The Disapproval Matrix? · Bamboozle · Mysterious Motel Manslaughter
Plus Part 2 of my author interview with Alex Mar
the true crime that's worth your time
Last week, I got to interview author Alex Mar about Mar’s new book Seventy Times Seven: A True Story of Murder and Mercy. (It may not feel “new” to her after five-odd years working on it…) The first part of our conversation went up on the Exhibit B. B.log over last weekend; now Part 2 is also live. (The second part does contain spoilers, of a sort, and I can’t get specific about the accompanying content warning without, well, spoiling. As always in the genre, read with caution/care for yourselves.)
An excerpt is below, in which Mar and I discuss approaching the more wrenching sequences as writers — and readers.
Alex Mar: I think that a lot of people who are readers of different kinds of writing about crime and justice, there's a fascination that is very human. But it comes from having a great distance [from] the reality of what took place. It feels very different to be in it with family members, and with people who were there at the time and who lived with the memory of this. It's just a different kind of weight that goes into the process, for sure.
SDB: Right. Yeah. I mean, I have a number of grand unifying theories about true crime because I do spend so much time with it in my day-to-day work. Most of them are probably bullshit, but I think one of mine that holds is that people are coming to it from a place of "knowledge is power." And sometimes that takes really outré forms, like people trying to get their minds around cannibalism, for instance. But also trying to get their minds around wrongful convictions, unfair sentencing.
But any aspect of true crime in terms of the criminal justice system, but also the trauma -- I think there's an attempt to try to control this terrifying unknown by taking on information about it. Even though having read every, whatever, Ted Bundy book probably would not have protected you from Ted Bundy. ... But yeah, I think that's one of the instincts from the reader's standpoint, that they're trying to both close the distance by reading these accounts, but also to reinforce it with information, if that makes any sense. I don't know if I'm right.
No, I think that's a really interesting theory, this idea that the information is going to empower you. And that staring something that scares you in the face, that somehow that is going to prepare you for something else about life.
I think there's also -- we would all really love for justice to be uncomplicated, in the way that most prosecutors are selling a certain sentence to us as the solution. In this case, you have: Ruth Pelke's death was a horrible tragedy. Her life mattered. Therefore, in a death-penalty state, we are going for the death sentence, because that's how we measure the seriousness of the event that took place. And the family gets on board.
And not just for the prosecutor, but I think also potentially for some readers, the idea that a victim's family member is standing up and saying, "No, my grandmother would never have wanted this, and this is a miscarriage of justice. It doesn't make any sense. We shouldn't be doing this." To think about how complicated even the conversation around finding justice for Ruth Pelke really is, is unsettling. So you have family members who are angry and traumatized. And then you have family members who are angry and traumatized, but they just don't see the prosecutor's agenda as healing for them or any kind of recompense. There's that kind of reaching across the aisle where Bill was saying, "I have something in common with this other family," right?
Right.
Everyone involved is a human being, and another death isn't going to bring back the victim. That's a really complex and complicating view of how the system should work. It's a real challenge to the system. But to me, one of the really big takeaways from working on this was just this vivid sense that there's a family on either side. And it really shakes up the idea that there's a good-versus-evil narrative that's really clear, and it's very satisfying to get to the end of that where justice is achieved.
Seventy Times Seven is available at the shop — or! If you take your Best Evidence subscription from free or month-to-month to an annual paid sub, you’ll be automagically entered in a drawing to win a brand-new copy of the book OR 2) one of two $10 Exhibit B. gift cards.
“Oh, but I bet you won’t ship to [anywhere in our wide world], bummer.” Wrong! I’ll send those prizes anywhere! …The gift certs go out via email so I can’t really take philanthropic credit there, but I will send the book internationally, no problem! — SDB
And now, over to another Sarah who interviewed Alex Mar recently…our esteemed colleague Sarah Weinman, writing a guest-opinion piece for NYT called “Truth Is Drifting Away From True Crime.” I might have reversed that subject/object pair, but the larger point still stands, as Weinman cites Mar, the In The Dark podcast, and a couple other properties as staying on the “honorable” side of “investigative journalism” — but many other properties that don’t, including a number of prestige TV series like The Jinx, and Truman Capote himself.
And then there’s the matter of the “truth”’s role in entertainment product.
But this misstep illustrates how, increasingly, stories of tragedy (and, ironically, stories of dogged journalistic reporting) have become simply another form of intellectual property to be put through a churn of repackaging and reselling.
It’s become a familiar cycle: A criminal case becomes a book, becomes a podcast, becomes a documentary, becomes a scripted series or a film, becomes another, more sensational film. There are now even true crime cookbooks. But somewhere at the start of it all an actual crime took place, leaving behind not just facts but victims and survivors. Where does a true crime cookbook leave them?
I could make a mordant joke about the Marvelizing of the genre, but it’s not really a joke, so much, at this point (see: the greater Dateline cinematic universe).
But Weinman’s cookbook comment got me thinking: the world needs a true-crime-only version of New York Magazine’s Approval Matrix, with its highbrow/lowbrow and brilliant/despicable axes. I’m not about to bite NYMag’s/Emily Nussbaum’s shteez by trying it under a copyright-compliant “Criminal Non-Fiction Scatter Chart” name or anything — but Weinman’s chosen examples just kind of naturally populated a t.c.A.M. in my mind.
…Great, now I can’t stop Cartesian-coordinating true crime! Walter Satterthwait’s jaunty author photo, bottom right! James Baldwin, top right! Dahmer cutting board, bottom left! The Bugliosi catalog, t…op? left? Where do we put that guy?
Now you!
