Peek at the Staircase · Yale Theft · Brock Turner
It's time for the March budget cleanup!
the true crime that's worth your time
See ya, March! It’s the last day of the month, which means it’s time for our big, bad budget doc cleanup. Every link that we didn’t get to this month is in this missive — sorry we didn’t get to do the full treatment on them, but we get through a lot each week. Every link can’t make the cut! But as an inveterate hoarder, I can’t bear to just delete them. So here we go. — EB
Colin Firth definitely didn’t push Toni Collette down The Staircase in trailer for HBO series [AV Club]
Sorry, The Staircase trailer. You dropped at the wrong point in the month for me to do much besides…wait what is Colin Firth doing with his voice? What on earth is that accent? This is what Michael Peterson sounds like; what is happening.
Also, “La Familia” is how my favorite local Mexican restaurant hashtags all its Instagram posts, so now I’m super worried about the four-step set of stairs they have into their sunken dining room. (It’s tile! The food is drippy! This is a legit concern!)
1976 Northern California School Bus Hijacker Granted Parole [Patch]
It’s a case familiar to anyone who watched the 1993 ABC Monday night movie They've Taken Our Children: The Chowchilla Kidnapping (what, you don’t remember TTOC:TCK? Well, here’s a Variety review). Frederick Woods (then aged 24) and two other men ambushed a bus packed with schoolkids and demanded $5 million. The victims were buried alive in a gravel quarry and managed to escape after 16 hours. Woods is now 70, and a parole panel agreed that he should be released; now it’s up to Gov. Gavin Newsom to make the final call.
An administrator at Yale Medical School admits stealing and reselling tens of millions of dollars of school computer equipment [Hartford Courant]
Here’s one for the next time you think “If only I had gone to Yale Med School, my life would be perfect!” (Ha ha, no one thinks that. Do they?) Jamie Petrone was the lead administrator of the school’s emergency medicine department, and she admittedly bought over $40 million in hardware and resold it, pocketing the cash as she did. (For comparison, the fruitcake fraudster “only” embezzled $16.6 million.) The 42-year-old admits that she’s been doing this for as long as ten years, and the IRS claims she also owes them $6,416,618 in taxes for the off-books resales.
Netflix receives criticism from viewers after releasing chilling trailer for Jimmy Savile documentary [Hello!]
I don’t know how legitimate Hello!’s claim that Netflix doc Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story “has already been met with a huge backlash from viewers” is, but, hey, I clicked on that before I clicked on Collider’s far tamer ‘Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story’ Trailer Reveals Netflix's Newest True Crime Docuseries so I guess that gets Hello! a “well played.”
The series about (per a press release) “one of the United Kingdom’s most beloved TV personalities” who was credibly accused of sexual abuse by about 500 women and children drops on April 6; based on this Guardian timeline it had better be about how police largely ignored reports of his alleged crimes until after his death in 2011. There’s also a dramatic adaptation of the case planned, with Steve Coogan playing Savile; Hello! says no one wants that, either. OK!
How the Los Angeles Times created a guide on what to do after sexual assault [Poynter]
A nice inside-media-baseball piece on how journo Salma Loum put this LAT service piece together last year, a seven-week project she embarked on because “Searching online for what to do after a sexual assault produces a lot of laws and complicated, dense information that is hard to follow.”
‘One of the Biggest Mistakes’: Ghislaine Maxwell Juror Admits to Judge He Messed Up [The Daily Beast]
Echoes of Scott Peterson’s recent hearings: Juror 50 “testified that he incorrectly answered questions about being a victim of sexual abuse on the jury form,” but also said that he “didn’t know he’d missed a question asking if he was the victim of sexual abuse.” The juror has participated in numerous interviews since Maxwell’s conviction, telling The Independent, “This verdict is for all the victims.” Maxwell’s lawyers will likely continue to use this alleged oversight in their ongoing bid for a new trial.
