Serial · Pez · Oatly
When an influential journalist helps a suspect
the true crime that's worth your time
Baltimore prosecutors have ordered additional tests in the death of Hae Min Lee. You don’t need me to explain who Lee is; if you’re completely unfamiliar with the first season of the Serial podcast, you’re not reading this newsletter. If you need a refresher on the progress of the case since then, Biography has a good timeline; the main thing to know is that the life sentence Adnan Syed is serving for Lee’s 1999 slaying remains in effect since a Maryland Court of Appeals reversed a 2018 court decision and denied his request for a new trial. Syed has maintained his innocence throughout.
The Juvenile Restoration Act, passed by the Maryland legislature in 2021, appears to have offered Syed a new route toward a possible appeal. After the law took effect last April, his attorneys asked for a sentence review — as reported by the New York Times, “The law gives prosecutors discretion to modify sentences of offenders who were under 18 at the time of their crimes and have served at least 20 years in prison.” Syed was convicted in February 2000, placing the case within those parameters.
Last week, the Baltimore City State’s Attorney's Office filed a joint motion with Syed’s defense team, requesting “additional forensic testing” of evidence from the case, CNN reports. “In the process of reviewing this case for a possible resentencing, it became clear that additional forensic testing - which was not available at the time of the original investigation and trial in this case - would be an appropriate avenue to pursue,” the prosecutors said in a tweeted statement.
Per the joint motion: “DNA testing has changed and improved drastically…Ms. Lee's clothing, shoes, and certain other evidence recovered from the scene have not been subject to DNA testing," and Syed “seeks to use the most advanced DNA testing methodologies that are currently available to analyze the biological evidence collected from the scene in an effort to exculpate him. The State joins in the request that the court order DNA testing on all pieces of the victim's clothing, shoes, recovered hairs, and other evidence submitted.”
Per the motion, the the Baltimore Police Department has 15 days to send the evidence from the case to an independent forensic crime lab for testing.
Folks who watched Amy Berg’s HBO doc The Case Against Adnan Syed (which Sarah and I did, discussing it on her then-podcast just a few months before we first launched the publication you’re reading now) might recall that an independent forensic review reviewed 12 samples from case evidence (“including fingernail clippings and material from necklaces and clothing,” the NYT reported at the time) and did not find any evidence of Syed’s DNA.
However, per the Times, “No one else’s DNA was found on Lee’s body or in her car, either. That means only that the killer, whether it was someone else or Syed, left no detectable trace among the areas sampled.” According to the Baltimore Sun, prosecutors tested the evidence in 2018 “as Maryland’s high court was set to consider whether to grant Syed a new trial.”
It took a public records request to make the information from those tests public, and once it hit the headlines, state prosecutors said “these results in no way exonerate him.” So, it’s unclear what’s changed since then, and a timeline for the next round of testing and results has yet to be announced. — EB
Oat milk wants your attention. Oatly might not be the best oat milk (that’s Califia’s barista blend, in my opinion), but it’s definitely the one with the most marketing hustle, with billboards and ad campaigns that are pretty hard to ignore. And now they’ve done a single-episode podcast that’s branded content (that’s a fancy way to say “ad”) in true-crime clothing.
New podcast Oatly Lake has all the hallmarks of the true crime and investigative journalism genres. Jingly-jangly intro music. An engaging podcast host. And a mystery rooted in small-town America.
The twist? The solitary episode of the first season, titled “Deep Waters,” is actually an 18-minute ad for Swedish alternative milk brand Oatly.
The advertiser is known for its bold and playful creative work and Oatly Lake is no exception.
The podcast was covertly released last week on Spotify, Apple and other podcast networks without any fanfare.
The podcast description strikes a why tone: “In Episode 1 of Oatly Lake, which is in fact the only episode of Oatly Lake, podcast producer Schuyler Swenson revisits the moment a Swedish-based oat drink company discovered the lake in Michigan that shares its name. Schuyler then takes listeners on a journey into the American Midwest, to the town of Mesick, to try to find answers to the burning questions this discovery raises.”
It’s a “real” podcast about a real lake, presented using a lot of the typical true-crime podcast tropes as a way to, I guess, increase brand awareness or continue to position Oatly as the cool oat milk that doesn’t take itself seriously, or something?
