February 23, 2023

Starkweather and Fugate · Hamilton and Burr · Ice-T and Live

And the good things about bad books

the true crime that's worth your time

The crime
Charles Starkweather’s late 1957/early 1958 killing spree in Nebraska and Wyoming.

The story
Conventional wisdom, not to mention pop-culture imaginings of the case like Badlands and Natural Born Killers, has assumed Starkweather’s mid-teenage girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate participated with Starkweather in this string of 11 murders — some of them of her own relatives — or at the least found them a turn-on. It’s probably evident from the title of The 12th Victim, a four-part docuseries from Showtime, that director Nicola B. Marsh views Fugate not as a perpetrator but as a trafficked child, told by Starkweather to comply or he’d harm her family.

“But hadn’t he/they already killed her family?” Well, this is the central question, because her family had in fact been killed by the time Starkweather took his gruesome show on the road — but, per Fugate, Starkweather had told her that they were being held elsewhere, and that they would be safe if Fugate did what Starkweather said.

There is credible evidence both for and against Fugate’s contention that she was a hostage, but my job here isn’t to get into the weeds with those details; it’s to tell you whether you should make time for The 12th Victim — and there’s credible evidence both for and against that, too. Let’s start with the pros, chief among them that, much like 2019’s Lorena, The 12th Victim expands our shortcut “knowledge” of a major case. Fictional versions of Fugate, particularly Sissy Spacek’s terrifyingly blank Holly in Badlands, tend to focus on Fugate’s damage or bad-seed status, but the fact is, this was a child, 14 years old. (Starkweather, only 18 himself and cognitively delayed, was executed in 1959. I have no doubt he was guilty, but I think the conversation about that sentence is a little different today.) Marsh gets excellent access to relatives, friends, historians, and authors, as well as to compelling contemporary footage.

But there is a nervous kitchen-sink way about T12V that’s a bit tough to take. That contemporary footage I mentioned would work a lot better if it were easier to distinguish from what might be gauzy re-enactments. The 3D-ing of still photos, the collaging of Starkweather’s name in audio, the chopping up of talking-head frames with a mirror effect to “reflect” the fractured nature of etc. etc. — it’s overdirected and twitchy. Marsh is an experienced cinematographer and has shot notable work in the genre (The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez and The Innocent Man, among others); it’s not a skills issue. It’s a “two hours of content in a four-hour bag” issue, and Marsh is just trying to fill the bag. RogerEbert.com’s Brian Tallerico concurs:

I only wish it was a bit more focused. The filmmakers have a habit of failing to connect dots or drawing them too broadly when they get into pop culture. By the time they imply that this case was the pioneer in true crime coverage, they’ve gotten lost in the forest of potential subjects. When “The 12^th Victim” focuses tightly on Fugate herself—as in footage of her as a babysitter after her release and interviews with that family—it’s effective, but it has a habit of padding to get to its four-hour length.

It isn’t the creative team’s “fault” that execs ordered the wrong packaging for a story, of course, and I don’t mind a montaged juxtaposition if it’s drawing new connections, but slowed-down footage of social-hygiene films and James Dean flicks paired with a Catholic bishop’s doomy intoning about “our times” is…not that. B-roll of alphabet blocks getting knocked over paired with a VO about Fugate’s volatile birth father is not that; foggy generalizations about the 1950s and the generation gap is not that. And nothing against Kurt Andersen, who is from Omaha, but he was in pre-K when all this went down, sooooo what’s he doing here, exactly?

Again, I have compassion for the filmmaker/s here, and again, there is worthwhile material in here — new information; striking representations of a hypnosis session Fugate underwent to try to excavate what she actually did and/or witnessed — but is it four hours of worthwhile? My esteemed colleague Mark Blankenship thinks so, writing for Primetimer that

the series persuasively argues that she was railroaded by the justice system, which couldn’t accept that a 14-year-old girl might have been the terrorized captive of a man who bragged he killed those people in order to become immortal. What’s more, it asserts that ever since, the media’s fascination with his crimes has trapped her in his shadow.

And Tallerico gave it 2.5 stars out of 4. It’s a solid story and a solid thesis statement about the corrosive effects of what Mark calls “the birth of true crime TV” on Fugate’s reality. But Blankenship’s review makes the doc’s case more efficiently and forcefully than the doc itself is able to, so I myself, having seen two of the four, plan to stop there. (The 12th Victim is available in full on streaming; if you’re watching via traditional means, new episodes drop each Friday.) — SDB

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The crime
Elma Sands disappeared from her home in what is today New York City’s SoHo on the evening of December 22, 1799. Some of her things surfaced in a nearby well a few days later; Sands’s body was also in the well, but not found until the first days of 1800.

