Scott Peterson · The Colorado Cannibal · Scenes From A Textbook Scam
Plus a century-old con and another murderous dentist
the true crime that's worth your time
The crime
The murders of Laci and Conner Peterson.
The story
Last July, I talked about Real Crime Profile’s special episodes on the murder of Gabby Petito, and while I don’t think the RCP team would especially appreciate my description of their work as, functionally, a cold-case binky, the same principles applied when I listened to RCP’s ten-parter on the Peterson case:
…RCP is, at times, emotionally satisfying. Cheaply so, perhaps, and often performatively so — the listing of victim-“centering” hashtags at the end of the episode; ugh — but after reading that VF timeline and realizing Gabby Petito’s murder could have been prevented or diverted at a dozen different junctures, to listen to Jim Clemente just hollering all over Laundrie and his self-servingly narcissistic goodbye-to-all-that letter? It’s like bourbon on the gums of my mental toddler; I just don’t know how else to put it. RCP is problematic in a lot of ways, and this isn’t a defense of the podcast, but it has its appeal in this overall — that when 1) those last unknown, unsolved pieces of a case seem designed to haunt us, and/or 2) the perpetrator is gone and cannot hear or answer for anything, there is at the very least a certain community in listening to Clemente and Richards shitting all over every inch of a self-pitying shithead murderer like Brian Laundrie.
Like RCP’s Petito episodes — which IINM the podcast added to last week to “celebrate” what would have been Petito’s 24th birthday — I don’t exactly recommend the Peterson-case coverage. But I don’t not recommend it, either? The usual caveats apply, as above, as far as this podcast functioning as self-regarding copaganda, plus ten episodes is at least two too many; a couple of times, I double-checked my player to make sure I hadn’t restarted an ep I’d already heard, because in the later going, the hosts repeat themselves a lot.
And while Laura Richards and her cute-as-hell baby of course have my best wishes (that hat! stop it right now)
and her recent experience as a pregnant person is pertinent, she makes a lot of absolutist pronouncements about the third trimester, what pregnant people do and do not do at that time, what their partners do and do not do at that time, newborns, birth weights (what I don’t know is a lot, but an eight-pound baby is not “tiny” where I come from, and I come from long-boned farm people), so on and so forth, and the net effect is to undercut her arguments.
But see above re: Clemente, and Richards, and Zambetti offering a more than occasional “it’s just such bullshit” while analyzing Scott Peterson’s national interviews; it’s viscerally rewarding. It’s also thought-provoking — or it is to me; I’m very interested in the concept that, while being an asshole isn’t illegal, it will often give a mostly circumstantial prosecution case a critical boost, and Clemente et al. also spend some time debunking the idea that circumstantial evidence isn’t “real.” I liked that discussion, and on balance I liked this set of episodes; if you have the same intermittent relationship I do with RCP and you follow this case, you might give these a try. — SDB
A handful of longreads to wrap up the week, plus eyewitness testimony on a book scam from yours truly! Let us know what you’re reading, watching, and listening to this weekend. — SDB
I've Lost $500,000 Betting on Sports and Don't Plan to Quit [Esquire] // This semi-oral history of his own addiction by “Johnny Overs” is, on the surface, only tangentially a true-crime story — references to Johnny’s bookies/organized crime; a bit near the end of the piece where Johnny talks about the generational trauma that is gambling in his family
My father wasn’t in my life growing up but I met him as an adult and I discovered he was a degenerate gambler, too. He was a manager of a Chase Bank and went to prison for embezzling money to fund his gambling habit. Did 24 months, I think. Now he goes across the country speaking about his addiction, running Gamblers Anonymous meetings. I wanted to say, “Look at these genes you gave me,” but I didn’t. I can’t blame him. You make your own decisions in life.
— but I’ve included it because it’s an anecdotal account of the ripple effect of criminalizing and decriminalizing “vice.” The “organizing” principle in organized crime is that of a parallel economy, whether its “widget” is booze during Prohibition, other drugs of abuse, sex, illegal loans, etc., so when the literal legalities of one of these “goods and services” changes, so do the illegalities, obviously. The piece is about one guy, but also about the shifts that take place when a “vice” is moved into the marketplace of responsible — and taxable — consent.
