The Janes · Tax Fraud · Raisins
Plus "Life After Lockup" and smugglers' frequencies
the true crime that's worth your time
The crime
Abortion and conspiracy.
The story
The Janes, which dropped on HBO Max earlier this month, “explores an underground network that sprang up in Chicago in the late 1960s to provide women access to abortion services before Roe v. Wade legalized the procedure.” Directed by Tia Lessin (Trouble The Water) and Emma Pildes, The Janes deploys an effective mix of archival footage of sixties Chicago and talking-head interviews past and present — but it begins with a particularly bracing story via the latter, of a rundown motel and a painful procedure that cost three months’ rent, so the documentary is not going to be for everyone.
That story put me in mind of one my mother used to tell, of bringing a college friend to a grimy house with multiple radios blasting to drown out the screams, and it isn’t the last horror you’ll hear, either. A rape survivor lectured on her promiscuity; a list of prospective “friendly” doctors with warning notations on drinking and requests for sexual favors; terms like “perforated” and “carbolic acid,” and memories of a “septic-abortion ward” that “was full, every day”; the notecards the Janes kept on clients, with notes like “23, 4 kids” and “be cautious — father is a cop” and “has $1.”
One Jane recalls the rigmarole involved in getting the Pill, namely that unmarried women couldn’t, so she went to Woolworth’s, bought a cheap gold-plated band for $5, and made an appointment as Mrs. Jane. This is where it was back then…and this is where it’s heading in half the country now, like before 2022 is out, so again, a look back at the view from second class may not seem as advantageous to the mental health this week as, say, a tray of Kraft dinner and vintage Baking Show episodes.
But as grim and dispiriting as The Janes can feel, I still recommend it, because for every testimony about a procedure performed with no anesthetic — “because I had to get up and walk out of there as though nothing had happened. And I did” — there’s the “And I did.” part.
They did it. They put their heads together, got organized, picked an anonymous name, got the word out. They found doctors and nurses and abortionists they could trust, who did good and safe work, and then they taught themselves to do the procedures. They borrowed apartments, carpooled clients, babysat, and detailed their own kids to help with pill-counting; they brought enough lunch for everyone; they could set up and split in five minutes if they had to. (It’s just process-y enough, the doc.) They saved or changed thousands of lives, because it had to get done. And it did. And now that it has to get done again, The Janes does give me hope that it can and will — that “to disrespect a law that disrespected women” is achievable in the near term.
The Janes is tough going at times, but it doesn’t feel as long as its 101 minutes, and it’s a pleasure to look at (except that one TH with the instruments) and an honor to witness these stories. If you feel like you can’t right now, I get it; stash it on your watch list for another time, because I recommend it — not just as a good sit but also, I think, as a corrective for people who think a post-Roe Gilead isn’t actually where we all live. — SDB
Aaaaand apologies for the whiplash, but there’s no good segue to the Life After Lockup supertease, so…here’s the Life After Lockup supertease?
I still have most of last season waiting on my DVR, but one of the things I like about the franchise is that it really only takes about seven minutes for the viewer to feel caught up enough to start groaning advice. And since the WE network mailer spoiled the Marcelino/Brittany/Brittany’s former cellie threesome, I guess I can just delete all those and start fresh…with Destinie riding again?
In any event, my fellow members in The “In This Masters Thesis, I Will” Defenses Of LAL After One And One-Half Cocktails Club can enjoy the premiere on Friday July 29; more information here. — SDB
Sarah Treleaven makes it a Best Evidence long-read-rec hat trick with “How three sisters (and their mom) tried to swindle the CRA out of millions” for Maclean’s. Treleaven, whose work we’ve linked to on “nurse impostor” Brigitte Leroux and Sarah Delashmit, carefully reviews the sales-tax-refund swindle the Saker family of Cape Breton tried to pull on the Canadian government. The following snip does a gorgeous job hanging a lamp on that line so many crime stories end up renting rooms on, between “venal” and “inept”:
When [the CRA’s auditor] requested purchase invoices, the Sakers told her their goods were from Chinese suppliers and customs didn’t provide any import documentation. When she asked for sales invoices supporting a $270,000 sale of wigs and hairpieces, Power received invoices for seafood lasagna. Georgette offered invoices for the sale of meatballs, but when Power asked if she had a permit for the sale of meat, Georgette indicated they were “meatless meatballs.” Some of the invoices appeared to have White-Out on certain lines. When Power met with Lydia to discuss Artisan Hair Loss Therapy, Lydia appeared to be reading off of prepared notes.
The auditor eventually expands the investigation, and the Sakers’ account of the ensuing search is by turns eye-roll-inducing and pitiable (“CRA investigator Mike Lemmon would later testify that the search was normal other than Georgette ‘peeing herself’”).
Like the Delashmit story, the Sakers’ alleged fraudery seems ripe for a scripted dramedy feature or short series. Any casting thoughts? — SDB
Hua Hsu’s “The Many Afterlives of Vincent Chin” is really striking. In some ways it’s stereotypical New Yorker: starting you out with a figure near the heart of the case, then zooming out to give you an almost sensory context (here, Detroit in the late seventies), then back in. What grabbed me was how it tried to answer the question, asked right in the subhed, “What do we want from [Chin’s] story, and the people who tell it?” Talking a few grafs in about the way Chin’s murder has become a touchstone in different media and parts of Asian American culture, Hsu says, “Chin has come to represent an origin story for Asian Americans, but also a kind of myth that gains resonance as it is shorn of details.”
