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Evidence of Things Seen
From Sarah Weinman, the award-winning editor of Unspeakable Acts, a groundbreaking new anthology showcasing the future of the true crime genre
True crime, as an entertainment genre, has always prioritized clear narrative, victims wronged, police detectives in pursuit, suspects apprehended, justice delivered--but what stories have been ignored? In Evidence of Things Seen, fourteen of the most innovative crime writers working today cast a light on the cases that give crucial insight into our society. Wesley Lowery writes about a lynching left unsolved for decades by an indifferent police force and a family’s quest for answers. Justine van der Leun reports on the thousands of women in prison for defending themselves from abuse. May Jeong reveals how the Atlanta spa shootings tell a story of America. This anthology pulls back the curtain on how crime itself is a by-product of America’s systemic harms and inequalities, and in doing so, it reveals how the genre of true crime can be a catalyst for social change. These works combine brilliant storytelling with incisive cultural examinations—and challenge each of us to ask what justice should look like.
True crime, as an entertainment genre, has always prioritized clear narrative, victims wronged, police detectives in pursuit, suspects apprehended, justice delivered--but what stories have been ignored? In Evidence of Things Seen, fourteen of the most innovative crime writers working today cast a light on the cases that give crucial insight into our society. Wesley Lowery writes about a lynching left unsolved for decades by an indifferent police force and a family’s quest for answers. Justine van der Leun reports on the thousands of women in prison for defending themselves from abuse. May Jeong reveals how the Atlanta spa shootings tell a story of America. This anthology pulls back the curtain on how crime itself is a by-product of America’s systemic harms and inequalities, and in doing so, it reveals how the genre of true crime can be a catalyst for social change. These works combine brilliant storytelling with incisive cultural examinations—and challenge each of us to ask what justice should look like.
304 pages, Paperback
First published July 4, 2023
About the author
Sarah Weinman
33 books270 followersSarah Weinman is the author of The Real Lolita: A Lost Girl, An Unthinkable Crime, and a Scandalous Masterpiece, which was named a Best Book of 2018 by NPR, BuzzFeed, The National Post, Literary Hub, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Vulture, and won the Arthur Ellis Award for Excellence in Crime Writing. She also edited the anthologies Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit & Obsession (Ecco) Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s (Library of America) and Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives (Penguin).
Weinman writes the twice-monthly Crime column for the New York Times Book Review. A 2020 National Magazine Award finalist for Reporting, her work has also appeared most recently in New York, The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, the Washington Post, and AirMail, while her fiction has been published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and numerous anthologies. Weinman also writes (albeit less regularly) the “Crime Lady” newsletter, covering crime fiction, true crime, and all points in between.
She lives in New York City.
(sarahweinman.com)
Weinman writes the twice-monthly Crime column for the New York Times Book Review. A 2020 National Magazine Award finalist for Reporting, her work has also appeared most recently in New York, The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, the Washington Post, and AirMail, while her fiction has been published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and numerous anthologies. Weinman also writes (albeit less regularly) the “Crime Lady” newsletter, covering crime fiction, true crime, and all points in between.
She lives in New York City.
(sarahweinman.com)
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 92 reviews
July 29, 2023
A well-edited and selective sourcebook of exemplary crime journalism articles and essays previously published in a variety of media outlets, and including pieces that explore the fraught issues around the ethics of telling crime stories when there are such great human costs both generating and emanating from these stories.
Some emphases are inclusivity of subjects’ voices, humanity, and certainly consent; consideration of race, gender, economic status, intergenerational/legacy trauma, and other intersectionalities of subjects; and making an effort to tell these stories not in a narrowly focused way, but rather with respect to the incredibly complex nature of the human lives and situations involved - again, especially including the possible long-ranging repercussions of how these stories are relayed (or, not relayed), especially when subjects have experienced oppression and when invisible or systemic biases are in play.
Although there are some pieces related to very violent crimes, there is nothing salacious or gawking here, it’s all respectful and academic in tone, so look elsewhere if that’s what you’re seeking. This could be a good survey text for a course in journalism or nonfiction writing.
My main complaint is that the included lengthy resource list of other true crime reportage worth exploring in light of this book’s themes is so long and interesting that I wish a few more pieces had been included; this seemed maybe a bit short compared to some other anthology readers. Many of the pieces that were included were interesting, but a few that stood out to me are:
How the Atlanta Spa Shootings - the Victims, the Survivors - Tell a Story of America
Who Owns Amanda Knox? (by Amanda Knox)
“No Choice But To Do It”: Why Women Go To Prison
The Short Life of Toyin Salau and a Legacy Still At Work
“Tie a Tourniquet On Your Heart”: Revisiting Edna Buchanan, America’s Greatest Police Reporter
Some emphases are inclusivity of subjects’ voices, humanity, and certainly consent; consideration of race, gender, economic status, intergenerational/legacy trauma, and other intersectionalities of subjects; and making an effort to tell these stories not in a narrowly focused way, but rather with respect to the incredibly complex nature of the human lives and situations involved - again, especially including the possible long-ranging repercussions of how these stories are relayed (or, not relayed), especially when subjects have experienced oppression and when invisible or systemic biases are in play.
Although there are some pieces related to very violent crimes, there is nothing salacious or gawking here, it’s all respectful and academic in tone, so look elsewhere if that’s what you’re seeking. This could be a good survey text for a course in journalism or nonfiction writing.
My main complaint is that the included lengthy resource list of other true crime reportage worth exploring in light of this book’s themes is so long and interesting that I wish a few more pieces had been included; this seemed maybe a bit short compared to some other anthology readers. Many of the pieces that were included were interesting, but a few that stood out to me are:
How the Atlanta Spa Shootings - the Victims, the Survivors - Tell a Story of America
Who Owns Amanda Knox? (by Amanda Knox)
“No Choice But To Do It”: Why Women Go To Prison
The Short Life of Toyin Salau and a Legacy Still At Work
“Tie a Tourniquet On Your Heart”: Revisiting Edna Buchanan, America’s Greatest Police Reporter
May 4, 2024
After hoping all along, this would get better. Nope. Boring.
July 26, 2023
*3.5
Evidence of Things Seen is an essay collection that's less about true crime and the culture surrounding it and more about the inherent issues in the justice system, parsed through a series of cases. The angle here seems to be not "Should we engage with true crime?" But "Since you're already invested in true crime, here's how to do that more responsibly." HEAVY TW for basically anything you can think of.
As with most essay collections, it's a bit uneven, but the majority of the chapters are truly well-written and impeccably researched. The standouts include the essays on women in prison (extremely thorough and empathetic), the piece on white collar crime (the most optimistic), and the personal essay by Amanda Knox about her own relationship with true crime media (the most insightful). The essay on the Atlanta Spa Shootings (weighed down by asides), the book review of a popular crime reporter (felt unrelated), and the "Letter to a Victim" (poetry??) are the weakest of this collection, but generally don't slow the book's overall momentum.
