Theranos · Lady Of The Dunes
Also: The guy who wrote "Madeline" allegedly shot his boss
the true crime that's worth your time
The Theranos trial will probably be delayed. Federal prosecutors have asked to delay the trial against Elizabeth Holmes until October due to the coronavirus crisis, which prompted her attorneys to ask that it be delayed until 2021, Law 360 reports. Her side’s reason for the delay request is because “prosecutors just informed her that they plan to file more charges and allegations against her in a superseding indictment.”
Law.com reports that Holmes defense attorneys Williams & Connolly say that the new indictment “would widen the scope of the alleged conspiracy to mislead investors, patients and doctors going back to 2010, change the definition of investors to include contractual parties such as Walgreens and Safeway, and seek two additional counts against Holmes over defrauding a patient and doctor who paid for blood-testing services,” which is why they’ll need even more time to prepare.
On Wednesday, U.S. District Court Judge Edward Davila appeared to split the difference just a bit, the San Jose Mercury News reports, and said that jury selection for the case would be pushed back until October 27 — but that things might get bumped even further. Since a grand jury would have to approve the new indictment, and grand juries can’t be convened until May due to a shelter-in-place order currently in effect in San Jose and other California, Bay Area cities, a decision will be made at a July 20 status hearing, as by then “we will have a better idea whether we’re going to be able to go ahead with the October trial date.” — EB
Elizabeth Holmes isn’t the only person who might benefit from a later trial date. As faithful Best Evidence readers know, we’ve vowed to cover the trial in person if we 2000 paid subscribers sign up by the beginning of the proceedings. It’ll take more than a pandemic to keep me away from that courtroom if we get 2K of you paying for this thing, and with an extension on the deadline, this feels more do-able than ever. So…
The next season of American Horror Story might tackle yet another true-crime yarn. The FX series from Ryan Murphy has always, ahem, borrowed pretty heavily from other properties in its genre, as well as true crime figures like the Zodiac, the Night Stalker, and H. H. Holmes (all, coincidentally OR NOT, cases about which Sarah or I have slacked “OVER IT” in the near year since Best Evidence began).
Now Redditors and other fiction speculators say that they believe that Season 10 of the show will be about the Lady of the Dunes, an unidentified body found in the Massachusetts dunes in 1974 which has subsequently been exhumed in 1980, 2000, and 2013 in an effort to identify her. She returned to the public eye in 2018, when author (and son of Bunting nemesis Stephen King) Joe Hill posited that the Lady was an extra from the movie Jaws. Yes, this really happened. TV Guide reports that the episode of BuzzFeed Unsolved spurred the theory, and writes that the previous (lackluster, IMO) season dropped clues to suggest that Season 10 will be a 1970s-set Dunes one. Bring back Jessica Lange and Connie Britton, AHS, and maybe we can talk. — EB
I find this new Irish true-crime parody podcast quite amusing. Murder Mor is the Ireland’s “first true crime parody,” Extra.ie reports, which suggests to me that either Ireland is late to the true crime game or everyone there just has less free time on their hands. Its first two bite-sized episodes (they’re each around 10 minutes) have already dropped, and the entire show is available via Patreon for bingers. Its cast includes “some of Ireland’s most talented comedians”; here’s the cast list if you’re up on the Emerald Isle’s stand-up stars. — EB
Amanda Knox is launching a pandemic-focused interview series. Deadline reports that the interviews will be called “Incarceration and Exoneration In A Time Of Pandemic,” and will have titles like “An Exoneree’s Quest for Peace in Quarantine, The Impact of Quarantine on the Incarcerated, and Gavin Newson’s Outbreak of Mercy.” They’ll run on the Crime Story podcast — a show for which Knox is a longtime contributor — and it looks like the first couple have already dropped, with transcripts attached to each episode here.
Ludwig Bemelmans, New Yorker cover artist and the author/illustrator of the Madeline books, shot his boss. So says a recent piece In Crime Reads, which traces Bemelmans’ troubled childhood in a region that’s now part of Austria, and cited a 1941 New York Times interview in which Bemelmans admits that at age 16, he shot a headwaiter at the restaurant at which he worked, then fled to the U.S.
Obviously, things turned out okay, or our parents wouldn’t have read us those books every night before bed, so check out Olivia Rutigliano’s full report to see how Bemelmans got from one end of things to the other. — EB
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