Phoenix Rising · Stupid New Jersey Tricks
Plus Billy Jensen and a based-on mystery
the true crime that's worth your time
Bounce is dropping a “true-crime original thriller,” Don’t Hang Up, on Sunday March 20…and I can’t figure out which true crime it’s based on. The film stars Wendell Pierce and Lauren Holly; here’s the logline, from Bounce’s PR email on the premiere:
The mystery revolves around Chris Daniels (Pierce), a husband and father whose life is upended when he gets a phone call that hurls him into a harrowing journey to save his family. Told his daughter has been taken hostage, Chris is ordered by the kidnappers to complete a series of missions to get her back, all while maintaining one deceptively simple rule: Don't hang up.
Meanwhile, the growing number of unanswered texts and calls from his wife Tracy (Holly) leads to escalating fear and even police interference – which unwittingly puts the safe return of their daughter ([Eden] Cupid) in even greater jeopardy.
Various Google search strings suggested a variety of bases for the story, including
the Barbara Mackle kidnapping (unlikely, but I did add both the TV movies based on the case to my Big Spreadsheet O’ Future Review Subjects)
the Bobby Greenlease kidnapping (even less likely)
the “virtual kidnapping” of either
Wendy Mueller’s daughter in 2016 or
a Purcell, OK couple’s daughter last year
Then again, common sense suggests that the “true” element is something along the lines of “it’s about a kidnapping, which is a thing that does occur IRL,” and the marketing team just decided this was good SEO. Any thoughts on which real-life case Don’t Hang Up could derive from? — SDB
“UNRAVELED: ONCE A KILLER exposes the limitations of criminal profiling and reveals a new investigative technique that could change the way investigators interpret cold cases.” An interesting marketing strategy in a genre that has relied pret-ty heavily on profiling as a draw — but then, perhaps the new “you armchair detectives can try this at home” draw is forensic genealogy? It’s…not really that “new,” of course. But when you remember that one of the co-hosts of U:OAK is Billy Jensen, who helped finish Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone In The Dark…about the Golden State Killer, who finally got pinned down thanks in part to a DNA-database upload…then the pivot makes more sense.
U:OAK is a podcast/docuseries double shot; the podcast starts next Wednesday, with a “companion two-hour special” by the same name dropping on discovery+ April 22.
There are thousands of overlooked killers living among us. Scattered across the country, these seemingly ordinary people have committed a heinous crime in their past, but continue to live normal lives and are never caught. In the next installment of the Unraveled anthology, Alexis Linkletter and Billy Jensen investigate the most elusive criminal to ever strike - the “one and done killer.” These mysterious offenders commit murder without sufficient evidence, never kill again, and disappear back into society for decades, leaving detectives and criminal profilers with an unsolvable case.
…Billy Jensen is a somewhat strange true-crime case (as it were) for me. I don’t really consume his output, because usually it’s not doing anything so interesting that I’d make time for it amid the firehose of true-crime content we’re all bathing in the last few years — but at the same time I feel kind of fondly towards him and think he’s basically sincere, and trying to do the right thing in the dead-center-of-the-fairway space he occupies, and has a sense of humor about himself. I could be wrong; maybe he’s a shithead! But I’ve always gotten the sense that, even if his content isn’t for me and even if he doesn’t always quite thread the needle of “justice” vs. commerce, Jensen does understand that that needle exists, and that as a name in the industry, he has certain responsibilities.
tl;dr: I wish him and his co-host luck with the project, but won’t be checking it out in either format, unless y’all feel like I should, so here’s that comment button again. — SDB
Our latest edition of “Today In True-Crime Buttholes” is in a medical rain delay — times two. Sunny Balwani’s trial faced
yet another delay Wednesday when the judge abruptly canceled the day's proceedings due to a secondhand COVID-19 exposure.
U.S. District Judge Edward Davila informed the newly empaneled jury and a packed courtroom that on the day before — Tuesday — there was someone in the courtroom who had been exposed to the virus.
Although that person has since tested negative, Davila, in "an abundance of caution," sent everyone home Wednesday morning.
There’s also the matter of the judge seeming…more susceptible to animal-welfare content than you might expect from a seasoned jurist:
Opening statements were slated to start Tuesday but were delayed when jurors claimed that serving in the protracted trial would cause them hardship.
…
[P]otential jurors recited a litany of work and child care obligations that they said would make it difficult to serve. One added that her dog suffered from separation anxiety. Another said that he believes that the criminal justice system is not impartial.
When a local veterinarian outlined her extensive duties as the county's sole animal doctor, including spaying baby kittens as "kitten season" begins and caring for dozens of sick baby goats, a clearly moved Davila urged people to volunteer to help her out.
The vet was excused, in the end, and as the maitre d’ for two graduates of feral-kitten “season,” I salute the court’s decision…but this is probably not the main issue facing the proceeding:
17 of the 19 new potential jurors reported that they had read news stories about Holmes and Theranos, watched the recent Hulu series "The Dropout," and/or seen the 2019 HBO documentary about Theranos' downfall.
Elsewhere, Larry Ray (supposedly?) suffered a seizure or seizures on Tuesday that have put his trial on pause as well. Per Vulture’s Court Appearances,
Earlier [on Tuesday], Ray’s attorney informed the court that Ray … had suffered a seizure at the federal jail in Brooklyn where he’s being held.
