Lucky · Rent-a-Hitman · Turtles
Plus: A couple of reviews worth reading
the true crime that's worth your time
A planned film adaptation of Alice Sebold’s 1999 memoir, Lucky, played a part in the exoneration of an innocent man. Like many people taken by 2002 novel The Lovely Bones, I circled back to the novelist’s memoir after reading it and was left shaken. Alice Sebold’s non-fiction account of her 1981 rape, entitled Lucky, sold over a million copies. A film adaptation was announced a few years ago, with producer Timothy Mucciante on board.
But as Mucciante dove into the story, he started to feel that something was gravely wrong. “It was obvious to me that something was off,” Mucciante told NPR, “because [Anthony J. Broadwater, the man convicted of Sebold’s rape] had no other criminal history…He basically got picked up off the street and thrown into prison for this.”
Speaking to the New York Times, Mucciante said that “I started having some doubts, not about the story that Alice told about her assault, which was tragic, but the second part of her book about the trial, which didn’t hang together.” Mucciante left the production over those concerns, then hired a private investigator to look into what he saw as holes in the case.
Dan Myers, the PI, brought the evidence he pulled that seemed to exonerate Broadwater to J. David Hammond, a defense attorney who’d also been mulling Broadwater’s case. Broadwater, who served 16 years in prison and was released in 1998, said he had long been haunted by his conviction. “On my two hands, I can count the people that allowed me to grace their homes and dinners, and I don’t get past 10,” he told the NYT. “That’s very traumatic to me.”
According to the DA of Onondaga County, where Broadwater was convicted in 1981, “This should never have happened…I’m not going to sully this proceeding by saying, ‘I’m sorry.’ That doesn’t cut it,” the AP quotes him as saying.
Per The Post-Standard of Syracuse:
The long-ago trial largely hinged on two crucial pieces of evidence: Sebold’s initial misidentification of the suspect during a police lineup and microscopic hair analysis, later deemed junk science by the federal government.
Hammond said the one-two punch of a single witness and junk science doomed the wrong man to suffer for 40 years for a rape he didn’t commit.
“Sprinkle some junk science onto a faulty identification, and it’s the perfect recipe for a wrongful conviction,” Hammond said.
Sebold has not responded to any outlets that have approached her for comment, but Broadwater says he hopes he hears from her. “I just hope and pray that maybe Ms. Sebold will come forward and say, ‘Hey, I made a grave mistake,’ and give me an apology,” Broadwater told the NYT. “I sympathize with her, but she was wrong.”
Meanwhile, the film adaptation — the same one that spurred Mucciante to look into the case — fell apart months ago, Variety reports. Not because of problems with the case, though, but over a simple loss of financing. Meanwhile, Scribner, the publishers of Lucky (which refers to Broadwater under the pseudonym “Gregory Madison”), says they have no plans to update the book to reflect the outcome of the case. “Neither Alice Sebold nor Scribner has any comment,” a spokesperson told Best Evidence (and a multitude of other outlets). “Scribner has no plans to update the text of Lucky at this time.” — EB
My god, how is it time to decide on Sarah’s December review? At present, Netflix hostage negotiation series Captive has the edge, but there’s still time to vote on what property she’ll present as a subscriber-only review next month. Honestly, I’m surprised that infertility scam podcast Immaculate Deception isn’t doing better!
A website created for a discarded business idea sent a reportedly mariticidal woman to jail. Back in 2005, NorCal resident Bob Innes and some friends decided to launch an IT company and call it “Rent A Hitman.” The idea, Innes told ABC7, was a play on words … Rent, as in hire us. Hit, as in web hit -- visitor traffic, analytics, that sort of thing.”
The business didn’t really go anywhere, but the site, at rentahitman.com, remained, telling visitors that “Since 1920, Rent-A-Hitman has assisted satisfied clients from all walks of life ranging from regular citizens (children & adults) to government employees and even political figures.” Three testimonials appear on the front page, with attestations like “Caught my husband cheating with the babysitter and our relationship was terminated after a free public relations consultation. I'm single again and looking to mingle. Thanks Guido!”
Hardly ground-breaking comedy, but I’ve seen worse. It seems relatively clear that it’s a joke site, though…or so Innes thought.
About 650 to 700 people have contacted him since he first registered the website in 2005, including about 400 who, like Wein, filled out his “service request form,” which requires users to give their name, email address and phone number, along with the same information of their “targets,” Innes said.
