Murdering the ratings: Why Jeffery Dahmer got two hit TV shows

November 11, 2022freshlyworded Leave a comment

“The only way I’ll ever get a television series made about me is if I become a serial killer,” I told my wife sarcastically, as we started watching a new Netflix show “Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffery Dahmer Story” a dramatised retelling of the crimes of one of the world’s most infamous (and revolting) mass murderers.

“Do I need to be worried?” she replied.

“Maybe….”

We’d watched about 40 minutes of the first of 10 episodes, when we both decided we’d had enough.

An African American man had been lured to Dahmer’s dingy Milwaukee flat, where he’d been partially drugged, threatened with an enormous knife and forced to sit on a blood-stained bed, while awaiting his hideous fate. A huge blue, industrial vat sat ominously in the corner of the room and the atmosphere was oppressive, almost unbearable.

“I don’t think I am in the mood to sit through 10 episodes of this,” I remarked, at which point my wife nodded in agreement and we stopped watching and found something distinctly lighter to enjoy with our cups of tea and biscuits. (For the record it was “Julia” about the life of the famous American television chef Julia Child, an excellent show).

And then what did I do a couple of weeks later?

Undecided about what to watch while my wife gobbled up episodes of the Walking Dead – I can’t handle the tension of that show, nor the constant gargling sounds of zombies – I started watched the other Dahmer show, the documentary series “Conversations with a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes”.

Based around previously unheard taped interviews with Dahmer and Wendy Patrickus, who was his defense attorney, the three part series travelled back and forward in time, cutting from grainy, homemade videos of Dahmer as a sweet, fair-headed child to those grisly scenes at the notorious Milwaukee apartment block as the barrels of human remains were carried down the stairs by crime scene investigators. In between we heard excerpts from the tapes in which Dahmer confesses his crimes and tries, unsuccessfully to explain his actions, and interviews with detectives, psychologists and former friends and neighbours.

There have been plenty more of these shows that have kept me mesmerised. I’ve watched dramatisation of the life of Ted Bundy (starring Zac Efron), a BBC series about London asphyxiator John Christie (played by Tim Roth) and another London killer Denis Nilsen (played to perfection by David Tennant) plus numerous documentary series about Richard Ramirez AKA The Night Stalker, David Berkowitz AKA The Son of Sam and. Peter Sutcliffe AKA The Yorkshire Ripper.

I’ve also watched another Netflix documentary series about Ted Bundy (Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes), while there’s another documentary series on my “must watch list” about the American serial killer Wayne Gacy ( who terrifyingly dressed up as a clown at children’s parties).

I don’t there is anything particular wrong or unusual about this viewing behaviour – I’m certainly, to calm my family and friends, not trying to pick up any tips. The truth of the matter is that everyone is part fascinating, revolted and intrigued by the “evil that men do” particularly of the psycopathic kind and especially when the monster looks like Dahmer: a normal, even somewhat handsome young man.

With 856 million hours of combined viewing and counting, The Jeffery Dahmer Story has been watched more than 95 million times from start to finish. Only Squid Game (1.65 billion hours) and Stranger Things Season 4 (1.35 billion) have been watched more.

Alongside the success of the dramatised series, the Jeffery Dahmer documentary series has also been a minor hit for Netflix, racking up millions of hours of viewing time.

No doubt Netflix executives must be delighted, though that might be tempered with the disappointment that there can be no second season. However, you can be certain someone at Netflix HQ is working on the next series and accompanying documentary about another sadistic mass murder.

While The Jeffery Dahmer Story has been lauded for its superb acting, disturbing and compelling storyline, and gritty realism, it seems to have emerged for no real purpose except gaudy entertainment. Dahmer was captured in 1992 and murdered in jail by a fellow inmate in 1994. Many would wish his name never be mentioned again.

But rather than forget about him and his reign of terror, Netflix has brought Dahmer’s vicious killing, dismembering and cannibalism spree back to live in vivid colour. In the process, their huge success has created fresh torment for the families of the 17 boys and young men who would have been alive today were it not for his unfathomable compulsions.

The same could be said for the documentary series though at least this provides fresh insights – these tapes have never been heard before – and gives the viewer a sense of the terrible impact his killing spree had on the Milwaukee community and the families of his victims.

(Incredibly, Dahmer could have been stopped after his very first killing – that of hitchhiker Stephen Hicks in 1978 when Dahmer was just 18 – had the police officer who stopped him to perform a drink driving test taken the time to look at what was in the garbage bags on the backseat, instead of believing Dahmer’s story that they contained animal remain s ).

Not surprisingly, the release of “Dahmer – Monster” has been met with rage, anger and disbelief by the family’s of his victims who were apparently not consulted about the making of the show, and which has reignited the grief they have had to live with for more than 30 years.

“It hurts. I shed tears. They’re not tears of sorrow, and it’s not disbelief in the Lord. The tears [are] tears of hurt because it hurts. It hurts real bad. But you have to trust and pray and just keep going day by day,” said Shirley Hughes, the mother of Tony Hughes, an aspiring male model, who was just 31 when Dahmer killed him.

The show’s writer Ian Brennan (who also wrote the hit musical series Glee) has defended his work as an “objective” portrayal, though professes amazement at its success:

“I think we show a human being. He’s monstrously human and he’s monstrously monstrous and that’s what we wanted to sort of unpack,” Brennan told news website Page Six at its premier

Also coming to its defense has been journalist Nancy Glass, the last person to interview Dahmer.

She perhaps gave the most telling and obvious reasons for the show’s success and many other similar shows”

“I know that that may seem bizarre, but I think it’s more about morbid curiosity than romanticism,” she told the New York Post.

One wonders what Dahmer himself would thought of a 10-episode dramatisation of his life and a three-part documentary series more than 30 years after his capture. Given his manifest inability to control his urges, it would be entirely plausible to think that he’d have “gotten off” on watching it all happen again. One can only but shudder at the thought.

“It was a compulsion. It became a compulsion,” he said in his last interview (watched 35 million times on YouTube).

In these interviews, Dahmer is softly spoken, articulate and appears highly intelligent. He also had a by all accounts happy childhood, and is described by his parents as a loving child, though one who took an interest at an early age in dead things.

Somehow this morphed into an obsession with the male human body, though why he then went on to murder, dismember, eat and preserve parts of his victims, even Dahmer cannot fathom.

Perhaps it this potential in everyone, to come apart at the seams, that drives our own fascination with true crime and violent killers.

No doubt Netflix and the other streaming platforms are well aware of this and have plenty more similar shows up their sleeves.

Revisiting Serial: The 5 big reasons why Adnan Syed most likely did not kill Hae Min Lee

February 20, 2022February 23, 2022freshlyworded 2 Comments

Like many of those who enjoy true crime podcasts, I got hooked after listening to the groundbreaking first season of Serial, which investigated the 1999 murder of Baltimore student Hae Min Lee, who was strangled and buried in Leakin Park on January 13, and the problematic conviction of he ex-boyfriend Adnan Syed.

