True Crime Addict (2016)

James Renner’s quasi-meta meditation on true-crime fascination generally, and specifically on the disappearance of Maura Murray in February 2004, is the most un-put-downable book I have read in some time. Renner personalizes his research and investigations, probing himself for the sources of his own interest. It sounds like this is not the first time he has done this. His first book, in 2006, Amy: My Search for Her Killer, is about the abduction and murder of Amy Mihaljevic in 1989 when she was 10. Renner is the same age as Mihaljevic and he was impressed with the case as a 10-year-old and has been ever since. The Maura Murray case is slightly different—a baffling disappearance that remains unsolved. True Crime Addict chronicles Renner’s efforts to solve it. I saw the episode of Disappeared about Murray (from that show’s first season) and was impressed and intrigued by the case. It’s tantalizing and mysterious in all kinds of ways. So among other things Renner’s book rekindled my interest in the case. And then Renner takes an interesting approach to his narrative—total transparency (seemingly). Because there are still so many unknowns to the case, Renner can’t structure it around a resolution. There is still not one, and many questions remain open. Renner works a day job as a college instructor, has extensive editorial experience, has written novels as well as nonfiction, and possesses the whole panoply of podcast(s), a blog, and a youtube channel. We learn of his personal experience with crime and abuse in the story of his predatory grandfather. In many ways Renner is on a righteous mission. He says confronting miscreants is one of his favorite parts of his work, allowing that that is also dangerous. We see a lot of doors slammed in his face and hear about a lot of messages he leaves that never get responses. He keeps the focus on the Murray case and pursues his avenues of information. I don’t know how far I’m going to go with this guy. I’m already checking out his podcast but that may not last long. I’m interested in another of his true-crime books and maybe even one of his novels. I really loved True Crime Addict.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Signs of a Psychopath (s1-6, 2020-2023)

Here’s a continuing series that seriously deserves all its content warnings because it can pack quite a punch. It’s a bit of a variation on the ubiquitous youtube true-crime videos based on police interrogation tapes. Usually those often very long episodes are focused on police interrogation techniques, to valorize or condemn them according to the video-maker’s own bent along with what’s on the tape. Signs of a Psychopath instead offers up 21-minute blasts of apprehended murderers who are variously still high on their work as they talk to police and the show describes their crimes. It is very chilling stuff and thus often gratifying to learn of their current status, usually incarcerated, sometimes dead of state execution or suicide. The show also includes a handful or more of long-faced forensic psychologists and such explaining the ins and outs of psychopathy. A few episodes are twice as long and tediously preachy about how to detect and stop psychopaths at large in the world (spoiler alert, it’s not easy). They’re not all the same, these miscreants. Some are cocky and jokey, others are dead-voiced (“so then I killed him too”). I don’t know what’s worse. They’re all quite disturbing. But once I found the show I streamed quickly through the rather short seasons, maybe six to 10 of these 21-minute bursts. Yes, it’s a freak show, I admit. They are the geeks and I am the gawker. And I get what I’m looking for—shock, followed by queasy outrage and ultimately despair. Good times! The crimes are heinous. Many fit the mold of classic serial killers—multiple murders, often with sexualized overtones. Others are more unusual, such as a nurse at a nursing home who killed a handful under her care for misbehaving in her judgment. One aspect of the show that sort of tells on what it’s trying to do is its disproportionate representation of women in this realm, which is overwhelmingly populated by men. —Still, ya know, gotta say, it’s pretty freaky, what these women do. And the men, of course. I think, actually, now that I think about it, it’s the cocky, jokey killers that seem worst to me. They dole out crumbs of teasing information to investigators trying to close cold cases, just for the attention, just for the lulz. One, giving the details on one of his crimes, makes a point of saying he knows more than he will ever tell about other murders, and shortly after that kills himself. Feel the despair.

People Try to Pet Tigers Sometimes... (2023)

True-crime youtuber Matt Orchard kicks off his 20-minute meditation on animal / human relations with a warning: “The following video contains visuals and especially audio of people in extreme pain, as well as other content that some may find disturbing.” It’s certainly true but he doesn’t warn—probably can’t—that many could find themselves literally laughing at the agonizing cries of pain, which are repeated for effect. Sure enough, the screams are the next thing we hear from a 911 call coming from a zoo in Florida. It’s amazing, in a way, that this victim even had the wherewithal to make the call. Orchard has previously made his feelings known about “Florida Man” incidents, and here we are again. The tale is about not one but two cases at Florida zoos in recent years where employees who are not responsible for animal care in any way decided it would be fun, or something, to go pet a tiger. These big cats are so adorable, after all—like Hobbes in the cartoon, or something. Orchard reminds us, however, that tigers are apex predators and generally more likely to show aggression than affection to random humans who hop safety fences and stick their arms through the wires of their fences for a little skritch-skritch. The worst visual details here are pixelated away but details about how the teeth inside a tiger’s mouth work are made quite clear. Your imagination gets some workout from this. Sadly, one of the tigers must be put down as the only solution to save a fool’s forearm. Orchard’s disgust with these two is palpable but, as he says, in the end most of us are going to have to side with the human in the immediate situation. It doesn’t help the endangered tigers any, whose dwindling numbers on the planet only make the situation worse. Zoo employees are seen crying over the incident and you may not be far from it either. We never hear from either of the fools—but what could they possibly say that wouldn’t make us think twice about who to shoot in the clinch? All you can do, Orchard implies, is run that agonizing audio a few times repetitively and let it become the cruel and savage joke that it and most “Florida Man” incidents are.

