Red flags: true-crime "experts" you don't trust
the true crime that's worth your time
I can’t say I was surprised to read the headline DPB forwarded me the other day — “Judge finds forensic scientist Henry Lee liable for fabricating evidence in a murder case” — except maybe in the fact that it took this long for Lee, long a “name” forensics expert in high-profile cases, to get his hat formally handed to him. For those of us who spend a lot of time in the genre, I think Lee’s been on a pay-no-mind list of sorts for a while; my own instinctive “objection: irrelevant” response to hearing Lee’s authoritatively soothing timbre in a docu or newsmag dates back to the original Staircase. I’m not alone on that.
And Lee’s not alone on my list of red-flag expert witnesses or docuseries talking heads — folks whose positioning as an authority in a case or investigative narrative poisons the entire well for me. Billy Jensen; Beth Karas (it’s not that she’s bad; it’s that she’s ubiquitous); Googling around to see if there’s a book (or TV doc) on XYZ case, then deflating when I realize that there is…but it’s by Aphrodite Jones (or produced by Dan Abrams); old footage of dudes who “did their own research” on Satanism or arson, which then sent (Black) people to jail for decades…I’ve got a pretty extensive list of insta-”nope!”s.
Pseudo-science, unethical behavior, captioned as “YouTuber”…what (or who) is your “worst evidence” red flag? — SDB