Released in 2014, the show hooked tens of millions of people as it delved deep into the baffling case, examining the evidence used to convict Syed and coming up with fresh leads, a possible alibi, new theories, controversies and inconsistencies.

Serial set the scene for an explosion of investigative true crime podcasts and became the template against which they would all be judged.

Serial also threw a huge spotlight on Syed’s conviction and the many doubts about the dubious testimony of his so-called friend and local drug dealer Jay Wilds which ultimately sent Syed to jail for life despite no hard evidence linking Syed to Lee’s murder. The podcast inspired a four-part HBO documentary that also argued for his innocence (along with numerous follow-up podcasts and blogs), paving the way for efforts by Syed’s legal team to secure a re-trial.

While that effort ultimately failed – in March 2019 the Maryland Court of Appeal quashed a decision by the state’s lower courts to grant him a new trial and in November 2019 the US Supreme Court declined to hear the case – doubts about his conviction have remained and the debate has raged for years online and on social media. Did Adnan Syed do it?

While it came out a few years ago,popular true crime podcast called Crime Junkie (which I have just discovered via a good friend) aired a special episode in April 2018, which in my opinion tips the scales firmly in favour of Adnan Syed’s innocence and highlights an appalling miscarriage of justice.

Called “What Serial Didn’t Tell You”, Crime Junkie host Ashley Flowers, with the help of her co-host Brit Prawat, pulls together all the extensive information published since Serial season one aired, drawn mainly from two other podcasts, Undisclosed and Truth and Justice as well as three blogs written by Rabia Chaudry (the lady who brought Adnan’s case to Serial host Sarah Koenig), lawyer Sarah Simpson and law professor Colin Miller, all three of whom are hosts of Undisclosed. She also read Chaudry’s best selling book Adnan’s Story.

“I tried to make that 30 minute thing with the top need to know facts [so that people can] have an informed discussion about Adnan’s case,” says Flowers at the start of the podcast.

Flowers then goes on to launch a concise and highly convincing argument for Syed’s innocence, or at the very least, the right to a new trial.

Without listening to all the podcasts, or reading the blogs and books Flowers researched to prepare the episode (I assume its accurate, Crime Junkie is a very popular and scrutinised podcast) I’ve summarized the main points she makes, plus added one of my own:

The cellphone tower pings

Adnan Syed was convicted of murder largely because Jay Wild’s testimony of what happened and where on January 13, 1999. This timeline of events matched the locations of cell phone tower that pinged off Syed’s mobile phone every time it rang on that fateful day.

“Police created a map to show how the cell phone moved during the day based on its signal pinging of towers,” Flowers reminds listeners.

While there was a lot of controversy about this testimony – Wilds changed his story when the police and prosecutors realised they got the map wrong being just one example – it still dealt a body blow to Syed because two calls pinged off towers near Leakin Park at 7.09 and 7.16pm that prosecutors said proved Syed was there burying Lee’s body.

(You can read Jay Wild’s account of that day as told to The Intercept in December 2014.)

“They even got an expert to testify to this in court who said Adnan was where Jay said he was at the time they were burying Hae’s body,” says Flowers.

However, this expert did not see (most likely it was deliberately withheld) a fax cover sheet from telephone company AT&T which made the point that outgoing calls only are reliable for location status. Incoming calls – the ones Syed received on January 13, 1999 – are not considered reliable information for determining a location.

“The expert witness did not see this, and would have changed his testimony” says Flowers. This was one of the man arguments Syed’s lawyer Justin Brown used to get a new trial.

2. The State of Hae Min Lee’s body

While this cell tower information is startling, it does not prove conclusively that Syed was not in Leakin Park at the time Wild’s said they were there burying Lee’s body, only that the data cannot be relied upon.

More important – and damning of the conviction of Syed – is the state of Hae Min Lee’s body when it was discovered four weeks after her murder on February 9.

According to Flowers (and confirmed by medica l examiner who undertook the autopsy), Lee had “full-fixed lividity” on the front of her body including her face, chest, stomach and legs.

Lividity or Livor Mortis is the settling of blood after death in gravity-dependent portions of the body, including in the organs. Blood settles after death in parts of the body closest to the ground, causing purplish-red blue discolouration.

Lividity happens pretty slowly, and can take 8-10 hours to occur, explained Flowers.

This meant Lee’s body had remained face down in the same position for that period and therefore she could not have been placed in the trunk of a car, as Jay Wilds, the state’s key witness had claimed when he picked Syed up around 4pm from Best Buy on the day of the murder.

In addition, because Lee was found on her right side, but she had full, fixed lividity on the front of her body, she could not have been buried flat in a shallow grave at Leakin park at around 7.30pm. Lee was last seen alive at around 2.15- 3pm, so at a minimum her body would have had to lie face down until 10.30 or 11pm, most likely even later.

“Nothing adds up,” says Flowers.

3. Hae Min Lee’s car

Hae Min Lee’s car – a Nissan Sentra – is a crucial piece of evidence as Jay Wild’s says that her body was in the boot before Syed drove it to Leakin Park with Wild’s following behind in Syed’s Honda Accord.

Later, according to Wild’s testimony Syed parked it in a lot behind some houses. The car was recovered on February 28, the same day Syed was arrested and charged with her murder.

Flowers notes that there was green grass growing under the car, and even inside the wheel well, which suggests the car was moved from somewhere else and that someone told Jay where the car was.

This is confirmed in pictures of Lee’s car, which you can easily find online showing clearly the grass growing underneath and the patch of dead grass next to it, indicating what should have happened over time.

“It highlights the fact again that Jay new nothing about what happened to Hae – his account is all made up. Jay’s story unfolds as police find new evidence not the other way round,” say Flowers.

And the question remains: who moved Lee’s car?

Hae Min Lee’s Car: the green grass can be seen clearly under the car

4. There is no evidence linking Adnan Syed to the crime scene (my own ‘research’)

The entire case made against Adnan Syed was based on Jay Wild’s testimony. There is in fact no physical evidence linking Syed to the crime scene, not a shred.

Furthermore, DNA testing carried out in 2019 of 12 pieces of evidence found on or around Hae Min Lee’s body found none of the them produced a DNA profile that was a match for Syed.

“This included a rope/wire found five inches from the body that yielded a DNA profile that is a match for some unknown person; and two hairs recovered from Hae’s body that are not the hairs of either Hae or Adnan,” writes law professor Colin Miller on his blog Evidence Prof.

5. Adnan Syed was the only person police investigated – there are other suspects

Says Flowers” “The cops looked into no one else a tenth as hard as they looked into Adnan” whose criminal record was pulled on February 3, 1999, before the anonymous tip came in to look at Syed as the most likely suspect.

Nobody else’s criminal record was pulled.

This included her current boyfriend at the time, “Don”, other people close to her. and a guy (Roy Sharonnie Davis) who had murdered another 18-year-old girl who attended Woodlawn High a year ago (Jada Denita Lambert, an 18-year-old Woodlawn woman whose body was found in May 1998) and was not in jail at the time (Davis was convicted in 2002).

However while Davis was surely worth investigating, the Crime Junkie hosts say its most likely Lee was killed by someone she knew.

