Mr. Bungle · Jimmy Kimmel · The Keepers
It's part one of our last budget sweep (on Substack, at least)!
the true crime that's worth your time
Hello and happy new year! As we’ve mentioned ad nauseam over the last couple weeks, like many other Substack-based publications, we’re preparing to leave this platform over its publicly-announced plan to continue to generate income from Nazi-related and other hate-based content.
(Former Washington Post criminal justice writer Radley Balko, who left the paper to launch a Substack and is now scrambling to figure out if he can afford to leave, made a nice point last week. He notes that Substack, which has positioned itself as some sort of last, fearless bastion of free speech, does not allow any content related to sex work and never has. It’s a policy that suggests that its management “find(s) porn, nudity, and sex work more offensive than Nazism.” It seems like that’s the sort of dissonance that Substack management should have considered when it wrote its bizarre response to writers’ Nazi concerns, and suggests that Substack management just might be too incompetent to trust with our work, your time, and your and my money.)
We started taking steps yesterday with our new plan, and it’s one I think you’ll really like! Not just saying that, Sarah and I are stoked as hell. But it’s time-consuming work, which means some publishing disruptions, we’re afraid. So thanks for your patience as we do things like break our monthly budget sweep into a couple days, so we can stay in touch but focus on the back end of things. We’re here, we’re thinking about you, and we’ll have more for you soon. — Sarah and Eve
Her Daughter Disappeared. That’s When the True-Crime Nightmare Began [Rolling Stone]
I feel like I’ve read enough of these stories lately, in which amateur sleuths make regular peoples’ lives miserable, to justify a meta-ID series called something like True Crime Ruined My Life. Get I Have Some Questions For You author Rebecca Makkai to host and you have a show I’d watch even if I didn’t have this publication to run! This one is a case that seems like a boat mishap — but one that amateur detectives have decided is a mysterious and perhaps even supernatural case, with TikToks and a popular Facebook group as only part of the frenzy. — EB
Michael Stone, Psychiatrist and Scholar Who Studied Evil, Dies at 90 [New York Times gift link]
The Most Evil host, Anatomy of Evil author, and shrink, who’d created a 22-category classification scale for killers, devoted some of his time to examining Hitler as part of his “yearning to define evil.” Take note, Substack. — EB
Sentenced to Life for an Accident Miles Away [New Yorker]
Crimes that result in a death can lead to felony-murder charges for those who committed the original crime — even if they weren’t involved in the death part of the case. That’s what happened in the case detailed at the top of the piece, which delves into the racial disparities for felony-murder prosecution and conviction, as well as the way its used by District Attorneys to manage public outrage when purse snatchings, for example, end in fatal falls. — EB
Pat McAfee Apologizes Over Aaron Rodgers’ Epstein Claim: “I Can Understand” Why Kimmel Got Upset [The Hollywood Reporter]
Why is known ding-dong Aaron Rogers saying that Jimmy Kimmel is one of the folks at risk of exposure when new documents related to the prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein are released on January 14?
Who knows what goes on in that conspiracy theory-peddling anti-vaxxer’s head, the continued employment of whom — as Colin Kaepernick continues to seek work — suggests that the NFL is more OK with unpleasant Qanon whackjobs than people who call for racial justice. Then again, this is a company (and sport) built on denying the dangerous impact it has on generations of men, so in the list of the football industrial complex’s crimes, this probably ranks pretty low. — EB
ID of Donna Lass skull helps prove the Zodiac killed her in 1970, sleuths say [SF Chronicle gift link]
The “peek through the pines” postcard (which, while googling, I found SO MUCH merch based on its graphic. There’s a “red flag when you befriend/start dating a true crime-interested person” in there somewhere but the last of my Trader Joe’s gingerbread coffee has not done enough magic to get me there yet) familiar to those who follow this case has been viewed by many as a reference to Lass, but law enforcement hasn’t made the connection. That still hasn’t changed, and Placer County police basically told said “sleuths” to leave the work to the crack team at South Lake Tahoe PD. Not sure who to root for here, tbh. — EB
‘It’s hell being famous’: second violent death of Serial podcast character raises ethics questions [The Guardian]
We discussed the fatal police shooting of S-town central figure Tyler Goodson when it happened, but this story looks harder at how the notoriety as part of this popular podcast might have weighed on the Woodstock, Alabama resident. Of note:
Goodson tried to cash in on his fame, selling T-shirts with “Black Sheep of S-Town” on the back via Facebook. Reality TV opportunities came up, but he turned them down partly because he was in a court case over personal belongings, including two buses and an 18-wheeler trailer, on McLemore’s property that he had been prevented from accessing by his heirs.