The real headline here is that Sarah has never seen Reversal of Fortune! The time has come to vote on her April bonus review, which goes only to subscribers. The poll to pick her poison is here, and YOU KNOW I’m going with Claus (Jeremy Irons) and Sunny (Glenn Close), y’all. Wait ’til she sees Dershowitz (Ron Silver, RIP) do his thing — since the film is based on Dershowitz’s book, he is super extra heroic, so, yikes.
Sherri Papini, mom accused of faking own kidnapping, can’t stomach jail food: lawyer [New York Post]
If I were to teach a class on Missing White Woman Syndrome, Sherri Papini would be on the syllabus way ahead of Gabby Petito. That’s because unlike Petito, who played no part in the furor around her disappearance, Papini allegedly created it — and allegedly made it racist as hell. Papini claimed in 2016 that she’d been abducted by a group of Latinx women — but in March the DoJ arrested her and said she’d made it all up. As long ago as 2017 the feds started publicly poking holes in her case, and officials tell the SF Chronicle that in 2020 they first confronted her with proof that she’d been with her ex during the time she claimed she was held captive.
Ann Wolbert Burgess on Learning from Serial Killers While Working With 'Mindhunters' [A&E True Crime Blog]
Burgess, the inspiration for the Wendy Carr (Anna Torv) character in Mindhunter, has a new book called A Killer by Design: Murderers, Mindhunters, and My Quest to Decipher the Criminal Mind. As part of her promotional tour, she did this quick interview with Kate Sullivan. No big headlines here, but it did make me want to read her book. Sarah, don’t suppose you have a copy on hand? [“One left!” — SDB]
Memphis True Crime Tour explores the city’s ‘dark history’ [Associated Press]
A bus tour company behind Memphis activities like the “Haunted Memphis Bus Tour,” the “Haunted Pub Crawl,” the “Memphis Ghost Walk” and the “Memphis Beer Bus” is branching out to true crime with a $25 crime tour that is regularly sold out. “We love Memphis, we’re not trying to be negative about it, but every city has a dark history,” its owner said. Attractions include:
Sites associated with Georgia Tann (1891-1950), the black-market baby trafficker who essentially kidnapped hundreds of children, and serial killer George Howard Putt (1946-2006), who claimed five victims over two months before his arrest in September 1969.
…
At one point, the bus stops near but does not cruise down Lester Street, where six people were murdered and three others were injured on March 3, 2008. The victims — shot, stabbed and bludgeoned — included five children, one of whom was only 3 months old.
The Atlantic apparently frustrated true crime fans a couple times last month. Here are the big ones:
The Things I’m Afraid to Write About [Sarah Hepola]
In her “Ideas” piece for The Atlantic, Hepola presents a significant number of falsehoods about the Brock Turner rape trial and case, apparently siding with Malcolm Gladwell, who seemingly defended Turner in one of his most recent books. In a sharply rendered twitter thread, Allie Jaynes dismantles Hepola’s claims, saying as she does that “I'm NOT an expert in this case, just someone who distinctly remembers the outrage around this very big news story… All details below are v. Googleable).”
Absolute Power [Graeme Wood]
Wood’s 12,000 word-plus Atlantic piece is subheaded “Asked about the murder of [Washington Post journo] Jamal Khashoggi, Mohammed bin Salman said, ‘If that’s the way we did things, Khashoggi would not even be among the top 1,000 people on the list.’” That didn’t appease the Washington Post’s media critic, Erik Wemple, who wrote that “The Atlantic’s interrogation of Mohammed on an early contender for crime of the century was thin,” and that
Withholding questions because you think the interviewee won’t answer them is not exactly fearless journalism. Sherif Mansour, Middle East and North Africa program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists, says there are a few key questions that Mohammed must answer, such as the location of Khashoggi’s remains. The Atlantic didn’t ask about that, either.
…
Instead, the Atlantic whiffed, allowing Mohammed to minimize his dismembered countryman without resistance. “We did not rebut this claim because our readers are not idiots,” responded Wood, suggesting that all the readers who account for the Atlantic’s 830,000-plus total circulation walk around with a command of the Saudi dissident hierarchy.
Friday on Best Evidence: We don’t do April Fools over here, so when Sarah talks about a Jack the Ripper musical, she’s dead serious.
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