Scoundrel · Bad Vegan · Alice
Plus: Is *anyone* paying attention to "Catfish" (etc.)?
the true crime that's worth your time
The crime
Edgar Smith killed 15-year-old Victoria Zielinski in 1957 as she walked home from a friend’s house in a New Jersey suburb. Years later, after William J. Buckley helped secure his release from prison, Smith attacked again, kidnapping a California woman at knifepoint.
The story
In the early pages of Sarah Weinman’s new book, Scoundrel: How a Convicted Murderer Persuaded the Women Who Loved Him, the Conservative Establishment, and the Courts to Set Him Free, one of Weinman’s sources says that the story she’s telling “would have made a wonderful novel or a wonderfully trashy one.”
It also makes a strong true-crime book. With it, Weinman lives up to her reputation as one of the genre’s most thoughtful writers.
Scoundrel, the masterful result of a years-long investigation, focuses on the unlikely relationship between Edgar Smith, a convicted murderer on death row; conservative scion William J. Buckley; and book editor Sophie Wilkins. The last published Smith’s jailhouse memoir, which made the case for his innocence.
Smith and Buckley started to write to each other in 1962 after the magazine publisher read a newspaper story that quoted Smith saying he read National Review in his prison cell. Through their correspondence, Buckley became convinced of Smith’s innocence, thinking his brilliant prose and witty letters showed he was too intelligent to be a crass killer. Buckley wrote a story for Esquire arguing Smith had been framed, launched a legal defense fund, and hired some of the nation’s top lawyers to defend his new friend.
Buckley also introduced Smith to Wilkins, after learning the editor was interested in publishing Smith’s memoir, A Brief Against Death. Smith’s and Wilkins’s relationship quickly transitioned from professional to romantic, with the pair exchanging dozens of sexually explicit letters transported by Smith’s lawyer to evade jailhouse censors.
Through a combination of Buckley’s advocacy, the success of A Brief Against Death, and a series of Supreme Court decisions, Smith’s conviction was overturned, and he was freed.
Weinman wisely incorporates extensive quotes from Smith’s letters into her narrative, showing how the imprisoned murderer manipulated Buckley and Wilkins into believing in his innocence. At times, Smith even attempts to play his two friends on the outside against each other. She demonstrates how two educated, intelligent people became ensnared in a liar’s web.
In Scoundrel, as in her previous work, Weinman places careful emphasis on the lives of Smith’s victims. She notes in her introduction, “It is the voice of the women, sacrificed on the altar of the literary talent of a murderer that animate the narrative of this book. The nonfiction crime genre increasingly makes greater room for the stories of women, embodying their full spectrum as human beings rather flattening them into products of seductive killers.” Weinman takes us into the lives of Victoria Zielinski and Lefteriya Ozbun, and the ripple effects of crimes.
True-crime fans will find a lot to like about Scoundrel. It’s carefully and meticulously reported, entertainingly written, and a fascinating, lurid tale. [“With more than a few echoes of the Norman Mailer/Jack Henry Abbott saga.” -- SDB] The book will also likely find readers outside the genre as well, with its exploration of Buckley and the broader media. It’s well worth a read. — Elizabeth Held
We love having voices like Elizabeth’s in Best Evidence. Sarah and I write the bulk of this thing, true, but working with brilliant critics and reviewers like her bring fantastic additional perspectives to BE. If you’re a paid subscriber, thank you so much for supporting our freelance program. And if you’re not, please consider picking one up so we can keep working with great folks like her.
U.S. romance scams are at a record high. So reports ABC as part of a story about a 78-year-old man law enforcement says was bilked out of nearly $500K by an alleged fraud ring he met on a dating app called iFlirt. (I guess this is the app? I mean, the platform itself wasn’t implicated but if there was an app used by scammers on a fictional procedural it might very well look like this one.)
The uptick news comes from the FTC, which issued a press release on the matter earlier this month. A few bits of note (and you have to love that the FTC annotates these releases, right?):
In the past five years, people have reported losing a staggering $1.3 billion to romance scams,[1][2] more than any other FTC fraud category. The numbers have skyrocketed in recent years, and 2021 was no exception – reported losses hit a record $547 million for the year. That’s more than six times the reported losses in 2017 and a nearly 80% increase compared to 2020. The median individual reported loss in 2021 was $2,400.[3]
and these bits, from the annotations:
About 28% of people who reported losing money on a romance scam in 2021 said they paid with a gift card or reload card, followed by cryptocurrency (18%), payment app or service (14%), bank transfer or payment (13%), and wire transfer (12%). These figures exclude MoneyGram and Western Union as these data contributors report each transaction separately, which affects the number of reports.
In 2021, the median individual reported losses to romance scams by age were as follows: $750 (18-29), $2,000 (30-39), $3,000 (40-49), $4,000 (50-59), $6,000 (60-69), and $9,000 (70 and over). Reports provided by MoneyGram and Western Union are excluded for these calculations as these data contributors report each transaction separately, which typically affects calculation of an individual’s median loss. About 70% (38,886 reports) of 2021 romance scam reports included age information.
