New Podcasts · Evan Peters · Kit Kats
Four new shows to look forward to in 2023
the true crime that's worth your time
Evan Peters’ Golden Globes win for his portrayal of Jeffrey Dahmer has further incensed the families of Dahmer’s victims. We’ve talked about some of this before: family members of the men killed by Jeffrey Dahmer say that they weren’t contacted by Ryan Murphy and/or the team he worked with to produce Netflix’s Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, and some of those same folks spoke out again after last week’s return of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s return to the awards stage.
That’s where Peters was honored as the Best Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series, an award he accepted with a quick and professional speech. His last line was “And lastly but most importantly, I want to thank everyone out there who watched this show. It was a difficult one to make, a difficult one to watch, but I sincerely hope some good came out of it.”
As noted by BuzzFeed in one of the site’s photo-heavy aggregation posts, folks on social media questioned why Peters didn’t also acknowledge the folks Dahmer killed.
Shirley Hughes, whose son Tony was Dahmer’s 12th victim, has been outspoken in her contempt for the series, telling the Guardian last year that she didn’t “see how they can use our names and put stuff out like that out there.” In the series, her son’s death is featured in the sixth episode of the series:
The episode – titled “Silenced” – shows Hughes meeting Dahmer during a night out and striking up a relationship with him. The show implies that, as Hughes tries to leave after a night spent together, Dahmer murders him, possibly with a bloodied hammer.
The episode ends with Dahmer cooking and eating Hughes’s liver after donating money to a search effort that his victim’s mother and other family members mounted after his sudden disappearance.
Speaking with TMZ last week, the 85-year-old Hughes said that “people winning acting roles from playing killers keeps the obsession going and this makes sick people thrive on the fame.” She said that at the least, Peters could have acknowledged those killed by Dahmer, but even that might not be enough. “It's a shame that people can take our tragedy and make money,” Hughes said. “The victims never saw a cent. We go through these emotions every day.” — EB
As the year begins, we’re seeing more and more announcements of podcasts launching in 2023. Here’s four of note to consider:
Tenfold More Wicked Season 7
This podcast from Exactly Right (My Favorite Murder, various mysterious cancellations, etc.) has been around since 2020, somehow churning out six seasons of (their words, not mine) “a unique blending of narrative nonfiction storytelling with investigative journalism, a deep dive into the lives of victims...and killers. And how they made history” in that relatively narrow window. Per a press release, the seventh season drops on Jan. 23. From the release:
This season kicks off with the frightening story of Eugene Burt. In the late 1800s in Austin, Texas, Burt murdered his wife and daughters, both of whom were under the age of 5. With a case that rocked the developing town, citizens were in disbelief - not only that their neighbor and friend could have brutally murdered his family but that he did not remember committing the crime.
Folks interested in the Burt murders who just can’t wait for the 23rd — or who aren’t interested in this podcast — can find a solid recap of the case here. The new season, which is called The Annihilator, will be available on all the usual podcast platforms. — EB
Chameleon: Dr. Dante
The fifth season of con-focused Chameleon podcast slipped past me earlier this month, and this one is a doozy: per Deadline, it’s about “Dr. Ronald Dante, a hypnotist and scam artist who was Lana Turner’s seventh and last husband.”
It will tell Dante’s story of being a prodigiously talented hypnotist, and not an actual doctor, whose mind-bending schemes spanned decades. Dante worked the smoke-filled nightclubs of 1960s Hollywood and rode the self-help craze of the 1980s and 90s, hypnotizing women out of their fortunes, taking out hits on his rivals and opening up one of the biggest fake universities in history.
He was convicted of a variety of crimes including mail fraud and died in 2013.
The series is already three episodes in, and I’m still on the first one — so far, I’m really enjoying its mix of ring-a-ding Hollywood glamour and self-help era exploitation. Is anyone else here listening to this one? — EB
Stolen Hearts
Wondery podcast Stolen Hearts dropped a trailer last week, but its announcement didn’t get any pickup until yesterday, when Variety ran the news as an “exclusive” (lol OK). That trade pub’s press release aggregation promised the following:
Merging crime and romcom in a twisting true life story, the six-part series journeys back to 2006 to tell the story of a highly respected police sergeant from rural Wales who falls for the wrong guy. Whilst looking for love online, decorated policewoman Jill meets Dean, a handsome, charming and self-made businessman from London, with his own range of male grooming products. But there’s something Jill doesn’t know, Dean’s got a skeleton in his closet and on Halloween night, their fairy-tale love story turns into a nightmare.
Unclear after that on if this was a true crime docupod or a scripted series, as Variety used language like “characters from the original story,” I googled around a bit until I found some actual coverage that seems to align with this blurb. Per a 2020 report from Wales Online, Dyfed-Powys Police Seargent Jill Owens met Dean Jenkins online in 2006, and the two began a long-distance romance. By that summer she was pregnant, but that fall he was arrested in a series of armed robberies — crimes Owens said she knew nothing about.
