The Grey's Anatomy Grifter · Murph The Surf
Plus filial ID fraud, a crime reporter's lost ancestor, and more
the true crime that's worth your time
Huge thanks to our esteemed commenter Muffy for alerting us to an update in the so-called “Grey’s Anatomy Grifter” story. That factitious-disorder fraud may have gotten shorter shrift than usual in May — we might have done more staring in gleeful horror at disgraced Grey’s writer Elisabeth Finch’s con if we weren’t busy staring in regular horror at the smoking crater where our reproductive rights used to be — but if you missed it the first time, good news! The Ankler’s Peter Kiefer, whose story created the crack that broke the dam, has a lengthy reported follow-up that includes many hours interviewing Finch, “The 'Grey's Anatomy' Liar Confesses it All.”
No need to chase down the original set of articles, either, as Kiefer’s latest does a great job reviewing the facts in the main, then putting Finch’s response then and now in context. Kiefer also expertly illuminates the rah-ther fine line between this pitiably “detestable” brand of fabulism and the “recreation of self” that so many rags-to-Hollywood-riches stories center on — not to mention the fact that, when women do it, it’s pathological…
Factitious disorder only entered nomenclature starting around 1980 and awareness surrounding it has grown rapidly since then. According to [Dr. Marc D.] Feldman, patients who exhibit its symptoms are overwhelmingly women and hard to identify because most of them live normal lives. The patients often work in the healthcare industry as a nurse or physical therapist or a clerk to gain access to medical information. Invariably, he says, they back themselves into a corner with a compounding of their lies over time and either have to come clean, claim that they’ve been cured or, in some extreme instances, claim divine intervention. Others just pick up and leave their communities and move on to their next marks.
but when men do it, it’s ambitious:
One of the most famous examples of fibbing involves a 21-year-old Steven Spielberg, who claimed to have snuck onto the Universal Studios lot in formal business attire and set up an office in an empty bungalow. … “Every day, for three months in a row, I walked through the gates dressed in a sincere black suit and carrying a briefcase,” Spielberg once told an interviewer. “I visited every set I could, got to know people, observed technique.” Or take the case of a young David Geffen who told one of his earliest employers, the William Morris agency, that he’d graduated from UCLA. He hadn’t. Worried that he might get caught, Geffen went into the office early for several months to intercept the university’s letter stating that he’d never attended. He successfully replaced the letter with one that said he’d graduated. He shared this origin story in an interview with Fortune, saying, “Did I have a problem with lying to get the job? None whatsoever.”
Y’all should read it for yourselves, not least so that we can discuss whether you think Finch regrets anything except having gotten caught (I don’t), or has “reformed” (read: “gotten effective counseling and learned other strategies to self-soothe”) (again: I don’t). And something happened in Finch’s childhood, but I don’t know if it’s what she says happened, although her willingness to kill off the sibling allegedly responsible does put a new spin on the term “storytelling.”
I also wonder if these stories haven’t taken on a sort of emotional urgency for us, the consumers, because they reflect consequences for harmful lies — the sort we’ve struggled to bring to bear on the political stage? — SDB
Speaking of “consequences for harmful lies” — ICYMI, Theranos CEO and alleged abuser Sunny Balwani got 13 years in federal court yesterday. I speculated when Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes got most of the book thrown at her last month that part of the sentence’s punitive length had to do with a girl making a bunch of white fossils look bad; not sure if we can extrapolate from that to Balwani’s even stiffer sentence. I do think these terms look a liiiiittle different if it’s two white Harvard dingleberries named “Win” and “Topher”; JMO. — SDB
I thought we’d decided as a culture that we’d hit max cap for discrete streaming services? Maybe I only announced that to myself, in my office. In any event, my whispered “no más” has gone unheeded, with MGM+ set to launch in the middle of January with RJ Cutler’s Murf the Surf: Jewels, Jesus, and Mayhem in the USA. I thought we’d also decided to fine subtitles that long for zoning violations, but jokes aside, I do look forward to the four-parter, which drops January 15 “to coincide with the official launch of MGM+.” I don’t agree with every choice Cutler makes in his work, but it’s seldom dull.
Here’s more on the series from Futon Critic’s write-around:
In October 2019, the New York Times published an article celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Museum of Natural History. One of the most momentous events to take place on site was an epic jewel heist, the biggest in American history, mastered by a band of suave "surfer dudes" from Miami in 1964. The key to the operation was Jack Roland Murphy, otherwise known as Murf the Surf, whose name was propelled into pop culture after the heist - creating a notoriety that would stretch far beyond the caper. What followed Murf's meteoric rise is a spiraling tale of unspeakable crime, murder, deception, and mayhem which, to this day, remains shrouded in mystery.