My only real issue with this collection is that it's founded on the idea that true crime is a healthy and even productive hobby for people to engage with, and doesn't really engage with the idea that that might not be true outside of a few statements in the editor's note. There's little mention of the paranoia, police worship, racism, and callousness towards both culprits and victims often perpetuated by true crime culture, which seems like a pretty big omission from a book subtitled "True Crime in the Era of Reckoning." There is a sort of "citizen detective" champion story, but even in that essay it's admitted that the Facebook group was unable to either solve a specific crime or prevent further harm even when the actor was still actively taking advantage of people. So like...what point was this story even trying to make?
I don't know if I should've expected too much, since the editor herself makes a living off of a true crime podcast, and therefore has a bias towards encouraging people to engage with this culture. But I wish a book about "Reckoning with True Crime" included some...you know...reckoning.
Evidence of Things Seen is an essay collection that's less about true crime and the culture surrounding it and more about the inherent issues in the justice system, parsed through a series of cases. The angle here seems to be not "Should we engage with true crime?" But "Since you're already invested in true crime, here's how to do that more responsibly." HEAVY TW for basically anything you can think of.
As with most essay collections, it's a bit uneven, but the majority of the chapters are truly well-written and impeccably researched. The standouts include the essays on women in prison (extremely thorough and empathetic), the piece on white collar crime (the most optimistic), and the personal essay by Amanda Knox about her own relationship with true crime media (the most insightful). The essay on the Atlanta Spa Shootings (weighed down by asides), the book review of a popular crime reporter (felt unrelated), and the "Letter to a Victim" (poetry??) are the weakest of this collection, but generally don't slow the book's overall momentum.
My only real issue with this collection is that it's founded on the idea that true crime is a healthy and even productive hobby for people to engage with, and doesn't really engage with the idea that that might not be true outside of a few statements in the editor's note. There's little mention of the paranoia, police worship, racism, and callousness towards both culprits and victims often perpetuated by true crime culture, which seems like a pretty big omission from a book subtitled "True Crime in the Era of Reckoning." There is a sort of "citizen detective" champion story, but even in that essay it's admitted that the Facebook group was unable to either solve a specific crime or prevent further harm even when the actor was still actively taking advantage of people. So like...what point was this story even trying to make?
I don't know if I should've expected too much, since the editor herself makes a living off of a true crime podcast, and therefore has a bias towards encouraging people to engage with this culture. But I wish a book about "Reckoning with True Crime" included some...you know...reckoning.
June 29, 2023
Evidence of Things Seen is a fantastic follow up to Unspeakable Acts, Sarah Weinman's prior collected anthology of true crime reporting and cultural criticism. The essays included in both volumes offer the type of thoughtful true crime-adjacent stories that I prefer over the genre's standard breathless recitation of horrific circumstances and grisly events. Instead, this collection focuses on systemic issues at play in both crime and our relationship to crime reporting. The included essays question who gets to be a victim (ie, who is given empathy and the benefit of the doubt), which types of crime are overlooked in the popular imagination, and who is left out of standard true crime narratives. Multiple essays offer thoughtful critiques of various failures of the justice system, illuminating the inherent biases which compromise police investigations and skew crime reporting to predispose the public against certain victims or types of crime, particularly in racial, socioeconomic, and gendered ways. I appreciate that this collection resists the urge to blindly uphold the system as it stands, instead humanizing those who are normally deemed unworthy of empathy.
I remain especially struck by the essay on a prison radio project. I am astounded by how transformational and meaningful the radio project is, particularly for inmates on death row. I found myself considering the inhumane structure of death row in a new way, via the essay's exploration of how transformational this radio program proves by offering an unexpected source of community in a system built to isolate. I found myself wondering about the utility of a new facet of our prison system, thoughts that also carried over from the essay on restorative justice models for victims of domestic violence. The best true crime writing, in my opinion, questions the status quo and challenges our preconceived notions about the workings of the systems of power that make up the criminal legal system. I will be thinking about this collection for some time.
I received a copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
I remain especially struck by the essay on a prison radio project. I am astounded by how transformational and meaningful the radio project is, particularly for inmates on death row. I found myself considering the inhumane structure of death row in a new way, via the essay's exploration of how transformational this radio program proves by offering an unexpected source of community in a system built to isolate. I found myself wondering about the utility of a new facet of our prison system, thoughts that also carried over from the essay on restorative justice models for victims of domestic violence. The best true crime writing, in my opinion, questions the status quo and challenges our preconceived notions about the workings of the systems of power that make up the criminal legal system. I will be thinking about this collection for some time.
I received a copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
July 1, 2023
This group of True Crime articles we get everything from Amanda Knox lamenting about the publicity she got after her roommate was murdered, a great article on Edna Buchanan in her crime beat, Book an ultimate poult win we also hear about a girl who went public with her sexual assault and then went missing that same day only to be found murdered, a letter to an anonymous murder victim son who the journalist accosted only hours after his dad‘s tragic death and so much more there’s even an article about all the missing indigenous women in California. I found this book engaging but also very sad at the same time but there is a feel good article about the person run radio station at a Texas prison outside of Houston but as far as feel good articles go I do believe that is the only one but having said that I would still highly recommend the spot I found it hard to put down I am always interested and True Crime whether that be murder white collar or something else in this book covers at all. This is a book I highly recommend for any True Crime fans. I received this book from NetGalley and the publisher but I am leaving this review voluntarily please forgive any mistakes as I am blind and dictate my review.
September 29, 2023
A thoughtfully curated anthology on American crime. This book challenges you to really think deeper, look at the societal and cultural implications of many crimes. It’s a difficult read at times, truly important for any reader, but especially fans of the genre. Which now it feels weird to be a true crime fan, but the reality is having an inquisitive mind; trying to understand the whys, and how we can do better.
January 13, 2024
I stumbled upon Sarah Weinman's previous collection of crime journalism, Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit, and Obsession, by chance in a bookstore and I still think about stories in it often.
Weinman considers this book--whose title is inspired by James Baldwin's book Evidence of Things Not Seen, about the Atlanta child murders--a companion to the first one and it's going to hit hard and repeatedly at the beliefs of a lot of readers, my own included. The overarching theme most of these tales have in common is "Who gets to tell our stories?" Some articles are better than others and at least one I thought was too long, but there isn't a bad, or even mediocre, one in the bunch. In fact, there are SO MANY brilliant articles here that it's hard to single out a few favorites but I'll try:
"A Brutal Lynching. An Indifferent Police Force. A 34-Year Wait for Justice" by Wesley Lowery
"How the Atlanta Spa Shootings-the Victims, the Survivors-Tell a Story of America" by May Jeong
"Picturesque California Conceals a Crisis of Missing Indigenous Women" by Brandi Morin
"The Prisoner-Run Radio Station That's Reaching Men on Death Row" by Keri Blakinger
"Has Reality Caught Up to the Murder Police?" by Lara Bazelon (If you watched Homicide or The Wire, prepare to be really depressed)
The appendix of further books, articles, and podcasts is huge. I'm still tempted to take some pictures of it.
