"The evidence is not overwhelming or definitive"
RFK Jr., "Secrets of the Dead," and a long-cold Nebraska case is closed Down Under
the true crime that's worth your time
Ready for a little “cozy true crime,” PBS-style? In yesterday’s episode of Extra Hot Great, I talked about a Season 19 (!) ep of PBS’s Secrets of the Dead, “The Caravaggio Heist,” which you can watch right here if you have a PBS member-station “Passport,” and which I recommend primarily because the chief architect of the stolen painting’s return, a nonagenarian when the episode was filmed, portrayed himself in the show’s re-enactments and had a goddamn ball doing it. (Fr. Marius Zerafa passed away late last year.)
SotD content isn’t always, or even a majority, true crime — but when it is, it’s mental comfort food whether it’s hot or cold. By that, I mean that, if it’s bedtime, it’s soothingly educational and un-gory and you can doze off while gentle academic talking-head interviewees drone on about quaintly ineffectual 12th-century assassination attempts or whatever. If it’s not bedtime, you can follow various passing references into other browser tabs to your heart’s content…where you’ll find, for one thing, that we know more about Caravaggio than about many of his contemporaries because he had so much “law-enforcement contact” via duels over courtesans, outré behavior derived from lead-paint poisoning, and so on.
Are you on occasional insomniac, or Liev Schreiber completist? Want to have true crime on tap for visiting parents/brothers-in-law who loftily insist they don’t like the genre but watch a crap-ton of History Channel? Clip and save this list of true-crimey episodes (and if you’ve seen any and have thoughts, let’s hear them!).
S02.E02 “Murder at Stonehenge”
S02.E03 “Death at Jamestown”
S03.E04 “The Great Fire of Rome” (i.e., was Nero also an arsonist, were early Christians arsonists, or was it just an accident)
S05.E02 “Gangland Graveyard” (featuring Joseph “Donnie Brasco” Pistone as himself)
S05.E03 “Voyage of the Courtesans”
S05.E04 “The Sinking of the Andrea Doria” (I don’t know if this is really true crime, but I happen to be listening to an audiobook on the wreck at the moment and there is some suggestion of unexplored liability, plus shipwreck footage is f’in cool)
S05.E05 “Umbrella Assassin”
S06.E06 “Irish Escape” (the aiding and abetting of an escape from the Australian penal colony)
S07.E02 “Escape from Auschwitz”
S08.E03 “Executed in Error” (Dr. Hawley Crippen case, and while I know via the shop that this case is a preoccupying subgenre in true crime, I hadn’t read the Wikipedia entry before today…and you should really treat yourself. Raymond Chandler references! Delightfully titled barrister memoirs! Whatever this is: “Police first heard of Cora's disappearance from her friend, the strongwoman Kate Williams, better known as Vulcana”!)
S09.E03 “Mumbai Massacre”
Duffy’s Cut, where 57 Irish railworkers lost their lives. (@Smallbones on Wikipedia) S12.E03 “Death on the Railroad” (starring Colin Farrell, like, henh? …ah, a Keith Farrell directs the investigation into “the 150-year-old mystery behind the deaths of 57 Irish immigrants”)
S13.E01 “JFK: One PM Central Standard Time” (I am almost sure I’ve seen this multiple times — and, despite the drama of the ep title, I am almost sure it is kind of boring? but there’s worse JFK content out there, Lord knows…and this is narrated by George Clooney)
S13.E06 “Dick Cavett’s Watergate” (and you won’t need a PBS login for this one…)
S15.E03 “The Alcatraz Escape” (see above re: the JFK episode — 90 percent of televised properties on the case = garbage, so this one, while not awesome, is at least bearable)
S17.E03 “The Woman in the Iron Coffin” (what looks like a homicide case turns into an eerily prescient mystery story about Victorian-era quarantine measures)
S17.E04 another Nero-sode, this one featuring a forensic profiler…do historians love trying to rehab that guy’s image or what
S18.E01: “Galileo’s Moon” (a neighborhood play, but here’s one for my fellow SPAAAAACE nerds, since Sidereus Nuncius was considered treachery and greeted with house arrest for its author)
S18.E05: “Abandoning the Titanic” (another neighborhood play, but evidently a “mystery ship” drew off from Titanic as she was sinking; I am not a maritime-law expert, but that sounds like negligence to me)
S18.E06: “Gangster’s Gold” (the search for the Schultz-mob equivalent of the Beale fortune; my local PBS stations looooove rerunning this one)
aaaaand S19.E06: “The Caravaggio Heist,” as noted.
The show usually returns in the fall, no doubt pegged to Halloween, which gives us time to catch up. — SDB
Speaking of S13.E01, you gotta love it when an email subject line sets ’em up so that you can knock ’em down. Earlier today, the JFK Facts ’stack obliged me with “Fact Checking RFK Jr: Is He Right About JFK?”
Nope. …G’night, everybody! — SDB
…jk, sort of, but: 1) come on; and 2) when even JFKF, which exercises the rigor it can but is still pretty crackpottish, has an “[audible sigh] fine” attitude towards RFK The Lesser?
