August 9, 2022

True Crime Brain · Ashley Flowers · Crypto

Plus: the real Tim Kono

the true crime that's worth your time

Is anyone here watching The Resort? As Leila Latif noted on Polygon, it “is perhaps the best example of ‘true-crime brain’ adapted to screen,” a reference to the genre-enabled entitlement some people (often white, usually American) have developed when confronted with an inexplicable and exciting investigation.

It’s Michelle McNamara’s seminal 2013 piece, In the Footsteps of a Killer, in a funhouse mirror. It’s this ding-dong tourist rescued in a treacherous area of a California forest after he opted to “personally investigate” the dehydration death of a family after what appears to be a poorly planned hike.

It’s Steven Pankey, the subject of a weekend segment on 48 Hours (it’s available to watch in full online)…or is it?

Pankey is a self-described “true-crime junkie” who’s been talking about the 1984 disappearance of 12-year-old Jonelle Matthews since even before her remains were discovered in 2019. Shortly after Matthews’s body was found, Pankey contacted the Idaho Statesman, and in a videotaped interview that’s also online, Pankey said that he first contacted the FBI about the case shortly after Matthews first disappeared. From the East Idaho News:

“I never met Jonelle, I never met her family, I didn’t know she existed or disappeared until Wednesday, Dec. 26 (1984),” Pankey said.

But he said he met with an FBI agent at the Greeley police station shortly after he returned, because he heard from his father-in-law, who worked for a cemetery, that someone had asked about getting rid of a body. The comments made him suspicious given Jonelle’s disappearance, he said, so he reported them to the FBI rather than to local police.

Nearly a year later, a grand jury ruled that Pankey, “armed with a gun, took Jonelle from her family’s home and killed her during the course of the kidnapping,” the New York Times reported in 2020. According to the indictment, he “intentionally inserted himself in the investigation many times over the years claiming to have knowledge of the crime which grew inconsistent and incriminating over time.”

Not so, says his defense attorney. “He's a true-crime junkie. He gets himself in the middle of murder cases, but that doesn't necessarily mean he actually was involved in them,” Anthony Viorst said at Pankey’s first trial, in 2020. But though he was accused of murder, the only charge he was convicted of was “false reporting,” 9 News reported last year. From their coverage:

Prosecutors argued that over the years, Pankey became obsessed with the case, and approached police and wrote letters to the Weld County DA's office several times about it, and at times insinuated that he had information about the case. 

"So for instance, on July 15 of 2013, you said that if you want Miss Matthews' body, you need to protect the witnesses' fourth, fifth and sixth amendment rights. Why did you write that, Mr. Pankey?" his defense attorney asked. 

"I don't know. I don't have a good reason," Pankey responded. 

When questioned on statements he made to police asking for immunity, Pankey said in part, "Because at that point, I wanted to privately say what I publicly said today that, you know, I really don't know anything, and I was bitter and I was just making stuff up."

Eventually, the judge ruled the proceedings a mistrial, and Pankey is expected to be retried in October. Pankey has since parted ways with his public defender, and (per the Coloradan) might end up as his own lawyer.

Another five-week trial for Steve Pankey will begin Oct. 4 after his first trial held last fall ended in a mistrial because jurors could not reach a unanimous verdict.

Pankey may end up representing himself in the upcoming trial after a judge allowed attorneys from the public defender's office to withdraw from the case Thursday, citing irreconcilable differences with Pankey. The issue between Pankey and the public defender's office was not publicly discussed.

…

"I may have to be the Lone Ranger," Pankey said, accepting the possibility of representing himself at the upcoming trial. 

“Mr. Pankey loves the limelight. He just does, for whatever reason,” his former lawyer told 48 Hours, and by this point in the story, I’m thinking that just maybe, this is less about an amateur detective wrapped up in a case he’s obsessed with and more like The Jinx — a man who probably could have slipped past everyone’s attention except that he kept speaking up. But I don’t know! Take a look at the CBS report on the case, and tell us what you think. — EB

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Speaking of crime junkies, so now Ashley Flowers has a novel? How Sarah notated this item in our budget doc is just too perfect, so I’m going to paste it here: “Ashley Flowers’s stupid shitty novel and People’s complicity in the ethical bankruptcy of tabloid true crime.”

