Paul Rudd · Cops Death · Zodiac
Plus: The Staircase is officially trolling us
the true crime that's worth your time
It’s the end of the month, and you know what that means: rent’s due, and Sarah’s gearing up to write some reviews. Paid subscribers to Best Evidence already know that as each month winds to a close, Sarah drops at least one review of content chosen by our readers. And now it’s time to choose her July topics…will it be a James Randi doc, a scam artist series, a fancily-cast Nazi podcast, or something else? It’s up to you.
And, yes, I said paid subscribers. If you’re just here for the free content, welcome, we’re truly happy to have you (also, we’ve been there). But if you want the full Best Evidence experience, complete with the flush of virtue that comes from supporting a couple of scrappy true-crime-content-analyzing dames, then…
The guy who created Cops died in a Mexican road race last weekend. John Langley, the so-called “Godfather of Reality Television,” died Saturday at the age of 78, the Associated Press reports.
A look at Langley’s Wikipedia page confirms that his most notable creation was Cops, and also provides tidbits like “Langley was a Morse code intercept operator in the Army Security Agency, an intelligence unit of the United States Army from 1961 to 1963, in Panama” and that Langley fought then head of Fox Barry Diller when the exec said that Cops needed a narrator and staged reenactments. “I said that defies the whole purpose of doing it the way I'm talking about doing it,” Langley reportedly said.
As you know, Cops aired its last episode on May 11, 2020, after 32 seasons and around 1,103 episodes. By then, Langley was doing fine: an “off-road racing enthusiast” (as the AP put it), he was spending much of his time participating in Smokey And The Bandit-style road races by the time renewed scrutiny of copaganda content prompted his show’s cancellation. And that’s what he was doing when he died Saturday: he was participating in the Coast to Coast Ensenada-San Felipe 250 when he was felled by a suspected heart attack in Baja, Mexico.
One of the first things I did when I heard about Langley’s death is check Dan Taberski’s Twitter account. Taberski’s the guy behind the Running From Cops podcast, which laid bare the pro-police agenda of the series. Neither Taberski nor the podcast’s Twitter account has mentioned Langley’s passing, and maybe they don’t need to — after all, the show’s off the air so folks arguably took his point seriously. Maybe there just isn’t anything left to say. — EB
Today in The Staircase casting: Olivia DeJonge (the girl from creepy bad-grandparents movie The Visit) will play Caitlin Atwater, the biological daughter of Kathleen Peterson (Toni Collette), Deadline reports. Atwater, as you might recall from the documentary, initially issued a statement saying, “My mother and Mike had an absolutely loving relationship and there is no way that either of them would ever wish any sort of harm on the other one.”
But after evidence was revealed regarding her stepdad’s romantic relationships with men, Atwater changed her tune, eventually testifying for the prosecution and filing a wrongful death suit against Peterson. She prevailed to the tune of $25 million, but as of 2017, she hadn’t been paid a dime. — EB
Allison Mack has turned her back on Keith Raniere. The Smallville actress, whose real-life role in NXIVM likely helped boost true-crime content on the sex cult, said in a letter presented prior to her sentencing that “It is now of paramount importance for me to say, from the bottom of my heart, I am so sorry.”
According to The Hollywood Reporter, which reports that the letter “accompanied sentencing guideline recommendations from her attorneys,” Mack said that “I threw myself into the teachings of Keith Raniere with everything I had.” She went on, “I believed, whole-heartedly, that his mentorship was leading me to a better, more enlightened version of myself. I devoted my loyalty, my resources, and, ultimately, my life to him. This was the biggest mistake and regret of my life.”
Mack’s attorneys are reportedly asking that, as part of her “plea allocution, her decision to cooperate completely and fully with the government,” that Mack be allowed to avoid jail. Mack has “publicly denounced Raniere (and her own prior association with Raniere) in the strongest possible terms,” her defense team says. We’ll see if the sentencing judge agrees, when her next hearing is held on June 30. — EB
The Shrink Next Door is a Paul Rudd TV show now. We last talked about the show way back in the halcyon days of 2019 — after NY health officials listened to bits of the Wondery/Bloomberg podcast about Dr. Isaac Herschkopf, a New York psychiatrist accused of mind control by his victims, they drafted a series of misconduct allegations against the shrink.
And apparently someone thought, hey, this sounds hilarious(ish)! And the next thing you know, AppleTV+ is announcing “The Shrink Next Door, starring Will Ferrell and Paul Rudd,” a series based on the (chilling, as I recall) podcast. Here’s the description sent to media:
Over the course of their relationship, the all-too-charming Ike slowly inserts himself into Marty’s life, even moving into Marty’s Hamptons home and persuading Marty to name him president of the family business. The series explores how a seemingly normal doctor-patient dynamic morphs into an exploitative relationship filled with manipulation, power grabs and dysfunction at its finest.
Rudd is playing Herschkopf (which is very kind of Herschkopf) and Ferrell is playing alleged Herschkopf victim Martin “Marty” Markowitz. Casey Wilson plays Herschkopf’s wife, and Kathryn Hahn plays Marty’s sister. So, a remarkably deep comedy bench, not quite Staircase-level star-studded but certainly close. Which makes sense when you dig up who’s behind the series: it’s The State’s Michael Showalter, a months-old Deadline story mentions in passing. The show reportedly wrapped in March, and is set to drop on Apple TV+ on November 12. — EB
Another guy says he cracked the Zodiac code. Fayçal Ziraoui is a “38-year-old French-Moroccan business consultant,” the NY Times reports. “I’ve never set limits on what I can learn,” he says, which is why he decided to decipher the Zodiac code…after two weeks.
Really? In two weeks, this guy did what no one else could? As you can imagine, the world is not so sure about Ziraoui’s claim. Here’s a snip:
Around 2 a.m. on Jan. 3, an exhausted but elated Mr. Ziraoui posted a message entitled “Z13 — My Name is KAYE” on a 50,000-member Reddit forum dedicated to the Zodiac Killer.
The message was deleted within 30 minutes.
“Sorry, I’ve removed this one as part of a sort of general policy against Z13 solution posts,” the forum’s moderator wrote, arguing that the cipher was too short to be solvable. The moderator declined to be interviewed by The New York Times.
Similar dismissive comments were made on other forums. Many of the comments went down arcane, and sometimes nonsensical, rabbit holes; others said Mr. Ziraoui’s methods were too convoluted.
David Oranchak, the leader of the team that cracked the 340-character cipher, said in a written exchange that he was skeptical of Mr. Ziraoui’s solution, noting that “hundreds of proposals for Z13 and Z32 solutions” already exist, and that “it is practically impossible to determine if any of them are correct” because of the brevity of the ciphers.
Still, others think he might have done it, including at least two French cryptographers. Check out the full story, then tell us in the comments if you think Ziraoui really and truly solved the cipher and cracked the case. — EB
Wednesday on Best Evidence: I suspect Sarah is going to lose patience with my link hoarding and do a budget-doc sweep, but who knows?
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