Disappeared (2009-2022)

I happened to remember this old Discovery true-crime show about missing person cases which I used to watch a lot. I found it online complete except for most of the first season and that was all she wrote for a week or 10 days. I didn’t get to all of it, but I sampled all the seasons and saw a couple of them complete. The initial run lasted six seasons, starting in 2009. Then there was a break and three more seasons, then another break and season 10 ran just last year. It turns out I hadn’t seen all the old episodes by a long shot. The comforting voice of Christopher Crutchfield Walker provides the voiceover in all seasons except 7 (nonetheless a pretty good season). The show is built out of interviews with various principals—not always all of them—accompanied by reenactments, which can be confusing or distracting but also helpful. It’s fair to say the shows are often padded out to fit a one-hour TV time slot. Compare the much more highly efficient Forensic Files, which can practically pack in three intriguing cases in the time Disappeared spends on one. But in many ways I appreciate the slower pace of Disappeared, which offers time to let the complexities settle in. They are essentially different shows despite all the police procedure: Forensic Files explicitly knows whereas Disappeared explicitly does not know. In general, I think the early seasons are better. The cases seem to be chosen more for their inherent interest, while the later seasons, especially 10, are focused more on urgent public service in the mold of America’s Most Wanted and To Catch a Predator, offering a platform to help solve cases. Since Gabby Petito there have been increasing cries for the media to focus on BIPOC missing person cases rather than solely on young white women, which is fair and reasonable. We hear more about gross police incompetence in these later seasons, and in turn police don’t always cooperate with interviews, which is unheard of in the early years. It’s easy to come away with a sense of outrage and urgency in the later seasons and it’s not out of place for these cases.

I found a Wikipedia article that traces ongoing results of the cases, another reason I favor the older episodes. Those cases simply have a better chance of being resolved by now. I ran into plenty of “still missing” notices there, but sometimes there are developments and sometimes they are as surprising as any twists and turns captured in the show. To be clear, these resolutions can also be something like learning how a stage magician’s tricks work. At first, curiosity is satisfied but then it starts to feel stupid that you ever wanted to know. For what it’s worth, my interest in these cases is apparently more about the mystery of them, how strange they can seem, rather than the horrors and sadness of human brutality and trafficking. Many of these vanished are victims of various crimes, or suicides, or even people trying to start over—and many times it’s fairly obvious what has happened to them. Once in a while they are found alive. Often their bodies are never found, or haven’t been yet. Among other things I am amazed how hard it can be to find a body—sometimes the follow-up casually mentions it was finally found in an area that was supposedly searched carefully. Once or twice the body has clearly been moved there later. The ones who likely died from exposure are often lost in unimaginably vast and harsh terrains. It’s actually disconcerting how many missing person cases there seem to be. The show is also useful that way, reminding us of it. What happens to these people? I feel for the families and those left behind, of course—their grief is often the hardest part to watch. See enough of these episodes and they start to fit patterns. Near the end of many someone is often seen saying, “Well, someone knows what happened here and I just wish they would come forward with what they know.” Check the Wikipedia page—sometimes they did.

Girl in the Picture (2022)

This may be the saddest and most wrenching true-crime story I have ever seen, vying with talhotblond and Dear Zachary in a competition where I don’t want to know the winner. One thing about true-crime stories is they are about things that more or less actually happened, squarely in the “you can’t make this up” category of things. Or you could make them up, but no one would believe you. This Netflix documentary delivers shocking twists and turns on the regular, launching the saga with the death of a 20-year-old woman on a lonesome highway in Arizona in 1990. The woman’s husband and kid hightail out of the region and so it all begins to unfold across years and decades. I will say I was annoyed with the style of the storytelling in the first third or so of this feature-length picture. It struck me as the “peekaboo” style of narrative, intimating it has things to tell us but not telling us, because too often it has little really to tell us. But no, this is actually an insanely complicated case and there were times I got a little lost in it, so in the end I appreciated getting the information one morsel at a time, carefully designed to clarify more than the obfuscations and delays of the peekaboo style. Girl in the Picture adds up to a story of great enormity and tremendous sadness. I don’t want to give much more than that away about it. Things are never quite what you think they are. It’s about the girl in the picture in the poster and her amazing indomitable spirit which is nonetheless trampled. It’s an elusive mystery and a terrible story of human depravity. It’s an indictment of the system and a cautionary tale about human predators—they are capable of more than you can even suspect, at least if you’re as naïve as I may be. It breaks your heart just to learn what they do. It’s not giving away too much to say it is heartening in the end but any feel-good was accompanied for me by a surprising amount of hard crying. I mean, maybe I was in the mood or something. Or maybe documentaries like this just do things to me and you.