“Someone paged Hae that day to meet her, and kill her, but that pager was never found.” Flowers says.

Flowers also question the alibi given by Don, who could not be reached until 1.30am on January 14, and who said he was working at a LensCrafters store.

I’d rather not going into all the anomalies in his alibi, but you could read about them on the Crime Junkie podcast. However, I will just mention one, both Don’s mom and his stepmom worked in manager roles at the company and provided his alibi on the day Lee was murdered.

‘If the police had done their job; if they would have looked into anyone else as hard as Adnan they would have found this out,” says Flowers.

According to evidence collected as part of the trial, Lee was due to meet up with Don on the day she died. She also worked at Lenscrafters, though not at the same store Don was working at that night.

Of course none of this is absolute conclusive proof Syed had no involvement in Lee’s murder – bear in mind Wilds gave about five days of detailed testimony at both trials so it beggars belief he made it all up.

However, it does highlight that if Syed had a decent lawyer he almost certainly would not and should not have been convicted based on the evidence and testimony presented at the trial. Furthermore, being a non-white American clearly did not help his cause.

If you’re interested in find out more, I’d encourage listening to the whole Crime Junkie podcast in full and then, if you’re keen, taking a deep dive into the case. There’s a ton of information out there.

(This link has all the court transcripts to the 1999 mistrial and 2000 trial)

If not – and no judgement here, life is too short – remember this point made by Flowers: “Adnan has facts on his side, the State of Maryland only had Jay.”

The nine lives of the Yorkshire Ripper

December 14, 2021December 15, 2021freshlyworded Leave a comment

Cats supposedly have nine lives, as the phrase goes, and so too did Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, who died in November last year from COVID aged 74, whilst serving 20 life terms at Frankland prison in County Durham.

I’ve just finishing watching the excellent four-part Netflix documentary ‘The Ripper’ which examines the series of horrifying murders committed by Sutcliffe, and the bungled attempts by the West Yorkshire police to capture him.

Incredibly, Sutcliffe, a married lorry driver from Bradford, was interviewed nine times by detectives, after his name came up in various lines of inquiry as a possible suspect. However, he was let go each time, despite some lower-ranking detectives and police officers reporting their suspicions.

A tragedy: many of these women may still be alive today had the police done their jobs properly

So often did police show up at his place of work to question him, that Sutcliffe earned the nickname ‘The Ripper’ among his truck-driving colleagues at Clark Transport – an irony, that would have seemed unbelievable were it included in the plotline of a crime novel.

As explained by Joan Smith, one of the few female journalists to report on the case, the all male senior detectives leading the investigation, blinded by their own sexist attitudes and sucked in by a hoax audio tape, dismissed Sutcliffe because he was recently married, had the wrong accent to the Geordie accent on the hoax tape and did not fit the supposed picture of a modern day Jack The Ripper maniac hunting down and slaying prostitutes.

As a result police also neglected to investigate other attacks on young woman at the time because they were not prostitutes or women of “loose morals”, and who because they survived these assaults, could have provided valuable information about their attacker and led to Sutcliffe’s capture many years earlier, saving the lives of many who later crossed his path.

Recalled retired West Yorkshire detective Andrew Laptew, one of the “stars” of the documentary with quiet fury: “I got the report typed up [about boots belonging to Sutcliffe that appeared to match footprints left at one of the crime scenes] and explained all the things that were bugging me. And the most startling thing was the Marilyn Moore photofit [based on an accurate description by Marilyn Moore who survived an attack by Sutcliffe]. It was a dead ringer for him

“Is he a Georgie,” Laptew was asked by his superior officer. “I said no. He’s from Bradford. But it’s an uncanny resemblance.

“Does he have a Geordie accent [to match the one on the audio tape]? I said no. He started effing and geffing. He said anyone who mentions effing photofits to me again will be doing traffic for the rest of their service.”

In the end it was only by sheer luck – Sutcliffe was arrested in January 1981 because he was driving a car that did not match its number plate – that led to his capture, confession and life imprisonment.

As with so many great true crime documentaries created by the streaming giants – ‘The Ripper’ was commissioned by Netflix – it takes viewers back in time through grainy, archival footage to Leeds, Manchester and Bradford of the mid-1970s where unemployment was rising as the great big factories were shut down, and as Margaret Thatcher became the first female British prime minister.

This footage is contrasted with crisp, present day interviews of families of victims, the now grey haired detectives who were on The Ripper taskforce and journalists like Joan Smith, as they look back on those terrible times, when an unknown killer terrorised the streets.

I found it compulsive viewing, so fascinating, seeing how a serial killer investigation back then relied on thousands of hand written index cards – so many in fact that the floor of the taskforce headquarters had to be reinforced to prevent it from collapsing – to create a database of suspects and evidence.

And yet for all the information gathering, and the many clues that should have pointed the way to a much earlier solving of the mystery, it was the bungling alpha male chief inspectors and their bureaucratic overlords, who made the key wrong assumptions about the case, that had the Ripper laughing in their faces for many years.

John Humble, who sent police the hoax letters claiming to be the Ripper (Humble mimicked phrases used in letters supposedly written to police in the 1880s by Jack the Ripper) and an infamous hoax audio tape was unmasked in 2005 and jailed in 2006 for perverting the course of justice.

“I remember listening to it and being incredibly puzzled because there was nothing on the tape that actually suggested it was genuine,” said Smith in November 2020, when Peter Sutcliffe died.

Julie Bindel, a feminist campaigner who was 18 and living in Leeds when Sutcliffe killed his 13th and final victim- Jacqueline Hill, a 20-year-old student – recalled how police denigrated the victims, some of whom were prostitutes, as being “fair game” despite many of them only doing what they did to support their families.

Bindel told The Guardian last year she remembered George Oldfield, who led the investigation, addressed the murderer on TV in 1979 saying: “There may be more pawns in this war before I catch you, but I will catch you.”

“That’s what women were to these detectives, said Bindel: disposable pawns.

But, says Smith, the Ripper investigation did force woman, who felt unsafe, to realise it was up to them to look after themselves, “because the police weren’t actually going to do it for us”.

“That was the beginning of women pushing back and say, No. Why shouldn’t we walk around at night at 2am without worrying that someone will attack us? So I think it changed women’s perception of how we live in this culture and it had a incredible radicalising effect on a whole generation of women.” Smith says.

The 13 women Sutcliffe was convicted of murdering were:

Wilma McCann, 28, from Chapeltown, Leeds, who was killed in October 1975.

Emily Jackson, 42, from Morley, Leeds. Killed on 20 January 1976.

Irene Richardson, 28, from Chapeltown, Leeds. Killed on 6 February 1977.

Patricia Atkinson, 32, from Manningham, Bradford. Killed on 24 April 1977.

Jayne MacDonald, 16, from Leeds. Killed on 26 June 1977.

Jean Jordan, 21, from Manchester, who died between 30 September and 11 October 1977.

Yvonne Pearson, 22, from Bradford. Killed between 20 January and 26 March 1978.

Helen Rytka, 18, from Huddersfield. Killed on 31 January 1978.

