American Nightmare
American Nightmare
Netflix, Spotify and economics and ethics of true crime
The questions of a true crime writer are many. Some have seemingly obvious answers. Others don’t.
When do you talk to the family of a victim?
How do you separate fact from fiction?
What’s more important? Contemporaneous interviews or what was said in court?
Every story is going to have its own timeline and its own truth. No matter where the path takes him or her, it’s up to the journalist / writer / podcaster / TV presenter to try to piece facts and memories together, then blend in some amateur psychology and pray that you’ve come up with something moderately understandable.
Other questions arise.
How many pages can we go until the mystery is revealed?
That’s a tough one in true crime. There’s no Hercule Perot around to bring the characters into a drawing room and have their stories revealed one by one until the murderer is exposed in the second to last chapter.
What makes a case important or newsworthy enough to be published?
When Burl Barer and I wrote our book “A Taste for Murder” there were several potential publishers who passed on it because the victim and perpetrator were Latino. There was no other reason. Fortunately, WildBlue took a chance and so did Nancy Glass Productions. Since then, it’s become a best seller and the subject of two TV shows, one of which we wrote.
So much for the publishers who passed on it. True crime, as we’ve seen in recent years, has an audience.
Over the past decade, the entertainment landscape has accepted true crime as the loss leader supplying the viewers and listeners that stick around to fund everything else. It’s risen from the basement of late night off-brand cable channels to Scorsese-directed Oscar-worthy film (“Killers of the Flower Moon,” for those of you who are asleep at the pop culture wheel.)
Thank (or blame) Netflix and Spotify.
Netflix, for example, had a whole genre of top-rated shows built off the fandom generated by Steven Avery’s conviction / exoneration / new arrest / fight against the system in Manitowoc County Wisconsin. Podcasts recorded in thousands of garages, living rooms and dining room tables and pumped out on innumerable platforms have been largely boosted by Serial and the great storytelling of Sarah Koenig as she unraveled a complicated decades-old murder case that led to the release of a convicted killer. I have my problems with the story, but it’s well-told.
Tech doesn’t make this a new phenomenon. In the Old Testament, Cain murdered Abel and David got Uriah killed so he could get with Bathsheba, a woman he had raped. Those tales are as a gripping as “Macbeth” which also purports to be a true crime narrative of the would-be Scot king and his bloodthirsty wife.
In any event, the best story telling depends on a twist. For the writers of the Avery and Serial stories, that twist was the possibility that a convicted murderer could be wrongly accused, convicted and jailed for decades because of shoddy or lazy police work, confirmation bias or just plain spite.
“American Nightmare,” the story of Denise Huskins, a woman who was abducted from her home by a serial predator, is also an exoneration story of sorts. Huskins’ boyfriend was maliciously interrogated by Vallejo police and an FBI agent who practically accused the poor guy of being the second coming of Scott Peterson. It took years of humiliation for Huskins and her now husband to get out from under shoddy police work and complicit media coverage.
As for Peterson, he’s still around. The Innocence Project has requested a review of DNA evidence gathered in his case to see if maybe police ignored evidence that might exonerate him.
As I mentioned two weeks ago in this space, convicted murderer Paul Garcia, incarcerated at the Valley State Prison in Chowchilla, Calif., believes he’s has a story worthy of a treatment like “Serial” or “Making a Murderer.”
Garcia is accused of masterminding the 2008 slaying of Mark Achilli in Los Gatos, Calif. He says his conviction was a miscarriage of justice and believes detectives jumped to conclusions in their investigation, relied on unreliable witnesses and presented only evidence that played to their confirmation bias. The cops said the killing happened because Paul and Mark were involved with the same woman. And, that the love triangle had deadly consequences.
Garcia says there’s way more to the story including duplicitous witnesses, compromised detectives and small town secrets that are better off left buried.
To prove that, he’s filed numerous appeals, lost a civil case related to the homicide and watched his options dwindle even as California is in the process of implementing new sentencing guidelines. It’s an uphill battle for sure.
A one-time freshman football coach at Bellarmine Prep in San Jose, Garcia said he approaches his challenge as though its the fourth quarter in a game where the score is close, but his team needs to step up and take control.
Honestly, as the writer, and a guy who grew up in the same community as Paul, I’m not sure which way this story is going to go or what it’s going to trigger.
Garcia recognizes the odds are stacked. And said so in a conversation on Aug. 22.
“I don’t know. There’s so much out there. The evidence supports my innocence,” he said. “But, now I’m behind the eight ball.”