The Scott Peterson Affair (2022)

I was intrigued to see Matt Orchard take up the Scott Peterson case on his Crime and Society youtube channel, because it was one I never got to and I was happy for the chance to see it laid out. Scott Peterson’s wife Laci, eight months pregnant, disappeared on Christmas Eve of 2002 while Scott spent the day fishing. Then news came he had been having an affair. Later Laci’s body was recovered from the San Francisco Bay. At the time the case broke, circa early 2003, I was too busy to wallow in the true-crime cable coverage (as I had with OJ Simpson, JonBenet Ramsey, and others). The coming of Nancy Grace was a turnoff, for one thing. She was and is an unpleasant presence on crime stories because her takes feel less like mama-bear instincts to protect victims (because she is one herself, etc., etc.) and more like bitter vindictiveness thirsty to punish miscreants. Partly because of that, and partly because all the evidence against Scott Peterson seemed circumstantial, and partly because I just wasn’t following it closely, something about the case seemed off to me. Aren’t there any number of spouse-on-spouse homicides in any given year? Why was this the one selected for the high profile treatment? Maybe because he seems like such a creep? OK, but it’s weak sauce. Orchard focuses on that—the visceral reaction Peterson provokes in so many (including me to some degree), which is almost uncanny—and then basically gives us the sequence of events and the theories and how they stack up. Then, with 15 or 20 minutes to go in the 70-minute video, he switches up and addresses the Scott Peterson truthers, those who believe he’s wrongly convicted based on public outrage and a rush to judgment. They have various evidence, including witness statements, to shore up their case. This had been my sense of it. But it’s all a red herring on Matt Orchard’s part as these theories quickly fall apart on close examination. A few key details of fact (via cell towers and such) make the circumstantial evidence of Peterson's guilt almost irrefutable. It’s a pretty neat trick—it might even be a spoiler for me to reveal it. But I feel like any doubt about the case is cleared away here with Orchard’s usual patient, straightforward explanations. And I think the notoriety of the case has less to do with Scott Peterson and more to do with the hungry maw of true-crime cable news coverage and Nancy Grace as its face. I still think she’s a shabby person to represent true-crime to the general public. Let’s make it Matt Orchard.

The Coldest Case Ever Solved (2021)

My true-crime interests inevitably intersected with my youtube travels and led me to a type of video that is obviously low-budget and fairly called amateur. The ones I tend to prefer—channels such as Hailey Elizabeth, Stephanie Harlowe, or That Chapter—are basically run by natural storytellers. They do their research and present their findings in narrative fashion (Elizabeth while she is putting on makeup), fortified by available footage and audio that can apparently be found on the internet, some of very poor quality. Most of these videos run 30 to 60 minutes though some can go on for hours if the case is weird and/or complicated enough. Matt Orchard, an Australian (or possibly New Zealander), is one of the best. His channel, Matt Orchard – Crime and Society, has ideas about larger issues like coerced confessions, problems with lie detectors, and other troubled aspects of justice systems (mainly US). These issues make solving crimes tricky business and often exercises in whether we can ever know the truth about some things (and, by implication, anything). Orchard also takes on celebrity cases such as Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard, the JonBenet Ramsey mystery, or Anthony Wiener—probably looking for internet traffic, but his treatment of the Ramsey case is one of the best I’ve seen. As often as not, as in his latest, How Chandler Halderson Didn't Come Close to Getting Away With Murder, he’s riffing on bizarre cases simply for their own sake, and sometimes even indulging a little copaganda, an ongoing pitfall of the genre. Like many youtubers, Orchard has an accompanying Patreon account where even more information and early access can be had for something like $2 a month. The Coldest Case Ever Solved balances a lot of his favored crime elements in one of his best videos, a one-hour treatment. The details are there to be discovered. They aren't what you expect. The case involves a 7-year-old girl who was abducted and murdered in 1957 and the trial of a man accused of the crime 55 long years later, in 2012. A lot of what makes the video work is the case itself. But Orchard’s acerbic recounting has a lot to do with it too, taking us through all the twists and turns. His research feels clinically precise, always—one of my favorite things about Orchard’s videos is the feeling they are authoritative. In that way he separates himself from a lot of the hysterical internet sleuths populating forums and youtube. I like to think Orchard is better than most of them. At the very least, the entertainment value is high. If you like this, try five more.

Who Killed Garrett Phillips? (2019)

This two-part three-hour HBO documentary from producer/director Liz Garbus (The Farm: Angola, USA; I’ll Be Gone in the Dark; Love, Marilyn) presents a murder mystery wrapped in law enforcement mistakes and bad faith. The movie lets its subjects speak for themselves through their words and actions. It never has to say a word about racism because we see it unfolding in front of us. It involves the murder of a 12-year-old boy in a small town in upstate New York and the subsequent single-minded focus on the town’s Black high school soccer coach. In the year or so before the murder the coach had been involved with the mother of the boy, Garrett Phillips. She is a white woman and her previous boyfriend, a policeman, did not like the relationship. The coach and the woman had broken up so recently that it still wasn’t clear whether they might not be able to patch it up. There are lots of unexplained gaps in this picture. The relationship of the coach and the boy is one. There are only glancing allusions that they did not get along. The reasons for the breakup are also unclear, though it sounds like racist social pressure was part of it. The mother evidently never wanted to cooperate with these filmmakers, so we never hear her version of anything. We never learn where she or the other son were on the day of the murder. That day, in the afternoon, people heard unusual sounds coming from the second-story apartment where the murder took place, including a neighbor who shared a wall and called 911. At first a lot of people seemed to think it was other kids in some kind of incident that went out of control, but police quickly focused on the soccer coach. He is not a bad suspect as these things go, but the evidence is ambiguous, circumstantial, and often strained. No other lines of investigation were ever seriously followed. The closer the evidence is looked at the less likely it appears to be the coach, but that doesn’t stop police and an overzealous prosecutor (later sanctioned for abuses in this and other cases) from systematically destroying the coach’s life with harassment and innuendo. It’s an object lesson, a cautionary tale, for Black people thinking of moving to white towns even still in the 21st century, no matter how well liked they may seem to be. And it’s another story of raw white fear and aggression. Who Killed Garrett Phillips? details the murder and investigation and then follows along with the attempt to pin it on the coach in court. It’s intense, dramatic, and harrowing, hard to watch as any dispassionate depiction of injustice can be. Definitely worth a look if you don’t mind getting helplessly angry about law enforcement excesses.