Vera Millward, 40, from Manchester. Killed on 16 May 1978.

Josephine Whitaker, 19, from Halifax. Killed on 4 April 1979.

Barbara Leach, 20. Killed while walking in Bradford on 1 September 1979.

Marguerite Walls, 47, from Leeds. Killed on 20 August 1980.

Jacqueline Hill, 20. Killed at Headingley on 16 November 1980.

Ann Rule, Kate Summerscale: two masters of the art of true crime writing

November 29, 2021December 5, 2021freshlyworded Leave a comment

The last two books I read were both in the true crime genre, and brilliant examples of writers at the top of their craft.

First I read Ann Rule’s Don’t Look Behind You and Other True Cases, a collection of mostly cold case investigations that take place around the Seattle area on America’s west coast,

After finishing it, I then stepped back 160-odd years and into an entirely different landscape, of Victorian England and the ghastly murder of a three-year old boy in a large manor house in the countryside and the London detective recruited to solve it in Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher.

Ann Rule, who died in 2015 aged 83, started her career as a law enforcement officer for the Seattle Police Department, wrote for True Detective magazine under a pen name and then established herself as the Queen of American true crime writing with a long career of best sellers. She is most famous for The Stranger Beside Me published in 1980, her sensational account of her charming, handsome friend Ted, whom she met while working at a Seattle suicide crisis hotline, who turned out to be serial killer Ted Bundy.

Ann Rule’s books are motivated by a strong desire for justice for the victims and their families, especially those heart-wrenching cases that are never solved.

Don’t Look Behind You and Other True Cases is dedicated to “everyone who has lost someone they love, never to find them – or learn the reasons they vanished”.

Rule goes onto explain, in a brief introduction to the first story in the book “North to Alaska” that when she chooses which cases to write about, they are almost always selected from the Cold Case departments of homicide divisions.

“There is something infinitely satisfying about finding killers long after they have become confident that they have walked away free,” Rule writes.

The two long stories in Don’t Look Behind You – “North to Alaska” and “Too Late for the Fair” both track cold case investigations: the former about the disappearance of charismatic meat salesman Joe Tarricone, and the second about Joanne Hansen, a young mother locked in an abusive marriage who vanished one day, never to be seen or heard from again.

Rule is a master of plot, narrative and pace: she is a natural and gifted storyteller. While her stories are rich with procedural detail – the collection of evidence, investigating leads – and the small steps taken by investigators to unravel decades old crimes, they never becoming boring or plodding.

It’s not hard to see why she became a best selling popular writer of true crime: stories are told in an uncomplicated, linear way with plenty of direct dialogue. She brings characters to life on the page, both the perpetrators and the victims, the latter for whom she displays the greatest of empathy.

She once said of her motivation to write about true crime: “I wanted to know why some kids grew up to be criminals and why other people didn’t. That is still the main thrust behind my books: I want to know why these things happen, and so do my readers,”

Apart from these two books – The Stranger Beside Me and Don’t Look Behind You – I have also read Rule’s Lust Killer, about the shoe fetishist and necrophiliac serial killer Jerome Brudos.

I highly recommend all of them if you enjoy reading, listening to or watching true crime stories. They’re an easy read, but also engrossing and thought-provoking.

Kate Summerscale is cut from a far more literary cloth than Rule, but none the less entertaining a writer.

In the case of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher – the only book of hers I have read – Summerscale writes from a much broader historical and social perspective, producing in the words of the great spy novelist John le Carre called “a classic of the finest documentary writing”.

Born in London in 1965, but brought up also in Japan and Chile, Summerscale attended Oxford University and then California’s Stanford University, where she obtained a masters in journalism. She worked at a number of English newspapers including the Daily Telegraph and Independent, whilst establishing herself as a writer with an award-winning biography about eccentric speedboat racer Marion Barbara ‘Joe’ Carstairs.

She then wrote The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, which won The Samuel Johnson Prize (since renamed the Baillie Gifford Prize), Britain’s top book award for non-fiction writing. It was also made into an ITV television series, which unfortunately seems very hard to track down.

I’ve actually read the book twice, but enjoyed it just as much the second time round.

It’s not as easy a book to read as the pacier novels of Ann Rule, but if your penchant is for slowly unravelling, procedural crime shows like Inspector Morse, Prime Suspect or Unforgotten I think you’ll immensely enjoy reading The Suspicions of Mr Whicher.

The “Mr Whicher” refers to Jonathan or “Jack” Whicher, one of the first eight police detectives who joined a newly created branch of the London Metropolitan Police, at Scotland Yard in 1842. Whicher was sent from London to the village of Rode, near Trowbridge in the county of Wiltshire to solve the most famous crime of the era, the murder of three-year-old Francis Saville Kent in a stately country home called Road Hill House.

Summerscale does not just tell the story of the Kent family and the terrible events of the night of Friday 29th of June 1860 at Road Hill House, when the young boy’s body was discovered shoved down a privy (outside toilet), his throat cut, and the efforts of Whicher, the most brilliant detective of his day, to solve the baffling crime.

She captures the whole zeitgeist of that time – the public’s fascination with the crime (especially since it occurred in the country home of a wealthy, upper class family) fueled by a legion of city and country daily newspapers that reported on its every detail, theory and rumour.

“While the press and the public condemned Whicher’s prurient, impertinent speculations, they freely made their own,” Summerscale writes, capturing the fascination with the case that gripped the country from the big cities to farming villages, and its distrust of the new class of detectives.

As Summerscale explains in her wonderfully researched book, the crime was the first “whoddunit” set in a quintessential country home, in which all the suspects were inside the house: circumstances which created the template for hundreds of fictional detective stories, movies and TV shows including Agatha Christie and Midsomer Murders.

Not surprisingly, the case influenced many subsequent Victorian novels, captured the attention of the greatest writer of the times Charles Dickens, a friend and admirer of Jack Whicher. Dickens, like everyone else had his own (wrong) theories about who the murderer was.

There are so many fascinating aspects to this book, not least of which is the crime itself, there’s the story of the brilliant career of Jack Whicher, and how the immense pressure to solve the Road Hill House murder almost finished him off, the growing power of daily newspapers to shape public consciousness and the emerging art of crime detection.

Part true crime, part historical and social commentary, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher is non-fiction writing at its finest and a must-read in my opinion.

What’s so obsessively interesting about the lives of serial killers?

August 13, 2021freshlyworded Leave a comment

Chances are, if I am at a loss as to what to watch or listen to, I’ll turn to some documentary, dramatised movie or podcast about a serial killer, psychopath or madman.

Just the other day, while my wife tuned out at the end of the day to episodes of The Nanny, I was racing through a new documentary series on Netflix investigating the Son of Sam murders which occurred in New York in the 1976 and 1977.

Narrated by Paul Giamatti, the show called The Sons of Sam (note the plural) focuses on the claim by obsessive investigative journalist Maury Terry who believed that convicted killer David Berkowitz did not act alone but was part of a satanic cult that committed the spree of murders that terrorised the city.