"Social justice" is a much used and abused term these days but this book talks about it and it's impossible to ignore.
Weinman considers this book--whose title is inspired by James Baldwin's book Evidence of Things Not Seen, about the Atlanta child murders--a companion to the first one and it's going to hit hard and repeatedly at the beliefs of a lot of readers, my own included. The overarching theme most of these tales have in common is "Who gets to tell our stories?" Some articles are better than others and at least one I thought was too long, but there isn't a bad, or even mediocre, one in the bunch. In fact, there are SO MANY brilliant articles here that it's hard to single out a few favorites but I'll try:
"A Brutal Lynching. An Indifferent Police Force. A 34-Year Wait for Justice" by Wesley Lowery
"How the Atlanta Spa Shootings-the Victims, the Survivors-Tell a Story of America" by May Jeong
"Picturesque California Conceals a Crisis of Missing Indigenous Women" by Brandi Morin
"The Prisoner-Run Radio Station That's Reaching Men on Death Row" by Keri Blakinger
"Has Reality Caught Up to the Murder Police?" by Lara Bazelon (If you watched Homicide or The Wire, prepare to be really depressed)
The appendix of further books, articles, and podcasts is huge. I'm still tempted to take some pictures of it.
"Social justice" is a much used and abused term these days but this book talks about it and it's impossible to ignore.
February 8, 2023
I received a free copy of, Evidence of Things Seen, by Sarah Weinman, from the publisher and Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. I mistakenly thought this was a novel, not just articles from newspapers and magazines. It was interesting though.
April 10, 2024
The stand out piece of this collection is May Jeong's How the Atlanta Spa Shootings—the Victims, the Survivors—Tell a Story of America.
Here's the opening paragraph:
I grew up on Unsolved Mysteries—(whyyy)—and grew into someone with an affinity for true crime podcasts and documentaries, and in my experience, true crime isn't that interested in how an incident fits into larger trends and instead is characterized by a preoccupation with personal details, both intimate and insignificant, drama, often in the form of unfounded speculation, and, it must be said, a certain amount of sleaze. Serious journalism rarely includes a reenactment of someone's last moments, for example. Most of the pieces in this collection are just straight up journalism that happens to be about crime.
So I'm not sure what exactly this book thinks it's reckoning with. Is it the genre of true crime itself? Or crime reporting in a time of heightened awareness of racial justice? These pieces touch on both, but I think Weinman could have done a better job in selecting them to make her thesis stronger. In fact, many of these pieces do not consistently identify their subjects' ethnicity, leaving me to believe those who are unidentified are, by default, white. When we are talking about policing and the legal system, race matters. How does obscuring that reckon with racial justice?
The collection opens with Wesley Lowery's A Brutal Lynching. An Indifferent Police Force. A 34-Year Wait for Justice. It's an important piece, but Lowery uses "patient" and "inmate" (repeatedly) to describe individuals. It's dehumanizing language that thoughtlessly reinforces discriminatory attitudes about who gets to be considered a person. Are we not meant to reckoning with criminal justice reform? I went looking for writing on the subject and found Alexandra Cox's The language of incarceration, which considers the uses of people first language in the context of incarceration and, in a neat coincidence, also focuses on the uses of such language in the context of disability rights. Cox quotes the Denver Principles, drafted by a group of activists living with HIV/AIDS in 1983:
All the pieces in this book were previously published elsewhere between 2020 and 2022, in publications like GQ, Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, and The Atlantic, and are arranged in three sections. The first is "What We Reckon With," and is mostly crime reporting and highly infuriating, both in the crimes that go unsolved because of prejudice and the ones that go unprosecuted because of privilege.
The second section is "The True Crime Stories We Tell," which, according to Weinman, "gives space to critical examinations of the genre and those who helped shape it." This includes a piece by Amanda Knox asking Who Owns Amanda Knox?, and an examination of Edna Buchanan and what it means to be a crime reporter when you have to depend on the police for your information. In that same vein, it also has Lara Bazelon's David Simon Made Baltimore Detectives Famous. Now Their Cases Are Falling Apart. Has Reality Caught Up to the "Murder Police"?, which should be required reading for anyone who read David Simon's Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets or ever watched Homicide: Life on the Streets or The Wire.
The third and final section is "Shards of Justice," which "offers some paths forward, both for our deeply fissured legal system and for the true crime genre itself." Here I can recommend Amelia Schonbek's Will You Ever Change? about restorative justice and the practice of surrogate dialogue, and Keri Blakinger's The Prisoner-Run Radio Station That's Reaching Men on Death Row. Both are on hard topics and both are excellent.
Fighting to put my thoughts into some kind of order for this review made me realize that this collection does reckon with many of the things it sets out to address, but it took me several hours to reach that conclusion. I had a different feeling while reading it, and at the time it seemed like the pieces she selected didn't, collectively, drive hard enough to prove her point. A brief introduction to each section may have helped to direct the reader's attention to particular themes and made this feel more cohesive.
I picked this up because I enjoyed Weinman's previous collection, Unspeakable Acts. Its argument felt better supported, and the writing really felt like true crime, good true crime, dramatic stories about people whose lives have been touched by violence, with just the faintest greasing of sleaze. Because enjoying true crime means having to grapple with your own curiosity and asking yourself, really, is this truly any of our business? In the case of this book, Evidence of Things Seen, being more reporting than rubbernecking, yes, it is absolutely our business. It's our responsibility to make sure our systems aren't punishing people solely because of what color they, and we can't change the things that need fixing if we don't know what's wrong. So give this a read, just go into it knowing it's journalism, not true crime.
Contains: Everything, but especially descriptions of violence, including racial, domestic, and sexual violence; child harm/death, including sexual abuse; animal harm/death; sex work, some forced; racism; incarceration and capital punishment.
Here's the opening paragraph:
On the afternoon of March 16, 2021, Marcus Lyon and his girlfriend dropped off their son at day care and went out for a late lunch not far from Sixes, a suburb of Atlanta that takes its name from a collection point on the Trail of Tears. The seafood restaurant where they headed stood just south of Larry McDonald Memorial Highway, named for the Georgia politician who served as president of the John Birch Society, a Cold War–era group that viewed the civil rights movement as a communist plot.Jeong's framing and contextualization of the spa shootings brings the region's overlapping inequities and prejudices to the fore in a way I've rarely seen. It's excellent work, and I highly recommend it. But it's not true crime.
I grew up on Unsolved Mysteries—(whyyy)—and grew into someone with an affinity for true crime podcasts and documentaries, and in my experience, true crime isn't that interested in how an incident fits into larger trends and instead is characterized by a preoccupation with personal details, both intimate and insignificant, drama, often in the form of unfounded speculation, and, it must be said, a certain amount of sleaze. Serious journalism rarely includes a reenactment of someone's last moments, for example. Most of the pieces in this collection are just straight up journalism that happens to be about crime.
