The crime
The Black Dahlia case.
The story
“The Black Dahlia mystery: Wild theories, enduring myths and a long-overlooked suspect,” by Christopher Goffard for the L.A. Times.
Goffard, whose “Crimes of the Times” series is also available on the LAT website (to which I’m not able to link for free; sorry, friends), also authored the super-readable series that became the Dirty John podcast. Hat tip to Craig Calcaterra for the link to this one – which is a fantastic read even, or maybe especially, for folks who capital-C Can’t With this particular case. It cuts through a lot of the noir-tropes clutter that tends to surround Elizabeth Short’s grimy final days and grisly end, but it also examines the clutter itself for insight into its enduring power.
Larry Harnisch, a retired Los Angeles Times copy editor, is now arguably the world’s top authority on the case. The battle for accuracy against the “true crime industrial complex” is never-ending. It would be easy to spend all day, every day, fighting off the crackpot theories of what the novelist James Ellroy has called “Dahlia freaks.” … Harnisch began researching the case seriously in the late 1990s, for a 50th anniversary story. He does not believe there is a single factually reliable book about it.
Further reading
My bookshop carries almost every book Harnisch impatiently dismisses (as well as several by the profiler cited in Harnisch’s research). FWIW, Harnisch’s favored suspect was also who the Solving the Black Dahlia podcast settled on; I don’t recommend said pod, but nor do I recommend putting too much stock in Harnisch’s book changing the way we think about Short’s murder.
You’ll need a subscription, but my top rec for related research is to dig into Goffard’s LAT archive for more midcentury-case reading.
The crime
Phishing.
The story
“USPS Text Scammers Duped His Wife, So He Hacked Their Operation,” by Matt Burgess for Wired.
When Grant Smith’s wife “inadvertently” gave a text phisher (or “smisher”) her credit-card info, Smith went on the offensive, following the chain back up to a sketchy Telegram account and an operation that sells “smishing kits” – basically, franchising these “bait stations” in exchange for a monthly subscription.
The jargon can get a bit dense, but you’ll get enough context to follow the story.
Further reading
AV properties about “marks” who decided to hit back include Love Fraud; The Tinder Swindler; and, though it’s less a con situation than a straight theft, and much more empathetic than vengeful, The Painter and the Thief. (And of course famous original Catfish, if you can stomach it still.) Eve and I talked about group unmasking effort There Is No Ethan earlier this year on The Docket.
The crime
For-profit prisons rebooting slavery, among other things.
The story
American Prison: A Reporter’s Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment, by Shane Bauer.
Prior to going undercover as a CO at a Corrections Corporation of America (since rebranded as CoreCivic) facility in Louisiana – the only way he could get even the most basic information about its operations – Bauer had himself spent time in the notorious Evin Prison in Tehran for blundering across the border on a hiking trip. That perspective is unique, but it isn’t why you should read Bauer’s book (previously a Mother Jones piece); you should read it because it’s so readable – pace-y, tense, evocative without overdoing it. It switches effortlessly between “present-day” accounts of his (laughably inadequate) training and (often strained) interactions with inmates and fellow COs and the history of racist profiteering in the prison industry, and while none of it is easy reading, Bauer’s prose is just good:
Two weeks after I start training, Chase Cortez (his real name) decides he has had enough of Winn. It’s been nearly three years since he was locked up for theft, and he has only three months to go. But in the middle of a cool, sunny December day, he climbs onto the roof of Birch unit. He lies down and waits for the patrol vehicle to pass along the perimeter. He is in view of the guard towers, but they’ve been unmanned since at least 2010. Now, a single CO watches the video feeds from at least 30 cameras.
…
Later that day, Reynolds and I bring food to Cypress, the segregation unit. It is dinnertime, but inmates haven’t had lunch yet. A naked man is shouting frantically for food, mercilessly slapping the plexiglass at the front of his cell. In the cell next to him, a small, wiry man is squatting on the floor in his underwear. His arms and face are scraped with little cuts. A guard tells me to watch him.
It is Cortez. I offer him a packet of Kool-Aid in a foam cup. He says thank you, then asks if I will put water in it. There is no water in his cell.
He’s also a trustworthy narrator, which is the other reason to read American Prison. It’s as much about journalistic integrity within an undercover assignment – and the undercover journo’s complicity with whatever system they’re covering, in exchange for information about that system – as it is about the day-to-day in a short-staffed facility with little interest in rehabilitation and even less hope.
Further reading
Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, by Ted Conover (who blurbed American Prison), also grabbed me by the throat when it came out. Anything by or about John Resko is also interesting. I haven’t read Caryl Chessman, but his testimony is considered foundational in the subgenre. And Eve and I both thought well of Time: The Kalief Browder Story.
The crime
Major cases at the Crossroads of America.
The story
“Book ‘Em: Essential Reading For Any True Crime Hound,” by Sarah D. Bunting for Indianapolis Monthly.
“…Hey, that’s you!” Sure is, in a piece Eve commissioned, and that I got a ton out of writing…and I don’t mean my fee. I had never dug into a bunch of these cases before, and while some of the reading is legitimately grim (nothing involving Larry Eyler is going to be a fun hang), I learned a lot. Every now and then, one of those black paperbacks with the red writing turns up a minor gem.
Further reading
I interviewed one of the recommended authors, Alex Mar, at the Exhibit B. B.log. Marc Singer wrote in The New Yorker about the murder of Carol Jenkins in Martinsville, IN (it seems she was headed to Vincennes, where half my family comes from; she never got there) and rumors about Martinsville’s status as a sundown town and Klan stronghold.
And if you can stomach it, the Indy Star‘s 2013 look back at “the most enduring nightmare in Indiana True Crime history,” the murder of Sylvia Likens, is thorough and immersive.
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