Then before that, I was gripped by an Australian true-crime documentary series on Stan called After the Night which looked into the series of killings that occurred in the affluent and until then quiet and safe suburbs of Perth in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The crimes were perpetrated by deranged family man Eric Edgar Cooke, the last person to be hanged in Western Australia.

David Berkowitz; Did he act alone or was he part of a satanic cult?

After the Night told the story not only of Cooke, but also of two other men who were wrongly convicted of some of his crimes, Darryl Beamish and John Button, and the lengths they and their supporters went to clear their names. It also captured very well the easy-going, carefree life in the well-to-do suburbs of Cottesloe and Nedlands, and how that sense of security was shattered by a violent string of murders and rapes.

A big motivator to watch this show was reading and re-reading Robert Drewe’s wonderful Perth memoir The Shark Net which had as its backdrop the Cooke serial murders and Drewe’s start in journalism as a cadet reporter for the West Australian newspaper. (Read my review here).

Before that both my wife and I watched The Serpent on Netflix about conman and serial murderer Charles Sobhraj (also known as the Bikini Killer) who lured in hippy backpackers travelling around South East Asia in the 1970s with the promise of a place to stay and a luxurious lifestyle and then poisoned them, held them captive and then murdered them and stole their possessions.

Charming and sadistic: Ted Bundy is a fascinating study in evil

Then there was the documentary series The Night Stalker, about the satanic serial killer Richard Ramirez who broke into homes across Los Angeles in the mid-1980s to rape and murder in a vile spree that terrorised the city. The documentary focused on the detectives who tracked Ramirez down and some of the extraordinary stuff-ups that occurred along the way. It also delved into the cult-like rock star status Ramirez enjoyed and the perhaps even crazier women who threw themselves at him.

Prior to that there was Des about the London serial murderer Denis Nilsen who lured in young men into his shabby Muswell Hill flat. Here he smothered them, slept with their corpses and then dismembered and attempted to flush their remains away. ‘Des’ was played by the brilliant David Tennant (a key attraction for watching the series).

Killing for Company the classic true crime book about Nilsen by Brian Masters (who is played by the great character action Jason Watkins in the television series) that so fascinated me when I read it whilst visiting my London cousin stirred my interest in Nilsen at the time. It also happened that my London cousin lived and still lives in Muswell Hill, a short distance from Nilsen’s flat of horrors, one of the creepy reasons no doubt I chose to read the book at the time.

I also watched the Netflix documentary series Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes which re-examined one of America’s most notorious and charismatic serial killers, who also had his own female fan club. There was also the biographical crime drama about Bundy (starring Zac Ephron in the lead role) Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile that I watched maybe a year ago.

My fascination with Bundy began when I read Ann Rule’s classic of the true crime genre The Stranger Beside Me. Rule’s perspective was unlike any other in the history: she was a friend of Bundy.

There’s more for sure. And there are also shows I’ve yet to watch but will no doubt get to at some point. A new Netflix documentary about the Yorkshire Ripper looks intriguing.

Part of the fascination for me is the “how they caught them” aspect, the police and detective work, the clues that emerge and the trail that leads them to identify and capture the villain.

It’s probably then not surprising that my favourite detective shows are not the fast-paced glitzy stuff (I can’t stand shows like NCIS) but the slow-paced procedural dramas featuring believable investigators, my favourites being the dour and eternally grumpy Inspector Morse, Idris Elba’s rugged and damaged Luther and most recently, the renegade LA detective Harry Bosch in the Amazon series Bosch played by Titus Welliver (and based on the novels by Michael Connelly).

All these shows and the ones I have described above I highly recommend if that sort of thing intrigues you.

I do wonder why I am so drawn to these dark and disturbing shows, as are so many other people.

I like to think that I am not a secret psychopath with a penchant for blood and violence. Rather I think there is an innate human fascination with evil people or – if you don’t subscribe to that idea – to people who do evil things, especially those who do them over and over again.

After all these ‘monsters’ were soft, and cuddly babies once, not little devils with horns and a pitch fork.

I also think, that there is penchant in all of us – in the right (or wrong) circumstances to commit crimes of violence and descend into a kind of madness. Just think of all those seemingly ordinary Germans and other Europeans who became Hitler’s willing executioners during the holocaust. Might they have gone on living ordinary lives had a mad dictator not come to power?

Interestingly, on YouTube, a death row interview with serial killer Richard Ramirez has over 6 million views, while Ted Bundy interviews and documentaries online have racked up millions. Ditto Jeffery Dahmer and others.

Just like slowing down when we pass a car crash, it seems we can’t look away.

Calling from WHERE? Who can you trust in a world of scams?

July 1, 2021July 1, 2021freshlyworded 2 Comments

My mobile phone started ringing, and a strange, long number flashed up: It was a call from Mumbai, India.

Since I didn’t know anyone from Mumbai and nor did I have any reason to expect a call from the Asian sub-continent, my immediate thought was: this has to be a scam call.

“Ha” I exclaimed as I watched the phone ring out. Then somewhat unexpectedly, the caller left a message on my voicemail. Still I didn’t think too much about it, and ignored that as well.

But then, as I returned to my laptop, a message popped up in my email.

It was from an employee at a data company I’d contacted after my login and password had stopped working on their website, which I use regularly as part of my job.

Based in Mumbai, he had rung me to try and sort out the problem I had.

I apologised for missing his call and asked him to please ring again.

When the Mumbai number came up a second time on my phone, I answered it and spoke to my email correspondent – a polite, softly-spoken man with a light Indian accent – who was doing his best to help me fix my problem. Which he did. A short while later I was able to log onto their website and get on with my work.

The incident though left me pondering about the strange ways our minds work and also how we navigate the world in which we live in.

As a survival mechanism in this digital age, we’ve learned to mistrust a lot of things: unexpected and unsolicited phone calls, emails and text messages that bombard us on an almost daily basis. We’re told: Don’t click on that link!

There is of course a good reason for being so suspicious. So many of these contacts are from criminals trying to steal our money, possessions and identity.

According to the Australian government’s Scamwatch website, Australians lost over $851 million to scams in 2020, a record amount.

This is not surprising. Scammers took advantage of the pandemic, including the fact that we were locked down at home and more reliant than ever on our smartphones, laptops and iPads for communication to steal from us through cunning digital means.

Not only that but a myriad Covid-19 specific scams have emerged that prey on our fears about catching the virus, ensuring we get tested and the urgency to get vaccinated.

“Last year, scam victims reported the biggest losses we have seen, but worse, we expect the real losses will be even higher, as many people don’t report these scams,” said Delia Rickard, deputy chair of the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission.

In fairness to me, I had been primed to treat my Mumbai call with suspicion. In the past few weeks I had received a number of phone calls from a mysterious Sri Lankan number that could only I suspected have been a scam. I ignored and blocked these numbers.

According to Scamwatch, this scam works by people calling the number back, connecting to a premium rate number and losing a lot of money.

“If you call the number back, you may be put on hold, hear music playing or the scammer could try and chat with you. The scammer’s objective is to keep you on the line for as long as possible as your call will be charged at a premium rate,” Scamwatch warns.

