to get too annoyed with productions about this case coming back to that phrase; the bland sweat-on-an-egg-white vileness of it is just too well suited to the subject matter — and a close reading of Warren Jeffs’s oleaginously blatant power-mongering with 2015’s Prophet’s Prey, not to mention several talking-head interviewees and sources with both.
But we haven’t done this before figuratively, either, because Pray and Obey is less focused on archival sources and more on anecdotal ones. Rachel Dretzin (Who Killed Malcolm X? and Frontline) and Grace McNally (who worked on The Vow and an opioid-crisis TV doc) don’t dwell as much on the visuals of regimental “polyg” purity as previous looks behind this nasty desert curtain; they let the victims narrate the crimes, from there to suggest the photos and videos. The endlessly replicating New-Jersey-via-the-Mennonites braid/bump coiffure, for instance: those styles and the limited variations thereon came directly from Warren Jeffs, and one of the few videos believers got to watch was on fishtail-French execution. Several former “sister wives” corroborate this with eye-rolls, as we cut from their present-day razored lobs or pixies to old photos of them on their wedding days, Snooki-bumped and rigid with terror.
On that point, too, Pray and Obey digs deeper. Most properties on Jeffs — although, much to my chagrin, not the scripted take starring Tony Goldwyn as an…enthusiastic groom to his teenage brides — will note the ages of the youngest brides in FLDS and then stand back from the arithmetic to let it speak for itself. And it does, of course; Jeffs Sr., Rulon, took wives six and a half decades his junior, few if any of whom had had even rudimentary reproductive logistics explained to them. But here, those wives speak for them-selves, and their horrifying testimony has a dark piquancy to it. One grumbles of her wedding night with Rulon, then 86, “Yeah, it…wasn’t magical.” Another notes of Warren’s apocalyptic rationalizations for pulling his “flock” further and further away geographically from mainstream society (read: “the prying eyes of non-monsters”) that “he knew how to tell us we were all gonna be destroyed, very vividly.”
And in two instances, interviewees boil the issues at hand down to sharp bone with admirable quickness — the woman (…I think? it could also have been Wallace Jeffs, one of Warren’s 29 brothers) who calls Warren “the awkward son of a man who had power”; and a Utahn prosecutor who doesn’t particularly care about punishing plural marriage per se, considering it a symptom: “It’s the secondary crimes that occur in a closed religious society.”
Pray and Obey is well made in the Netflix style, and it isn’t over-directed; it isn’t really capital-T Trying Something, it’s just giving survivors room to talk, and occasionally prompting them off-camera to take that last cognitive step towards a fuller understanding of the Jeffses’ abuses. But I thought I would recommend it only for people who hadn’t interacted with the case before via the other films I mentioned, because it wouldn’t furnish any new information — but I do recommend it, because, in its way, it does furnish new information. As I said before, often the narrative play with Jeffs and FLDS is to provide the revolting numbers and let them work on the viewer, be they the ages of the brides; the age differences in these marriages, often vast; the distance between blood relations “promised” to one another, often disappearingly small; or the sheer volume of victims, whether it’s underage girls given like chattel to adult men, or teenage boys and young men simply dumped out of the community as spare parts.
But the human mind finds big numbers like that hard to manage sometimes. You think you get it, but in its aggregated numerical form, you don’t, quite. With more and longer stories, detailed with faces and tears and grim late-night scrambles to finish dread trousseaux, you get it. I mean, you don’t, in the same way you don’t “get” Gacy, because you, a non-predator, can only follow it so far. But the foregrounding of these survivors helps you imagine it better, and attach to them as hopeful. Pray and Obey isn’t absolutely essential, but it’s a worthwhile addition to this major case’s file. — SDB
Next week on Best Evidence: Real talk? I just don’t know. My reward to myself for surviving this curséd week is Anthony Bourdain’s Typhoid Mary, so maybe I’ll pay that forward. Stay safe in the meantime!
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