Only Murders In The Pod · Spider Sabich · ACS: Fact-Check
Plus two longreads on forensic genealogy finding justice
the true crime that's worth your time
Want more Only Murders In The Building? There’s a companion podcast for that. Hulu drops new episodes of the Hulu sitcom Tuesday nights; Only Murders In The Pod releases on Wednesdays at midnight PST. According to OMITP’s parent company, Straw Hut Media, “secrets are being revealed each week,” including that the show is set to continue into a second season:
Before any official news from the network, show writer Kirker Butler shared that the team is back in the writer’s room during his interview in Episode 2, Who is Tim Kono. He said, "What we're doing right now is we're working on season 2. So it's all about breaking the overall arc of the season; what our mystery's going to be, who our suspect's going to be."
I really like the show so far, but the podcast is almost certainly superfluous: if the original property is doing its job vis-a-vis mystery construction, the podcast can’t reveal too much or it’ll ruin its own illusion, and if it’s not doing its job, the podcast trying to goose interest with Easter eggs won’t help. Not to mention that the Straw Hut PR team is probably going to tell us the highlights every week via email blast anyway. YMMV, but unless you’re a real sitcom-process fan, this one sounds like a skip.
But you may find show co-creator John Hoffman’s interview last week with The Wrap interesting. Hoffman talks about the real-life basis for Tim Kono’s story, and his own journey of investigation into the horrifying demise of a dear friend he’d lost touch with. As I read his remarks, I found a lot of the bittersweet, almost supernatural elements of the first few episodes — which already worked for me as a gentle balance against the satirical sourness — falling into place. Here’s Hoffman talking about that balance from the other side:
When you’re on the edge of life-and-death questions, you bump up against just the human comedy of it all. And and that, to me, is what allowed sort of a big scope for what we’re doing in the show with the reality of this crime and the moments of human connection and humor and discovery. So that’s where the whole show lives. And it really was my experience when I went investigating this thing.
Hoffman also suggests that viewers not go over the first handful of episodes with a Lost-toothed comb looking for clues to the ultimate outcome, and I must say, the more I interact with this show and learn about its origins, the more I respect it, and the conversations it might prompt about true crime as a source of comfort and irritation and passion. — SDB
Not all companion content is created equal, though, and history wonks/fans of Slow Burn’s third season should check out Vulture’s fact-check of each episode of Impeachment: American Crime Story. It announces some impressive credentials up front —
For all ten episodes of Impeachment, we’ve asked Madeline Kaplan, the researcher for the Clinton-Lewinsky season of Slow Burn, to fact-check the show’s major events and minute details against her own understanding of the events. (Kaplan and [Slow Burn host Leon] Neyfakh’s eight-book reading list can be found here and doesn’t include the Starr Report and its eyebrow-raising appendices.)
— and then has Kaplan get into the accuracy of the first episode on everything from timelines of when various players meet, to Paula Jones’s husband’s attitude towards Bill Clinton, to food/meal details. Here’s Kaplan talking about whether Impeachment embroidered Vince Foster’s last meal:
“Yes, [Tripp] got him a hamburger and M&M’s. I’ve seen it described as ‘a handful,’ so I don’t know whether it was a scoop or a box.
“There is something that they don’t get into here, which I understand, which Tripp brought up later in some of her interviews with the special counsel about Foster: Apparently, she thought it was strange that he took off the onion. There was an onion that came on the hamburger, and he took it off. And she thought that was weird, that she didn’t think that someone who was planning to commit suicide would be worried about his breath.”
I’m looking forward to checking in with Kaplan each week for background detail. And if you’d like even more behind-the-scenes intel (and, like me, aren’t sure the decision to center Linda Tripp’s POV is the play), Impeachment EP Sarah Burgess talked to Deadline’s Dominic Patten about the first draft of the premiere, flashback choices, and the challenges of writing about a person who’s, you know, also an EP on your show. Here’s a snip:
It was very significant that I wrote the first three scripts before I met Monica [Lewinsky]. I think that did set me off on a certain path and helped me to not feel constrained. Then I really got into it with her on every page of every script. She gave me a lot of notes. I didn’t take all of them and she and I ended up in a good place at the end of it, because she, as you said, engaged with it as a professional.
I’ve seen more episodes than “civilians,” so this may be more interesting to me as a result, but I also wonder how different this season looked before the decision to bring Lewinsky on as a consulting producer; if I had to guess, I’d say the other timeline’s version of Impeachment is not as good, or at least not as considered as to how we as a culture were engaging with this story and the Clinton presidency. What do you guys think? — SDB
In the beginning, there was Disgraceland. Then Disgraceland creator Jake Brennan spun off a Badlands podcast with a first season called “Hollywoodland,” which is exactly what you think it is. And on September 22, the second season of Badlands debuts: “Sportsland.” A quick teaser from the pod’s YouTube-trailer page:
BADLANDS Season 2: Sportsland is all about the shocking rise and fall of sports legends. Beginning September 22nd, listen each week for wild stories about Mike Tyson, Oscar Pistorius, Aaron Hernandez, Evel Knievel, Tonya Harding, Pete Rose, Sonny Liston, Spider Sabich, Ty Cobb, and, of course, O.J. Simpson.