This four-part documentary series will explore the tumultuous life of the man behind the legendary nickname. Featuring exclusive access to Jack Roland Murphy himself prior to his death in 2020, the series will address the blurred line between fact and fiction, faith and delusion, sanity and madness - raising the timely question of who and how we believe.
I believe that the title should spell the man’s nickname the way every other publication does — “Murph,” not “Murf” — but that’s my final nitpick (…in this entry). You can read that 2019 NYT piece on the “Band of Surfer Dudes” who robbed the Museum right here; the lengthy NYT obit for Murphy, who died in September of 2020, is here, and here’s a snip from that:
A daring thief and self-promoter, an author, a prison missionary and television evangelist, he created his own myths and let the news media and Hollywood embellish them.
He published a short, self-serving memoir, “Jewels for the Journey” (1989), which neglected to mention that he was a convicted murderer; and he was portrayed in films, including Marvin Chomsky’s “Murph the Surf” (1975), a glamorized account of the museum caper with Don Stroud in the title role.
A more dimensional take from Robert D. McFadden than you might expect on folk-hero-criminal myth vs. reality, that ties back into the “who and how we believe” bit that interests me about Cutler’s project.
But hey, universe: stop creating streaming services. — SDB
A Houston Chronicle crime reporter was inspired to try to track the long-cold case of his great-aunt’s disappearance from Smith College. Frances St. John Smith was last seen on the first Friday the 13th of the 1928 spring semester; her vanishing stoked fears of a serial killer stalking the Smith campus, but while that didn’t seem to explain what had become of Frances, other explanations were in short supply.
At first, St. John Barned-Smith’s writing is choppy and self-conscious — the photos and ephemera do more to evoke Frances’s history, and the missing flyer is more flavorfully written — but he settles into the story somewhat as it goes along, although you can feel how much got cut or left out by the Chron’s editor for “flow.” I get it, but as the daughter of a Smith grad, whom I can no longer query as the shadow cast by this and other cases at the college, I wanted more, more about Frances’s days and dates with Amherst men, about the lyrical ways flyers were written a hundred years ago.
And then there’s the epilogue to the story, which is that it’s Barned-Smith’s last story for the publication. Knowing that gives a sort of depth to the awkward, somewhat choked-feeling prose of the piece, and it does manage to convey the simultaneously cold and overheated quality of reaching across time to ancestors you didn’t know, but also could see. A compelling read for that reason, with fantastic visuals as well. — SDB
We know it’s a tough time financially — interest rates, holiday obligations, etc. — but a paid subscription to Best Evidence helps cover our costs on stuff like subs to the Houston Chronicle, whatever MGM+ is going to charge (hee/sigh), and so on.
If you can’t make paid support work, thanks for considering it — and sharing B.E. helps too, and is free. — SDB
And finally, thanks to our esteemed colleague Sarah Weinman for this late-breaking longread from Elle — a second identity grift! This one’s from Sarah Treleaven, whose work we’ve mentioned often around here, on the curious case of a 45-year-old who stole her daughter’s identity. The lead-up to the revelation that the flaky college student an entire Missouri town knew as “Lauren” was actually “Laura,” and literally twice as old as she’d claimed (even though friends fondly remembered her as “so dumb” and often thought she was younger than she’d alleged), is a master class in documenting how grifts of this sort — the ones that appear glaringly obvious in retrospect — get put over and sustained. Like, based on the mugshot above, you might not guess she’s forty-five, but you’re not going any younger than thirty-five IMO, cutesy cat-ear headband notwithstanding. But you’re also not necessarily going to think that hard about her age if she’s not in a mugshot, if that makes sense.
Not that the locals/various FB commenters graded on that curve:
When the Mountain View police posted about the case on Facebook and included Laura’s mug shot, one person commented that “Stevie Wonder could tell she ain’t 24!!!” Another suggested that Laura’s chest wrinkles—something more typically developed in midlife—were the true giveaway. (To be fair, the rhinestone cat ears Laura was partial to—and wearing in her mug shot—do force the eyes up.) Further suggestions that those who had been victimized get their eyes checked were not well-received.
More from Sarah Treleaven here, and if you’d like to do a deeper dive on one of the cases I always get wikiholed by, James Hogue, I’ve got a wrap-up of materials and reviews here. — SDB
Friday on Best Evidence: Cosby, Denali, Harper Lee, and Sandy Hook.
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