So I'm not sure what exactly this book thinks it's reckoning with. Is it the genre of true crime itself? Or crime reporting in a time of heightened awareness of racial justice? These pieces touch on both, but I think Weinman could have done a better job in selecting them to make her thesis stronger. In fact, many of these pieces do not consistently identify their subjects' ethnicity, leaving me to believe those who are unidentified are, by default, white. When we are talking about policing and the legal system, race matters. How does obscuring that reckon with racial justice?
The collection opens with Wesley Lowery's A Brutal Lynching. An Indifferent Police Force. A 34-Year Wait for Justice. It's an important piece, but Lowery uses "patient" and "inmate" (repeatedly) to describe individuals. It's dehumanizing language that thoughtlessly reinforces discriminatory attitudes about who gets to be considered a person. Are we not meant to reckoning with criminal justice reform? I went looking for writing on the subject and found Alexandra Cox's The language of incarceration, which considers the uses of people first language in the context of incarceration and, in a neat coincidence, also focuses on the uses of such language in the context of disability rights. Cox quotes the Denver Principles, drafted by a group of activists living with HIV/AIDS in 1983:
We condemn attempts to label us as "victims," a term which implies defeat, and we are only occasionally "patients," a term which implies passivity, helplessness, and dependence upon the care of others.Words like "patient" and "inmate" shouldn't be used as a substitute for a person's whole identity. It's sloppy writing, and made me question just how much thought Weinman was putting into curating this collection.
All the pieces in this book were previously published elsewhere between 2020 and 2022, in publications like GQ, Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, and The Atlantic, and are arranged in three sections. The first is "What We Reckon With," and is mostly crime reporting and highly infuriating, both in the crimes that go unsolved because of prejudice and the ones that go unprosecuted because of privilege.
The second section is "The True Crime Stories We Tell," which, according to Weinman, "gives space to critical examinations of the genre and those who helped shape it." This includes a piece by Amanda Knox asking Who Owns Amanda Knox?, and an examination of Edna Buchanan and what it means to be a crime reporter when you have to depend on the police for your information. In that same vein, it also has Lara Bazelon's David Simon Made Baltimore Detectives Famous. Now Their Cases Are Falling Apart. Has Reality Caught Up to the "Murder Police"?, which should be required reading for anyone who read David Simon's Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets or ever watched Homicide: Life on the Streets or The Wire.
The third and final section is "Shards of Justice," which "offers some paths forward, both for our deeply fissured legal system and for the true crime genre itself." Here I can recommend Amelia Schonbek's Will You Ever Change? about restorative justice and the practice of surrogate dialogue, and Keri Blakinger's The Prisoner-Run Radio Station That's Reaching Men on Death Row. Both are on hard topics and both are excellent.
Fighting to put my thoughts into some kind of order for this review made me realize that this collection does reckon with many of the things it sets out to address, but it took me several hours to reach that conclusion. I had a different feeling while reading it, and at the time it seemed like the pieces she selected didn't, collectively, drive hard enough to prove her point. A brief introduction to each section may have helped to direct the reader's attention to particular themes and made this feel more cohesive.
I picked this up because I enjoyed Weinman's previous collection, Unspeakable Acts. Its argument felt better supported, and the writing really felt like true crime, good true crime, dramatic stories about people whose lives have been touched by violence, with just the faintest greasing of sleaze. Because enjoying true crime means having to grapple with your own curiosity and asking yourself, really, is this truly any of our business? In the case of this book, Evidence of Things Seen, being more reporting than rubbernecking, yes, it is absolutely our business. It's our responsibility to make sure our systems aren't punishing people solely because of what color they, and we can't change the things that need fixing if we don't know what's wrong. So give this a read, just go into it knowing it's journalism, not true crime.
Contains: Everything, but especially descriptions of violence, including racial, domestic, and sexual violence; child harm/death, including sexual abuse; animal harm/death; sex work, some forced; racism; incarceration and capital punishment.
August 4, 2023
As a criminal justice professional, collections of articles pertaining to my line of work are fascinating to read. True progress in this world depends on evidence based studies and stories. This collection of articles was well picked and gave an array of topics from the popular true crime to the reality of domestic violence. An article that resonated with myself was “Will You Ever Change?” By Amelia Schonbek. This article discusses a domestic violence dialogue program, giving survivors and perpetrator an opportunity to talk and make sense of their experiences. Criminal justice is a broken system in America, and these stories reflect people who are doing the work to make a change. I found a majority of the stories to be fascinating, however I skimmed through a few. If you are fascinated by the various subcategories of criminal
Justice, this collection is worth the read.
Justice, this collection is worth the read.
July 20, 2023
Even if you don’t engage with it, it’s kind of hard to ignore the vast amount of true crime media that is available to us today. Podcasts, documentaries, books, magazine articles…it’s everywhere. And as this genre has grown, so have the number of critiques levied against it.
Evidence of Things Seen is an essay collection exploring this rise of true crime obsession, the valid critiques of the genre, and how it has impacted the criminal justice system. It features articles about crimes that have been neglected by the system, police brutality, and restorative justice and is an essential read for anyone who has ever watched Dateline or read I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. I think everyone can learn something from this book.
Despite the heavy subject matter, the format of this book is easily digestible. The essay format makes it easy to pick this one up when you have time, and if you read it on audio, it feels like you’re listening to a podcast.
My one gripe is that almost all of the essays have been previously published in other media outlets, so if you’re someone who keeps up with crime and justice news, a lot of the content might be familiar. But, if you’re brand new to it, you’re in for a fascinating journey.
Evidence of Things Seen is available now. Thanks to Ecco and NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.
Evidence of Things Seen is an essay collection exploring this rise of true crime obsession, the valid critiques of the genre, and how it has impacted the criminal justice system. It features articles about crimes that have been neglected by the system, police brutality, and restorative justice and is an essential read for anyone who has ever watched Dateline or read I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. I think everyone can learn something from this book.
Despite the heavy subject matter, the format of this book is easily digestible. The essay format makes it easy to pick this one up when you have time, and if you read it on audio, it feels like you’re listening to a podcast.
My one gripe is that almost all of the essays have been previously published in other media outlets, so if you’re someone who keeps up with crime and justice news, a lot of the content might be familiar. But, if you’re brand new to it, you’re in for a fascinating journey.
Evidence of Things Seen is available now. Thanks to Ecco and NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.
August 25, 2023
I really enjoyed this anthology for the most part, but I was pretty confused throughout. The introduction addresses True Crime as entertainment (TCE*) and how it’s actually beneficial to society as a tool to increase advocacy and agency for victims of crimes. But there’s really only two essays that address TCE at all (one where a true crime fanatics FB group discovered that a “distressed wife” was actually an unwed scammer, and one where protesters were using social media to help track down their missing friend after cops put off on doing anything). The rest of the essays were beautifully written (for the most part), enlightening, and easy to read, but they were about crimes that were committed and how the justice system is designed to fail many minority groups. That’s a valid criticism of society and it definitely deserves more awareness. But I was looking forward to a book addressing how TCE is affecting society and the pros and cons, and that’s just not what I got from this book. Overall, I did really enjoy “Evidence of Things Seen” and I learned a lot, so I’d recommend that everyone read this book. Just be aware that you’re getting somewhat of a different book than advertised.