Was the ‘Colorado Cannibal’ a villain or a victim? You decide. [National Geographic] // This deep dive (…sorry) into Lake City, CO and how it’s turned the grisly travails of Alferd “The Colorado Cannibal” Packer into a cottage industry isn’t written or copy-edited especially well. But NatGeo is historically a more photo-forward publication, and the primary reason to check out its account of Packer’s disputed time in the San Juan Mountains is graphics like this one, a photo of a “model made for the long-closed Denver Wax Museum.”
Yiiiikes.
The prose is clumsy, and by-the-ways a handful of aspects of the story (Packer’s escape and re-capture, for one) I’d have liked to spend more time with, but Packer’s is a lesser-known tale in a culture as preoccupied as ever with this particular taboo…and as tasteless as ever in exploiting grue for tourism dollars (see: the town’s mystery-meat-eating contest; guys, really!). If you can set aside the occasional “Packer stood trail” typo, you get details like this one, which underline the wisdom of defendants keeping silent.
The jury didn’t buy his story—not only due to the damning testimony of the prosecution’s witnesses, but also because of Packer’s odd performance on the stand. He habitually referred to himself in the third person—as in, “Packer was as much thought of as any man”—and often seemed more interested in settling personal vendettas than proving his innocence. Decrying Constable Lauter as a liar, Packer blustered: “To think that one little Dutchman could take a knife away from me. No, sir!”
THE EVOLUTION AND ART OF THE BIG CON [CrimeReads] An excerpt from another book on my wavering stack of genre TBRs: Alan Prendergast’s Gangbuster.
Want me to move the Prendergast up in the queue? And speaking of CrimeReads content, I’m interviewing Alex Mar — whose convo with Sarah Weinman Eve mentioned yesterday — for the Exhibit B.log in a week or so; got any questions I should ask Mar?
Oh, speaking of Exhibit B.: 1) that 15%-off-major-case sale ends tonight, so if you’ve got notorious-case research to do, do it for cheaper; and 2) check this shit out…
Cape Cod's Books by the Sea Victim of Credit Card Scam [Shelf-Awareness.com] // I’m somewhat chastened to admit that I myself almost fell for this flimflam, which three different scammers have now attempted to run on me, and I think it’s partly because I didn’t — and still don’t — quite see the up side for the fraudsters.
Tom Phillips, owner of Books by the Sea, Centerville, Mass., is trying to recover from a textbook buying scam that is threatening the survival of his business. Hyannis News reported that Phillips is "looking down the double barrel of a fund-depleting nightmare." Variations on this scam have plagued booksellers and other retailers for decades.
The original Hyannis News report is so parodically breathless that it’s hard to take the story seriously (Boston25’s overview is more measured), but my research turned up a number of references to/reports going back to the early aughts on this specific special-order scam…and I dimly recall my bosses at Bohemian Bookworm schooling the search team on DIY anti-fraud traps.
Here’s what it looked like for me and Mr. Phillips:
In early October [of 2019], Phil[l]ips received an e-mail from an individual asking if Books by the Sea sold or could pre-order textbooks and if he accepted credit cards.
This last bit is what finally tipped me off the third time: the stilted query about whether Exhibit B. takes credit cards. In retrospect, it probably should have raised a red flag immediately — it’s…2023? who doesn’t? and if you spent long enough on the site to find the contact info, wouldn’t you have seen the CC icons?
But it didn’t, and the first guy was asking me about law textbooks, which is not really Exhibit B.’s lane but was close enough that I agreed to track them down — but I sent links to the customer, for two reasons. First, well, Mr. Phillips can explain it:
Replying that the bookstore could do this, he cautioned the would-be customer that textbooks are very expensive and payment would have to be made up front.
The orders inevitably totaled several grand, before shipping, and I don’t tend to have that kind of credit available. I can get it, but it’s a hass, and I’m happy to do a little extra to build customer loyalty…but not for, like, nursing/med-surg texts, which is what the second and third dudes wanted. Or for a customer who’s weirdly insistent on adding unnecessary shipping time and charges to an order, from a store that doesn’t specialize in what he needs.