Innes vets the entries, which come in at a clip of about eight to 10 a month these days. He tosses the crank entries. But if he can verify the existence of the person requesting a hit man and the target they want killed, he forwards the information to one of RentAHitman’s 17,985 “field operatives,” which just so happens to be the approximate number of law enforcement agencies in the country.
All these years later, he’s still a little dumbfounded people don’t realize his site is bogus.
“I don’t get it,” Innes told The Washington Post last week. “People are just stupid.”
One of those people is Wendy Wein, who pleaded guilty to two counts of soliciting a murder last week. Michigan’s The Monroe News has the report.
According to police, Wein completed a form on the site called a ‘service request’ using a fake name, but the form did include other personal identifying information. The owner of the website domain reported this information to the Michigan State Police and said he created the domain as a cyber-security test site.
After being made aware of the situation, an undercover detective with MSP contacted Wein on July 17, 2020 and made an arrangement to meet at a cafe in South Rockwood later that day. The interaction was under surveillance by Monroe Area Narcotics Team and Investigative Services (MANTIS), and Livingston and Washtenaw Narcotics Enforcement Team (LAWNET). Surveillance revealed that Wein repeatedly told the detective she wanted her ex-husband murdered.
Wein provided the detective with her former husband’s home address, place of employment and work schedule, and agreed to pay $5,000 for the murder. Wein met up with the detective in person a second time later that day to give him a $200 cash down payment. She was arrested shortly after, and confessed her involvement and intentions.
Innes tells ABC7, “The website has prevented, essentially, 150 murders at this point,” and what I am wondering is WHY THIS HAS NOT BEEN ADAPTED YET. I mean, with 8-10 service requests a month coming to that site, and 150 potential homicides investigated, this feels like PODCAST GOLD, Y’ALL. Why isn’t someone from a big pod company (or small, I don’t care) getting Innes to sign on the dotted line? I would listen to this show all day, if allowed. — EB
And now, two recent reviews that have attracted my true crime TV attention:
True-crime TV fuels ‘missing white woman syndrome.’ Two new docs aim to change that [LA Times]
Sarah tackled Black and Missing (HBO) and Murdered and Missing in Montana (Oxygen) earlier this month, in an issue I urge you to read. Now LAT critic Lorraine Ali offers her take, saying both shows do a good job in examining “why law enforcement and the national media pay far less attention to a disappearance when the victim is Black or a person of color, and how much of the apathy is rooted in systemic racism.”
And what’s this Dahmer doc on…Tubi? Fox, which owns C-list streaming platform Tubi, caught my eye with this fairly tasteless syndicated listicle of Jeffrey Dahmer properties, which places the new Tubi show on top. Intel is scarce for Fresh Meat: Jeffrey Dahmer, which (based on IMDB) appears to be from a first-time documentarian named Kevin Barry. I share this Twitter user’s (unanswered) questions about the project:
But am not curious enough to figure out how to add Tubi to my quiver of platforms. Have any of you watched it (or Black and Missing or Murdered and Missing in Montana) and have thoughts? — EB
And finally, an animal-smuggling longread. “To Catch a Turtle Thief: Blowing the Lid Off an International Smuggling Operation” reads the headline in The Walrus, your first hint that this is not your usual heist or homicide yarn. Here’s a snip to get you going:
Canada and the US are signatories of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, which requires an Appendix II permit to ship live turtles internationally. After the package of terrapins was discovered, the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) scanned its import/export database for the person named on the padded envelope as the shipper: Dave Sommers. There was no history of permits filed under that name. An anonymous informant—referred to in court documents as CPI-444—later called the Virginia-based offices of the USFWS’s international arm and mentioned the name Dave Sommers. Not only was he shipping turtles illegally, reported the informant, Sommers was collecting them illegally too.
Shortly afterward, a formal joint investigation between Canadian and American authorities was launched, something Jordan says occurs only a handful of times a year in cases of wildlife crime. Previous joint efforts, says Jordan, have convicted poachers of Alaska’s famous brown bears and a black-market importer of exotic Caribbean fish. The parcel of turtle hatchlings would come to reveal much more than just who had sent them: it would act as the first bread crumb in a trail from the Calgary airport to a New Jersey swamp to exotic pet collections in China, exposing a network far larger than one person and one padded envelope.
Read the whole tale of terrapin transgression here. — EB
Wednesday on Best Evidence: Only subscribers will see what Sarah has in store; join them!
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