Vibe February 1994 · Menendez Reconsidered
It's real '90s in here today. Also, two big trials begin.
the true crime that's worth your time
As I noted in a recent discussion thread, I’d been on the hunt for an under-$100 copy of the February 1994 Vibe for ages. The one I scored for a fraction of that price isn’t mint, but for a true-crime collector like me, it’s a solid return on the investment. On page 17, Alan Light has a meditation on the Möbius of hip-hop, image, and violence, and the hand-wringing in response to, in early 1994, Snoop Doggy Dogg (then awaiting trial for murder) and Tupac Shakur (aggravated assault, among other charges). A couple pages later, the editors tartly make note of other (mostly white) famosos acting out but not getting analogous front-page coverage or editorializing, including ShanDo, Eddie Vedder, and the he-said/she-said that was the breakdown of the Axl Rose-Stephanie Seymour relationship.
And then of course there’s the cover story that makes the mag a collectible, “This Thug’s Life” by Kevin Powell. Yes, “that Kevin Powell.” The article begins with an epigraph by poet Sonia Sanchez (eye-roll…but a gentle one! I too was in my twenties once!) and then we’re straight into a scene from Shakur’s November 1993 arraignment for “sodomy and sexual abuse.” Powell’s relationship to Shakur’s story has always been dramatic, but on a prose level, “This Thug’s Life” isn’t particularly impressive: affected, straining for a late-night lyricism. But Powell was the one journo Shakur consented to speak with at that time, “perhaps because [Powell] had been working on the story long before these arrests [in addition to the sex-abuse charges, Shakur was alleged to have shot off-duty cops in Atlanta]”…but possibly also because Shakur sensed Powell and/or his editors would be smart enough to get out of Shakur’s way on the page. The man had natural narrative charisma — it’s part of why we still talk about him, although we can’t act like his unsolved murder isn’t always in bolder type — and when Shakur is talking about his childhood, his stressors, his underground magma lake of resentment and paid-forward mistakes, the piece is immensely readable. As you always do when interacting with Shakur from this side of his death, you feel the loss of him.
But my primary interest in this issue of Vibe centered on features writer turned Law & Order: SVU scribe Kathy Dobie’s investigation into…well, the logline wants you to think it’s into the murder of James R. Jordan Sr., Michael Jordan’s father. It isn’t, exactly, and “Murder By The Road In Robeson County” is also trying maybe a bit too hard to Do Something — a Hemingway something, or really probably more of a Welty something, or a Bogdanovich something. There’s an “after the break” sub-lede that gets the job of teasing the “real” story here done, but at the same time…
A lot of folks feel bad about what happened to Michael Jordan’s daddy, but feeling bad about that gets them to feeling real bad about some other things.
…I don’t know. I married a Tar Heel; half my husband’s family comes from the little town where James Jordan is buried. The fragrance of their speaking does get into the hair, so to say. But the locutions get a liiiittle folksy outside the quotation marks at times, given that Dobie is from New Haven, and ostensibly reporting out a murder.
Dobie is at least partly known, now, for a reporting focus on sexual violence; she won a National Magazine Award for 2011’s “Tiny Little Laws: A plague of sexual violence in Indian country,” and wrote a New York piece a few years back about the real-life Manhattan SVU’s attempts to nail Harvey Weinstein. Her memoir, The Only Girl in the Car, is about her own rape. You do see some of these issues percolating through “Robeson County” — inept (or too-keen) prosecutors, the “different” justice on offer for Native Americans in the Robeson area, sexually frustrated adolescent males creating a tinderbox of harassive boredom — but what you also see, alas, is that thing a lot of features in monthlies were doing back then, with varying degrees of success: breaking the fourth wall in interview transcripts, a lot of atmospherics studded with too-neat soundbites.
And yet, it works. I didn’t especially want
In the night that is really night, secrets roam, stray dogs, and boys who dream with guns.
to work on me, but I did like turning that sentence over to see how it was done, and I do know that road, the smell of it, the color of those dogs. It creates a picture in the mind’s eye, it’s thoroughly reported, and Dobie went in with a transparent plan — “my pitch, wanting to know about Robeson County and what it’s like to be 18 here.” Jordan’s killers, Daniel Green and Larry Demery, were or were around that age at the time of the murder, and both were known to have committed prior violent acts, so there is some abstracting around about bored youth and “deep neglect” and race relations in small towns struggling with their own self-images, among other big ideas. But there’s also a window opened into how this country related to itself in the early ’90s, to crime and “justice,” before the internet and a certain low-speed chase changed any number of conversations. No, there’s no discussion of Jordan Sr.’s alleged gambling debts, and the way the discussion of his death centered around that victim-blaming aspect of his life for a while. The case was still technically pending at publish time, so there’s no real resolution there, either. (For what it’s worth, according to Green, there still isn’t.) But it’s ahead of its time a little bit, grasping in the direction of systemic analyses of specific cases, versus defaulting to scaremongering terms like “super-predator” and “wilding.”