* This is my own abbreviation since I didn’t want to type out “True Crime as Entertainment” 800 times.
Date Read: 08/22/23 - 08/23/23
* This is my own abbreviation since I didn’t want to type out “True Crime as Entertainment” 800 times.
Date Read: 08/22/23 - 08/23/23
September 14, 2023
Although true crime readers will devour this book, it is unlike the majority of other books that focus on true crimes.
First, this is an anthology of recent pieces that were published in a variety of newspapers, magazines and online sites. Second, it is likely most readers will not have heard of most of these cases (maybe all). There are no serial killers here.
Most importantly, these essays focus on crime by looking at a variety of related topics that Americans really need to start discussing more: gender, socioeconomics, justice, race, religion, policing, rehabilitation, revenge, white collar criminals, cycles of violence, alcoholism, alternatives to prison, and more. Each story was fascinating--the book reminded me of the series (no longer being made) Best American Crime Stories.
Each essay is well-written and compelling and--I hope--will make other readers really think about their own notions of justice, crime, and blame.
First, this is an anthology of recent pieces that were published in a variety of newspapers, magazines and online sites. Second, it is likely most readers will not have heard of most of these cases (maybe all). There are no serial killers here.
Most importantly, these essays focus on crime by looking at a variety of related topics that Americans really need to start discussing more: gender, socioeconomics, justice, race, religion, policing, rehabilitation, revenge, white collar criminals, cycles of violence, alcoholism, alternatives to prison, and more. Each story was fascinating--the book reminded me of the series (no longer being made) Best American Crime Stories.
Each essay is well-written and compelling and--I hope--will make other readers really think about their own notions of justice, crime, and blame.
December 28, 2023
This book was not what I thought it was. And I’m not MAD about that. It’s solid. It’s good. It’s interesting. Like all anthologies, some essays are high points and some are low.
… but what I THOUGHT it was, what it was billed to me as. A series of essays looking at the true crime genre, its benefits, its failures, its shortcomings, how it impacts society and the families involved in the crimes it focuses on, etc. That book would’ve been great.
And this book is good. Don’t get me wrong. A collection of impactful essays WITHIN the true crime genre, not looking AT the genre. But I just wanted something else.
… but what I THOUGHT it was, what it was billed to me as. A series of essays looking at the true crime genre, its benefits, its failures, its shortcomings, how it impacts society and the families involved in the crimes it focuses on, etc. That book would’ve been great.
And this book is good. Don’t get me wrong. A collection of impactful essays WITHIN the true crime genre, not looking AT the genre. But I just wanted something else.
August 15, 2023
I overall enjoyed this book: it had interesting stories regarding current issues in the CJS. Some chapters were a bit more engaging than others though.
Loved the intro by Rabia. It got me excited to continue reading but the book never returned to that same excitement (except maybe the 3rd chapter on women killing their abusers).
Loved the intro by Rabia. It got me excited to continue reading but the book never returned to that same excitement (except maybe the 3rd chapter on women killing their abusers).
May 15, 2024
This is a collection of essays, compiled, together or relating true crime. Most of them, or less about me, too, it of what happened, and more about the impacts these things have on culture, or in general, just the cultural climate. I really enjoyed the personal essay from Amanda Knox, and the one on women in prison. Overall though this was just okay!
March 13, 2024
Disturbing, fascinating, infuriating, thought-provoking, and full of trigger warnings, this essay collection focused on true crime is, as all anthologies are, uneven in its storytelling. However, I was absorbed the whole time.
4 stars instead of 5 because the subtitle is misleading. Besides a brief mention in the forward, this book really has no "reckoning" to speak of.
4 stars instead of 5 because the subtitle is misleading. Besides a brief mention in the forward, this book really has no "reckoning" to speak of.
June 24, 2023
I won this book in a Goodreads giveaway. Thank you Goodreads, Ecco and HarperCollins Publishers, and Editor Sarah Weinman. This is a collection of previously published articles with a common theme of social justice.
Overall, I found it an enjoyable and enlightening reading experience with a lot of food for thought. I had already read one of the stories by chance in its original form though, and I don’t read many magazines at all these days.
The selections were a little uneven, some being stronger than others, but I think that’s to be expected and wholly subjective. Then there is at least one piece that is well-written, but doesn’t seem to fall under the subject of social justice.
However for the most part, this was time well spent, with the caveat that if you read many magazines, you may have already seen the bulk of this material. Then again, you may want it all collected in one place anyway—it’s that good.
Overall, I found it an enjoyable and enlightening reading experience with a lot of food for thought. I had already read one of the stories by chance in its original form though, and I don’t read many magazines at all these days.
The selections were a little uneven, some being stronger than others, but I think that’s to be expected and wholly subjective. Then there is at least one piece that is well-written, but doesn’t seem to fall under the subject of social justice.
However for the most part, this was time well spent, with the caveat that if you read many magazines, you may have already seen the bulk of this material. Then again, you may want it all collected in one place anyway—it’s that good.
July 29, 2023
I really liked this collection of articles. I’m not a huge consumer of true crime but liked this collection and the texts. The variety of the topics selected was really great and thought provoking.
September 19, 2023
Basically the articles republished in this book want to upend all the clear-cut narrative arcs (as given in the pitch for the book too) of ‘victim wronged’, ‘police in pursuit’, ‘suspect apprehended’ and ‘justice delivered.’ The stories that resonated with me were those of the victims of Atlanta Spa shootings, the missing Native American women of California and the story of Dhawan family. Memorable Quotes from each article are reproduced below:
‘True crime cannot be divorced from society because crime is a permanent reflection and culmination of what ails society’ - Sarah Weinman
PART 1: WHAT WE RECKON WITH:
- A Brutal Lynching. An Indifferent Police Force. A 34-Year Wait for Justice by Wesley Lowery. Originally published in GQ, July 2020.
[23 year old Timothy Coggins of rural community in Spalding, Atlanta stabbed, tortured and killed in 1983 by Frankie Gebhardt (and murder ‘watched’ on by) Bill Moore Sr., white brothers-in-law who lived in the trailer park near where Coggins’s body was found.]
- The Short Life of Toyin Salau and a Legacy Still at Work by Samantha Schuyler. Originally published on Jezebel, August 2020.
[19 year old Oluwatoyin Sala killed by Aaron Glee.]
Without (young Black women who agitated about Toyin’s disappearance) Toyin’s name could have been swept to the side, like any of the 64,000 or more Black women and girls who are currently missing in the United States, a statistic only exacerbated by the well-documented disparity that Black women’s disappearances are often erased by police and in the press—what Gwen Ifill once nicknamed “Missing White Woman Syndrome.”
- “No Choice but to Do It”: Why Women Go to Prison by Justine van der Leun. Originally published in the New Republic, in partnership with the Appeal, December 2020.
[Kevin Amos 19, killed by girlfriend Tanisha William’s roommate drug dealer Patrick Martin. She got 20-40 year sentence to Martin's life without parole.]