That change in state for a true-crime story is something I think about a lot. I think about it for non-crime stories, too, the way an event or a person smooths out once they’ve gone through the veil or joined the museum “wing” of the memory; I wrote about my grandfather along similar lines a few years back. Clif Sr. died when my father was ten:
I don’t know much about him. He was easygoing. He liked steak. He could really wear a tank top for a Depression-era gent. He looked like me. Only these broad, blank stones remain after two generations, worn down smooth by the mythos of an early death.
Hsu gently draws out ideas about the true-crime stories that, via many retellings, become not just themselves, but all the other stories like them — that a communal need to revisit them both reinforces and reshapes them. For non-reviewers, that shape might be a ritual; for us, it might be a signpost leading out of a bygone time. What is it about a so-called “major case” that we need? …I don’t know the answer, but I know I like a longread that raises the question without making me feel like a gawker, so if you have any TNY views left on the month, give this one a look. — SDB
Time to pick the July bonus-review topic! What’s in a name when it comes to true-crime titling? Let’s find out. There’s a handful of recent docs here that I just didn’t get around to when they dropped, plus a scripted look at Jeffrey Dahmer that somehow is 20 years old now??
You can vote for multiple selections, so choose whatever looks interesting
but remember, everyone gets polled, but only paid subscribers get the review! …Speaking of which, this week is a galactic crapshow of deadlines, but The State of Texas vs. Melissa will get done by the nation’s birthday! If you’d like to read that and/or any of our other paywalled stuff, treat yourself:
Let’s wrap up this edition with a pair of listicles, each of which had one distinctive detail that stuck with me. We’ll start with the News-Observer’s overview of “North Carolina’s 12 most famous true-crime cases,” which contains a few of the, uh, usual suspects — Jeffrey MacDonald; Susie Newsom — but leads with the Lawson-family murders. Charles Lawson killed most of his family on Christmas Day of 1929, but the notable bit here, sadly, is not the massacre, or Lawson’s motives, but a…somewhat overly homey approach to evidence preservation:
Interest in the murder was so extreme that Charles Lawson’s brother began charging 25 cents for admission to tour the crime scene, and sightseers traveled there from miles around to walk through the Lawson home. Some tourists even stole souvenir raisins from the top of the Christmas cake, which had sat undisturbed on the kitchen table. A glass dome was placed over the cake and it sat on display in the home for years.
“Souvenir raisins.” What a world. That factoid put me in mind of visiting Graceland, and how, apparently, Elvis Presley’s Aunt Delta still lived in the house for many years and was basically part of the tour when it wended past the kitchen and into the Jungle Room — like, she’d be sitting in there watching Days with her stockings rolled down.
It also reminded me that I’ve had just about every book about all 12 cases in stock at Exhibit B. at one time or another — and I’ve got a #majorcase sale going on through June 30, so if you want to read up on any/all of the listed cases, enter code ExMC at checkout and take 15% off.
And finally, Longreads has a list of pieces on unsolved mysteries, some of which don’t really qualify as true crime; others appeared in Texas Monthly, so we’ve probably linked to them at some point already. The one that grabbed me was Zaria Gorvett’s 2020 piece for the Beeb on a radio station “no one claims to run.” Ever since reading about unclaimed stations near the ends of the radio bands years ago in one of William Poundstone’s Big Secrets books, stations that just broadcast single Morse-code letters or a woman reading strings of numbers in Spanish, I’ve been utterly captivated by them. Social media has “stations” like this, gray-web accounts that post instructions — for re-ups and money drops, I assume — coded into blandly ordinary pictures of kittens or daisies; I didn’t think the 20th-century version still existed. Here’s a snip from Gorvett’s investigation:
In the middle of a Russian swampland, not far from the city of St Petersburg, is a rectangular iron gate. Beyond its rusted bars is a collection of radio towers, abandoned buildings and power lines bordered by a dry-stone wall. This sinister location is the focus of a mystery which stretches back to the height of the Cold War.
It is thought to be the headquarters of a radio station, “MDZhB”, that no-one has ever claimed to run. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for the last three-and-a-half decades, it’s been broadcasting a dull, monotonous tone. Every few seconds it’s joined by a second sound, like some ghostly ship sounding its foghorn. Then the drone continues.
Once or twice a week, a man or woman will read out some words in Russian, such as “dinghy” or “farming specialist”. And that’s it. Anyone, anywhere in the world can listen in, simply by tuning a radio to the frequency 4625 kHz.
It’s so enigmatic, it’s as if it was designed with conspiracy theorists in mind.
See above re: my bonkaloo schedule this week to explain why I literally wrote “fall down wikihole re ghost radio” on my to-do list. Anyone else obsessed with that stuff, to the point of interviewing their ham-radio-expert uncles about it? — SDB
Coming up on Best Evidence: Recasting problematic hosts, Only Murders, and more.
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