Unlike my Mumbai call, there was no follow-up email from Colombo asking me when was a convenient time to call and so I am fairly confident I did the right thing.

Of course Smartphones, which we all never leave home without have put scammers in touch with there potential victims on an almost 24/7 basis, and they know it. Vigilance is required at all times!

Aside from my Sri Lankan friends, I’ve received calls with messages telling me I am being sued or that I owe the tax office a lot of money. I am told to call a number immediately. Then of course there are those countless quasi-scams from energy companies promising to cut my bills.

And what about the calls I get asking me to complete a short questionnaire as part of a Melbourne survey to see how people are coping with the pandemic? Is that a scam? I haven’t stuck around to find out.

My email inbox is also fill of scams, not all of them filtered into the Spam folder.

I regularly get emails telling me an Amazon subscription has been activated and I am about to debited a large amount of money unless I click on some link.

In a variation of this scam, I was emailed a message about a Norton Anti-virus program subscription that had been auto-renewed. In both cases – unless its a coincidence – the scammers had worked out I have an actual subscription to Amazon and that used to have a Norton Anti-virus program on my home computer, no doubt to add a ring of believability to their emails.

**The Norton Anti-Virus scam I received via email**

Mostly though, email scams are easy to pick out. Often the email address is something concocted on Gmail or Hotmail or there are spelling or grammatical mistakes or other silly errors.

But some scams are extremely sophisticated, one of which nearly caught out a family member who was in the process of transferring a large amount of money overseas.

Known as a payment redirection scam, it involves a scammer impersonating a business or its employees via email and requesting an upcoming payment be redirected to a fraudulent account.

A small error – the incorrect spelling of the word “direct” which was spelled “dirrect” in an email signature alerted my family and the legitimate company they were dealing with to the impending diversion of funds, which was thankfully unsuccessful, but only just in time.

As the Scamwatch figures show, many other people are not so lucky and are conned out of their money, even their houses and possessions, sometimes their life savings.

In some cases, people fall for scams because they are gullible, naïve or not very tech savvy. Sometimes its out of greed or desperation (Emails telling you have won a competition or inherited a large sum of money) or sometimes out of loneliness (as in online romance scams) and sometimes because they scam is very brilliant. We can only hope we don’t fall victim to one of those.

As to my Mumbai call centre caller, I can only apologise and say to him: Sorry mate, it’s the world we live in!

My father the serial killer: discovering the real Shannon O’Leary?

July 9, 2019August 7, 2019freshlyworded Leave a comment

out-of-the-fire-and-into-the-pan It’s hard to write an honest review about ‘Out of the Fire and into the Pan’, the second memoir penned by the Australian actor, performer and songwriter Shannon O’Leary, without confessing that a large part of my motivation for reading it was finding out the identity of the author.

Shannon O’Leary is a pseudonym adopted at the request of her family.

Her first memoir, ‘The Blood on My Hands’ which I read and reviewed almost 3 years ago, dealt with the author’s horrific childhood, where she was sexually, physically and emotionally abused by her father Patrick, a sadistic serial killer (never caught) whom the author witnessed murder young women on the rural outskirts of Sydney in the 1960s and 1970s.

Out of the Fire and into the Pan, which begins with the author’s move from Port Macquarie to the inner suburbs of Sydney aged 15, is the story of O’Leary’s bumpy journey through a string of failed relationships with damaged men to becoming a mother of five kids and entrepreneur. It also charts her eventful and ultimately successful career in the entertainment industry.

While I was curious from the start to know who O’Leary really is (not too many memoirs claim a serial killer for a father) the stimulus to try and solve this mystery actually came from O’Leary herself: her second memoir seemed packed full of clues about her real identity.

For instance, she writes that in 1977:

I was always busy acting. I had a guest spot on a well-known soap opera, appeared in some television commercials and gained some extra work on a few films

A footnote identifies the soap opera as ‘The Restless Years’ and so I spent a great deal of time trawling through the list of actors that appeared on the show, to try and work out which one was Shannon O’Leary.

When that proved fruitless, I tried Googling her work as a ‘reporter’ on popular television show from the early 1980s, and another, a childrens show, she said she appeared on called the Super Flying Fun Show.

Later in the memoir, she mentions a scandalous story about her that appeared in a gossip column when she was dating a much old British-born cinematographer called ‘Henry’ and again I dug around online looking for the article without any luck.

She also writes about her work on a 1980s ABC mini-series where she agonised about having to appear topless in an embrace with a “young blond Shakespearean actor [who] was already a star in Britain”.

All these clues were enticing, but led me down rabbit holes and towards red herrings.

In the end, it was the return address on the back of the package which contained my review copy of her book which proved the most valuable clue. After a bit of digging and cross-referencing of property records, I discovered who she was and soon came across the concise Wikipedia page of the real Shannon O’Leary. I also found other stories about her and her family online.

While, I do not plan to reveal who Shannon O’Leary really is – that was never my intention – I can say that the information online corroborates the major biographical details shared in her memoirs – though unsurprisingly, there is no mention of her disturbing childhood or who her father was.

It was also nice to see a photo of Shannon O’Leary and learn a bit about her interesting family, in particurlar her kids, which have also been successful in the entertainment sphere.

As for her second memoir, it is worthy sequel to the harrowing story of her childhood, and also an enjoyable chronicle of what life was like in Australia for a young aspiring actor and entertainer in the 1970s and 1980s.

The second memoir, while not nearly as shocking as the first book, still includes graphic flashbacks to the abuse she suffered at the hands of her father, who continues to make sadistic appearances in her life, a hissing shadow of a man that refues to go away, and whose crimes went completely unpunished.

I heard him laugh and opened my eyes to see him pointing the gun at me. The shot cracked out, whizzing over my head making me jump and teeter on the branch.” I think you can stay there for hours,” Dad said, as he walked inside.

Thankfully O’Leary also takes time, amid the many traumatic and sad episodes, to recount her successes, big and small along the way. Most pleasingly for the reader there is a sense of progress, of building towards something hopeful: a loving relationship, a happy family and a comfortable home in a NSW country town.

Despite her abusive childhood, O’Leary emerges as a victor, as someone who triumphs over the rotten hand dealt to her at the start of her life. That she survived at all is a wonder, even she struggles to fathom:’Why was I spared?’

If I am to make any sort of criticism of her memoir, it would be to say that the author sometimes says too much when less would be better.

But that is a very minor criticism. O’Leary is good story teller, blessed with the gift of objective self-reflection. All of her experiences are retold with a feeling of ardent authenticity. The key moments in her life, both good and bad, become her “stepping stones” towards a place of relative normality.

For O’Leary, the act of writing and telling her incredible story, as painful as that must have been at times, is way for her to liberate herself from her past and to find healing.

“Letting people know about my childhood was like I’d experienced a coming out – a shedding of skin,” she writes towards the end of her second memoir. “By writing the book and with my father dying (in 2009), I had liberation from my past.”

‘Black territory’: the dark story of Sunbury’s asylum on the hill

May 12, 2019June 14, 2021freshlyworded 8 Comments

In 1945, Maraquita Sargeant, a young teacher and concert pianist living in rural Victoria was admitted to a notorious lunatic asylum north of Melbourne.

