LDS · Ryan Coogler · Undercurrent
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the true crime that's worth your time
You’ve likely seen the footage by now of director Ryan Coogler being led out of an Atlanta Bank of America branch for the crime of withdrawing money from his own account. Most of the headlines refer to him as the director of Black Panther, and I get it. But folks from the Bay Area were chilled by the story, as Coogler first caught the world’s attention with Fruitvale Station, his movie about a horrific and fatal police shooting of a public transit passenger. Seeing Coogler — who, like Oscar Grant, the central figure of Fruitvale Station, was just trying to live his life — cuffed for no reason and moved along by cops was an unsettling reminder of how vulnerable a person is when someone calls the cops for no reason.
It’s unclear why the story didn’t make headlines until this week, as it went down at an Atlanta BofA on January 7 of this year (Coogler is there shooting Black Panther: Wakanda Forever). Suddenly, two months later, it looks like Variety got a tip, and pulled most of its reporting from police reports, as Coogler has been silent but for a brief written statement: “This situation should never have happened. However, Bank of America worked with me and addressed it to my satisfaction and we have moved on.”
According to Atlanta police, Coogler made an in-person visit to a branch, and handed a teller a note reading, “I would like to withdraw $12,000 cash from my checking account. Please do the money count somewhere else. I’d like to be discreet.” Based on body camera footage released after the story broke, Coogler gave the teller his ID and inserted his BofA ATM card and entered its PIN, so his identity was clear.
However, “The teller then informed her boss that she suspected it was a robbery attempt and together they called the police,” Variety reports. The cops also detained Coogler’s friends, who were waiting outside, placing them in the back of a police car. After questioning everyone, they were released. “We deeply regret that this incident occurred,” Bank of America said via statement. “It never should have happened and we have apologized to Mr. Coogler.”
Writing your withdrawal information on a note isn’t an unusual thing to do, especially in urban areas, and asking a teller to do the count out of the public eye isn’t that odd, either. Of course, it also isn’t odd to be drunk on the train on New Year’s Eve in Oakland, but that’s the reason police gave for why they pulled Oscar Grant off a train and eventually killed him, a detail that Coogler was surely thinking about as the cuffs closed around his wrists in Atlanta. — EB
[Correction: An earlier edition called the film Fremont Station; we’ve corrected it to the proper title.]
Under the Banner of Heaven has a release date. This is the Andrew Garfield-starring adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s book, the story of the 1984 slaying of Brenda Wright Lafferty and her young child.
The bones of the case, per the Provo Herald Extra:
Lafferty was a beauty queen and college graduate hoping to go into journalism. Instead, she pursued a family life with her husband Allen Lafferty and her baby Erica.
The stories of her experiences with the Lafferty family are wide-reaching and discussed numerous times in the decades since.
On July 24, 1984, Allen was away from their American Fork duplex when Brenda’s brothers-in-law came to her home to fulfill what they believed was a prophecy.
They brutally murdered Brenda, 24 at the time and 15 month-old Erica while she lay in her crib.
During their subsequent trials, Dan Lafferty was sentenced to life in prison and Ron Lafferty was given the death penalty.
Dustin Lance Black adapted Krakauer’s 1983 book on the slayings, which investigators linked to the Laffertys’ membership in a fundamentalist LDS (Mormon) sect. Garfield plays Jeb Pyre, a cop on the case, and Sam Worthington and Wyatt Russell play the Lafferty brothers behind the homicide.
Via press release, Hulu announced that the FX series will drop “exclusively on Hulu” on April 28, with a two-episode premiere. Five more episodes will stream on subsequent Thursdays. What do you think, are you down to watch? — EB
Undercurrent: The Disappearance of Kim Wall is a completely serviceable and well-made documentary that you probably don’t need to watch. Part of that is because we live in a time when we have so many choices when it comes to true crime that it’s not just that we can afford to be picky, it’s that we have to be. It’s also because at some point, you have to ask yourself if your life will be improved by yet another reminder that wacky sociopathic rich white men will always get more attention than the people they exploit and harm (cough Elon Musk cough).
The details of the case: Swedish freelance journalist Kim Wall was working on a story about Danish entrepreneur Peter Madsen, who’d built his own submarine (the UC3 Nautilus). As part of that reporting, she boarded that sub for a two-hour tour. Prosecutors said that he tortured her and killed her, and even Madsen admits that he dismembered her and dumped her body parts in plastic bags, though he claimed it was she died accidentally (first he said because a hatch hit her head; later he claimed she was exposed to toxic gas) and his plan was to bury her at sea before taking his own life.
