Landscapers · Jan. 6 · Black and Missing
Plus a mother of a true-crime connection
the true crime that's worth your time
A very happy and well-behaved All Saints Day to you all. Especially fond wishes to Eve for covering for me last week after the passing of my mother, Barbara, who would have groaned at the pun in that subhed, mostly because she didn’t get to it first.
Today is the 79th anniversary of my mother’s birth, and I wondered how to honor the occasion, given that she wasn’t a big true-crime person. Worst crimes in Indiana history? Military murders, since she was an army brat? She was born on Fort Jackson; that installation’s had some doozies just in 2021.
Barb did know a handful of bold-type cases, but only because they kept coming up in the crosswords she did each day (in pen, she would have had you know), so I could start with a word-puzzle connection: completed crosswords found with a child’s body led, after much combing of documents and handwriting samples, to an arrest in the 1981 murder of little Lars Bense.
Barb was also obliged to become, and stay, a Girl Scout until nearly voting age — high-ranking officers’ wives, like my Nana, were expected to have First Lady-esque “causes” or projects; Nana’s was the Girl Scouts, and a Scout program center was named for her back in the eighties. A relevant true-crime read in that vein was unsettlingly easy to find: the murders at Camp Scott in Oklahoma in 1977, which remain unsolved. The Tulsa World ran a deep dive into the case and the last hours of the victims last year, and evidently there’s a 1993 documentary on the case narrated by Johnny Cash, which…what? I’m sorry Ma and I can’t watch it together and make fun of it, but if it’s on YouTube, you guys and I could watch it together and make fun of it!
…oh dang here it is:
“Happy” birthday, Ma? …The rest of you, let me know if this looks like a likely watch-along. — SDB
It’s also time for you to let me know what my November bonus review is about! We’ve got a couple of docuseries, a TV movie, a 2020 podcast; we’ve got the carceral system and multi-generational con families; a little something for everyone.
And look for the Tread review in a few days, but remember: the bonus reviews are only for paid subscribers, so if you want to read that — and alllll the others! — then mash that button. — SDB
The Washington Post dropped a huge, intensive before/during/after report yesterday on the Jan. 6 attack. On the heels of last week’s reports that some GOP lawmakers held repeated meetings with 1/6 organizers come other nauseating revelations about how much was known in advance about the insurrection, and how little was done to head it off. Like a lot of content about that day, it’s rage-making to a possibly unhelpful degree; like a lot of content about Trump-adjacent events, it’s often so hard to separate venality and rank incompetence that you may just want to throw up your hands and think about something else. And I get it. But when he wasn’t performing a valuable function as a sophomore-year sleep aid, Thucydides occasionally had a point. Here’s a snip from the “Before” section:
The paralysis that led to one of the biggest security failures in the nation’s history was driven by unique breakdowns inside each law enforcement agency and was exacerbated by the patchwork nature of security across a city where responsibilities are split between local and federal authorities.
While the U.S. government has been consumed with heading off future terrorist plots since 9/11, its agencies failed to effectively harness the security and intelligence infrastructure built in the wake of that assault by Islamic extremists to look inward at domestic threats.
Intelligence officials certainly never envisioned a mass attack against the government incited by the sitting president.
Never mind hearing the last of 1/6 as a true-crime prospect; I think we’ve barely heard the first of it — and we’ll try not to get too tangled up in the story around here, but the point of the newsletter is to find you the true-crime content that’s worth your time, and if you have the vague sense that a bunch of laws got broken and a bunch of people should be fired for cause back in January, the Post team’s extensively but not intrusively researched and footnoted investigation is just the clarifying thing. — SDB
Oxygen’s Murdered and Missing in Montana premieres this coming Friday. Not to wax too cynical here, because the disproportionate number of disappearances and deaths among indigenous communities is and has been a problem and it’s high time we had a glut of properties about it. But something about the special feels cynical its own self. Maybe it’s the alliteration? Here’s Oxygen’s PR rundown of the program:
MURDERED AND MISSING IN MONTANA focuses on the disappearance and mysterious deaths of three Indigenous girls, leaving their families and community with many unanswered questions and without any closure. The special aims to bring awareness to the ongoing crimes against Indigenous girls and women in Montana, which has one of the highest rates of missing and murdered Indigenous women in the country. It exposes the limited resources given to investigate due to unclear jurisdiction but also what exactly can be done to protect the vulnerable.