Here she would remain for the next 22 years, incarcerated against her will and tragically, completely sane.

Years after her release in a more enlightened and less cruel age, psychiatrists would describe Maraquita as being nothing more then “mildly eccentric”.

Her ‘lunacy’ in 1945: not wanting to have any more children.

Her youngest child, Tony, who was only 18 months old when his mother was taken away, calls the now empty lunatic asylum “black territory”.

“This is a black place. I don’t want to be here,” he says in a short video about his mother produced by Washington’s famous Smithsonian Institute.

This “black territory” is a place I have only recently discovered for myself.

It’s only a 20 minutes drive from where I live and somewhere I pass almost every day on my train ride into work.

Maraquita Sargeant (from the Smithsonian video)

For months I’d thought the majestic looking red-brick mansion rising above trees on a distant hillside was a country estate, perhaps built long ago for a Melbourne land baron.

It was only when I found myself standing outside its locked-up gates, staring up at the classically proportioned Victorian structure with its steep black roof, long-tall chimneys and large empty windows that its real purpose came into focus.

Known originally as the Sunbury Industrial School, the vast complex of mostly abandoned and decaying buildings was for over 100 years a lunatics asylum. It occupies almost the entire hillside of housing estate called Jacksons Hill.

In its most recent incarnation, until 2011, the asylum complex was a study campus occupied by Victoria University. Search online and you’ll find plenty of ghost stories.

More recently known as Caloola, the site’s history goes back over 150 years to 1864, when it became the site for one of Victoria’s twelve ‘Industrial schools – institutionalised homes for delinquent or neglected children, that were a horror of diseases, death and discomfort in their own right.

The ‘Hospital for the Insane’ or ‘Sunbury Asylum’ was built in 1879 and then expanded over the next 40-odd years into a complex of 20 separate buildings, including a psychiatric hospital.

Back then there would have been very little to see from the hillside apart from farmland and another famous Sunbury landmark, the grey-spired Rupertswood mansion – home of The Ashes grey-spired Rupertswood mansion – home of The Ashes. Rupertswood was completed in 1876 and is now incorporated into a posh private school.

1024px-Rupertswood_mansion_side_angle_shot

Rupertswood: Home of The Ashes

While the building of a modern highway has made Sunbury an outlying suburb of Melbourne today, back in the 1870s, Caloola asylum inmates would have felt very isolated from the wealth and power of boom town Melbourne, then one of the richest cities in the world thanks to the Victorian Gold Rush.

This separation was of course deliberate – people considered ‘mad’ in those days like Maraquita Sargeant were locked up far away from the chattering middle-classes, often to be forgotten about or no longer mentioned (except in whispers) by their own families.

“Asylums were typically distant from population centres, with extensive grounds and ha ha walls to prevent escape,” the Victorian Heritage Database entry says of Caloola.

This is black territory, a dark place of menace.

According to the VHD, the purpose built Sunbury asylum with its “pavilion wards in brick with terra cotta roofing tiles conformed to international standards of asylum and hospital planning adopted in the later nineteenth century”.

“Caloola is of historical significance for its physical fabric and spaces which demonstrate nineteenth century attitudes to the treatment of mental illness, including the padded cells, ripple iron cells and dormitory accommodation.”

An inmate of Sunbury asylum, in what appears to be a strait jacket

In the Smithsonian video, Tony Sargeant enters one of the claustrophobic former padded cells, the cushion lining peeling back from the wall like dead skin adding to the sense of horror. In another, he finds the large empty former linen room, where his mother spent her days monotonously patching up sheets and pillow cases.

“That was her big job in life. Even though she was a concert pianist,” Tony says.

Caloola remained a mental institution and training hospital until 1985 when it housed intellectually handicapped people.

From 1992 to 2011 it was a campus of Victorian University. Some of the building are still in use as a primary school, radio station, art gallery and theatre company.

For a while – after the university campus closed – a passionate local lady called Julie Mills and her husband ran popular two-hour guided tours of the asylum buildings providing insights into how the facility operated and how patients were treated at the time.

Ms Mills told the Sunbury Leader in November 2015 she wanted to shine a light on the mental health system in those days, and how it has changed, and tell the stories of some of the people treated, often harshly, within its walls.

“A lot of the Sunbury asylum history is about stigma and it is something that was buried in family histories,” she said.

Often people – many of them women – were placed into the asylum for conditions that today would be compassionately treated like post-natal depression, or for just being drunk and disorderly.

In the case of Marquita Sargeant, she was denied her freedom – and later sent for a failed lobotomy at the Royal Melbourne Hospital – because a director at the asylum deemed her “a threat to certain prominent people’s reputations”.

I found countless other example of the cruelty, deviancy and filthy conditions that were part of asylum life for inmates, right up until the 1990s when the asylum housed mental patients, many of whom were abused or over-medicated.

A newspaper article that appeared in the Melbourne Argus in December 1881 reported on investigations into the lecherous behaviour of the asylum superintendent at the time Albert Baldwin, after he had a 17-year-old girl Agnes Simmonds visit him in his office, where he locked the door.

“The patient was alone with Mr Baldwin in his officer for some time,: testified William Walker, the asylum storekeeper and clear.

“Eventually she left with the attendant. Baldwin then called me in, and I found him in a flurried state. He pulled up the blind of his window, washed his hands and face and brushed his hair. The patient Simmonds left on the 5th September and I believe has gone to New South Wales.”

A feature article on Sunbury Asylum that appeared in The Age newspaper in 1999 talks of Elizabeth Kennedy, 31, a suicidal dressmaker, who spent 7200 hours “in seclusion”, from 1894 to 1896 which meant she was forced to wear a camisole – the notorious straitjacket – and webbed trousers daily.

“A woman in seclusion also wore canvas gloves shaped like oven mitts. Many of the inmates died of pneumonia and, in the early years, they were given cold baths. Difficult patients were deprived of dinner,” the article says.

Last May, Jackson’s Hill and asylum complex was acquired by the State Government’s Development Victoria. However, plans to turn it into a community, arts and cultural precinct appear to have stalled.

Instead, it stands still and empty, a decaying and ghoulish Dickensian shrine to those who suffered unjustly and often terribly behind its walls.

As for my mistaken belief that this hillside of horrors was a majestic country estate, I can take some solace from a 1996 article in The Age newspaper, in which the writer described Caloola’s gardens, open-air pavilions, and curved ha-ha walls as having a “beauty that seems at odds with their original purpose”.

Is it OK, now, to like Lance Armstrong, even just a bit?

March 28, 2019April 2, 2019freshlyworded Leave a comment

430px-Lance_Armstrong_(Tour_Down_Under_2009)

In 2009, at the Tour Down Under

There are almost endless reasons to dislike Lance Armstrong, the former king of the Tour de France, once the greatest endurance sportsman in the world.

There’s the cheating, the lying (for years) about cheating, and the suing of those people like journalist David Walsh who (for years) rightly accused the Texan of cheating.