In its totality, the preponderance of new JFK evidence does not yield “smoking gun” proof of a conspiracy, but it does further undermine the credibility of the Warren Commission’s conclusion that the president was killed by one man alone for no reason. It raises investigative possibilities unknown to the Warren Commission or the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
All the same, RFK Jr. has overstated his case. The evidence that has come into public view since Oliver Stone’s 1992 “JFK” movie is consistent with a CIA-assisted false-flag operation designed to kill the president and lay the blame on Cuba. The evidence is not overwhelming or definitive. Rather, it is suggestive and incomplete.
Hat tip to JFKF’s Jefferson Morley, quoted here, for nutshelling the primary issue with the vast majority of conspiracy theorizing around the JFK assassination: it is suggestive and incomplete. Moreover, it will remain suggestive and incomplete — more so with every passing year, as we approach the 60th “anniversary” of JFK’s murder — and adherents of the more outlandish deep-state-adjacent explanations will have to rely ever more heavily on proving negatives, which of course allows their wheel-spinning to continue. The average monologue on the CIA subtopic is deeply tiring, but mostly, it’s not hurting anyone.
It’s different with RFK Jr. I feel compassion for him; the trauma comes factory-installed in that family, and not everyone can, or is given the tools to, cope — and even curdled faith is faith, a map for the wee dark hours. There is the temptation, thanks to his shadowed name, to dismiss his sweatier pronouncements as pitiable “acting out.”
But he’s nearly 70 years old and a presidential candidate, not a toddler who missed his nap — and that shadowed name is also hallowed. There is also the temptation among a not-insignificant part of the electorate to trust that name and those who continue bearing it into public service, without thinking on it too deeply. He’s a Kennedy, he’s a Democrat, it’s probably fine.
The Bulwark’s Mona Charen begs to differ:
But RFK Jr. is no typical Democrat. He went off the rails decades ago, and his manias about dark forces and evil schemes fit smoothly into Trump’s own cracked obsessions. He was an early proponent and superspreader of the thoroughly debunked claim that childhood vaccines cause autism. Emerging from the Trump Tower meeting, RFK Jr. spoke enthusiastically about their conversation, noting that Trump mentioned having five friends whose children developed autism after receiving immunizations. The president-elect told Kennedy that he would like him to assemble a “vaccine safety and scientific integrity commission.” Thankfully, nothing came of it.
During his two-hour announcement speech, an alarm sounded in the Park Plaza hotel and a public address alert advised people to evacuate. “Nice try,” Kennedy said, addressing the disembodied voice, clearly assuming that the fire alarm was only the latest attempt by “them” to silence him.
Your mileage may vary with that publication (if you’re not familiar, here’s our esteemed colleague Skye Pillsbury on its MO and rapid growth), but I can’t stop drawing parallels between the two breeds of old-man tantrum…and I can’t help thinking that the solution in both instances is the same: ignore it. Negative attention is still attention. — SDB
Our esteemed colleague Sarah Weinman recommended a 2017 Omaha World-Leader story in her book Unspeakable Acts, and it’s been sitting in our budget doc for aaaages, waiting for a rainy day. Top-notch headline from the World-Leader staff, too: “He killed his parents in Omaha at age 16 and escaped from prison nearly a decade later. Then he simply vanished” — but we just never got around to writing it up.
Cut to earlier this week, when a hed in the daily WaPo top-stories email rang a tiny alarm bell for me. Maybe I recognized the name, William Leslie Arnold, but it’s not like three-first-name murderers aren’t thick on the ground in true crime? Or maybe it was the successful-lamster aspect, which is unusual. The Post’s Jonathan Edwards breaks down the initial cases:
In 1958, at the age of 16, Arnold shot his parents in their dining room because they’d refused to let him take a girl to the drive-in, the Omaha World-Herald reported. After burying them in the backyard, he lived in his family home for the next two weeks as if nothing had happened, attending school, going to church and even opening his father’s business, staving off questions by telling people his parents had left town to visit his grandparents, [Deputy Marshal Matthew] Westover said.
Then, his charade collapsed when the grandparents came to town looking for Arnold’s mother and father, he added. When police eventually came to the house, Arnold pointed out to officers where he had buried his parents, and they soon dug up the bodies, according to the World-Herald. The following year, he pleaded guilty to the murders and was given two life sentences, the U.S. Marshals said in the release.
For the next eight years, Arnold was a “model prisoner,” according to the release. But on July 14, 1967, he and another inmate escaped, fleeing to Chicago, where they went their separate ways. While the other fugitive was captured, Arnold eluded the manhunt. And he continued to do so as days turned to weeks, months and then years.
Who knows. In any event, Westover inherited Arnold’s case, and turned to forensic genealogy, hoping for a break. And he got one. Although Arnold had changed names (to another three-firster) and continents — and, well, sides of the veil — a relative had posted DNA to an online database, letting Westover solve the mystery (and the OWL’s Henry Corden update his story).
Maybe I should put a bunch of other cold-case story links in our budget doc, let them marinate for a year or two, and see if that gets results like this! Watch your six, D.B. Cooper. — SDB
Coming up on Best Evidence: Oxygen premieres and weekend watches.
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