Also of note: Goodson, who died in the hospital after his shooting by police rendered him brain dead, was an organ donor; surgeries for recipients began on December 12. — EB
Theo Lengyel, Founding Member of Eureka’s Mr. Bungle, Arrested in Connection With Girlfriend’s Murder [Lost Coast Outpost]
People from the 1990s might recall metal-adjacent band Mr. Bungle, a side project of a former Faith No More frontman and other folks ousted from their respective bands. I was never into them as a person in Indiana, when I moved to the Bay Area — where they were based — I heard even less about them than I did in the midwest, which likely says something about to whom they appealed.
I hadn’t thought of the band in years, until news broke that founding member Theo Lengyel was being sought as a “person of interest” in the death of his girlfriend. Police are keeping mum on the circumstances and reasoning behind the arrest, but I can definitely see this as an eventual filler episode (in between the Tupac and Spector highlights) in an Oxygen/ID type show called Murder and Music or whatever. — EB
‘Killer Portland’ True-Crime Series In The Works From Back Roads Entertainment & A+E’s Category 6 Media [Deadline]
Sadly, this isn’t an adaptation of the (fictional) podcast above. Instead, the folks behind Pawn Stars, of all shows, are working on “a true-crime series exploring a possible serial killer in the Portland area.”
It’s unclear what case specifically they’re focused on, and the press release rewrite here — such as “The project tells the story of determined families who initiated their own investigations into the unsolved murders of their loved ones. Working alongside citizen journalists and armchair sleuths, they uncovered crucial evidence that prompted a multi-agency investigation that is now bringing justice to the victims and exposing the evil lurking within the city” — sure doesn’t help. Any ideas what this possibly linked set of Pacific Northwest homicides might be? — EB
The 23andMe Data Breach Keeps Spiraling [Wired]
If ABC News is looking for internet-based stories to blow out (pause here as I seethe about how many hours of my life were lost to their dumb Ashley Madison series), the 23andMe case is a good place to start. The company, which has been scrambling to keep the story as quiet as possible, was forced to admit to the SEC that 14,000 direct users had their data stolen; data scraping suggests that 6.9 million other folks are at risk, too. This isn’t just a password leak:
Hackers stole display names, most recent login, relationship labels, predicted relationships, and percentage of DNA shared with DNA Relatives matches. In some cases, this group also had other data compromised, including ancestry reports and details about where on their chromosomes they and their relatives had matching DNA, self-reported locations, ancestor birth locations, family names, profile pictures, birth years, links to self-created family trees, and other profile information.
The company told users last month that it had changed its TOS “related to dispute resolutions and arbitration,” likely to avoid lawsuits resulting from this breach. But will that be enough? — EB
Body of Joyce Malecki, whose 1969 murder was featured in 'The Keepers,' exhumed by FBI [CBS]
The feds are keeping mum on what caused them to exhume Malecki, whose 1969 homicide case remains unsolved. Father Joseph Maskell, the priest and alleged serial sexual assailant often linked to the case, died in 2001 and was exhumed in 2017 by Baltimore police as part of another, possibly connected homicide case, but that action didn’t result in any evidence relevant to the case at hand. — EB
‘The Tinder Swindler’ Producer Behind ‘Dead In The Water’ True Crime Series For Prime Video [Deadline]
This series, the release of which is planned for some time in 2024, is about the 1978 slaying of Central American tourists Chris Farmer and Peta Frampton. After decades missing, their graves were found in Guatemala in 2019; their alleged killer, a California boat guy named Silas Duane Boston, was charged in the homicides in 2016 but died prior to trial. The way he was tracked down is a legitimately fascinating story, so you can see why it attracted the attention of producers and Prime. — EB
Thursday on Best Evidence: Part two of our budget sweep, aka all the links we meant to get to but didn’t.
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