Sands was almost certainly murdered, and almost certainly by her lover, Levi Weeks, but “almost certainly” in the sense that every other explanation is even more circumstantial and fundamentally unprovable than the case against Weeks. The murder is remembered today primarily because 1) it’s among the first bold-type “popular-crime” cases in the new country, and 2) Weeks’s defense team included Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton.

The story
Burr, Hamilton, and local bigshot Henry Brockholst Livingston — anything named “Livingston” in the five boroughs of NYC is named for that dude — got Weeks acquitted, but while the presiding judge had given the jury instructions designed to effect that result, literally nobody else in the city of New York agreed with the verdict, and Weeks decamped to Mississippi, where he became a respected architect. As noted, present-day interest in the story hinges on its role in the creation of tabloid journalism and monetized true-crime narrative…or on the involvement of modern musical theatre’s highest-profile frenemies, Hamilton and Burr. Paul Collins’s Duel With the Devil: The True Story of How Alexander Hamilton And Aaron Burr Teamed Up to Take On America’s First Sensational Murder Mystery predates the cultural ubiquity of Hamilton by a couple of years, and doesn’t noticeably center Weeks’s legendary defenders, so if you pick the book up hoping for a deep dive into their whole deal, Duel may well disappoint.

I can’t say for sure, though, because I bailed on the audio version about a third of the way through. It wasn’t the lack of Hamiltonian content; I do find Burr compelling as this weird master of the post-colonial self-own, plus this isn’t the only crime story he bumbles into, but I’m also one of like eight people who has never seen Hamilton, doesn’t know any of the songs, and isn’t inclined to change that state of affairs, so the fact that those two hadn’t shown up by the time I quit the book isn’t pertinent.

And it’s not the writing either, or I don’t think it is; I’ve read other Collins and enjoyed it a lot, especially Banvard’s Folly and The Murder of the Century. Collins, like fellow Poe contextualizer Daniel Stashower, is skilled at moving between the details and timeline of the specific case, and broader observations and scene-setting about Manhattan — and the so-new-it-was-still-sticky country — at the dawn of the 19th century. Not everyone enjoys sidebars on historical perspective or how much of the island of Mannahatta was still farmland, but I do, so while some negative reviews on Goodreads complained about those bits, they aren’t why I DNFed it either.

Part of the problem is the narrator, who I won’t name because I think the producer fucked him by using odd first-take-y line readings in a bunch of places — but I think the main disconnect for me is that the “evidence” we have is so anecdotal and unreliable, so dramatically overwritten by the primary sources themselves, that it’s like looking at the case through a muddy windshield. Collins quotes extensively from those sources, which makes sense, but at least in the audio iteration, it creates the same distance Swanson’s Bloody Crimes often did between what we can know now and what chroniclers thought they knew then. It’s on the author in cases or stories that old to step in and dehumidify the contemporary accounts, or break them up with some analysis. Eyewitnesses in the days before indoor plumbing who “swore” they heard a victim scream “o, murder!!”? That shit just did not happen, ever, I’m sorry; present-day historians can’t take that sort of “evidence” as read.

Net, it’s a combination of 1) some histories not being well suited for audio depending on the sourcing used, and 2) some narrators not being well suited to smooth those bits over. As with Bloody Crimes, I bet this one’s better on the page than in the ear, but I stuck to my 2023 resolution to put down books I’m not enjoying in favor of something else…in this case, Stashower’s book on the Cleveland Torso Killer. — SDB

The crime
Per the book’s subtitle, “Famous People Who Were Gruesomely Killed.” …Also at least five dozen counts of felony comma splice, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

The story
There is a drinking game in More Shocking Celebrity Murders: True Crime Cases Of Famous People Who Were Gruesomely Killed, but one that will itself gruesomely kill anyone who plays it, because if you drink every time the book is tastelessly flip; every time it violates the rules of grammar; and every time one of its luckless subjects is not really even a celebrity? You will have subsided into a coma by page 5. Or possibly by partway through the table of contents. (Of the 15 named-chapter victims, I had heard of three.)

Author Jack Smith’s writing is tone-deaf along more than one axis, as you’ll see in this snippet about Susan Cabot’s demise at the hands of her son, Timothy Scott Roman.