I'll Be Gone in the Dark (2018)

Michelle McNamara's true-crime book about the so-called Golden State Killer is already making it to recommendation lists of best true-crime ever. This is likely due more to circumstances above and beyond the book itself. It's a very good book, such as it is, but explicitly it's incomplete. A fair amount of its reputation has to do with the killer, who was so elusive for so long that he has at least two other police and/or media nicknames. I first learned about him in the 2000s from an episode of the A&E channel's Cold Case Files. Joseph James DeAngelo, as we finally learned was his name, was an amazingly skillful and sickeningly prolific sexual offender who finally graduated to serial killer. He was savagely cruel with a penchant for bizarre gestures. I kept him in the back of my mind and looked out for more information about him. McNamara reportedly had much the same experience, perhaps even with the same TV episode. She really went to work on it as a web sleuth in the 2010s. At some point I remember running across her blog, True Crime Diary. I read enough of it to appreciate she was on the case and that it was still unsolved. In fact, it was McNamara who gave him the “Golden State Killer” sobriquet. He had previously been known in Sacramento as the East Area Rapist and in Southern California as the Original Night Stalker. McNamara's blog was way deep in the weeds when I found it around 2013 and I didn't end up visiting often. She died in 2016 at the age of 46, while working on this book. The book is constructed from manuscript parts, notes, and other sources by true-crime writer Paul Haynes, investigative journalist Bill Jensen, and McNamara's widower Patton Oswalt. It's a work of love and done really well. It was published in February 2018. Two months later, in a dramatic turn of events, DeAngelo was finally run to ground at the age of 72. He was subsequently convicted in 2020 and sent to prison for life, which is probably not a very long sentence, but still. All the stuff that McNamara wrote here, including a long section of memoir about an unsolved murder in her Chicago neighborhood when she was growing up, are far and away the best parts of I'll Be Gone in the Dark. But the book is often fragmented. One section is a partial transcription of a day she spent with one of the cold case detectives on the case. A valiant job was done pulling this together after her death, but her touch on a final pass is missed, and inevitably, as we learn more details with time, someone is going to do a better job of telling DeAngelo’s whole story. But he may always be known casually as the Golden State Killer—the nickname McNamara gave DeAngelo before we knew his name. I'll Be Gone in the Dark is more and more a curiosity as time goes by, and an incomplete one at that, but still worth looking into.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Making a Murderer (2015-2018)

I had a pretty good groove going last fall on true-crime documentaries and then I ran into the very hard wall of the Netflix series Making a Murderer. It's relatively long, with both its 2015 and 2018 seasons running to 10 one-hour episodes each, but that was not the problem. I made it to episode 9 of the first season before I foundered. Sometimes you have to take care of your soul. I'm sure there are greater travesties and outrages of flawed criminal justice, but I can't think of one at the moment. By ep 9, the handwriting in this case is on the wall, and I just couldn't bear it any longer. This is the story of Steven Avery, who was accused in 1985 of a rape he did not commit, lost at trial, and went to prison for 18 years. He got out because DNA technology arrived and then became sophisticated enough to prove not only that he didn't do it, but that a man who had gone on to rape again did. Terrible tragedy, set right. But let's not be hasty. As Avery moved to sue Manitowoc County in Wisconsin for the malice and incompetence, Manitowoc County responded by getting him (read: framing him) for a heinous crime: the murder of a young woman whose body had been burned to hide the evidence. Avery's innocence is the position of this documentary anyway, written and directed by Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos, and they make their case a lot better than Manitowoc law enforcement did for his guilt—the first time or the second. To make it worse, Avery's nephew Brendan Dassey finds himself caught up in it, still a minor, and he goes to prison too. They are still there—the second season basically details the heartbreaking efforts to get them out. If I have any complaint about this TV series (other than the unusually pungent unremitting bleakness, generally a true-crime known quantity) it is that it waits until the second season to start really looking into alternate theories of the crime.

I know the show made quite a splash on its initial release, and I wonder how those viewers could stand the three-year wait for answers (which are still incomplete) to the questions raised in the first about specifically the murder. It was the convincing depiction of the monstrous corruption of Manitowoc County law enforcement that sent me into the tailspin. I didn't want to live in a world with people like them. But eventually I came back and finished. Ricciardi and Demos show many different ways how unlikely if not impossible it is that Avery and Dassey killed the victim. In the second season, the attorney Kathleen Zellner arrives like a rock star and starts investigating the murder the way it should have been, making the show both more heartening and more interesting. She uses more standard if highly sophisticated investigation techniques. (As opposed to spending time making up lurid stories for press conferences and coercing confessions. A few years after the trial, the prosecutor Ken Kratz was forced to resign for sending sexually coercive texts to a domestic violence victim. That's his moral compass.) There are gaps and questions in Zellner's theory too—if it's a compulsive sex crime, for example, why is it an isolated one, with most of the alternate suspects still living in the area? But more things make much more sense as a result of her work. In the context of this show it's thrilling to see someone actually try to figure out what happened. It's hard to recommend anything that affected me so strongly that I stopped watching it for almost two months. But, if you can stand it, it ultimately does everything a true-crime story can in terms of shock, outrage, and eternal human truths. It's especially remarkable for a case that is still as wide open as this one. There may be a third season yet.