Does the world need more takes on Pistorius, Hernandez, or Simpson — even if the Simpson crime story on this pod is the set-to over memorabilia that he actually got time for? With all due respect to Brennan, who is evidently an expert packager even if his product has missed me (no shade; I just don’t remember ever consuming it), it’s a no from me, dawgs, and also a no on more Harding and Tyson (especially with beaucoup Tyson-iana headed our way in the short term). I get feeling like you “have to” cover certain stories, but you don’t. You don’t have to avoid them or anything, but even for a higher-profile franchise like Brennan’s -lands, it’s not required to have a take.
That said: I had completely forgotten the utter, and utterly ’70s, craziness that is the Spider Sabich story, and it seems like maybe Brennan should spin the “Sportsland” season off into its own discrete podcasts and do entire seasons on Sabich, Pete Rose, and baseball’s various worst racists (Cobb; Judge Landis; Cap Anson; Campanis, why not). The following bit in Sabich’s Wiki entry alone is good for a 45-minute episode, IMO: “After the criminal trial, Sabich's parents filed a civil lawsuit against Longet in May 1977. The case was eventually resolved out of court in September 1979, with the proviso that Longet never tell nor write about her story.” I would love to know what that’s about, not least because Longet’s defense attorney later became her husband? Maybe I should give that ep a listen. Here’s a video trailer for “Sportsland,” if you’re curious:
You can read more about Sabich and his untimely death at SnowBrains.com; you can tell me if any of the various Oxygen-y shows about Sabich is worth my time, or whether you want us to review the Sabich ep of “Sportsland,” in the comments. — SDB
The more paid subscriptions we have, the more reading and reviewing we can do. The subs we need to keep you up to date cost money too; grabbing — or gifting! — a subscription to Best Evidence helps us keep up.
Already behind that paywall? Thanks so much! Behind on other bills? We get it…but recommending us to a friend is free.
Need to know if Chad Michael Murray made a half-decent Ted Bundy? Hit that button. — SDB
We’ve written a lot about forensic genealogy around here, and the tension between its usefulness in solving cold cases, and the potential for misuse by law enforcement. Whether it’s an interim policy from the Department of Justice that we noted two years ago, which warned about the potential for invasion of privacy; James Renner’s Porchlight Project, which hoped to crack the unsolved murder of Barbara Blatnik; or the solving of the Mary Scott and Kalitzke/Bogle cases, it’s a topic that remains top of mind for true-crime consumers and investigators — and two recent longreads focus on how online genealogy tools, used judiciously, can serve victims and their families.
The first is a haunting look at a decades-old mystery in Pecos, TX: Michael Hardy’s “The Death and Rebirth of Pecos Jane” in August’s Texas Monthly. “Pecos Jane Doe” died mysteriously in a motel pool in 1966; the man she was with, who’d registered them as man and wife (they weren’t) under a name that led investigators nowhere, took off after Pecos Jane was taken to an area hospital, never to be seen or heard from again, so while the case wasn’t treated as a homicide or suspicious for many years…well, I won’t spoil the story, because the pleasure of a TM story is so often not what you learn but how you’re led there. Suffice it to say, “Russell” acted sketch at best:
[W]hy would he return to his room rather than immediately flee the scene? Perhaps he wasn’t responsible for her accidental death, but simply panicked and decided to disappear after learning she had drowned.
Whether or not he killed [Pecos Jane], his decades of silence seem an act of extraordinary cruelty. At some point in the past 55 years, he surely could have dropped an anonymous note letting the family know what happened or at least where to look for her. Instead it was left to some unknown tipster with an apparent interest in obscure cold cases to reignite the search for Pecos Jane’s identity.
It’s a wonderful read, both in the parts of the case it solves and the parts it can’t; Substack’s back-end search is not great, so I’m not finding any previous links we’ve dropped to Hardy’s work, but I’m certain it’s happened and will happen again. Describing an exhumation with care and respect and not going overboard with the Hemingway phrasings isn’t easy, and Hardy gets it done.
The other longform piece is from Xtra*, on a pair of married forensic genealogists trying to up the solve rate of cases of missing trans people. Erica Lenti wastes little time detailing the challenges of these particular cold cases:
And when [trans people] are killed, their cases often fall under the radar—or, if they are pursued, those cases remain especially difficult to solve. Some folks, estranged from their families of origin because of their gender identity, are never identified at all. Many are misgendered in death, leaving their chosen families unable to find them, either. Some trans folks, pushed to the margins of society in life, go unidentified for decades in death.
From there, it’s on to Anthony Lukas Redgrave and Lee Bingham Redgrave, spouses who founded the Trans Doe Task Force in 2018. Their research leading up to creating the TDTF had cracked, among others, the case of Christine Jessop, a 9-year-old killed in 1984. Lenti’s piece is a little overwritten in spots (pro tip for writers of and about true crime: even if your subject did get goosebumps upon uncovering a critical clue, cut it) and seemed to end a bit abruptly, but it’s a good read overall, and at least a little hopeful about the prospects for identifying victims and getting them justice. And I was glad to be re-introduced to Xtra*, which also ran a solid interview with Uncover: The Village host Justin Ling in July. — SDB
This week on Best Evidence: James Ellroy, Mafia hockey, Kendrick Johnson, Kenneth Chamberlain, and much more.
What is this thing? This should help. Follow Best Evidence @bestevidencefyi on Twitter and Instagram. You can also call or text us any time at 919-75-CRIME.