Evidence of Things Seen: True Crime in an Era of Reckoning

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Introduction

Editor’s Note

Part I: What We Reckon With

A Brutal Lynching. An Indifferent Police Force. A 34-Year Wait for Justice.

The Short Life of Toyin Salau and a Legacy Still at Work

No Choice but to Do It: Why Women Go to Prison

The Golden Age of White-Collar Crime

Picturesque California Conceals a Crisis of Missing Indigenous Women

How the Atlanta Spa Shootings—the Victims, the Survivors—Tell a Story of America

Part II: The True Crime Stories We Tell

Who Owns Amanda Knox?

Tie a Tourniquet on Your Heart: Revisiting Edna Buchanan, America’s Greatest Police Reporter

The True Crime Junkies and the Curious Case of a Missing Husband

Has Reality Caught Up to the Murder Police?

Part III: Shards of Justice

Will You Ever Change?

The Prisoner-Run Radio Station That’s Reaching Men on Death Row

To the Son of the Victim

Three Bodies in Texas

Acknowledgments

Other Notable Crime Stories

Contributors

Permissions

About the Author

Also by Sarah Weinman

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

BY RABIA CHAUDRY

The debate about whether the true crime genre, across all forms of media, does more harm than good in society is long-standing and contentious. For many years now, in the perceived wake of the true crime boom, there has been an equal and opposite reaction against it.

The criticism stems from different corners, enumerating several ways that true crime media may harm us. On one hand, popular culture critics like Laura Bogart, who penned a piece unequivocally titled Why Our True Crime Obsession Is Bad for Society, worry about the glorification and profiteering from violence and violent offenders. She observes that Poorly executed crime stories . . . equate brutality with profundity and correctly points out that monsters like Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer have left permanent marks in pop culture while their victims have been forgotten.

On another hand, there is a real concern that our collective mental health is being damaged by true crime. This worry is not just raised by online commentators and members of the media, but also mental health professionals. In 2021, citing the rise of true crime podcasts, books, and TV shows, the Cleveland Clinic posed the question Is Your Love of True Crime Impacting Your Mental Health? They answer this question with a maybe. In the right (or wrong) circumstances, true crime can increase anxiety, impact social skills, disturb sleep, and even lead to hyperventilation and heart palpitations. Stories about murder, rape—all sorts of unspeakable violence—can lead to paralyzing paranoia and fear, especially in women, they argue. These stories create distrust and fear of strangers, preventing some from even engaging in small talk with neighbors, certain that anyone, anywhere could be the next John Wayne Gacy or Aileen Wuornos. No small talk, say these critics, means less connectivity and less personal happiness. Pay attention to how your body reacts to true crime, they advise, and take a break when needed.

Both of these arguments have a shared underlying assumption: that true crime has only recently become a national—nay, international—obsession. And it is this explosion of true crime that is at the root of our problems. We are surrounded by it, unable to escape.

This, however, is a false premise. Public fascination with true crime is as old as human history. Crime and criminals are centered in the greatest stories ever told. From scripture to Shakespeare, there is no great epic without crime at the heart of it. Violent crimes in particular expose what happens when the darkest aspects of human nature—envy, greed, lust, pride—go unchecked. They serve as lessons for us, mirrors held up to our own internal urges, and assurances that justice, divine or otherwise, is never far behind.

Long before Ted Bundy became an iconic true crime subject, Jack the Ripper occupied the thoughts and nightmares of many millions (and still does). Who among us didn’t grow up singing a children’s ditty about Lizzie Borden murdering her parents with an axe, over a century after it allegedly happened? Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and the authors of thousands of sixteenth-century crime reports, nineteenth-century penny dreadfuls, and the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series recognized and banked on the ever-present public interest in stories about crime. And what is the nightly news but a brief review of the day’s local true crime? All that has changed in the past few decades is that newer forms of media give us faster and easier accessibility, oftentimes with near-instant reporting, and greater global reach. We can stream on-demand documentaries and podcasts not just about local crime stories, but also about crimes committed in India, Australia, Ireland, Israel, without ever leaving the comfort of our couches.

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So no, the obsession isn’t new, and neither is the societal preoccupation with notorious criminals. It’s just easier to feed. And even though the average person may have access to more true crime media than ever, it is also a misperception that it has become inescapable—after all, according to Pacific Content, in 2022 only 17 percent of the top podcasts on the charts were true crime shows, and Edison Research reported that in the same year, true crime ranked fourth in the most popular podcast genres. In other words, it only feels like you’re surrounded by it if you’re immersed inside a true crime bubble by your own choice.