To use the verb “to bop” in this context not once but twice: nope. A veritable torrent of misplaced commas: gah. Diction that careens between clanky vernacular and wooden overcompensation: oof. Here’s Smith on Nipsey Hussle1:

And yet! With all of that said! This is not the worst true crime I have ever read! Granted, I have read some extremely bad true crime, and granted, More Shocking is also remarkably bad, but I must give Smith credit: the book is a large number of bad things, but it is not boring, it is not slow, and it is not cynical.

Smith’s title is vulgar, but it got my attention! My first reaction was “Jeeeeeesus, guy,” but my next reaction was to shrug that, well, he fucking went for it. And Smith’s prose is like a spoon in the garbage disposal, but there’s not a lot of it, he chunks it up into manageable sections, and if there’s nothing else to say about a case, he’s on to the next chapter! I can think of maybe three other authors in the genre who can get in and out of their shit that matter-of-factly. Doesn’t make Smith a genius, but it’s something.

And Smith’s evident enthusiasm for his topic is more than a little grimy, but he’s not performing somber respect for the sake of it! He’s having a ball writing up these cases. That’s probably inappropriate, but at least it’s sincere. We talk a lot around here about the ethics of investigating, profiting from, and/or creating careers around the tragedy and grief of victims and their families, and implied in and around that discussion is that to enjoy or relish researching a case, or constructing a genre narrative, is unseemly at best. But sometimes the need to perform funereal respect sucks the air out of a true-crime property, as though it’s wrong to take the work seriously or take satisfaction from doing it well, so we’ll just keep verrrrry still and recite the ugly facts in a monotone — but to care about case enough to spend time with it, to tell the story of it the best you can so that a lot of other people spend time with it and care about it? That’s respect, too, in its way. Smith’s avidity crosses a [rimshot!] line, but if the other choice is a Nancy Grace-style hypocritical and performative outrage? I won’t choose Smith every day, but: still.

More Shocking Celebrity Murders isn’t refreshing, or raw, or any of the other adjectives critics hide behind instead of saying that a creator did their best but their best is still ass. It’s not good, at all, and I don’t recommend it. But it made me think, and Smith appears to give a legit damn about the topic. Pretty sure most of the Oxygen programming roster can’t say either thing. — SDB

Ending today’s edish on a higher note…literally, because it’s two excellent longreads with musicians at the center. First up is a SPIN cover-story interview with Tracy “Ice-T” Marrow. I really like how well the transcript captures the flavor of Marrow’s speech patterns; I don’t know if you’ve ever listened to his rap work, but his flow is really changeable, much more so than you might expect from his acting, and you get that from the text.

I’ve also linked back many times to my Rap On Trial review and other reading that contemplates the criminalization of hip-hop lyrics; unsurprisingly, Marrow digs into those concepts here. Here’s a snip, after Kyle Eustice asks Marrow about the reaction to “Cop Killer”:

You suddenly became a target.

Yeah. We’re just doing rock music. We’re just talking that shit. They thought it was a call-to-action to kill police, and it couldn't have been further from that. It was a song about rage, somebody mad enough to go after the cops, a cop killer based on police brutality. But they were like, “You’re trying to tell people to go do it.”

See, they think rappers and Black people aren't capable of making art. You have to be that angry Black man. I'm not trying to kill no police. That was just a minute in time where they were just out of control and they were going after our head. It was supposed to be over for me at that point. They were trying to blackball me and blacklist me. I was never really worried about the cops as much as I was worried about running into a cop lover.

The next is a decidedly more gossip-forward piece from Rolling Stone (no offense, Andy Greene! that’s a compliment!) about the litigious meltdown of the band Live, which is ongoing:

This is hardly the first time in music history that a band has melted down due to personality conflicts, clashes over money, and legal battles. Wildly successful groups from the Beatles to the Police to Fugees have faced some combination of those issues, and most of them eventually got past it and repaired the damaged bonds. That’s hard to imagine in this case. The onetime best friends in Live are now so bitterly divided on every imaginable topic — even the most basic facts of what transpired over the past few years — that speaking with them feels like asking Marjorie Taylor Greene and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to sit down for a friendly chat about the root causes of Jan. 6.

There’s a violent (alleged) grifter on house arrest, an Instagram firing, forgery, a self-serious lead singer who thinks he’s the first to discover Buddhism, and much more. — SDB

Friday on Best Evidence: Lit-mag scams and weekend reads.

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