Given the ubiquity of true-crime content that details romance scams, I have to say that I came into the FTC’s announcement with a bit of an eye-roll. Who are these ding-dongs that haven’t ever seen the countless online relationship scam stories out there? One thing that occurs to me, though, is that based on this data, romance scammers might be winning because of these shows, all of which detail vast and shocking losses.
I’m not saying that being scammed out of $750-$9,000 is an inconsequential loss — I get mad if I feel like I wasted $5! — but perhaps this is how these scammers are winning these days, by keeping things small. If I met someone online and they asked me to loan them $300K, I’d know there was trickery afoot.
But if someone said they needed me to help them buy some gift cards, I might just assume they were bad with money, not that they were part of a global fraud network. After all, every romance fraud story I’ve seen goes way into the six figures, while “He Took Me For $750 in Walgreens Gift Cards” hasn’t been a topic on Dr. Phil quite yet. — EB
Chris Smith sure has been busy lately! We just talked about the FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened director last week, as he’s heading up a docuseries on alleged stolen crypto launderers Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan for Netflix, but before that we’ve got his Bad Vegan to look forward to.
This four-part show is about Sarma Melngailis, who built a raw food lifestyle and dining empire (she owned New York’s Pure Food and Wine and One Lucky Duck, among others), and was arrested in Tennessee in 2016, on the run after authorities accused her of “stealing $844,000 from four investors, failing to pay $400,000 in taxes, and ‘shortchanging employees’ $40,000 in wages,” CBS reported at the time.
This part of the story might ring a bell: it was widely reported at the time that police said they were able to find Melngailis and her husband after the pair ordered a Domino’s pizza to be delivered to their hotel, clearly the subject of much mirth given her position as a plant-based icon.
It’ll be interesting to see how Smith tackles this, since so much of the story revolves around that punch line. It’s jazzy on the surface, isn’t it? Vegan icon caught via chain cheese? But it gets less funny when you start to unpack how eager we always are to deconstruct how women eat — and how excited folks get when they think they’ve “caught” someone who restricts their diet because they must or simply because they wish to, “cheating.”
Will Smith get into all that, and does he have the chops to navigate those waters without falling into diet-shaming cliche? We’ll find out on March 16, when the show drops on Netflix. — EB
Is Alice really based on a true story? The trailer for the Keke Palmer-starring feature looks like someone rebooted problematic 2020 horror movie Antebellum as a 1970s piece — but according to the trailer, it’s a true story. So, what’s the deal?
In the trailer, we see Palmer’s character toiling on a plantation in what looks like pre-Civil War times, until she escapes and sees a road (also: big The Village vibes). What appears to follow is a revenge story about how she seeks to punish the person who kept her captive and unaware that it was 1973, and the world was in the midst of the civil rights movement.
Speaking with the LA Times, Alice writer/director Krystin Ver Linden said that the piece was inspired by the story of Mae Louise Miller, which was detailed in a 2006 episode of Nightline:
Their story, which ABCNEWS has not confirmed independently, is not unheard of. Justice Department records tell of prosecutions, well into the 20th century, of whites who continued to keep blacks in "involuntary servitude," coercing them with threats on their lives, exploiting their ignorance of life and the laws beyond the plantation where they were born.
The sisters say that's how it happened them. They were born in the 1930s and '40s into a world where their father, Cain Wall, now believed to be 105 years old, had already been forced into slave labor.
"It was so bad, I ran away" at age 9, Annie Miller told ABCNEWS' Nightline. "But they told my brother they better come get me. I ran to a place even worse than where I were. But the people told my brothers, they go, 'You better go get her.' They came [and] got me and they brought me back.
Ver Linden said she first heard the Millers’ story via a People article datelined the next year.
The story that Miller, 63, and her relatives tell is a sepia-toned nightmare straight out of the Old South. For years, she says, the family was forced to pick cotton, clean house and milk cows—all without being paid—under threat of whippings, rape and even death. They say they were passed from white family to white family, their condition never improving, until finally, hope that life would ever get better was nearly lost.
Technically, the Walls were victims of “peonage,” an illegal practice that flourished in the rural South after slavery was abolished in 1865 and lasted, in isolated cases like theirs, until as recently as the 1960s. Under peonage, blacks were forced to work off debts, real or imagined, with free labor under the same types of violent coercion as slavery. In contrast with the more common arrangement known as sharecropping, peons weren’t paid and couldn’t move from the land without permission. “White people had the power to hold blacks down, and they weren’t afraid to use it—and they were brutal,” says Pete Daniel, a historian at the Smithsonian Institution and an expert on peonage.
The Millers’ story came to light following work from Antoinette Harrell, a genealogist known as the “Peonage Detective,” who shares some truly remarkable stories on her website. According to the LA Times, though, while peonage was real, and the Millers lit the spark for the screenplay, Alice is wholly fictional. I am already looking forward to how how certain factions of society — the same ones that insist on flying Confederate flags due to their love of their “heritage” — will react to this movie! I am sure all those folks will do just fine. Prepare for them to melt down on Facebook when the movie drops on March 18. — EB
Wednesday on Best Evidence: “Beastly” coverage of animal “crime sprees.”
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