Satirizing Anna · Roger Stone · TSA
Some disconcerting true crime photos
the true crime that's worth your time
I guess it was inevitable. This past week, on Saturday Night Live (yes, I still watch SNL. I have tried to kick the disgusting habit and cannot), Inventing Anna got its due. This is unsurprising given 1) the low hanging fruit bold strokes vibe of the series, even without the weird accent stuff and 2) the show’s intense New York-ness. If there are two things SNL cannot resist, it’s fruit within reach and anything about its eponymous city.
I find this to be a perfectly fine bit that did a nice job of hitting the right beats to nod to the original property, which Sarah reviewed last month:
My one gripe is the ending, which will distract anyone who follows the ins and outs of true crime inside baseball. Concluding with Kate McKinnon insisting on being Delvey was distracting, and not in a satisfying way. The SNL vet, who made recent true crime TV news when she splashily departed The Dropout at the 11th hour* and whose headline role as Carole Baskin just dropped last week, comes across oddly as the person who insists on also wanting to live the Delvey life.
Why use her when other folks were available, or end the solid sketch pretty much any other way? Oh, well, it’s not like endings have ever been SNL’s strong suit.
All and all, I’d say this bit is a find addition to the show’s other true crime-related shorts, including one from almost exactly a year ago, “Murder Show.”
And then there’s my all-time favorite, which I link to way too much, “Serial: The Christmas Surprise.” The 2014 (my god) sketch might be one of my favorite SNL bits from the last decade. I cannot find fault with it at all! — EB
*Having now watched The Dropout, I can only say that her departure was a good thing! For more on that show, check out this week’s yet-to-be-released Extra Hot Great podcast, where we’ll break it all down.
Marilyn Hartman is back in the news, prompting me to ask my favorite question: Why hasn’t this been adapted yet? Hartman is known as the “Serial Stowaway;” for two decades she’s allegedly snuck onto multitudes of commercial flights at airports including San Francisco International Airport (her first known attempt), Chicago O'Hare, and many others.
A figure of bemused fun at first, folks viewed Hartman as a sort of strange folk hero, like Gritty or mural restorer Cecilia Giménez. But as time went on, and Hartman was caught again and again, people grew less amused.
For some folks, Hartman was an uncomfortable reminder that the elaborate security features put into place at U.S. airports aren’t nearly as infallible as the TSA claims, as she could easily pass through security and board flights both domestic and international. “The first time I was able to to get through I flew to Copenhagen” Hartman told Chicago’s CBS affiliate from jail. “The second time I flew into Paris.”
To others, Hartman’s repeated offenses felt far less fun once she revealed that they were the result of a chronic mental illness. Here’s the take of Eric Zorn, a columnist at the Chicago Tribune:
Marilyn Hartman needs help.
She doesn’t need to be kept behind bars. She doesn’t need to be demonized as a threat to public safety. She doesn’t need to be featured for our amusement in heavily hyped TV news reports.
…
She’s hurt no one and, in fact, done travelers a favor by revealing holes and vulnerabilities in airport security. She doesn’t belong in jail — where she is again awaiting the next developments in her case — but in a safe, therapeutic setting where she can be looked after by doctors, not guards. Whatever caused this most recent relapse, let’s hope it doesn’t derail her chances for getting the care she needs and living out her days in obscurity.
I see Zorn’s point, sure, and clickbait coverage of her incursions grate on my sensibilities, too. But other reporting on Hartman, like this 2015 San Francisco Magazine longread (republished at SF Gate) headlined “The woman who smuggled herself” feel far more worthwhile, as they start to paint a portrait of a complicated, witty, troubled woman who’s just trying to find a way through her illness to happiness. The airport stuff isn’t a gleeful Catch Me If You Can romp, it’s a compulsion she’s powerless to battle.
It’s also a portrait of police, um, discretion — what I describe to folks as the advantages I, myself, am starting to see as a grey-haired, middle-aged white woman.
The Hartman canon, in fact, contains numerous small acts of leniency and compassion by law-enforcement officials. In Seattle, where Hartman in 2013 attempted to enter a plane using someone else's boarding pass (a tactic she also deployed in 2009 in Hawaii and last year at SFO), police denoted her offense as "mental instability."
She was escorted to the light rail station, and no charges were filed. Police in San Francisco gave her BART tickets and a ride back to her SRO hotel room after admonishing her at the airport. The cop who in 2010 caught Hartman—then a reentry student at the University of Hawaii—dozing "on top of the giant chair" in front of a Kauai furniture store politely suggested that she visit a nearby shelter. Last March, an Alameda County sheriff's deputy intercepted Hartman shambling along Oakland's Airport Drive in the wee hours. She told him she intended to "get" a ticket to Hawaii.