As with true crime’s impact on our mental and emotional health, cautions against the genre tend not to be backed by empirical evidence. More study is needed to determine what effect, if any, consumption of true crime stories may have on our psychological well-being. Interestingly, there is existing data—some of which is captured in this very anthology—that suggests the true crime genre is beneficial to society. This collection before you is proof positive that without this genre, advocates like me would be at a loss, struggling to tell the stories of the neglected victims of crime and victims of the criminal justice system.

I was in law school in 1999 when my younger brother’s best friend, Adnan Syed, was convicted of the murder of his classmate Hae Min Lee. Adnan was just seventeen years old at the time of his arrest and maintained his innocence from the day the police hauled him in handcuffs from his bed. I believed in his innocence and hoped in vain for fifteen years that appellate courts would give Adnan justice, before I finally turned to media—true crime media. The podcast Serial brought Adnan’s case much-needed attention, awareness, funding, and support, and made his story an international phenomenon—but didn’t exonerate him. So I wrote a book about the case, produced an HBO series about it, and launched my own podcast, Undisclosed, with attorneys Susan Simpson and Colin Miller, which first examined Adnan’s case and then went on to investigate and report on twenty-four other innocence cases.

Half of the defendants in those cases, including Adnan, are now home thanks to our work, and it was true crime media that made all the difference. Our investigations and reporting uncovered new evidence, including witnesses who had never been spoken to and leads that were never considered before. Through Undisclosed, and many other shows like it, we were able to educate an audience of hundreds of millions about how the criminal justice system really works. In the past decade, Americans have become more knowledgeable than ever about police brutality, prosecutorial misconduct, junk forensic science, institutional racism, the phenomenon of false confessions, the impact of cash bail on the poor, and the prison industrial complex—and nearly all of this education can be attributed to true crime media.

And so we have this collection before us, a group of true crime stories that will intrigue but also enrage, fascinate but also educate. We begin with a look at what this nation reckons with, or rather should be reckoning with, through stories everyone should know: the indifference with which violence against Black girls and women is met, a crisis of thousands of missing and murdered Indigenous women across the nation, the lynching of a young Black man sitting unsolved for decades due to police inattention, the untold tales of physical and sexual abuse common to over 90 percent of incarcerated women, the rise in murderous hate crimes against Asian Americans.

These are the stories that usually stay hidden, the ones that have only recently begun to emerge after centuries of true crime focused on the success and power of law enforcement, on the honor and respectability of the system and all who serve in it. These are the stories that have been buried beneath an illusion of American exceptionalism, that are still fighting to be told in an era when teaching the truth about our national history of racism and racial injustice is being outlawed state by state. We rarely hear about these victims, and even more rarely hear directly from them, because, as the next section illustrates, who tells the story always determines what story gets told.

Who owns the face, name, life of the subject at the center of a true crime story, who decides who the victims, the perpetrators, and the heroes are, what figures are celebrated as trusted sources on crime and justice, and who gets to dole out justice? These are the questions interrogated in the next category of pieces in this anthology, tied together by a common thread—the shaping of public perception, for decades, by unreliable narrators. We have lived through the era of stories about the glorified, duty-bound, gut-guided detective and the victims who had some responsibility for their own demise. We are currently living through a new iteration of American vigilantism, in which gullible online hordes move in swarms to solve mysteries and mete out justice, often in response to information that is at best questionable and at worst outright fiction designed to manipulate the social media user. These pieces challenge us to look beyond the words on the page and question—or at least consider—the source, to acknowledge how our own perceptions and biases have been impacted by dubious narrators, and to be aware of whose voice is centered in media.

Finally, the anthology takes us to the changing face of justice today, to those who are seeking ways to take back their power and searching for redemption. From a program that brings the victims of sexual assault face-to-face with the perpetrators of it to a radio station giving incarcerated men on death row one last chance to reclaim their humanity, these stories take us beyond the initial reporting. What happens in the years after the convictions, after the violence? How do people in true crime stories respond to the trauma they’ve been dealt? This selection will change how you think about justice, redemption, personal power, and maybe even forgiveness.

Certain criticisms of true crime may prove to be valid, but on the flip side, true crime media has become the most powerful advocacy tool available to bring us the stories that have the potential to change hearts, minds, and systems. It is this very media that challenges the deeply entrenched influence of state actors over the public narrative around crime. There are too many among us who became swept up in the tough-on-crime years, who nodded approvingly at three-strikes-you’re-out, who leaned into our televisions, eyes wide, as we heard about superpredators for the first time. Popular true crime has served a vital function in the fight against state power, as a tool of protest and empowerment, and a way of finally adding to the public narrative from the margins and the shadows. As an advocate for the incarcerated innocent and criminal justice reform, I have found nothing more effective than popular true crime media to both educate myself and others about systemic injustices, and challenge our own deeply held misperceptions.