It’s an interesting tactic, especially given the general desire from advertisers not to be associated with crime content. Both ad networks and direct sales agreements with online advertisers often exclude crime content from display placements, which is pretty understandable if you think about it. So, to establish your brand as in a way synonymous with crime content is an interesting decision — or one that indicates that true crime, as a genre, isn’t perceived as crime at all by some marketers or companies. Now that’s a weird thing to consider. — EB
The Playboy readers in Best Evidence’s audience will already be familiar with this one. I’m speaking, of course, to those of you who read the now-digital publication for its articles — specifically, its long investigations. Which were often quite good!
That mag’s archives are tough to search, sadly, so I can’t give you a link to 2015’s “How a Michigan Farmer Made $4 Million Smuggling Rare Pez Containers Into the U.S.” Collectors Weekly has a backstory on that piece about Steven Glew, who back then was “offering the book and movie rights to his life story as the world’s most notorious and successful Pez-dispenser smuggler.”
It looks like someone eventually took Glew up on his offer, as Amy Bandlien Storkel and Bryan Storkel’s documentary on his true crime adventures premiered at SXSW last week, because while ding-dong bar owners will performatively dump vodka with Russian names into the gutter, god forbid anyone impose economic or cultural sanctions against Texas over its war against women and trans folks.
Where was I? Oh, yeah, Pez Outlaw. Per Slashfilm:
Have you ever heard the story about the Pez Outlaw? In the 1990s, a curious man named Steve Glew met a mysterious woman at a toy convention. Opening her coat like a spy in a thriller she showed Steve a rare Pez dispenser — and told him how he could get his hands on such a gem: by hopping on a plane to Slovenia. From there, Steve embarked on a globe-trotting journey that allowed him to quit his dead-end machinist job and become the Pez Outlaw, a near-mythical figure who would head to Pez factories in Europe, buy up designs that weren't regularly sold in the United States, and flip them for a profit. And we're talking a big profit here — somewhere in the millions. Things got so good that Steve actually had to hire a team to help him sell Pez.
Of course, Steve wasn't selling his own product. He was selling the property of the Pez, and Scott McWhinnie, then-president of the Pez Company (he actually went by the title the Pezident) wasn't happy. Thus the stage was set for an epic rivalry between Steve, the man dubbed the Pez Outlaw, and the Pezident.
The doc has garnered positive reviews from critics thus far, with many praising how low stakes and “victimless” the crimes portrayed are. “Despite fitting in with recent docs examining the Beanie Baby fad and synthetic diamonds, and too many documentaries about online fraud and corruption to count, Pez Outlaw instead settles for something more frivolous and fun,” writes the Hollywood Reporter, for example.
The doc has yet to announce distribution, so it’s unclear when we’ll be able to check it out — consider this your “you heard it here first” alert. In the meantime, Glew is a quirky and charming presence on Facebook, and will probably know where the doc is screening well before the rest of us. — EB
After this, I hope Best Evidence never has to think about Chris Cuomo again. This Vice piece casts into sharp relief how a powerful journalist can minimize allegations against someone accused of harassment or abuse.
Emails newly obtained via New York’s Freedom of Information Law shed light on the intimate involvement of Chris Cuomo, the disgraced former CNN personality, in responding to public-relations crises surrounding his brother, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who resigned last year after several women said he had sexually harassed them.
At one point the emails show Chris Cuomo and the governor's top aide, Melissa DeRosa, working alone on a draft of a statement the governor would give responding to harassment allegations. They also show Chris Cuomo discussing how best to attack reporting by the New York Times that revealed the nursing-home COVID-19 death toll was far higher than the governor had said.
Obviously, a pretty notable breach of journalistic ethics, and one that makes you wonder if this was the first time the former CNN staffer pulled this kind of bullshit.
As folks who live in the New York area know, Andrew Cuomo is attempting some sort of a comeback (already!) with the New York Times reporting that his “still-active campaign account began spending $369,000 to air a television advertisement across the state — a media blitz designed not to support or attack a political candidate or even to apologize to New Yorkers, but to brazenly recast himself as the victim of politically motivated ‘attacks.’”
Cuomo continues to face a civil suit from a state trooper who says Cuomo harassed and touched her inappropriately. He also faces state and federal inquiries over the nursing home deaths, and issues with his memoir.
At a speech at a church in Brooklyn, he claimed that CNN was “afraid of the cancel culture mob” and fired his brother, without acknowledging the clear journalistic impropriety revealed in the FOIAed emails. You can read Vice’s reporting on the document dump here. — EB
Later this week on Best Evidence: We’ll have a great discussion thread for you tomorrow, Sarah will have a juicy issue for you Thursday, and get your raw veg out Friday, when I’ll review Bad Vegan.
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