Slender Man · Black Dahlia · Accidental Presidents
Two hits and a whiff
the true crime that's worth your time
By the time you read this, I hope I’ve returned to New York airspace. I went to Boulder to celebrate the life of my Uncle Tom, a wise and gentle man we couldn’t really spare; one of my favorite memories of him is of us tooling around the city, listening to NPR and talking the stories over. As I write this, I’m pointed east, trying to beat a winter-weather system back into my home time zone.
One of the silver linings to a drive this long is how far down you can whittle that stockpile of audiobooks and podcasts you’ve meant to make time for for ages. Here’s what I knocked off in the last week. — SDB
The crime
Various assassinations, plus a whole heap of corruption.
The story
I started Accidental Presidents: Eight Men Who Changed America because it seemed like audiobook Buntnip: a comprehensive but not too academic history, compelling and well-written but soothing enough to put on at bedtime. It worked a treat for nighttime listening, but it isn’t snoozy exactly, so I had no problem staying awake at the wheel…especially during narrator Arthur Morey’s/author Jared Cohen’s gleefully snarky account of Andrew Johnson’s inebriated speech at the 1865 inauguration. I had never heard that story before and I cringed the whole way through it.
Cohen, obsessed with presidential history generally and “accidental” presidents — those who succeeded to the office via the death (or impeachment) of their predecessors — specifically since early grade school, starts each chapter with a contextual overview of the “original” president’s relationship with his VP, where the party system/electoral politics stood at that time, and any other background pertinent to the impending “accident.” Then it’s on to the inciting incident; the accidental president’s response to his moment in history; and how it might reflect forward in future chapters. That lets Cohen cram a lot of info into the book, and framing the narrative in terms of the overlap between the regimes instead of silo-ing them chronologically works really well.
The Coolidge section is a great example: Cohen opens with the demise of Jess Smith, irises out to talk a little bit about the Great War and the “enh, he’ll do” nomination of Harding, then gets granular about Harding’s history, including a handful of characters you’ll remember from Boardwalk Empire if you watched that, and a couple who passed through the peripheries of the Lindbergh kidnapping. His writing is assured — occasionally I was like, “Wait, we’re starting how many years before such-and-so’s demise?”, but Cohen always brings it back around — and Morey’s history-prof timbre is well matched to the material.
Harding’s tenure is also sodden with crime, but not every chapter has to do with a political murder or corruption, and some of you might struggle to care about John Tyler no matter how expert the rendering — so for some readers, maybe a secondhand version of the text is preferred, because it’s easier to skim presidents/periods of time you don’t engage with. But I didn’t care about Tyler either until I listened to the book, so in either iteration, I recommend it. — SDB
The crime
The so-called “Slender Man stabbing” case.
The story
It’s hard to believe the events Kathleen Hale capably reviews in Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls happened almost a decade ago. It’s also hard to believe how much dysfunction seems to center on Waukesha, WI and surrounds, but anyway, the stabbing of Payton “Bella” Lautner by untreated schizophrenic 12-year-old Morgan Geyser and her shared-psychotic-disordered friend Anissa Weier is one of those stories that has stuck with me. It’s probably unsurprising, between the internet-peril pearl-clutching on the part of prosecutors; the “Girl World” aspects of Geyser and Weier’s relationship, which simultaneously present as 1) obvious to almost any tween girl emerita and 2) impenetrable to law enforcement and mental-health professionals; and how polarized shit gets when children and criminal justice meet.
But although I happily stock Slenderman at the shop, I did wonder whether I would bother reading it, because it felt, maybe, like one of those Vanity Fair articles that becomes a book, a book those who read the VF article don’t need — because we know everything we’re going to know already. You could technically call the case’s disposition “ongoing,” but it isn’t, especially, for reasons I won’t elaborate on so as not to undercut the mic drop that is the end of Hale’s book. We know what happened. We know what happened after that. We more or less know why, to the extent that we can, and a lengthier version of previous attempts to know the unknowable isn’t going to tell us more. It’s just going to take longer. That, and the book comes multiple years after previous properties, some of which worked, some of which sucked. Is this true crime worth your time?
I think it is, if you haven’t kept up with the case (or never engaged with it in the first place), and even if you have, the audiobook is very well done by Therese Plummer. She mangles a couple of locutions, but only a couple, and the Doing Of Voices can go a lot of ways and mostly not good ones, but Plummer’s is outstanding, especially with Geyser and Weier. For the writing’s part, Hale has spent a lot of time with the case, and the foreword might seem excessively meticulous about sourcing/the lack of it, but that in turn seems to relieve Hale of the burden of including every single piece of information she did get in the body of the text. The subject matter almost dares Hale to over-subscribe certain images, but she avoids the traps (…mostly; it’s not that I don’t believe the story about Geyser’s mother and the stray kitten, but it’s too “GEDDIT??” and should have got cut).