(My even doing this is probably bottom left, but: here we are.) — SDB
Hard to believe that a music festival 1) in New Jersey 2) that is literally named “Bamboozle” is alleged to have both “hoodwinked” AND “hornswoggled” ticket-buyers! jk, it isn’t. It is a little hard to believe that this fest is billed, or bills itself, as “N.J.’s most famous music festival,” because I don’t think I’d ever heard of it until I found myself on NJ.com, reading about allegations that Bamboozle promoter John D’Esposito “hasn’t kept his promises. [Fans] accuse him of posting misleading advertisements, failing to deliver promised refunds and offering musical acts that don’t align with expectations raised by the organizer on social media.”
Granted, I’m an old broad who hasn’t lived full-time in Jersey since God was a child, but anyway, when NJ Advance Media’s Karin Price Mueller talked to D’Esposito, he claimed he hadn’t disputed challenges from unhappy customers to credit-card charges, and
denied that the festival lineup is different from what was advertised.
“The people that are mad that we didn’t have Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance, they won’t let go of the memories,” D’Esposito said before ending the call.
He did not respond to follow-up questions via email about whether he would send refund checks to consumers if he couldn’t do it via credit card and what, if anything, he would do for consumers who were told that the tickets they bought would be the cheapest available.
Various ticket-buyers interviewed have filed complaints with NJ’s Division of Consumer Affairs, and Mueller’s piece goes deep with several of them on the specifics of what they allege was a bait-and-switch.
D’Esposito isn’t the most gracious, or organized, but I suspect that’s probably what these missteps come down to; I don’t know that there’s intent here, or a series of decisions taken to cover up gross incompetence/under-preparation a la the Fyre Festival. The guy hasn’t thrown one of these parties in over a decade, and it’s probably not like riding a bike. To me — and I don’t mean to sound dismissive, because I understand the emotional investment for people in events like these and I’ve made it myself in the past, but it reminds me of the (again, to me) overly intense handwringing over Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing on Springsteen tickets. It’s far from a perfect analogy, but I think in both cases, people aren’t angry so much as hurt. A show/performer with whom they feel a powerful personal attachment has treated them like a mark, and the transaction itself might not qualify as fraudulent, but once the parasocial relationship feels fraudulent, a high price tag is harder to justify. Just my theory; we’ll see what goes down in A.C. next month. — SDB
I’ve got Love & Death and White House Plumbers screeners to keep me (very; do we really need five episodes on the Watergate burglars? guess I’ll find out!) busy the next few days, plus a rare single-issue cold-case magazine from the fifties to look at with you guys next week. What’s on y’all’s true-crime consumption docket for Earth Day?
A few longreads and updates to get you started if you’ve got choice paralysis or nothing in your TBR pile is calling to you…
THE BODY IN ROOM 348 [Vanity Fair] // The great Mark Bowden takes on the mysterious murder of oilman Greg Fleniken in VF’s May 2013 issue. A well-liked middle-aged man whose autopsy suggests he got rolled over by a boulder; a private dick Bowden had written about in VF before who swears as much as I do, if not more (…I know!); a telltale…air-conditioner?
It was hard to see this making sense, but Brennan had learned to be patient. It was a mistake to let what you do not know race out ahead of what you do. A crime was a puzzle. If there was even one small piece that did not fit, the puzzle was incomplete. So he was willing to follow the evidence in unlikely directions. Even when the conclusions it suggested were absurd. Greg could not have been beaten to death in his room, the evidence suggested, and yet he had died there, and he had died quickly after sustaining his wounds. Somehow, that's what had happened.
A process-y article with a jazzier, more noirish diction than you usually see in VF, but it’s not affected.
Echoes In The Dark [Vanity Fair] // I didn’t know how much appetite I had for yet another “but what does this say about us” navel-gazer on the Idaho college-student murders, but because it’s written by Kathleen Hale (Slenderman), I gave it a shot. The piece does get into what the coverage of the murders says about internet sleuths; about the part of the culture that objectifies ubiquitous reporters (partly, this is a not-entirely-respectful profile of NewsNation’s Brian Entin, and the “emotive man” “reporting persona” pioneered by Anderson Cooper); and about the psychology of the true crime audience.
In Justice on Demand: True Crime in the Digital Streaming Era, Tanya Horeck writes, “The notion that audiences can participate in true crime has, of course, always been a feature of the genre” because it offers a metaphorical seat in the jury box. What is different about today’s true crime audience, Horeck says, is their expectation that the genre be literally interactive — that “justice is something that can be accessed through binge-watching.
Lots of good sourcing here that put a handful of books on my TBR (just what it needed, lol), and it’s not too heavy-handed with the “color.”
Florida is ground zero for moving scams where companies demand extra fees — or steal your stuff [Business Insider] // Not Florida!!!1!
Documentary Spotlighting Intersection Between the KKK and Law Enforcement to Premiere on ABC [ABC News Press] // Grand Knighthawk: Infiltrating the KKK hits Hulu next Thursday, April 27. It’s the first joint project from ABC and the AP.
Based on an award-winning investigative AP series, the true-crime documentary captures the infiltration of the klan in northern Florida by a former Army infantryman named Joe Moore and includes exclusive new interviews with the FBI agents who oversaw the operation and exposes systemic corruption.
The doc’s particular focus is on, per AP acting Global Investigative Editor Alison Kodjak, “the ongoing problem of extremist infiltration into U.S. law enforcement agencies.” ABC News dropped a first-look trailer earlier this week; not sure I have the emotional fortitude to try this one, to tell you God’s honest.
Next week on Best Evidence: Unsolved Murders, Roy Cohn, Susan’s Edgars predictions, and the death of Ta’Neasha Chappell.
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