Second, the whole deal is a hass — ordering, waiting for the order to come in complete, repackaging (very heavy) textbooks for shipping and hoping they don’t get damaged and then refused — and to make it worth my time, I have to charge a handling mark-up, but I don’t consider that ethical…
…so I offered to eliminate the middleman of, uh, myself, but the customers were always like “but you promised to take care of this for me!!” With apologies to Sam Gerard: that’s hinky.
That said, even on the third go-round, it still didn’t seem that unusual, because if you’ve worked either in used books or on the internet for any length of time, you know there’s a certain breed of book-acquisitive mole-creature Boomer dude who is just…like that. Doesn’t quite get how things work, doesn’t hear it when said “how” is patiently and repeatedly explained, simply must go around the block to get to the house next door and assumes you’ll follow him with all his shit piled in a Radio Flyer, including his Rube Goldbergian coffee order.
This droit du ass-pain-eur attitude, while an irritant, is not going to set off a ton of alarms for a woman of my particular experience, is the point. Back to Phillips:
After receiving the list of desired books, Phillips researched the titles, responded with a total price and received the buyer's credit card information. When the books arrived, he ran the credit card, which was accepted, and shipped the books. The customer/scammer subsequently ordered three more times.
It never got that far for me; I did build a custom order for the first guy, with a warning that price fluctuations might mean he paid more “at the register.” That guy then ghosted, I now suspect because my shop software’s anti-fraud algo smelled a rat when he tried to check out. That didn’t happen for Phillips, and for various reasons involving fine-print subclauses on merchant liability, he got stuck with the entire bill. Detroit indie 27th Letter got tagged just last summer, for several times the amount Phillips was saddled with and equally dim prospects for a settlement in the store’s favor. (27th Letter is hanging in, but BbtS, as it happens, is closing next weekend — I think for other reasons, but I doubt the post-scam experience helped, especially given the timing.)
Needless to say, I don’t judge these shops or anyone else who got taken — I would have been an anyone, were I not a solo owner with zero spare time for extra steps. And I understand how the scam works…the mechanics of it. What I don’t understand, as I mentioned, is the why. The ROI doesn’t seem high enough. The scammer has to spend extended time “with” the mark, and the longer the exposure, the higher the risk, plus if you can’t get these stolen-card deals done quickly, the card will get reported. But provided the card works, it’s still not a cinch to make money; textbooks have a high margin (especially if your “wholesale price” is zero, sigh), and an operation like this is likely a boiler-room/assembly-line prospect on the admin side…but here again, to move units quickly, on eBay or whatever, before you get reported, you’ve got to sell at a deep discount. Reeling in marks, constantly shuffling your Gmail addresses and eBay usernames, trapping and ditching cards, sitting on auctions — it all seems like a lot of work, and too chancy, for the size of the score.
But I’ll give the Textbook Prisoner con this: it’s less annoying than other, shorter cons I’ve had run on me as a bookseller. It’s not as insulting to my intelligence (claiming the package never arrived) or as wearyingly nasty (trying to blackmail me with negative feedback/reviews). It’s wrong, and it’s weird, but it’s not personal.
Did This Trump-Loving, Leopard-Hunting Dentist Kill His Wife? [Rolling Stone] // Content warning for big-game hunting, which leads this story about the suspicious death of Bianca Rudolph and may make some readers hope a lion snuck into her and her husband Larry’s tent and spoke truth to power.
Alas, Bianca’s death quickly starts to look like a fraud — at minimum.
It was, Larry soon declared, a tragic accident. The local cops agreed and, after accompanying Larry and the corpse to Lusaka, returned his weapon. “They aren’t exactly CSI: Miami,” says Dan Foote, former U.S. ambassador to Zambia.
An intelligence officer from the wildlife authorities arrived on the scene and later shared his observations with fellow investigators: The barrel seemed too long to him for self-infliction. The police had not collected fingerprints. And this American in the golf shirt, his tears dried fast.
And allegedly not Larry’s first, or last, although certainly his most lethal…aaaaand allegedly he and his longtime mistress were asking around their acquaintance groups about hit men.
The RS piece is from the middle of last year; Rudolph and Milliron’s trial got an outcome not long after the magazine hit mailboxes. In theory, they were set for sentencing in early February, but I can’t find any updates from this calendar year. Feel free to brief me in the comments! — SDB
Next week on Best Evidence: Trailed, Film Threat, and crackpot subcommittees.
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