Slenderman · Boston Strangler · Citizen Sleuth
Plus: A cell phone scam long read
the true crime that's worth your time
Happy day two of Sarah’s birthday week! I’m piloting the Best Evidence ship on my own this week, while she celebrates her 50th birthday in style. Want to celebrate with her? Then a paid subscription — knocked down to only $50 for the year — might be the way to go.
Or you can treat yourself to an item from her small true crime bookshop (take it from a fellow shopkeeper — every sale feels like a gift in the slow retail days of March), or just wish her a happy 50th birthday in the comments. It all works! — EB
Welcome to what’s become an annual tradition here at Best Evidence – a dive into the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award Fact Crime nominees. Are any of the 2023 nominees worth adding to your reading list?
Let’s start our look at the nominees with Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls by Kathleen Hale.
The titular violent crime will be familiar to most – the 2014 stabbing of 12-year old Payton (Bella) Leutner by her close friend Morgan Geyser and classmate Anissa Weier in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Fascinated by the mythical Slenderman character and driven by a desire to please him, Morgan and Anissa planned the murder of their classmate, believing that to have the intended impact the victim had to be someone Morgan loved. The details of this crime have been well covered in the news and in the 2016 documentary Beware the Slenderman. So while much of Hale’s Slenderman is familiar, its focus on Wisconsin’s juvenile justice system and Morgan’s mental illness is illuminating.
The Slenderman case brought about an almost satanic panic level of hand wringing around unsupervised internet use among children. A lot of hay has been made about Slenderman’s online origins and the hold the figure seemed to have on the girls. Hale expertly puts all this in the context of Morgan’s early-onset childhood schizophrenia and Anissa’s desperate need for others’ acceptance. Visions plagued Morgan for years before the crime and the introduction of Slenderman via Anissa validated and nurtured the delusions she was already having. Anissa, easily influenced by her peers, was diagnosed with shared delusional disorder after the crime. So the explanation, as much as there can be one, seems to fall to a Leopold and Loeb-esque union of two troubled young people set on a destructive and violent course.
Hale really digs into the police’s handling of the case and the subsequent legal wrangling to determine whether Morgan and Anissa were competent to stand trial and if they’d be charged as adults. It’s jarring that the police subjected Morgan to a 5-hour confession with no parent present and clear that the police had no idea how to handle a child with a serious mental illness.
The court and mental health system in Wisconsin seemed ill-equipped to deal with a case like this. A huge focus was placed on determining the competency of Morgan and Anissa to stand trial. To this end, Morgan was denied the medication necessary to address her delusions and other symptoms of schizophrenia. There was little interest in addressing her mental illness, instead the desire was to keep her lucid enough to make it through a competency hearing.
Hale had a great deal of access to Morgan, her parents, and legal team and this book very much feels like her story. The desperation of her family to ensure she was getting the care she needed after her arrest is palpable as is the tremendous guilt they feel for not recognizing the signs of Morgan’s illness. Building sympathy for Morgan while not diminishing the impact on her victim is a fine line to tow. Hale fell short in my eyes on this score. At times, Peyton’s family and supporters feel brushed aside and minimized in service of the perspective Hale wanted to advance. That’s a shame, but there’s still value in Hale’s comprehensive reporting and examination of this haunting crime. – Susan Howard
If Susan’s review inspired you to read Slenderman, a new, hardcover copy is available at Sarah’s bookstore for only $27. (I love that it’s in the “internet peril” section.) It feels good to shop small! — EB
Without Facebook, we wouldn’t have Boston Strangler. Like many of you (I assume), I watched the feature-length telling of the 1960s-era case last weekend, and I certainly see why so many folks compared it to Zodiac. A period journalism piece set in a smoky newsroom with yellow or blue gels and an unsettling lack of resolution? Check and check.
But even though I knew the ending wouldn’t be a neat one, I still found myself forgetting that, somehow hoping that the many strange threads of the case would be woven tightly in this telling. I think a lot of that is because of the remarkably compelling performances from Keira Knightley and Carrie Coon (as journalists Loretta McLaughlin and Jean Cole): Coon is pitch-perfect as a seasoned hard-news, shoe-leather journo who learned to play the game, while Knightley rends your heart a bit with her frustration on the lifestyle desk and her wish to do more. (Chris Cooper, as their paper’s city editor, Jack MacLaine, is a little too good to be true.)
Knightley and Coon are the sugar coating on the disturbing subtext of the movie: that the Boston Strangler, perhaps, is less of a specific killer and more of a general boogeyman, the expression of male hate against women who dare live alone. (The Zodiac is arguably a similar concept, though less definable by his target.) Suspected Strangler Albert DeSalvo is basically a joke in this film, and that seems intentional in the casting — David Dastmalchian, who plays DeSalvo in BS, has made a career of playing squirrelly, weaselly weirdos, not imposing and unstoppable forces.
It’s a deft demystification of the invincible serial killer trope, and the other suspects are similarly screwy. This isn’t to say that they’re any less of a threat, of course — but it’s always felt like a cheat that Hollywood suggests that serial killers are these impossible geniuses with superhuman strength and cunning. In reality, most killers are just men, weak and stupid, preying on a population that the powers don’t care to protect. Boston Strangler knows that, and rests comfortably in that truth, even though a scary, mesmerizing killer might make for a more viral story.
