Troubled Teens · Cleveland · Social Distancing
Also: Art theft on Hulu
the true crime that's worth your time
A new podcast seeks to expose “tough love” programs for teens. The Lost Kids, a show from Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reporter Josh Bloch (you might remember him from the first season of CBC’s Uncover podcast, “Escaping NXIVM”) covers cases like the disappearance of Daniel Yuen after he was placed in a “behavior modification” school in 2004.
A Google of the school Yuen was enrolled in, known as CEDU, uncovers loads of accounts like this one that refer to the program as a dangerous cult — the institutions were even the subject of a 2014 doc, segments of which are available to watch on YouTube. “We start looking into this program, and one of the first remarkable things we discover is that hundreds of kids have run away from this place,” Bloch says in a cross-promotional item for Oxygen. The six-episode podcast drops on June 3. — EB
A murderous nurse is the subject of a new British docuseries. The subject of the series, Beverley Allitt, has been the subject of adaptations in the past: Angel of Death: The Beverly Allitt Story, dropped in 2005 but hasn’t been made available for streaming, and she’s a regular on shows that round up child homicides or nurses that kill. That’s because in 1991, Allitt killed four kids, a court found, and attempted to kill three others, all during a two-month stretch at a hospital.
This new show, The Beverley Allitt Tapes, gets its name from the “never-before-seen police interviews with Allitt” that appear in the show, which was recently picked up by UK network Sky Crime. It’s currently in production, and a release date has yet to be determined — but if it moves as other Sky true crime docs do, it’ll be on a U.S. streaming service shortly thereafter. — EB
Have you checked out The Painter and the Thief yet? The doc on a Czech painter who ended up befriending the man who stole her art was released on Hulu this past weekend, and it’s generating rave reviews — the L.A. Times found it “moving,” the New Yorker called it a “quaveringly dark fairy tale,” and IndieWire declared it in Oscar contender.
I haven’t given it a peep because I’ve spent the holiday weekend binging Cary Grant movies (I could talk all day about how stylin’ and cool — but totally without sex appeal — Grant is, but that’s a whole other newsletter), but I mean to get to it this week. How about you? — EB
A new true-crime series is touting its post-pandemic production safety measures. In The Footsteps of Killers is a three-part docuseries that stars Emilia Fox (she’s an actress likely best known for her role on Silent Witness, a 23-season British procedural) and criminologist Professor David Wilson.
Together they’ll take a fresh look at “historic crimes to unearth new evidence,” Deadline reports, but don’t expect handshakes or hugs, as Deadline says it’ll be made while “observing UK government guidelines on social distancing and broadcaster production safety protocols.” If that means that this show will be shot entirely via Zoom, I might not be able to take it…but by then, maybe my standards will have dropped. — EB
Crime in Cleveland is getting the graphic novel treatment. Artist Jake Kelly is behind Doomsday Map, a comic book about the Shaker Heights bombing of 1970. Cleve Scene reports that Kelly’s goal is to produce a series of books on Cleveland’s multi-year wave of explosions, which earned it the nickname “Bomb City USA” in the mid-1970s. You can score the first issue in the wild yarn here. — EB
Wednesday on Best Evidence: No podcast this week due to the holiday, so it’s Sarah’s choice!
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