And if some of these quotes sound a little too perfectly sauced, I might steal them anyway. An earlier victim of Demery’s sighs that the police in her neighborhood aren’t “worth a snap,” and goes on to say, “Some people are too sorry.” Later, Demery is described by a contemporary: “Nobody messed with him. But nobody cared for him either.” And who didn’t feel at the end of high school the way Jamie feels: “I stayed in North Carolina all my life and I know what it’s got for me and it’s pure nothing.” They’re all so tired already and they’re not even old enough to rent a car. So, as true crime, maybe it’s not worth the money and trouble it cost. As a document of a time and place and an aimless age, it’s quite something.
And if you’d like to see for yourself, pop on over to Exhibit B. and see if it’s still available. The whole shop’s on sale until Tuesday night; enter code EXMAS at checkout. — SDB
And in case you don’t have like 41 tabs open after the previous segment, here’s a Vibe listicle on hip-hop conspiracy theories from 2010…including one insisting that Shakur is alive.
And here’s a backgrounder on Michael Jordan’s short-lived baseball career. The received wisdom on that for baseball fans at the time was that he did it as a tribute to his father but was never going to hit big-league pitching. I got to see him in a spring-training game that year; he looked pretty good to me. — SDB
My subscribers-only review of The Gits is coming soon; the chance to decide what I review for December is coming…right now! A handful of podcasts, a streaming docuseries, and a miniseries on offer this time around, so vote now! (You can vote for any/all of the properties you find appealing; pick me a good one!) — SDB
And remember, those reviews are just for paid subscribers. So it seems like a good time to remind you that Best Evidence makes a great gift: small carbon footprint, no supply-chain issues, and if you plump for a paid sub, you get access to the entire archive of bonus materials. All those entries with locks on them? $5 a month is the key for you or a friend/relative/office Secret Santa giftee.
Two high-profile trials begin today. You may have forgotten all about the Jussie Smollett proceeding — I certainly had — but “after years of delays” the matter is moving ahead. Smollett is charged with “filing false reports to police and costing Chicago hundreds of thousands of dollars” as law enforcement investigated an alleged hoax hate crime he staged against himself. Hard to believe this one survived the pandemic etc.
But the big headlines belong to opening statements in the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, who’s accused of “conspiring with disgraced* financier Jeffrey Epstein to sexually abuse underage girls.” Choire Sicha is writing a coverage newsletter about the trial called Court Appearances for New York:
Maxwell says she’s completely innocent. The victims will testify otherwise. The trial will dominate the news.
But in irregular emails, over days, weeks, or months, we’ll try to bring you as near to the trial itself as we can get, in this, the first edition of New York’s Court Appearances newsletter.
That and other comments imply that the newsletter, which is expected to have 2-3 weekly editions, will cover other major local trials; you can sign up here. — SDB
Um: the former? But seriously, folks: this Telegraph Twitter thread about…MenendezTok, I guess? is an interesting way of basically repackaging a story from earlier this year about renewed interest in the Menendez case among Gen Z. It basically unrolls a longform piece on the Telegraph website that’s behind a paywall, beginning with an overview of the case: the murders of José and Kitty Menendez, the initial suspicions by family and law enforcement that organized crime was involved, the quiet period over the holidays, and then the drip-drip of damaging circumstantial information about Erik and Lyle Menendez that culminated in…well, you probably know the rest.
But sliding behind the paywall embroiders the story with more detail, including a three-decades-old interview the brothers did with Miami-based reporter Robert Rand, and his memories of the experience; a reference to Lyle’s “chicken-wing restaurant” in Princeton (the idea that he would be “called away” to deal with that hole-in-the-wall joint across the country is hilarious); and the effect the OJ Simpson verdict, so recently rendered, might have had on the brothers’ second trial. And then there’s the idea that Erik and Lyle’s claims of abuse might land differently today:
In part, this might just be the swings and roundabouts of storytelling – after a time, the only interesting story remaining to be told is the one that runs counter to what has been told before. But it is surely also a reflection of how our world has changed in the last quarter of a century. Even if to claim sexual abuse is not to prove it, the way such abuse is thought about now is very different from how it was in the 1990s. It’s difficult to imagine that if the same trial with the same evidence was held today, no matter what its ultimate verdict, that the brothers’ accounts would be so routinely dismissed or scorned.
And then there’s the letter, surfaced in 2018, in which Erik seemed to discuss the alleged abuse months before murdering his parents; and the lengthy interview Chris Heath conducted with Lyle, prefaced by some rationalizing of the messiness of the brothers’ self-defense timeline. Taken together, I don’t know if it makes a subscription worthwhile — I read the piece with a free trial, so the price is currently right — but the idea that we couldn’t really “hear the case” 25-30 years ago because we were in a different cultural place vis-a-vis believing survivors is an interesting one to contemplate. We’re also in a different place vis-a-vis thinking the thoughtless horrific acts of adolescents are irreversibly probative, or I hope we are. What about you, readers — have your thoughts on the Menendezes’ guilt, or the appropriateness of their sentences, evolved over time? — SDB
This week on Best Evidence: Marilyn Manson, Alice Sebold, and Mia Zapata.
What is this thing? This should help. Follow Best Evidence @bestevidencefyi on Twitter and Instagram. You can also call or text us any time at 919-75-CRIME.