Still, he continued on to court. Ray’s next medical emergency took place shortly after Judge Lewis Liman dismissed the jury for a lunch break. Liman was mid-sentence, taking care of some procedural housekeeping, when one of Ray’s attorneys interrupted.
“I think we need to take a minute,” Neil Kelly said. “Do we have medical staff in the building?” Ray began moving his head as Kelly came to his side. The judge called for medical services and cleared the court. Outside of the courthouse, a photographer for the New York Post captured an image of Ray, his eyes rolling back in his head and a breathing mask strapped to his face, being loaded by EMS workers into an FDNY ambulance.
There’s an unmistakeable “…faker” undertone to much of the coverage of this; New York Mag’s Marcus and Walsh drily report that the judge let the jury go for the day on Tuesday after instructing them “that Ray’s condition ‘has nothing whatsoever to do with the facts of this case.’ (A frequent topic of testimony has been Ray accusing people of poisoning him.)” Shortly thereafter, they note that “the possibility of a mistrial looms,” and in a case centered on the defendant’s skill at/depravity of manipulation, you have to wonder.
On the other hand, maybe someone did poison Ray. No shortage of suspects there, eh what. — SDB
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And now, back to your regularly scheduled “…Oh, New Jersey” programming. — SDB
Generally speaking, my university’s only use to me in my career is to note the various villains who also attended for the purposes of this here newsletter. But every now and then, the alumni mag tips me to an interesting story or two. The first is on a spring-semester class, “Architecture of Confinement, from the Hospice to the Era of Mass Incarceration,” inspired — if that’s the right word — by the closing of the state’s only carceral facility for women. A conference on the topic will convene on campus next month at the James Stewart Theater (yep, “that James Stewart”) at 185 Nassau (…my god, my thesis advisor is still there).
The second is how George Strawbridge “solved” the “arson” that burned foundation campus building Nassau Hall “to its skeleton” in 1802. It starts out as a somewhat quaint howdunnit involving academic cells next to belfries; it ends on a down note, with the PAW’s Elyse Graham glumly reminding us that, “[l]ike other Southern alumni of his generation,” Strawbridge had no further use for Old Nassau “after it affirmed its support for the Union in the Civil War.” Yeah, same to you, buddy. — SDB
The crime
That industrial metallurgist (…idk) Marilyn Manson (b. Brian Warner) sexually assaulted and abused actor Evan Rachel Wood (…allegedly, I’m obliged to say) during their four-year relationship, which began when she was 18 and he was 37; and that the statute of limitations for outcry witnesses to report intimate-partner violence is historically very short in most states.
The story
Warner is suing Wood and activist Illma Gore, who appears in the two-part doc, for defamation over HBO’s Phoenix Rising, Wood’s personal and memoiristic account of, among other things, her time with Warner and her fight to get the Phoenix Act passed in some effective form. Warner declined to take part in the project and has denied any and all allegations of misconduct and/or abuse, but I’m not here to tell you whether his lawsuit has any merit, although I suspect it’s a PR bluff that won’t go much of anywhere. I’m here to tell you whether Phoenix Rising is worth your time, and overall, it is.
Rich Juzwiak describes Phoenix Rising, which is directed by Amy Berg, as “cut from the same must-watch-can’t-stomach cloth as 2019’s Leaving Neverland,” and it is difficult going at times, particularly in the second installment. In the first installment, you may feel a little impatient at times, with the home movies and the account of the breakdown of Wood’s parents’ marriage, but it’s all in the service of creating context for concepts like grooming and isolation, things abusers do that their targets may not have words for — as Wood didn’t, so when chyrons appear to explain what “love-bombing” is, or when Wood is very earnestly talking about what looks like Warner’s choice to “stay in the trauma” of his own upbringing, Phoenix can come off a bit…first-semester freshman. But that’s part of the doc’s appeal; Berg and Wood understand on some uncynical level that by telling Wood’s specific story, they can speak to more universal experience — that this particular journey to coming forward is one many of us can recognize, in all its awkward ferocity.
Wood also talks about the broader cultural willingness to accept Warner’s outré behavior as Manson as an ironic comment on lifestyle pieties, which she found exciting at first: “I liked him, and what he stood for.” And hey, I did too, back in the day. I watched that Dinner For Five episode Phoenix Rising uses to talk about Manson as a wolf “in wolf’s clothing,” and I too thought, “He’s so smart in how he manipulates reaction to his image.” Little did we know how smart, or how little of it was in fact image, and one of Phoenix Rising’s biggest assets is its ability to kind of take hands with the viewer all “yeah, we also thought X, and now that we know it’s actually Y, it’s super-shitty, but it wasn’t just you…but so also check this out” — without stepping back to admire the way it’s doing it. It’s confident in its pacing and what it deliberates on or skips over. It trusts itself, and that assuredness is in conversation with Wood’s younger selves. That dialogue isn’t evident right away, but sometimes you have to let a documentary get where it needs to in its own way. Phoenix Rising does that, and while the scenery is often ugly, I recommend it. It’s distinctive, it’s not over-produced, and it’s not trying to position itself, as “prestige programming” or as anything else. — SDB
Friday on Best Evidence: Bad Vegan, Tokyo Vice, and Buzzfeed beats the rap.
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