There’s also the manner of Armstrong’s cheating – an elaborate, carefully planned scam – and the damage he did to the reputation and integrity of cycling and the hurt he caused to his friends, family, co-workers and fans.

If that’s not enough, there is the fact that despite having to pay back millions in fines and penalties, he remains by all accounts exceedingly wealthy courtesy of his investments (funded from his cycling pay cheques) in funds that backed the likes of Uber.

Perhaps – most galling for some – is the fact that he appears to have put all the doping and cheating behind him, forgiven himself and moved on with his life. He has embarked on new business ventures and hosts podcasts, like The Move, about the Tour de France. In short he appears pretty content for someone whose fall from grace has in its Icarus-like plummeting – had no equal in the world of sport.

An unexpected reaction

But a strange and unexpected thing happened to me when I listened to an interview Armstrong gave on the popular podcast, Freakonomics Radio: I found myself liking (just a little bit) the Lance Armstrong I heard during the course of his conversation with host Stephen Dubner.

I mentioned this to a friend, who was appalled.

For him there was no forgiveness. In essence, he said repeatedly, I had been duped by Armstrong who according to my friend had fooled me and others with his seemingly sincere words.

Armstrong during his racing days

But I wasn’t the only one. The podcast host himself, Stephen Dubner (author of the best selling book Freakonomics) had an even stronger positive response that bordered – dare I say it – on admiration for the world’s most famous sports cheat.

Finishing his hour-long interview with Armstrong, Dubner said, without any trace of irony or sarcasm: “Lance Armstrong, you’ve come a long way. It’s impressive.”

I emailed Dubner, told him how similarly I felt and my friend’s angry reaction. He replied:

“Yes, I heard quite a lot of the responses that you described. I tell people that I love living in a world where people are free to rabidly disagree about who/what they like, as long as they can stop short of violence.

No doubt many people (including my friend) “rabidly disagree” with my softened position on the disgraced cyclist.

In many people’s eyes what Lance Armstrong did is unforgivable and some would even go so far as to say he has not been punished enough.

Charismatic, candid and interesting

So what softened my opinion?

Well for one thing I found Armstrong to be a charismatic, candid and interesting interview subject.

I guess I was also charmed by the way he spoke; Armstrong has a propensity to include cycling metaphors into his speech:

“Life adjusts, the burn rate is taken down,” he says referring to the end of his sporting days, and with reference to the cycling union he says “it has no power, no stroke”.

Asked about the infamous Oprah Winfrey interview, Armstrong admits “it did not go well”.

“For cycling fans it was not enough and for the general public, it was too much,” he says quite eloquently.

He also admits that “he sued people and treated them badly” but that he has “travelled the world to sit down with people, to talk and to apologise”.

“I have tried to make amends and move forward,” Armstrong says.

How to fix cycling

I also thought he had a lot of good things to say, like how to fix the sport of professional cycling.

According to Armstrong there needs to be a strong cyclists union so that riders earn a fair cut from television revenues.

I was amazed to learn – I’m assuming its true – that the organiser of the Tour De France, ASO (Amaury Sport Organisation) takes all the television rights revenue that come from the race, sharing nothing with those that compete.

Or to put in Armstrong’s vernacular: “[For riders] it starts with a zero, and ends with a zero.”

Armstrong believes a strong union could push for a fair cut of the Tour’s revenues, starting small and then negotiating a bigger amount over time.

Under the current system, he explained, a cycling team that loses its sponsor has nothing (apart from some bikes, gear and vehicles) at the end of the season, and this “creates the incentive to do what ever you can to succeed”.

But, if everyone is making money off TV revenue – regardless of if they come first or 20th – “then you would think and I truly believe athletes would self-police” Armstrong says.

Throughout the interview it seemed clear to me that Armstrong had changed a lot.

Nothing encapsulated this more than an incident Armstrong recounted to Dubner where he was heckled by former fans. It was in Denver the previous summer and Armstrong was about to catch an Uber taxi to a cycling event.

A guy at the bar got up and in Armstrong’s words: Started yelling “Fuck you” over and over again and would not stop. Soon the whole patio was chanting it and Armstrong was shaking.

“I thought to myself. I am Lance Armstrong. I have to do something,” he tells Dubner.

But rather than storm back into the bar and pick a fight, he phones the restaurant, gives the manager his credit card details and tells him to use it to pay for everyone’s meals and drinks.

It’s the only thing he could think of doing at the time, he says. “I get it,” Armstrong tells Dubner referring to the anger people still feel about him and how he let them down.

It’s anecdotes like this, that paint a picture of a guy who is not all bad.

Dubner also reminds us that for all his faults, Armstrong the cheat is also the guy who encouraged a generation of Americans – a country with a massive obesity problem – to get on a bike and do a bit of exercise.

He was also the guy, who founded the Lance Armstrong Foundation, now called Livestrong, a charity which has raised tens of millions of dollars to support cancer sufferers. Armstrong resigned as chairman in 2012 after the doping scandal, but the charity continues and has helped over 100,000 people battle the disease.

Let’s also not forget Lance Armstrong defied the odds and beat an advanced stage of testicular cancer in a truly inspirational story

The truth is Lance Armstrong is a complex character, with shades of light and dark, good and bad.

Even the great racing commentator Phil Liggett, who knew Armstrong better than many of his fiercest armchair critics, admitted in an interview he gave to Brisbane’s Courier Mail in 2016 that he still had some affection for him:

“…I find it extremely difficult to hate him because of the way I had seen him help cancer victims. And he was still the best rider of his era. I have always said drugs don’t turn a donkey into a thoroughbred.”

The anonymous Casefile host: the mystery solved?

March 15, 2019March 21, 2019freshlyworded 6 Comments

casey

Incredibly, a year has passed since I first blogged about the identity of the Casefile host, after which he blocked me on Twitter.

During that time I have also blogged on the topic of doxxing, written about my favourite true crime podcasts (republished in the Financial Review) and most recently I provided those curious Casefile fans with a guide to solving the identity of the Casefile host for themselves.

Of course the reason WHY he chooses to remain the anonymous host of a hit podcast is an entirely different and perplexing mystery – but I think I might have finally solved it.

The reason I hadn’t worked it out earlier (it was staring me in the face a year ago) was that I did not realise the host (Brad) has a different surname to his father.

The host’s late father was a chief inspector in the NSW police.

I think the anonymous host may be sensitive about this connection given the content of his show, or perhaps his family is.

In addition it also explains his interest in true crime and why he chose to make a podcast about it.

The police connection could actually run a lot deeper – the host himself might have been a policeman at one time.

How do I know this?

At the funeral for his late dad, the host’s mother said Brad intended to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a police officer.

Whether he actually went on to become a policeman, I don’t know – but if it were the case, it would be another reason for his anonymity.

The police connection is certainly a more plausible explanation then the host just wanting to “stay out of the story and “let the facts speak for themselves”.

Case solved?

PS. An interesting aside, someone told me there’s a rather amusing Facebook post floating around about the Casefile host. To find it, simply log on to Facebook and search for “Casefile host”.