Here again, a paper version may work better if you know the story reasonably well and might feel the need to skim; some of the second half feels…not redundant, exactly, but the intransigence of the system when it comes to juvenile justice and forensic psychology isn’t exactly unpredictable as events unfold. But the narrative moves right along, and if the case fascinates you, a savvy author won’t try to do too much more with it, and Hale doesn’t. I recommend this one too. — SDB
The crime
The gruesome murder of Elizabeth Short in mid-January of 1947.
The story
I almost can’t believe how mediocre Audible’s Solving the Black Dahlia podcast is. So, no need to scroll down for my recommendation obviously — it’s a nope, for both case-heads and those new to the story — but I think it’s worth unpacking the why a little further, because it’s kind of a case study in how not to make a case-specific true-crime pod.
The issues begin with the overall structure. The six episodes range in length from 18 to 46 minutes, and in theory, that’s fine. In practice, it feels reverse-engineered, and like certain episodes didn’t “have enough” to justify their existence — and the narrative arc, such as it is, is basically “let’s introduce Steve Hodel’s crackpot heap o’ coincidences in the first ep, then spend the rest of the podcast’s runtime challenging his theory that his dad George killed Elizabeth Short, only to replace it with one that’s only marginally more compelling, with a bunch of sidebars along the way that are more about the host than the case.”
The problems persist intra-episode; six episodes totaling around three hours is, in this iteration, both too long and inadequate to the task. At no point does host/co-creator Douglas Laux give us a thorough overview of crime-scene info/facts in evidence, or list the most popular or credible theories in an organized way. He does find time to mention several times in each episode that he’s a former CIA operative, which I didn’t find especially pertinent off the top — you’re trying to figure out who killed Short, not make her a confidential informant — and found even less relevant by the end.
I don’t think this is an entirely immaterial skill in the genre, mind you, because enough interviewees and/or law-enforcement contacts will choose to trust a “Company” vet over a civilian that it could have gotten Laux superior access (as it may have here, although access to Hodel is of questionable scarcity…or value). But it’s not used to good effect, and it does seem like a host claiming that specific bona fide might spend a little less time dwelling on how shocking the crime-scene photos are. They are, but that’s a big part of why the case continues to fascinate, like it or not, and 10-15 minutes of runtime devoted to how “kids today” just looked at the photos in a criminology class and ate popcorn is not a good use of anyone’s time. It’s…a criminology class. Presumably the number of people recoiling from murder scenes and fleeing to the comp lit department drops to zero after a couple weeks.
So, Solving the Black Dahlia isn’t a good grounding in the case if you don’t know it, and if you do know it, it feels like 95 percent wheel-spinning of this sort — amateurish wheel-spinning at that. Laux takes certain things as read…literally, because Steve Hodel and John Douglas (The Cases That Haunt Us) agree on the significance of the dump site in the case, which Laux comes back to several times. But he also takes as read the “this perpetrator has to have been a doctor/surgeon” part of the profile, which I thought we’d debunked by 2021 when the podcast came out, if not sooner. (In fact, I think Douglas may knock that idea down in his chapter on the Ripper.) The result is that the suspect he lands on, a Los Angeles surgeon whose daughter knew Short’s sister, is better than George Hodel, but still not good especially, much less the slam-dunk he thinks. (IIRC, Douglas names a possible suspect, which I will confirm when I get home to my bookshelves; Laux doesn’t mention this.)
Laux’s writing is labored and could have used a copy-edit (you get one use of “huckster,” not three; you get zero uses of “mountebank,” even if it’s pronounced correctly, which it was not). Often, Laux’s introductions to interview segments and clips either summarize them to the extent that they’re no longer necessary, or don’t segue into them properly, and his “acting” is unconvincing. Again, Laux has things to offer the medium, and future podcasts will probably improve in that regard; nobody’s good at this right away. But you can’t leave a “Walter Heirens” in the final edit. You have to go back and fix it. And on top of alllll of this, the thing is physically challenging to listen to. The studio bits sound murky; the interviews sound screechy. Even grading on a curve of listening to it in the car, I just felt like…when are we, here?
The baggy structure, the not knowing who it’s for, the slapped-up sound and credulous interview questions…the whole thing sounds a decade old. In, I don’t know, 2014 or 2015, when nobody knew what tools to use and even “professional” podcasts had some aural hangnails, okay. In 2021, when presumably Audible paid for this: no. — SDB
Friday on Best Evidence: Baldwin! Streep! Spacey! It’s a star-studded day.
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