"I asked Hartman if she had any money and she showed me $4," the deputy wrote in the subsequent incident report. "I asked her if she believed $4 would be sufficient to buy a ticket to go to Hawaii. Hartman said, 'You're right. You're right. I'll just go back to the BART station.'" The deputy drove her to the Coliseum BART station. It was closed, so he drove her to Broadway and 14th Streets, where she caught the 800 bus back to the city.
It’s certainly not Hartman’s fault that she looks like an anglo-centric Hallmark version of a grandmother (we undyed cis female caucasians are all one red beanie away from Mrs. Claus territory, y’all), but contrasting this treatment with the treatment a Brown person would get for the same offense…yeah.
So, there’s a lot of fodder for a thoughtful Hartman documentary, in my opinion, or even an edgy, guilt-ambivalent series in the lines of Inventing Anna or The Dropout.
Last week, Hartman, who is now aged 70, was sentenced for her conviction of “felony counts of criminal trespass and escape from electronic monitoring,” the Sun-Times reports. Her consecutive terms include 18 months for trespassing, and two more years for the escape. However, she’s already served 874 days in Cook County jail as she awaited trial, which means that with time served, she “could be released directly from Cook County Jail, having completed her sentence there, but the exact date was not immediately known.” — EB
Parsons prof David Carroll is hooking us all up with access to a bombshell true crime longread. I always struggle with suggesting you read paywalled content in this publication — while Sarah and I can write off our many many many subscriptions to newspapers and magazines (as well as streaming services, a whole other matter), its unreasonable to assume that you all have that latitude.
At the same time, I’m reluctant to suggest you weasel around subscriptions — as Best Evidence is only possible due to our paid subscribers, that would be pretty gross.
But when Parsons media design prof David Carroll gives all of us a way into a hot story that’s subscriber only, damn right I’m gonna make sure we all get it.
You might have seen Carroll in data exploitation doc The Great Hack; he’s known for his years-long battle with Cambridge Analytica over its illicit data collection methods.
He’s also a prolific Tweeter, which tracks with the other personality points I just listed about him. One of those tweets, published last week, makes available to all “The Roger Stone Tapes” a report on “previously unseen documentary footage” of the convicted and pardoned Republican operative and alleged collaborator with Russia.
Backstory on the report:
Stone allowed the filmmakers to document his activities during extended periods over more than two years. In addition to interviews and moments when Stone spoke directly to the camera, they also captured fly-on-the-wall footage of his actions, candid off-camera conversations from a microphone he wore and views of his iPhone screen as he messaged associates on an encrypted app. Reporters from The Washington Post reviewed more than 20 hours of video filmed for the documentary, “A Storm Foretold,” which is expected to be released later this year.
The footage, along with other reporting by The Post, provides the most comprehensive account to date of Stone’s involvement in the former president’s effort to overturn the election and in the rallies in Washington that spilled over into violence on Jan. 6.
Wildly, Stone denies many of the verging on criminal details reported in the Post story, all of which reportedly came from the footage, so ??. Thanks to Carroll and his handy link, everyone can see what the then-president’s intimate allegedly did and said, which probably won’t matter to his base (does anything?) but might be fun fodder for the next time you’re at dinner with your extended family. You can read the full report via the link in the tweet above. — EB
A photography student has turned the sites of the Yorkshire Ripper slayings into a Masters project. Britney Pease, a Masters candidate at Leeds Arts University, tells The Phoblogger that she started on her photo project, the Murder Diaries, because “An interest of mine is crime, true crime.”
For the Murder Diaries, she visited spots at which Peter Sutcliffe is said to have killed his 13 female victims, including apartment buildings and playgrounds. “My project is cool because it can be gory. It makes you think back to the past and offers something different to view,” she said.
It’s an interesting idea to center the locations instead of the victims (or the killer), something that resonates for me given my obsession with true crime real estate. However, though I’m not an art critic, I question the need to reproduce the crime tape or forensics ID markers to make the artistic point.
There’s power, I’d argue, to letting a place where something awful happened just…be, I’d tell Pease if she asked me. The unspoken contrast of a neat room with the chaos that besmirched it, or the peace of a field where a body was buried, says more than a straight-up restaging. What do you think? — EB
Wednesday on Best Evidence: More on SNL, which, let’s be honest, can use our help.
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