The Professor and the Prostitute (1986)

Note the subtitle, And Other True Tales of Murder and Madness, as this is a collection of nine short true-crime pieces by Linda Wolfe. She notes here that her specific interest in crime focuses on the middle class. I was disappointed at first that the book is smaller pieces, but they turned out to be very good—interesting cases, and interesting journalistic ways of chasing down the stories. She talks to lots of people, but she's also thoughtful and informed when she probes into the psychological aspects. I found out about it originally from Bill James's book on true-crime literature, Popular Crime (basically worth reading itself). These pieces reminded me how good those Year's Best annuals on true-crime used to be, for as long as they went in the 2000s. The title piece here is the longest. The most interesting to me now was a case that involved twin gynecologists who both died at age 45 in strange circumstances. The case served as an obvious inspiration for director and writer David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers movie from 1988 with Jeremy Irons playing both twins. The real-life version did not invent strange and disturbing gynecology tools like in the movie, but they were similarly innovative researchers who had some reputation before going weird. An amazing amount of the movie comes right from the case, which makes the case even more creepy. Wolfe, who died in 2020 at 87, had a good nose for true-crime cases that can haunt—maybe because she does keep the focus on the middle class, which makes them familiar to me in subtly uncanny ways. My copy is a lurid mass market paperback from the mid-'80s, part of my intermittent downsizing project. I felt a little trashy seeing it laying around but I liked it in some nostalgic way for that reason too. Wolfe was more self-deprecating than warranted in her introduction and throughout. I liked her straightforward way of getting at these cases. She has a lot of insight into the people and the incidents and how they all add up. A lot of books look like this one, but not many of them are this good. It was over too soon. I wanted more.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Don't F**k With Cats (2019)

When we last saw web sleuths in action (two weeks ago, in Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel) they were mostly all wrong. Here they are mostly all right. This Netflix miniseries starts, as so many things do, on Facebook, when a video was posted called "1 Boy 2 Kittens." Part of what is so interesting about this documentary is the power of this video and others posted by the same fellow. They are mercifully never shown to us, except in very small fragments, but they literally break down web sleuths and a police detective, who respond with blubbering tears and outrage, as do we all just knowing about it. In the first video the cats are killed by being placed in plastic bags from which the air is removed with a vacuum cleaner. These kittens are barely weaned, not even two months old, and they die. We see the corpses briefly, which he keeps in his refrigerator for later videos. This mysterious fellow kills other animals for videos and eventually goes on to kill a person. His story is another one that belongs to the internet age, interesting and creepy in its own right. Those of us who believe that wantonly killing animals ritualistically is a sign of a serial killer working himself up to bigger crimes are not surprised by how this case turns, but until that murder the web sleuths are unable to get the attention of the police IRL to take it seriously. For one thing, figuring out who the guy is at all and then where he lives in the world is no easy thing. The web sleuths manage it—all the various details of how they do so are there to be discovered. It's fair to call it fascinating, and relatable too, especially when they can't get the attention of the police once they have found the guy. Along the way, unfortunately, they do find at least one wrong guy, who is then hounded and harassed by web sleuth hangers-on until he commits suicide. Oops. That's the problem with these internet things. You can find out amazing things, but the mob feelings incited can also go out of control and ruin the lives of innocent people as well as guilty. On the other hand, our cat killer is anything but innocent and in general police will not take the case seriously until he actually does kill a person, also again done for the camera. Thanks to the work of the web sleuths—basically one of those private Facebook groups that can cause so much trouble—police are able to get the guy after only the one murder. If you have tender feelings like me for animals you have to be careful with this miniseries, which I think is worth seeing. They never show much, but your imagination is fully inflamed to terrible things. It's probably the next-worst thing to seeing the videos (which I refuse to look at myself) but at least there's a happy ending here and altogether it's an interesting ride.

Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel (2021)

I was surprised to see that this Netflix miniseries has been ranked in aggregate on IMDb by some 16,000 viewers at 5.9 stars out of 10. I did what I could, giving it 8 stars, but one person can only do so much here. The complaint, as far as I can tell, seems to be the same as mine about Wormwood a few weeks ago, which is that it is too long and padded out. But that was not my experience. Parachuting in to check out the first few minutes of the first episode—a new habit of mine, and I'm quick to abandon ship—I was completely pulled into this strange story of a young woman's disappearance from the legendary Cecil Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. Looking further into it before committing myself to all four hours I noted that the documentary was coproduced and directed by Joe Berlinger, coproducer and codirector of the memorable Paradise Lost series, recounting the harrowing story of the murder of several children in May 1993 in West Memphis, Arkansas. So that did it and I went all the way with this fascinating documentary, which is so skillfully put together. It tells the story of Elisa Lam who disappeared from the hotel in 2013 in mysterious circumstances. She was a young Chinese-Canadian woman traveling. She kept a prodigious account of her own life on Tumblr. The elements in the case were baffling and tantalizing: video of Lam behaving strangely in a late-night hotel elevator the night she disappeared basically drove the whole phenomenon of it. Unexplained editing of the video confused it further, along with an army of eerie coincidences and the very strange circumstances of her death and how her body was discovered. Everything is ultimately explained, and it's all there to be discovered. Berlinger evidently still has some of his old sympathies, as the case also involves accusations against an outsider figure, a Mexican death-metal musician named Morbid who happened to be staying in the hotel at the time Lam disappeared. In this age of social media mob action, he found himself the object of hundreds of self-styled web sleuths who were sure he was good for the crime. Not surprisingly, perhaps, The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel and the case are deeply involved with the effects of swarming social media. Sometimes I think social media is all there is to think about after climate change. Add to the mix that the Cecil Hotel, located at the edge of the Los Angeles Skid Row, has a longstanding reputation for being haunted, tainted, cursed, and otherwise an ineffable vortex of evil. What a cluster! The only spoiler I'll mention is that, even though I am generally sympathetic with their impulse, 99% of the web sleuths were wrong about everything in this case. Berlinger and crew put this miniseries together artfully, making it work well as a suspense production, and a lot of the interviews are just great—not only the people corralled for it but all the things they have to say. This is a good one. I think I've talked myself into revising my ranking to a 9.