‘Women’s prisons are populated not only by abuse and assault survivors, but by people who are incarcerated for their acts of survival. About 230,000 women and girls are incarcerated, an increase of more than 700% since 1980. (versus more than two million imprisoned men). (My findings suggest) conservatively, more than 4,400 women and girls are serving lengthy sentences for acts of survival.
The court appointed William White, a private attorney with a county contract, as Tanisha’s defender. According to a letter that White later wrote to the judge, he was constrained by a “$1,000 cap” on his legal work for Tanisha. He billed for 36.5 hours, which means that, unless he was granted a fee extension, he was paid $27.40 per hour—a rate that diminished the more he worked. A homicide case, according to David Moran, of the Michigan Innocence Clinic, “is the legal equivalent of performing brain surgery."
(A 2008 National Legal Aid & Defender Association report on Michigan’s indigent defense systems reported that) the fixed-rate system created “a conflict of interests between a lawyer’s ethical duty to competently defend each and every client and her financial self-interests that require her to invest the least amount of time possible in each case to maximize profit,” according to the report.
- The Golden Age of White-Collar Crime by Michael Hobbes. Originally published in HuffPost Highline, February 2020.
With few exceptions, the only rich people America prosecutes anymore are those who victimize their fellow elites.
- Picturesque California Conceals a Crisis of Missing Indigenous Women by Brandi Morin. Originally published in National Geographic, March 2022.
The National Information Crime Center, a federal agency, has documented more than 5,000 cases of missing Indigenous women. Experts say the real number is likely higher. 84% of Indigenous women experience some form of violence during their lifetimes while those living on reservations are killed at 10 times the national murder rate.
“A lot of times the places they go missing from are extremely rural,” Lucchesi says. “There’s a lack of services, a lack of transportation, and a lack of opportunity.”
That’s especially true in California. The state as a whole has the highest Native American population in the United States—more than 750,000 people belonging to nearly 200 tribes, many of them living in the sprawling metropolises of Los Angeles and San Francisco. Yet those urban areas appear to be far less dangerous for Indigenous women than rural northern California, with its soaring redwood forests and rugged shoreline. There, at least 107 women have been murdered or gone missing since 1900, twice the number as in the Bay Area, where the Indigenous population is three times the size.
- How the Atlanta Spa Shootings—the Victims, the Survivors—Tell the Story of America by May Jeong. Originally published in Vanity Fair, March 2022.
[Shootings at 3 parlors: Young’s Asian Massage Parlor, Gold Parlor and Aromatherapy Parlor, for which a customer Mario González was arrested, the eventual arrested suspect is not named, while names and stories of all of the Asian workers who died are given.]
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, known as Hart-Celler, ended the quota-based immigration system and specifically encouraged immigration from Asia and Africa. The Asian population in America grew from 63,000 people in 1870 to 12 million in 2000, and that number has nearly doubled since. They came to America as members of educated professional classes who, in the new country, became Gujarati hotel operators, Korean shopkeepers, Vietnamese nail salon owners, and Hmong chicken farmers.
(Spa Work) is as common in immigrant communities as it is misunderstood. According to Georgia state human-trafficking awareness training, people with limited English skills living at their place of work is considered a sign of sex trafficking, yet these are standard practices among workers. The work itself might mean ordinary massages, or it might mean massages that include erotic services—specifically manual stimulation, which some workers do not think of as sex work, as it doesn’t involve penetration.
Workers like Kim Grant can make as much as $20,000 in a good month. That money supports families in this country and the other. Whatever remains is spent by visiting “room salons” or “host bars,” part of a larger world of night culture that originated in Japan and became popular across Asia and in diaspora communities called mizu shobai, the “water trade,” where hosts and hostesses lit cigarettes, poured drinks, and provided sexualized company while encouraging patrons to spend more, for which they received a cut. Host bars traditionally catered to men looking for female companions, but in recent times, bars catering to female customers have sprung up, which spa workers often patronized. Money also flows into private gambling dens, where workers get together to play Go-Stop, a Korean card game, or participate in kye, a kind of kitty, meaning “bond,” the informal lending system used by many immigrants with no access to official banking systems. Kye has been crucial to newcomers who are locked out of traditional labor markets due to a lack of language skills or discriminatory practices, and wish to start their own businesses. Ivan Light of UCLA estimated that as much as 40 percent of Korean-owned businesses in Los Angeles have been financed via kye, which has a social as much as an economic function, and together with the water trade is among the few ways people like Kim had of staving off the incurable loneliness that is central to immigrant life.
Daoyou Feng paid for her mother’s eye surgery; her nephew’s school fees; her sister-in-law’s business expenses; weddings & funerals of relatives and neighbors. she sent extra money for holidays; paid to renovate her parents’ house, as well as for the mortgage on her oldest brother’s house; At various times, Feng supported 10 family members.
The family considered repatriating her body back to China, but according to an ancient local tradition, unmarried daughters who die away from home cannot be buried in their ancestral village....Her brother did not travel to U.S....She was interred in U.S. after her body lay unclaimed in the county morgue for 19 days. Her funeral was attended by sympathetic strangers, no friends or colleagues, many of whom were asylum seekers or of otherwise precarious immigration status.....(her family simply prayed for her in village's ancestral tomb).
Chinese laborers in the South were among the earliest Asians to migrate to the U.S. from the mid to late 19th century. Anxious white plantation owners hired them during Reconstruction. The first Chinese in Georgia came as contract laborers in 1873, when an Indianapolis construction company brought in 200 Chinese workers to help build the Augusta Canal. Although Chinese labor completed much of the public infrastructure work in Georgia at this time, including railroads and bridges, according to Emory University history professor Chris Suh, the Chinese population was scrubbed from history, subsumed into the Black-white binary of the American South.
These immigrants aided in the “economic transition from raw extraction to something approaching industrial capitalism,” as Alexander Saxton writes in The Indispensable Enemy, but were reduced to their basic economic function—treated later as “high-tech coolies,” says Mount Holyoke College associate professor Iyko Day, pointedly using the slur, derived from the Tamil word kuli, as in “wages.” South Asian and Syrian merchants traveled across the American South into the early 20th century, hawking rugs and fabric, or chinoiserie. Then Methodist missionaries began recruiting students from Korea, Japan, and the Philippines to study at Duke, Emory, and Vanderbilt universities.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, known as Hart-Celler, ended the quota-based immigration system and specifically encouraged immigration from Asia and Africa. The Asian population in America grew from 63,000 people in 1870 to 12 million in 2000, and that number has nearly doubled since. They came to America as members of educated professional classes who, in the new country, became Gujarati hotel operators, Korean shopkeepers, Vietnamese nail salon owners, and Hmong chicken farmers.
Woodstock, Georgia, was Cherokee country before its original inhabitants, who had been in the area for 11,000 years, were displaced by white settlers around the mid-1700s. On May 28, 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, codifying into law the forcible removal of 15,000 Cherokee people from what is today their namesake county. The white settlers panned for gold in nearby rivers, purchased Black people as slaves, and opened chicken-processing plants, still in operation nearly two centuries later.