On, and speaking of viral, back to my lead sentence: speaking with Deadline, director Matt Ruskin explains how he found his way into the BS story in an anecdote that actually explains a lot about the movie’s overall structure. From Ruskin:
Jean Cole’s obituary mentioned she had two daughters, and one of them had a Facebook profile with one photo showing her with her arm around an old friend of mine. So I called my friend Lana and I asked her how she knew this woman, she said it was her mother and Jean Cole was her grandmother. When I told her about my interest in the story, she introduced me to Loretta and Jean’s families who welcomed me with open arms and gave me access to everything from old photos and journals to old clippings, and they gave me the unvarnished family history. I was totally hooked at that point.
Have you watched Boston Strangler yet? If so, what did you think? — EB
A documentary about controversial true crime podcast Mile Marker 181 is getting some big buzz. Emily Nestor’s Mile Marker 181 podcast was initially intended, she said then, to cast light on the death of Jaleayah Davis. As Investigation Discovery recapped in 2019, Davis was found dead on an Ohio road in 2011, the victim of what police said was a brutal car crash. Her friends and family, as well as independent investigators they hired, said Davis was murdered, and that police covered up the crime, a claim echoed across the internet.
Nestor’s podcast was intended to find out the truth, but she found herself at the center of a shitstorm when she began to suggest that she believed Davis’s death was an accident, too. Petitions urging that the podcast cease and passionate Reddit back-and-forths followed; meanwhile, we have allegations of an improper relationship between Nestor and Paul Holes on the same weekend as alleged true crime figure assault. (This is a gross simplification of the matter! But we can’t be here all day. If you’re looking for gossip, this probably handles it, good luck and god bless.)
First-time director Chris Kasick tells Filmmaker that…
I met Emily in early 2019, and she was one of those characters you sort of wait for, someone who is screaming to tell her story. And then as I had started talking to other people and doing research and investigating, I had a lot of questions about the first season of her podcast. I moved to West Virginia, rented a house, and I knew entertainment and fact were going to collide at a certain point. I was all in on this story, and I watched it develop over the course of four years.
What resulted is Citizen Sleuth, a doc about Nestor and her podcast that debuted at SXSW earlier this month. Reviews so far have been roundly positive, with the Austin Chronicle calling it “essential viewing for any amateur detective who’s wondered if they might be the Nancy Drew to get to the bottom of a case, or any true-crime junkie who consumes material related to these important stories.”
Right now, though, the film lacks a distributor — in fact, its so nascent that it doesn’t even have a trailer. That means that though reviews and coverage are deep on the ground, you and I and most folks we know can’t watch the doc. At least, not yet, but if and when that changes we’ll let you know. — EB
Sarah said she’s spend this week off reading, and judging by the links she’s dropping in our budget doc, she’s plowing through a lot of magazines. Here’s an example: from veteran journo Mickey Rapkin we have “The $130 Million Cell-Phone Scam,” about the ex-husband of a Bling Empire star — a guy once profiled as an “extraordinary teen” — who’s in jail after a 2015 arrest for wire fraud and money laundering.
According to federal prosecutors, Lin Miao tricked people into agreeing to “hard-to-cancel, recurring monthly payments” on their cell phone bills, to the tune of millions and resulting in “private jets to Las Vegas, $400,000 monthly credit-card bills, and sugar babies—so many sugar babies.” This is the first interview he’s done regarding the claims against him, and the product is a story so intense, wild, and such a specific tale of aspiration and assimilation that a big-name adaptation feels inevitable. Here’s a snip:
Freshman year, Lin started a business selling remaindered posters (of cats and motivational sayings) out of a kiosk at the local mall, using that $2,000 grant he’d read about in the guide book. But retail wasn’t the future. When he returned to campus as a sophomore, in the fall of 2006, Miao started to notice ads all over the Internet promising Ten ringtones sent to your phone for $9.99 a month! You didn’t even need a credit card; just text the word RINGTONE to some five- or six-digit number and the charge would appear on your phone bill. Ringtones were a big deal then, a way to stand out from your peers by having 50 Cent’s “Candy Shop” play every time your phone rang (back when people made calls). Miao did some research and discovered that this ringtone company would pay you $18 for every customer you enticed to subscribe to their service. He nearly dropped to his knees.
Miao had become friendly with a couple of guys in the Boston area around his age who were ace programmers, and he convinced them to go into business with him. All they needed was a website where they could place the ringtone ads. Miao asked them what would be a cool site with a big following. Both friends happened to be into UFC fighting. If they’d build a UFC fan page, Miao explained, he’d use keywords to drive traffic to the site.
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Very quickly, they were receiving deposits of $10,000.
It was 2006 and still dirt-cheap to advertise on MySpace (once the largest social media platform in the world). So Miao plastered ringtone ads there, too. A few months later, he called Bank of America to check their account balance. “It was $700,000,” he says, still mystified today.
It’s a great yarn, and I can see why Sarah saved it to read on her week off. Set this one aside for when you have time to really savor it. — EB
Wednesday on Best Evidence: Required reading list time!
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