The Confession Killer (2019)

I thought this Netflix miniseries was a pretty good primer on Henry Lee Lucas, who emerged in the '80s as pretender to the throne of King of the Serial Killers, the most prolific, rampant, and eclectic of all time. The legend was printed in the movie Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, although now we know it is mostly fiction and Lucas should be up for some posthumous credit along with screenwriters Richard Fire and director John McNaughton, plus Michael Rooker in possibly his greatest performance. It may be the single greatest serial killer movie of all time. Please don't talk to me about The Silence of the Lambs or M. The Texas Rangers, according to this documentary, still have Lucas down for some 200 murders—hitchhikers and housewives stabbed, shot, bludgeoned, strangled, stomped, throats cut, necks broken. After he killed them he had sex with them. Sometimes he didn't like their look so he cut off their heads first. He was thus set up as the Monster Truck Rally of serial killers. The worst any human could imagine. Pure E - V - I - L. It turns out—and it took awhile to really get to it, well into the 2010s, because the Texas Rangers resist the truth to this day (according to the doc)—Lucas probably killed three people: his mother (an abusive prostitute), his 15-year-old girlfriend (when Lucas was in his 40s), and a landlady. All the rest were more or less a matter of Lucas amiably going along with Texas law enforcement when they found this easy and fun way of clearing cases: Get Lucas to confess to it. He'll do it! Ironically, people-pleasing is in the nature of Lucas's pathology and his skills for reading people were prodigious. When others looked harder they started seeing 1) a crazy thing, and 2) something that should have signaled we're done here. The crazy thing was how much driving Lucas would have had to do to commit these crimes. There were periods of days and weeks on the timeline where literally, physically, the only way he could have done it was with constant driving, killing, and no sleep. The "case closed" thing was irrefutable documentary evidence in dozens of the murders that Lucas was elsewhere—a matter of timeclock stamps, receipts, and witnesses. He could not have been in New Mexico killing a housewife when he was buying gas and a hot dog that day in Florida. However, again by the slant of this miniseries, which is compelling, law enforcement by then was flocking in from 20-odd states with their cold case files, and Lucas was clearing them left and right. He'd grin, suck on a milkshake, and admit to every single one, offering up the lurid details, including his favorite about the having sex with the corpses. Uncovering the fraud of all this is basically the arc of this miniseries, a twisting complicated story that is there to be discovered. Lucas died in prison in 2001 awaiting execution for a murder he could not have committed. Required viewing for anyone like me who thought Lucas might be the ultimate boogeyman. He's still pretty creepy.

Wormwood (2017)

For the most part I have been out of step with many fans of documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, who directed this Netflix miniseries in typical fashion for him. His breakthrough picture for most—The Thin Blue Line (1988)—also happens to be where he lost me, though his previous films (Gates of Heaven and Vernon, Florida) certainly had their own problems. With The Thin Blue Line, Morris adopted a more sincere, crusading journalist approach even as he indulged various arty cinematic impulses, which have dogged his work (and apparently impressed the critics) ever since. Wormwood is a great example of both. On the journalist side, he takes on the case of Frank Olson, a CIA scientist specializing in biological warfare who died under mysterious, unexplained circumstances in 1953. Morris works with Olson's son Eric, who was a young boy at the time of his father's death and has spent much of his life trying to get to the bottom of it. In many ways Morris even shows up the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who once called the Olsons the most "uncurious" family he'd ever heard of for accepting the CIA's first account of the death, which is that Olson "fell or jumped" from a 10th-floor hotel room in some kind of terrible accident, smashing the window on his way out. Hersh made his observation of the Olsons in 1975, when a second version of the story came out. Now we were told that Olson had been surreptitiously dosed with LSD in a CIA experiment, subsequently suffered a mental breakdown, and now his death was called a suicide. This is the story that a curiously uncurious Hersh believed until circa 2014, when Eric Olson personally challenged him with his own theory that the CIA murdered his father. This had somehow never occurred to Hersh, who checked with a source and within 48 hours could confirm the murder, though he could not give any more detail than that for fear of burning his source. In many ways, Morris the journalist is thus able to paint himself as superior even to Hersh, who does not come across well in this documentary.

On the cinema side, meanwhile, Wormwood is Morris at his best or worst, depending on your view. It's full of art and cinema: slo-mo reenactments with Hollywood stars, brooding layers of text and images, fancy transitions, clips from practically every movie anyone mentions, some pretty good pop music, a whole treatment of Hamlet (from which the title among other things), etc., etc. It took me until the last episode to notice the clock in the room where the lengthy interview with Eric Olson took place is stopped at 2:35—the time his father died in 1953. That's all clever and good, but at four hours this six-part epic miniseries is just way too long, and a lot of it is padding. As a reviewer says on IMDb, there's an excellent 90-minute documentary here lost in the caverns of overproduction. Eric gets to make a pretty good case that his father was killed by the CIA, but Morris's intention seems to be more along the lines of wondering what we can ever really know for sure. Certainly this is one of those cases where it seems likely we will never know the whole story. At least, perhaps, Eric got the chance to argue convincingly for murder, in what has turned out to consume his whole life. He may have got some closure or satisfaction with this version of the story (certainly in regard to Hersh), but sadly, Wormwood is mostly more of a wasted opportunity.