If at this point, you’re like “fuck this guy,” then join the club. And that’s sort of the problem with Undercurrent, which aired on HBO in two parts (each one hour long) on March 8; it’s on HBO Max as well. While the first 45 minutes or so lead up to Wall’s disappearance, with friends, colleagues, and former instructors talking about her, after that, we’re stuck with Madsen. And that guy sucks, and would suck even if he wasn’t a murderer, I suspect. (cough Elon Musk cough, man, I need to get this lung thing looked at!)
It’s not director Erin Lee Carr’s fault that Madsen is a shithead, nor is it her fault that the story is all about him. That’s often the problem with this genre. Even when you do your best to center the victim with quotes from friends and colleagues, that center remains empty, so the villain — especially when the villain is the amateur hour version of a Bond nemesis, with all the attendant quirks and foibles that made the Wall case such great fodder for the Danish press — oozes in to take that void over.
That’s what you end up with for the bulk of Undercurrent, and I just kept thinking, “Why am I doing this to myself?” If you enjoy hate-following Elon Musk or other monied bombastic jerkwads on twitter, then you might have more tolerance for Undercurrent than I did, so have at it.
But if you’re looking for a way to get a better feel for the non-toxic characters in the story — the Wall family, the investigators who dismantled Madsen’s lies, and the prosecutors who made the case against him — then you’ll be better served by The Investigation, the Scandinavian series made in consultation with Kim’s parents, Ingrid and Joachim Wall. It, too, is available on HBO, and unlike Undercurrent, it has the dramatic leeway to pull the focus from Madsen and toward people who might actually do some good in this world. [“I reviewed it for Primetimer last year and definitely recommend it.” - SDB] — EB
Substack’s search still sucks, but they do have an app. Substack, the newsletter-slash-glorified-blog platform you’re reading right now, announced Wednesday that the company has launched an app, something intended to bring “all your Substack subscriptions together in one venue, giving you a beautiful, focused place to read your favorite writers.”
They go off the deep end just a bit after that, I fear, writing:
It is an app for deep relationships, an alternative to the mindless scrolling and cheap dopamine hits that lie behind other home screen icons. It offers a quiet space to read, where the work itself is given the spotlight and you’re not pulled into status games or trivial diversions
I mean, no, it’s an app that lets you read the Substack publications you subscribe to, the same way Tumblr’s app did, or Blogger’s did, so let’s not act like Substack just discovered fire here. The differentiator between the Substack app and those venerable blog readers, in my mind, is that it provides a seamless way to financially support the folks whose writing you like, in a way that’s better designed than, say, the Patreon app.
Which reminds me, if you do feel like financially supporting Best Evidence…
I’m not going to keep boring you with my platform-specific thoughts, but especially since many of you have been with us since Substack’s rickety beginnings, I do what I can to let you know when they launch a change to the product. But if you do relish more talk about Substack and its overall business, my friend Casey Newton has a nice analysis of the news on his publication, Platformer, with plenty of good stuff even before you hit the paywall! — EB
“To the Son of the Victim” is not a longread, but a read that deserves a bit of meditation. I usually try to leave you for the weekend with a recommendation for a piece that takes a bit longer to digest, and while Sophie Haigney’s piece for the Paris Review isn’t lengthy, its got a lot to process.
Haigney was a breaking news reporter for the SF Chronicle, which means she was often on the recent crime beat. This piece clearly references that time in her career.
I’d been in Oakland for a pink sunrise, watching police sweep a homeless encampment, gathering what we called “string” from residents who had nowhere—yet again—to go. I felt more outraged than usual and also maybe more useful. This was journalism, I suppose I was thinking, making sure the world knew what was happening right here. I wrote three hundred words for my newspaper’s website in a café and was preparing to drive back across the Bay Bridge in brilliant golden morning light. Then I got a call.
An editor back at the office on Mission Street was listening to the police scanner and heard something unusual going on near Santa Rosa, about sixty miles northeast. Since I was already out, could I go? I could. I drove north, generalized dread already flushing cold through my veins, though I had no sense of what I was going toward. This is what the days were like, back then: waiting for something to happen, hoping it wouldn’t, getting the call, driving, always driving, toward disaster.
What follows is a raw, accurate depiction of the conflicting emotions of an emerging reporter, and how ugly our profession can be when directed toward feeding news consumers’ endless appetite for crime. It’s a brave thing to write, the opposite of journalistic self- aggrandizement. You should read it. — EB
Next week on Best Evidence: Ghislaine Maxwell! Bar Rescue! Lupin!
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