The next year she was suspended from the force, the year after that, she was fired. Here’s Owens:
They didn’t believe that I knew about Dean's activities but they said that I should have known. One of the reasons they raised was that, in Dean’s grooming range – that he distributed from his warehouse in London and sold in a High Street chain – he had two products that should have alerted me to what was going on.
He had a shower gel product called Beat the Filth and a hair gel product called It’s a Stick Up.
They told me that those names should have been a red flag for me, as a sergeant – that I should have realised then that something was up. Bottles of shower gel and hair gel? I’m sorry, I didn’t.
The Western Telegraph reports that in late 2020, Owens released a memoir entitled Two Cops and a Robber (easy to find a used copy, if interested), which I suspect caught someone at Wondery’s eye, and now here we are.
As with all shows Wondery, the podcast’s release is complicated: Wondery+ folks had access to the full show as of January 16, while everyone else gets it on a one episode a week basis starting February 6. — EB
Bear Brook Season 2
New Hampshire Public Radio’s podcast Bear Brook made a bit of a splash with its first season, an investigation into a Stand By Me-like discovery of a barrel of human remains. Its second season, is vaguely promised some time “this winter”
and is about Jason Carroll, a man who confessed to murder over 30 years ago, and who has been imprisoned ever since, but maintains that his confession was coerced and that he’s innocent.
NHPR has been covering the case for a bit, here’s a snip from a report last June:
In November 1989, Lamy and other investigators questioned Carroll four times in as many days without a lawyer present. Carroll’s mother, Karen Carroll, a Bedford police officer, actively participated in one interrogation. In a recording of it, Karen Carroll can be heard yelling and pressuring her crying son to say more.
“If you put a knife in that woman, I want to know!” she yelled at one point. “You stabbed her, didn’t you?”
Carroll, who gave several conflicting statements under questioning, ultimately said he stabbed Sharon Johnson in the back, then Pfaff took the knife and stabbed her repeatedly in the chest.
Mousseau, Carroll’s attorney, said the intensity of the interrogation, his youth at the time and his mother’s involvement created a coercive environment, and that his statements to police include “glaring inconsistencies” with other evidence in the case. For example, she said, Carroll told police the murder weapon was his pocketknife, which had a blade of about 2 inches, though a stab wound in Johnson’s back was 4 inches deep.
According to the New Hampshire Center for Public Interest Journalism, “the main evidence against Carroll was a confession the defense claimed was coerced by [police] and Carroll’s mother, Karen Carroll, who was then a Bedford police officer who believed she was trying to save her son by encouraging him to cooperate with authorities.”
That detail right there is the headline, to me — in a regrettable sea of coerced confession claims, it’s rare that we hear that the accused person’s mom might be on that side of the table.
As of last November, Carroll’s bid for freedom had stalled, with Judge Will Delker telling Carroll "Your failure to accept responsibility and to cooperate when you had the opportunity to do so meant that your coconspirators escaped justice.” Attorneys with the New England Innocence Project remain on the case, however, with one saying that “the hearing was only her first step in trying to free Carroll.”
Presumably, all that will be in the podcast, whenever it lands — as winter officially ends on March 20 this year, NHPR still has some time, I guess. — EB
I’m pretty sure Sarah manifested my favorite true crime story of the year, so far. “What unbelievably dumb crimes should become prestige properties,” she asked last week, and two days later, this crossed my desk: “Man Steals More Than $100 In KitKat Bars In Maplewood: Police.”
Maplewood, NJ, a sleepy burg near South Orange (where I’m from) and the far-more-interesting city of Newark, doesn’t often appear in my crime alerts, so I appreciate that when it did, it did so deliciously. The deal is simple: a guy allegedly his $138.26 worth of KitKats in a bag while shopping at a QuickChek corner store (this one, I suspect), was spotted by police nearby, and was arrested for shoplifting.
The big questions I have are how much QuickChek is charging per KitKat, and how many they keep on the floor? Kroger charges $1.49 per bar, which means you’d have to steal 92 KitKats to approach $138.26. A box of 32 KitKats weighs 3.2 lbs, which means — if the Patch report I’m citing in this item is correct — that this man found a way to allegedly hide nearly 9 lbs of KitKats before heading out the QuickChek door.
Then again, if this QuickChek is prone to the same near-criminal corner store markup as the bodegas on my block, the suspect might have had to hide less than half that. If one of you happens to be in New Jersey and can check on the corner store candy markup margin, we might have an answer on where the evil truly lies in this small town NJ candy heist. — EB
Wednesday on Best Evidence: A sadly KitKat-free discussion thread.
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