This anthology itself is evidence of the true crime genre’s potential to do good, to deliver justice in both large and small measures, by offering a small window into stories we’ve never heard before, from people society never thought mattered before. And there is none better than Sarah Weinman, with her deep experience thinking and writing about crime, to pull these pieces together as a guide for us all to connect the dots, and do better.

Editor’s Note

The most powerful piece of true crime–related art I’d seen in years was tucked away in a difficult-to-access corner of a downtown New York City museum. This was not what I expected at the spring 2022 New Museum retrospective for the artist Faith Ringgold, a formidable educator and activist best known for showstopper quilts that present visceral juxtapositions of major facets of Black American history.

The quilts were, justifiably, worth the museum visit. But my attention, at the time and since, kept returning to that corner, near a stairwell connecting the museum’s third and fourth floors, where the Atlanta Children and the paired Save Our Children in Atlanta and The Screaming Woman sculptures had been secreted away.

Atlanta Children, on the right, was structured as a chess board, but these were no typical pieces. Each depicted a Black child in distress or pain, or dead. On the left was a female sculpture (the aforementioned Screaming Woman) clad in a green dress, a button adorning her right lapel, holding a poster Ringgold had created listing the names of twenty-eight boys, girls, and young men. This is a commemoration to all those wantonly slain in the dawning of life, Ringgold wrote. Make it impossible for the sins of hate and indifference to persist in America. Stop child murders!

These words and images resonated as viscerally with me in 2022 as they must have with every person who has viewed them since their creation in 1981. Ringgold was making art out of the Atlanta child murders, one of the most confounding serial crimes in American memory, a story that resists the usual constraints of true crime storytelling—and yet inspired one of the foundational texts of this ongoing true crime moment, whose title and trajectory are in turn the inspiration for this anthology.

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BLACK BOYS AND GIRLS WERE DISAPPEARING AND TURNING UP MURDERED IN and around Atlanta. Between 1979 and 1981, as answers proved frustratingly elusive in tandem with the rising body count, parents of the murdered children demanded justice, because it was becoming all too clear there would be none. The subsequent killings of two men, Nathaniel Cater and Jimmy Ray Payne, both in their twenties, led to the arrest of twenty-three-year-old Wayne Williams, tied to their deaths by considerable circumstantial physical evidence. But even though police immediately named Williams as the prime suspect in the child murders—murders which appeared to stop with his conviction for the killings of Cater and Payne in 1982—he was never officially charged with those crimes. Larger issues grew more prominent in the intervening decades: Why hadn’t Atlanta police taken the child murders more seriously, and earlier? How had systemic inequalities, from asymmetrical economic status to homelessness and, above all, racism, influenced the trajectory, and the mistakes, of the investigation?

More than forty years later, after countless treatments in books, podcasts, documentaries, and scripted television series, the Atlanta child murders remain a cipher among criminal cases. The lingering lack of total resolution highlights how deeply the system failed the murder victims and their families. This is not, however, because of what remains unknown: it is because of what is known, is evident in plain sight, and still denied wholesale.

No wonder the celebrated writer James Baldwin felt called to explore the Atlanta child murders, first in a long essay for Playboy, and then in The Evidence of Things Not Seen, published in 1985, two years before his death. Baldwin was two decades removed from the height of his celebrity, when The Fire Next Time (1963) had made him the philosopher-king of the civil rights movement, whose work was supposed to bring order out of mounting chaos, and who was unfairly expected to alleviate white guilt and offer them hope as a salve.

But by the early 1980s, America had soured on Baldwin. Readers viewed his later novels and nonfiction as downers, as speaking truths that were no longer fashionable, no longer palatable, no longer a conduit for idealism. As Hilton Als wrote in 1998, Baldwin’s fastidious thought process and his baroque sentences suddenly seemed hopelessly outdated, at once self-aggrandizing and ingratiating. Backlashes against progress, and the rise of Reaganite Republican politics, prevailed. Baldwin still spoke in his own tongue, still called out the essential disparities. But younger generations found greater literary kinship with the works of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Toni Cade Bambara. Searching for different truths blinded people to what was right in front of them: that Baldwin still had the fire, still was nowhere close to the end of the line.

This change in attitude about Baldwin may explain why the initial critical response to The Evidence of Things Not Seen was one of widespread bafflement. Baldwin had no interest in adhering to a typical true crime narrative, or even traditional narratives at all. His lambasting of the Atlanta Police Department and of the city’s governmental bodies was a song on repeated refrain, but most people just wanted to turn the music off. His reporting was introspective: while he did visit crime scenes and bore witness to the loved ones left behind, Baldwin ultimately concluded that he could not impose himself upon the parents of the murdered children after they had already suffered such grievous and continuing losses.