Who Killed Little Gregory? (2019)

I went digging around at Netflix and turned up this five-hour French true-crime documentary miniseries about a famous case in France from the 1980s. It's pretty good. The case is a bit of a forerunner to the JonBenet Ramsey murder in the US in the '90s, with a bizarrely ritualized and still formally unsolved murder of a young child, tantalizing clues that point to an inside job, and lots of mistakes on the part of law enforcement and investigators. The Gregory Villemin murder in rural France was preceded by years of anonymous threatening letters and phone calls to the boy's parents, specifically calling out Gregory's father Jean-Marie and promising vengeance for reasons known only to the stalker. This stalker and likely murderer became known in France as "the Crow," associated with the 1943 movie Le Corbeau directed by Henri-Georges Cluozot (a good one—worth seeing!). Gregory was murdered at the age of 4, trussed up and thrown in the local river to drown, with one more letter following to his parents from "the Crow," taking credit. There are a lot of moving parts to this case, including an incompetent judge overseeing the investigation and constant media / paparazzi harassment as the case unfolds. It captured the imagination of France, with an absurd number of people wrongly certain they knew who was guilty and innocent, again much like the Ramsey case in the US. The Gregory case has a number of surprises and strange twists and turns—the lengthy running time is justified and I don't want to give too much away. It reminded me of another title that came up in the same Netflix search, The Staircase, another TV miniseries and also coincidentally a French production, though in that case the crime under examination was committed in the US. I like these forensic procedural cases because they are just so chilling and mysterious, so open to interpretation and uncertainty, often feeling impossible ever to find satisfaction from. At the same time, Who Killed Little Gregory? is quite good at raising emotions. Not so much for me because it's a kid's death—though the photos show him to be extraordinarily adorable and it's hard to think of the way he died—but because the perpetrator feels so provocatively close, likely a member of the extended family. Who Killed Little Gregory? is thus often infuriating, and even desolating, but in that righteous, satisfying true-crime way. Recommended.

Mindhunter, s2 (2019)

I raced through the first two seasons of Mindhunter in less than a week, which is pretty fast for me and a good context for any complaints I might have now. If nothing else the show is entertaining and compelling. I read the book it's based on some time ago when it was much newer, the 1995 true-crime by John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker on the origins of criminal profiling, also called Mindhunter. Criminal profiling continues to be controversial, with mixed results. It's been long enough since I read the book that I can't speak to discrepancies very well. I don't remember any character like the hotshot young Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff), who seems to understand serial killers instinctively well. He's a little unnerving here and also has the usual array of exaggerated powers in our era of superheroes. I don't remember Charles Manson being interviewed in the book, and the Richard Speck we are presented with here is very different from a mid-'90s portrait I saw on one of those Bill Kurtis true-crime shows reporting that estrogen drugs were being smuggled into prisons and Speck was taking them. Across both seasons, Mindhunter teases us with brief scenes of the Kansas-based BTK killer. The obvious suggestion is that he is on his way to becoming an A plot. I thought that would be the second season but instead (even as the show kept teasing BTK) the Atlanta child murders of 1979 to 1981 take over. I do remember that being extensively discussed in the book. The first season of Mindhunter is largely concerned with getting the FBI Behavioral Sciences Unit off the ground in the first place, through the work of FBI agents Ford and Bill Tench (Holt McCallany) with academic psychologist Wendy Carr (Anna Torv). As is often the case with extended TV dramas, Mindhunter is better when it sticks to the subject at hand and not so good when it wanders into the personal lives of its characters. At the same time some of these threads—notably the sense that Tench's adopted 9-year-old son is on the way to his own serial-killer psychosis—are the most compelling. But I think you can see the problem of improbable, convenient coincidence here. Carr is a lesbian in the closet, Ford—well, there's something wrong with Ford. I thought often of the show Dexter, which I've never seen much of but know features a serial killer doing excellent police work, because that's what we seem to have in Ford. Even when Mindhunter does stick to the subject at hand it feels a little puffed up, with Ford taking on and often psychologically breaking down the likes of Speck, Manson, Son of Sam, and other terrible killers with their own trading cards and fan base. But this show is done so well that I couldn't stop watching it, like I said. Reportedly most of the responsibility goes to David Fincher (Se7en, Zodiac, The Social Network), who gets an executive producer credit and directed a good many episodes. I hope there's a third season. No one is being very clear about it at the moment.