Woodstock....today is almost 80 percent white. It is the hometown of at least two notable figures: Dean Rusk and Eugene Booth. Rusk, who later became secretary of state, was responsible for splitting the Korean peninsula in two using a foldout map from a copy of National Geographic. The line “made no sense economically or geographically,” he later admitted, but it allowed American occupying forces to take control of Seoul, a decision that would divide families for generations. Booth was a nuclear physicist and core member of the Manhattan Project, which led to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, killing as many as 250,000 civilians, according to some estimates.
He was a typical mass shooter in that he was white and male. He was unusual in his age—21; the average is 33—and in the fact that, unlike 60 percent of American mass shooters, he did not appear to have a violent history, nor any prior convictions, at least none in the public record. There had been no known childhood trauma, either. He was a product of his social world.
PART II: THE TRUE CRIME STORIES WE TELL:
-Who Owns Amanda Knox? by Amanda Knox. Originally published in the Atlantic, July 2021.
[Rudy Guede convicted of murdering Meredith Kercher. Knox convicted, acquitted, as was her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito. Now, she has a podcast ‘Labyrinths’ and has ‘written journalism’.]
Does my name belong to me? Does my face? What about my life? My story? Why is my name used to refer to events I had no hand in? I return to these questions again and again because others continue to profit off my identity, and my trauma, without my consent.My name is the only name that shouldn’t be in that headline.
- Tie a Tourniquet on Your Heart: Revisiting Edna Buchanan, America’s Greatest Police Reporter by Diana Moskovitz. Originally published in Popula, July 2020.
(1987 book by Buchanan ‘The Corpse had a Familiar Face’) What struck me, from page one onward, was how police positive it was. How it is littered with calls for tougher justice, using victims as props to demand harsher sentences, and how it ignored all the ways American society sets people up to break the law in the first place. How bad behavior by officers—even the one Buchanan briefly married—is condemned, but never really traced back to any larger issue.
There are moments when she seems to be upholding the values of each and every life....“There is no dirt-bag murder.” But elsewhere she offers the startling observation that most people have nothing to fear in Miami, because the vast majority of victims “contribute to their own demise.”
“They deal drugs, steal, rob, or stray with somebody else’s mate until a stop is put to them,” Buchanan writes. “Most Miami murder victims have arrest records, most have drugs, alcohol, or both aboard when somebody sinks their ship.” “You should not pity most criminals, either; tie a tourniquet on your heart. Sad and sleazy losers are easy to feel sorry for, until you recall what they have done, over and over and over, and will continue to do, given the chance. They say all they need is a break, but if you check it out, you find they’ve used up lots of them.”
To be a great police reporter—the kind editors champion, the kind that gets raises and promotions, the kind that wins a Pulitzer—you have to be friends with a lot of cops.
The older I get, the more I wonder why nobody ever asked why my job was necessary, why everyone believes we live in a world filled with crime (we do not) and that it must include crime reporters.
- The True Crime Junkies and the Curious Case of a Missing Husband by RF Jurjevics. Originally published in Vice, August 2021.
[True Crime Junkies, a Facebook group, started and co-administered by Melania Boninsegna.
In 2019, it covered the case of Tatiana Badra’s ‘husband’ Ethan Rendlen, missing, later found dead, undetermined causes]
It was a maddening situation for the family. Rendlen was unable to see what those who loved him found obvious: he was being conned. But, like any good scam, Badra’s had begun with developing a powerful psychological hold over Rendlen. Those mechanics of manipulation don’t “happen overnight,” said Alexandra Stein, a visiting research fellow at London South Bank University who specializes in the study of cults and dangerous social relationships. “This is a process. You get the initial come-on, which is very nice and flattering, and creates rapport and starts building trust.” Badra’s seeming generosity with her inherited money, coupled with constant tales of distress, made for a persuasive lure: a “love-bomb,” in which the victim is showered with attention, affection, and sometimes gifts. Rendlen’s appointment as a knight in shining armor to her constant distress was the clincher. Badra also kept Rendlen isolated from his family, managing to convince him that he had been molested as a child by a relative. “Scammers work with fear,” Stein explained. “A corollary relatedness is urgency: ‘if you don’t help me now, I’m going to lose my child, my house, my life.’ And also the threat that you might lose a relationship that purports to be beneficial to you, but is actually causing you chronic stress. That creates a trauma bond. All of these things work to prevent you [from] using your systematic thinking.”
- Has Reality Caught Up to the “Murder Police”? by Lara Bazelon. Originally published on the Cut, in partnership with the Garrison Project, January 2022, as “David Simon Made Baltimore Detectives Famous. Now Their Cases Are Falling Apart.”
[1986: Faheem Ali killed by ____ ; Baltimore homicide detectives Thomas Pellegrini, Richard Fahlteich, and Oscar “The Bunk” Reque pressured 12-year-old Otis Robinson who falsely identified 25 year old black man Gary Washington. Washington's lawyers presented witnesses who said the killer was Lawrence Thomas. In 2018 conviction was overturned. At 57, he walked free.]
Since 1989, 25 men convicted of murder in Baltimore have been exonerated, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
PART III: SHARDS OF JUSTICE:
- Will You Ever Change? by Amelia Schonbek. Originally published in New York Magazine, July 2021.
[About Domestic Violence Safe Dialogue program and its participants.]
- The Prisoner-Run Radio Station That’s Reaching Men on Death Row by Keri Blakinger
Originally published by the Marshall Project, in partnership with the Guardian, December 2021.
[106.5 FM The Tank, Texas’ Polunsky prison’s own radio station, started in 2020, doesn’t have the fame or following of San Quentin’s Ear Hustle podcast.]
- To the Son of the Victim by Sophie Haigney. Originally published in Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us, edited by Colleen Kinder, and republished in the Paris Review, March 2022.
You were generous to me on a day when you had no reason to be. I wish I’d been kinder in return.
- Three Bodies in Texas by Mallika Rao. Originally published in the Believer, March 2022.
[In Jan. 2014: A stay-at-home mom & former software engineer, Pallavi Dhawan accused of murdering her 10 year old son Arnav, who suffered from health problems; COD undetermined. She was depressed, husband wanted to leave, all allegedly.]
On September 4, 2014, Pallavi and Sumeet Dhawan were both found dead at their home. They were determined to have ingested sleeping pills—Pallavi, a fatal dose; Sumeet, not enough to kill him, according to an autopsy report. He’d died from a fatal blow to the head by a cricket bat. Pallavi had drowned in the backyard swimming pool. The couple were days away from the grand jury trial that would either convict or acquit her.
‘True crime cannot be divorced from society because crime is a permanent reflection and culmination of what ails society’ - Sarah Weinman
PART 1: WHAT WE RECKON WITH:
- A Brutal Lynching. An Indifferent Police Force. A 34-Year Wait for Justice by Wesley Lowery. Originally published in GQ, July 2020.