The other thing that lands wrong for me is in that last sentence — the blaming of law-enforcement underwork of these cases on jurisdictional problems. Those problems absolutely exist, don’t get me wrong, and a state like Montana where you can drive all day and not see a single other car presents size-/population density-based policing challenges…but this isn’t an excuse you tend to hear trotted out when it’s not a minority population getting besieged. …I don’t know; the special just strikes me as kind of “look at us, caring!”, in a way that’s slightly gross. Is it just me? — SDB
The trailer’s below; if you have longreads to recommend on any of the cases under discussion, let’s hear them. — SDB
I don’t have the same issue with upcoming HBO docuseries Black and Missing. I concede that perhaps that’s because it’s HBO and I’m a big snob, but perhaps that’s also because this one is devoting more than twice as much runtime to the issue, and seems like more of a proactive investigation than a reactive performance. From HBO’s press release:
[Black and Missing,] by multiple Emmy® winner Geeta Gandbhir and award-winning documentarian, journalist, author and activist Soledad O’Brien, follows sisters-in-law and Black and Missing Foundation founders Derrica and Natalie Wilson as they fight an uphill battle to bring awareness to the Black missing persons cases that are marginalized by law enforcement and national media. The series, which was three years in the making, takes on new urgency given the renewed national conversation on “missing white woman syndrome”.
…
Cases of missing Black people remain unresolved four times longer than those of white people.
“Three years in the making” just has a little more heft IMO. Black and Missing premieres Tuesday November 23; in the interim, you can check out the Black and Missing Foundation’s website. And that docuseries is the first of four doc projects, debuting on HBO on Tuesdays through the end of the year, that explore “crime-related stories and the issues surrounding them.” Here’s the rest of that list:
LIFE OF CRIME: 1984-2020 (November 30), an intimate verite documentary that spans 36 years in the lives of three friends from Newark and captures the highs and lows of the vicious cycles of drug addiction and street crime in one of the roughest parts of New Jersey. Directed by Jon Alpert.
THE SLOW HUSTLE (December 7), a searing look at corruption within the Baltimore Police Department, through the prism of a veteran officer’s mysterious death, as local journalists, family and the community strive to find the truth. Directed by Sonja Sohn.
THE MURDERS AT STARVED ROCK (December 14 and 15), a three-part documentary series exploring the 1960 brutal murders of three women in Starved Rock State Park in LaSalle County, Illinois, and the decades of questions and doubts that have haunted the son of the prosecutor in the case, as the man found guilty seeks to clear his name after sixty years in prison. Directed by Jody McVeigh-Schultz.
Yes, “that Sonja Sohn, from The Wire.” I’m looking forward to all of these…and thinking I should go back and hunt up Charm City, which I think aired via Independent Lens and is still clattering around on one of my DVRs. — SDB
Also dropping on HBO (or maybe only HBO Max? that branding narrative is still something of a tangle) on December 7: Landscapers, starring Olivia Colman and David Thewlis. The four-parter is “inspired by true events,” specifically
the story of Susan and Christopher Edwards, a mild-mannered couple who went on to kill Susan’s parents and bury them in their back garden, a crime that remained undiscovered for over a decade. The darkly comic drama is based on extensive research, hours of interviews, and direct access to the accused, who have always claimed their innocence.
I’d never heard of the case, but this 2014 Guardian longread on the Edwardses, their victims, their memorabilia addiction, Susan’s forged correspondence with Gerard Depardieu, a disputed inheritance, Eurovision, the cop next door…you start the article wondering how HBO’s going to get four episodes out of this story and by the end, you’re wondering why it’s not thirteen. I’d watch a whole hour on the new owners of the victims’ home just based on this bit from the end:
“A lot of people have said, ‘How can you possibly still live there?’ but I love our home,” she said on the day of the verdicts. “We’ve got a great garden and we’ve had a lot of happy times here. I’ve lived here all this time and the Wycherleys have not done me any harm. They’re not going to do me any harm now.”
Curiosity piqued? The official trailer is below. — SDB
This week on Best Evidence: Joe Berlinger, Julia Garner, Norman Mailer, and a wine called The Prisoner.
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