What baffled people then makes far more sense now in a society loosed from anything resembling order and of a consensus reality. The Evidence of Things Not Seen has rightly grown in stature over time, reconsidered as a forerunner for other important works that showed how crime is woven into the fabric of society, how the legal system is built to fail millions of the marginalized, and how prioritizing collective voices can supersede traditional narratives about perpetrators.

As Baldwin wrote in the book’s preface, the Atlanta child murders ultimately created a campaign of sustained terror, and because the totality of that emotion is so great, terror cannot be remembered. One blots it out. It is not the terror of death, but rather the terror of being destroyed. That palpable sense of fear permeates every interaction Baldwin has as he grapples, once more, with having once been a Black child in a white country.

It is not the evidence of what is unseen, but rather what society still refuses to see. When Lady Justice is willfully blind, how damaging are the costs and how irreparable is the harm? As both Faith Ringgold and James Baldwin knew too well, crime has always been a catalyst for greater pain, and no part of the pursuit of justice could alleviate it.

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THE PAST FEW YEARS HAVE BORNE PERPETUAL WITNESS TO SEISMIC CHANGES that continue to rock the globe: the COVID-19 pandemic; protests against racial injustice, and then a vicious backlash; right-wing extremism and the cancer that is white supremacy; increasingly oscillating temperatures thanks to climate change; the obliteration of reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights; and the distortion of reality put in sharp focus by the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Most of these major events were shocking, but surprises they were not. They were evidence of what was visible to anyone bothering to pay attention. Denial, however, is a more potent aphrodisiac than looking reality squarely in the eye. It is far easier to cast the perpetrator of a mass shooting, for example, as a lone wolf in the throes of mental derangement rather than a cog in the spinning wheel of more cohesive and reprehensible ideologies firmly rooted in bigotry and conspiracy theory.

True crime cannot be divorced from society because crime is a permanent reflection and culmination of what ails society. And while collective interest in true crime has only grown since the first season of Serial in 2014, so too has it morphed into something larger and more troubling, reflecting the acceleration of what we cannot look away from.

Evidence of Things Seen—of course the title is an homage to Baldwin, the Jeremiah of the latter half of the twentieth century—is divided into three parts. What We Reckon With examines events of the past few years, as well as the precipitating factors that catalyzed those events. Racial injustices past and present are examined by Pulitzer Prize winner Wesley Lowery in his searching portrait of a 1980s-era lynching, and by Samantha Schuyler, chronicling the brief life and murder of Black Lives Matter activist Toyin Salau.

Canadian writer Brandi Morin delves into the plight of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, specifically in California but universally applicable to North America, while Justine van der Leun investigates the continuing failure to treat as victims rather than perpetrators those who endure intimate partner violence and kill their abusers. White-collar crime, and the federal government’s steadfast refusal to punish those who engage in it, gets the full treatment by Michael Hobbes, and Atlanta merits the cruel spotlight once more through May Jeong’s powerful account of the city’s 2021 spa shootings, its effect on Asian communities, and the larger history of exclusion and xenophobia.

The True Crime Stories We Tell gives space to critical examinations of the genre and those who helped shape it. Amanda Knox takes back her own narrative and voice in unforgettable fashion, while Diana Moskovitz and Lara Bazelon convey the importance, complications, and damage done by the work of Miami police reporter and author Edna Buchanan, and Baltimore journalist and television showrunner David Simon. The ever-growing interdependence between true crime and those who consume it, and what happens when amateur participation becomes something more sinister, gets a full airing by RF Jurjevics.

The final section, Shards of Justice, offers some paths forward, both for our deeply fissured legal system and for the true crime genre itself. Amelia Schonbek examines a case of restorative justice with unbounded empathy, while Keri Blakinger, one of the finest criminal justice reporters working today, gives an inside look at death row prisoners finding solace and comfort in a radio station that’s specifically targeted to them. Sophie Haigney’s moving letter to the child of a victim of gun violence, whose death she witnessed, refracts and upends expectations, while Mallika Rao finds greater meaning, even hope, in an unfathomable murder story.

All fourteen of these pieces, as well as Rabia Chaudry’s incisive introduction, reflect true crime’s shift from providing answers to asking more questions. As a whole, this anthology is a testament to the discomfort we live in, and must continue to reckon with, in order to hold the true crime genre to higher ethical standards and goals. It is our duty to take the evidence of what we see, tell the truth, and strive for better.

Part I

What We Reckon With

A Brutal Lynching. An Indifferent Police Force. A