I’d argue that People has been complicit in the ethical bankruptcy of pretty much everything since it launched as a one-pager in Time back in 1974 (here’s its first stand-alone issue, if you had any doubt that it’s ever been anything but press-release barfback), but still, I know what she means.

And the People article, which was penned by a college undergrad interning at the magazine at whom I will not punch down, is pretty barfback-y, with passages describing the alleged plagiarist like “Besides having an encyclopedic knowledge of true crime…” The plagiarism accusations against Flowers are not mentioned in the piece.

Don’t waste your time with the People piece, or with Flowers’ novel,1 which will be released by publishers Penguin Random House on Aug. 16. Instead, here’s a complicated, fascinating, and ultimately heart-filled plagiarism story from Air Mail’s Johanna Berkman about Jumi Bello, a young female novelist whose admitted pattern of plagiarism is significantly more worthy of your time — and Bello, for all her admitted misdeeds, is a far more deserving person of a bit of space in our brains. — EB

I suppose Only Murders in the Building is also an example of true crime brain, but the case feels milder and less corrosive than the behavior exhibited in The Resort.2 But, though we talk about OMitB a lot in this publication due to its relevance as a comment on our genre of focus, until I read this (nearly year old!) piece in The Wrap, I didn’t know there was a real life inspiration behind the first season.

According to show co-creator John Hoffman:

A year before I started writing this show, a friend of mine was found dead on his floor with someone else and it was deemed a murder-suicide. And, with my friend being the one who had committed suicide and committed murder, I couldn’t fathom that at all based on the person I knew. But I hadn’t spoken to him in over 20 years, and he was very dear to me when I was growing up.

So I went on a mission to find out what the hell has happened here. And my gut told me, that is impossible. And by the end of the year of truly investigating, going to Wisconsin, meeting his family, meeting his kids, learning what his life had become, the whole case had been investigated and reversed. And the truth was, he was killed… That sounds very dark for a lovely comedy series like this. But it was close to Mabel’s experience.

This story ran in September of 2021, but I just stumbled across it the other day, and wondered why I hadn’t heard it before. But other than some reblog pickup, I haven’t seen anyone forward that story at all.

And now I’m the one with true crime brain, because I’m a little indignant! Why hasn’t anyone followed up with Hoffman to get some solid facts on this case? Where are the local newspaper stories headlined TV Writer Prompts Reversal Of Suicide Ruling? I AM AN ENTITLED TRUE CRIME PERSON AND NEED TO KNOW MORE!

Or maybe there is more out there on this mysterious case and Hoffman’s role in it, and I just missed it. If so, hook me up with a link? — EB

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I know that hearing about crypto makes a lot of your eyes glaze over. And I get it; it’s a challenging concept and, given how much the market is cratering, it almost doesn’t seem like it’s worth the effort to try to figure it out.

And also, given how the market is cratering, is it worth it to mount a big crypto heist? In the case of last week’s Nomad hack, perhaps: though cryptocurrency ain’t worth what it used to, if someone told you all you needed to do is copy and paste to steal millions in actual money, wouldn’t you be tempted?

Cnet has a very accessible explanation of the “decentralized heist,” in which over $190 million was stolen via a vulnerability in “security-first” messaging protocol Nomad. Snip:

You'd need to know ethereum's development language, Solidity, to understand the technical aspects. The gist is that the smart contract broke. Certain transactions that shouldn't be approved could be pushed through and replicated. It appears that suspicious transactions began occurring at around 9:13 a.m. PT, when several wallets removed 100 bitcoin ($1.7 million) from the bridge. All anyone had to do from there was copy and paste the exact script the scammer used, replacing the original exploiter's wallet number with their own, and push it through. Others took out funds in ether and the USDC stablecoin, among other tokens.

"This is why the hack was so chaotic," said Sam Sun, a researcher for crypto investment firm Paradigm, in a tweet thread deconstructing the exploit. "You didn't need to know about Solidity or Merkle Trees or anything like that. All you had to do was find a transaction that worked, find/replace the other person's address with yours, and then re-broadcast it."

The bottom line is that several folks pulled down a lot of cash last week — and given crypto’s by-design untraceability, they might not ever get caught. This isn’t something I’d think could translate well to the screen, but if a podcast wanted to tackle how this heist went down, and what the repercussion were, I’d sure listen. — EB