The Big Con (1940)

Although now it is as notable for being outdated as much as anything, David W. Maurer's study of the confidence racket remains as charming and engrossing as when it was published. As a linguistics professor by day, Maurer's fascination started with the lingo of con men. But the intricacies of the con job as such, as it existed during the Great Depression, are at least as fascinating, and down that road Maurer went, letting the rackets take priority over any study of the language. And why not? My copy, with introduction by Luc Sante, is classified as "crime / sociology." It's definitely an odd duck of a book. When I say it's outdated, that's merely in the mechanics of the operations as reported. Certainly the work of these "gentlemen" criminals goes on—consider the well-known African prince email scam. Back then (and perhaps now still), these tricksters were considered the upper crust in the underworld. What's outdated is the technology. One reliable ruse at that time, for example, the so-called "payoff," is built around race results that can be delayed long enough to get bets down in betting parlors on actual known winners. Or, more accurately, it's based on the believability of such a scenario. Maurer makes grifting seem more dignified and civilized than our last president did. He buys into the rationale that is common wisdom among con men, which is that you can't cheat an honest man. A lot of these cons specifically play on the existing avarice of the victim, or "mark" as he was known then (and still might be). I'm not so sure about that, but maybe that's because I'm not so sure my own avarice couldn't be excited into disaster, given the right circumstances. But Maurer is obviously comfortable with and even enjoys the company of these criminals, which enabled him to pump them for lots of interesting and entertaining information. The result is this tremendously readable book, a real page-turner in its way. The Big Con also served as a primary source for the movie The Sting, although Maurer had to take the producers to court to get the recognition. Note that Chapter 9, "The Con Man and His Lingo," is a glossary, because you're going to want to refer to it frequently.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

People Who Eat Darkness (2010)

Richard Lloyd Parry's true-crime nonfiction novel has obscure ambitions in directions toward the best—certainly in the opinion of the blurbers lined up for it—namely, In Cold Blood and The Executioner's Song. The story in summary has endless potential for the flatly lurid and sensational but Parry evades all that with his canny construction. In 2000, a 21-year-old British woman working in the shadowy hostess bar economy of Tokyo goes missing. Her family is frantic, flying in to Tokyo to press the search. Media coverage is all over it (in the UK, no doubt—I don't actually recall it). Speculation and high emotions are rampant. Nine months later her dismembered body is found buried in a cave. Eventually a man is charged with the crime. Parry is quite artful about the way he distributes information. In his tick-tock portions he discloses almost right away that the woman, Lucie Blackman, was dead within 24 hours of going missing. He unhooks us from the roller-coaster ride of the family, police, and public in real-time, but puts us on another one instead. He works the suspense by taking the space he needs for exposition, which may be somewhat dry but is necessary to understand this case, and is often so alien that more time is required to digest it: about the hostess bar economy in Tokyo, about how Western women are viewed there, about the surreptitious nature of the work in terms of their visas. Later, as Parry reveals more and the story deepens, he must describe the Japanese police culture and criminal legal system. The trial takes literally years. Parry never explains his title, but in a way he doesn't have to because it feels like eating darkness is what we're doing as we go. The variety of human monsters is probably infinite but it's somehow always surprising when you come across the next new one. Parry, a British national who serves as an Asia correspondent for the London Times is uniquely positioned to tell the story, with which it sounds like he was patiently, grindingly obsessed for more than 10 years (and could well still be following further developments). The result is a remarkable book that makes a good deal more of a routine missing person case (in this day and age!) than you or I or anyone else might have. Kind of like In Cold Blood and The Executioner's Song.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

I'll Be Gone in the Dark (2020)

The HBO miniseries about the Golden State Killer turns out to be a tender love story at least as much as true-crime grit even as it focuses on one of the most prolific and depraved serial killers in history. The Golden State Killer operated in the '70s and '80s, known as the Visalia Ransacker in the mid-'70s, the East Area Rapist around Sacramento in the late '70s, and the Original Night Stalker in the '80s in Southern California. It actually took a while for people to figure out they were all the same guy, which was part of the problem with running him down. He was also very good at what he did. His last murder was 1986 and he was never caught until 2018, when he was 72 and retired. In the intervening period there was a Cold Case Files episode that featured the case. I saw it and remember vividly the sinister, ferocious details, which lit me up like a Christmas tree (or, the requisite mantra in true-crime lore, made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck). Michelle McNamara also saw it and her hairs stood up too, but she took the extra step of going online to find out more, a famous rabbit hole for amateur sleuths then and now. By 2013 she had a blog that focused on it and other unsolved crimes—in fact, she's responsible for the nickname that has stuck, the Golden State Killer—and shortly after that she got her well-deserved book deal. Before she could finish writing it, however, she died from complications of drug use (on the same day as Prince). She was married to the comedian Patton Oswalt, which is where the love story comes in. Their marriage is wrapped as tightly into this miniseries as the GSK and his victims. Was that a good idea? I don't know. It's often a moving story as it develops. McNamara's allies and assistants on the book joined forces with Oswalt to finish it after she died, and it was published just two months before Joseph James DeAngelo was apprehended in the Sacramento area, where he lived most of his life. I'm really not sure how well the book or miniseries harmonize with the GSK story, which is a doozy of human cruelty and mystery. But like everyone else, I can't help liking McNamara. Her personal story is part of both the book and the miniseries and it is a great and sad story in itself. She was a good writer and it's a good book. But I was happiest, in both, for the GSK information, which multiplied what I had learned from Cold Case Files by magnitudes. And I still want to know more, but I'm not sure how much DeAngelo is talking. They threw the book at him after his arrest (most of the rapes beyond the statute of limitations) and this past June he pleaded guilty to some 26 charges. He is going to prison until he dies—at 74 and a sexual offender, that likely won't be long. I still have a few more questions, but really, this miniseries is basically adequate to them. It tells a great story about the crimes and victims—it is excellent on the victims—and a great story about McNamara. Maybe six hours is a bit much, three or four probably could have done it, but even the padding in this miniseries often feels compelling. Recommended for anyone who can stomach hearing the graphic details. There are more heroes in this one than you could imagine.