[23 year old Timothy Coggins of rural community in Spalding, Atlanta stabbed, tortured and killed in 1983 by Frankie Gebhardt (and murder ‘watched’ on by) Bill Moore Sr., white brothers-in-law who lived in the trailer park near where Coggins’s body was found.]
- The Short Life of Toyin Salau and a Legacy Still at Work by Samantha Schuyler. Originally published on Jezebel, August 2020.
[19 year old Oluwatoyin Sala killed by Aaron Glee.]
Without (young Black women who agitated about Toyin’s disappearance) Toyin’s name could have been swept to the side, like any of the 64,000 or more Black women and girls who are currently missing in the United States, a statistic only exacerbated by the well-documented disparity that Black women’s disappearances are often erased by police and in the press—what Gwen Ifill once nicknamed “Missing White Woman Syndrome.”
- “No Choice but to Do It”: Why Women Go to Prison by Justine van der Leun. Originally published in the New Republic, in partnership with the Appeal, December 2020.
[Kevin Amos 19, killed by girlfriend Tanisha William’s roommate drug dealer Patrick Martin. She got 20-40 year sentence to Martin's life without parole.]
‘Women’s prisons are populated not only by abuse and assault survivors, but by people who are incarcerated for their acts of survival. About 230,000 women and girls are incarcerated, an increase of more than 700% since 1980. (versus more than two million imprisoned men). (My findings suggest) conservatively, more than 4,400 women and girls are serving lengthy sentences for acts of survival.
The court appointed William White, a private attorney with a county contract, as Tanisha’s defender. According to a letter that White later wrote to the judge, he was constrained by a “$1,000 cap” on his legal work for Tanisha. He billed for 36.5 hours, which means that, unless he was granted a fee extension, he was paid $27.40 per hour—a rate that diminished the more he worked. A homicide case, according to David Moran, of the Michigan Innocence Clinic, “is the legal equivalent of performing brain surgery."
(A 2008 National Legal Aid & Defender Association report on Michigan’s indigent defense systems reported that) the fixed-rate system created “a conflict of interests between a lawyer’s ethical duty to competently defend each and every client and her financial self-interests that require her to invest the least amount of time possible in each case to maximize profit,” according to the report.
- The Golden Age of White-Collar Crime by Michael Hobbes. Originally published in HuffPost Highline, February 2020.
With few exceptions, the only rich people America prosecutes anymore are those who victimize their fellow elites.
- Picturesque California Conceals a Crisis of Missing Indigenous Women by Brandi Morin. Originally published in National Geographic, March 2022.
The National Information Crime Center, a federal agency, has documented more than 5,000 cases of missing Indigenous women. Experts say the real number is likely higher. 84% of Indigenous women experience some form of violence during their lifetimes while those living on reservations are killed at 10 times the national murder rate.
“A lot of times the places they go missing from are extremely rural,” Lucchesi says. “There’s a lack of services, a lack of transportation, and a lack of opportunity.”
That’s especially true in California. The state as a whole has the highest Native American population in the United States—more than 750,000 people belonging to nearly 200 tribes, many of them living in the sprawling metropolises of Los Angeles and San Francisco. Yet those urban areas appear to be far less dangerous for Indigenous women than rural northern California, with its soaring redwood forests and rugged shoreline. There, at least 107 women have been murdered or gone missing since 1900, twice the number as in the Bay Area, where the Indigenous population is three times the size.
- How the Atlanta Spa Shootings—the Victims, the Survivors—Tell the Story of America by May Jeong. Originally published in Vanity Fair, March 2022.
[Shootings at 3 parlors: Young’s Asian Massage Parlor, Gold Parlor and Aromatherapy Parlor, for which a customer Mario González was arrested, the eventual arrested suspect is not named, while names and stories of all of the Asian workers who died are given.]
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, known as Hart-Celler, ended the quota-based immigration system and specifically encouraged immigration from Asia and Africa. The Asian population in America grew from 63,000 people in 1870 to 12 million in 2000, and that number has nearly doubled since. They came to America as members of educated professional classes who, in the new country, became Gujarati hotel operators, Korean shopkeepers, Vietnamese nail salon owners, and Hmong chicken farmers.
(Spa Work) is as common in immigrant communities as it is misunderstood. According to Georgia state human-trafficking awareness training, people with limited English skills living at their place of work is considered a sign of sex trafficking, yet these are standard practices among workers. The work itself might mean ordinary massages, or it might mean massages that include erotic services—specifically manual stimulation, which some workers do not think of as sex work, as it doesn’t involve penetration.
Workers like Kim Grant can make as much as $20,000 in a good month. That money supports families in this country and the other. Whatever remains is spent by visiting “room salons” or “host bars,” part of a larger world of night culture that originated in Japan and became popular across Asia and in diaspora communities called mizu shobai, the “water trade,” where hosts and hostesses lit cigarettes, poured drinks, and provided sexualized company while encouraging patrons to spend more, for which they received a cut. Host bars traditionally catered to men looking for female companions, but in recent times, bars catering to female customers have sprung up, which spa workers often patronized. Money also flows into private gambling dens, where workers get together to play Go-Stop, a Korean card game, or participate in kye, a kind of kitty, meaning “bond,” the informal lending system used by many immigrants with no access to official banking systems. Kye has been crucial to newcomers who are locked out of traditional labor markets due to a lack of language skills or discriminatory practices, and wish to start their own businesses. Ivan Light of UCLA estimated that as much as 40 percent of Korean-owned businesses in Los Angeles have been financed via kye, which has a social as much as an economic function, and together with the water trade is among the few ways people like Kim had of staving off the incurable loneliness that is central to immigrant life.
Daoyou Feng paid for her mother’s eye surgery; her nephew’s school fees; her sister-in-law’s business expenses; weddings & funerals of relatives and neighbors. she sent extra money for holidays; paid to renovate her parents’ house, as well as for the mortgage on her oldest brother’s house; At various times, Feng supported 10 family members.
The family considered repatriating her body back to China, but according to an ancient local tradition, unmarried daughters who die away from home cannot be buried in their ancestral village....Her brother did not travel to U.S....She was interred in U.S. after her body lay unclaimed in the county morgue for 19 days. Her funeral was attended by sympathetic strangers, no friends or colleagues, many of whom were asylum seekers or of otherwise precarious immigration status.....(her family simply prayed for her in village's ancestral tomb).
Chinese laborers in the South were among the earliest Asians to migrate to the U.S. from the mid to late 19th century. Anxious white plantation owners hired them during Reconstruction. The first Chinese in Georgia came as contract laborers in 1873, when an Indianapolis construction company brought in 200 Chinese workers to help build the Augusta Canal. Although Chinese labor completed much of the public infrastructure work in Georgia at this time, including railroads and bridges, according to Emory University history professor Chris Suh, the Chinese population was scrubbed from history, subsumed into the Black-white binary of the American South.
These immigrants aided in the “economic transition from raw extraction to something approaching industrial capitalism,” as Alexander Saxton writes in The Indispensable Enemy, but were reduced to their basic economic function—treated later as “high-tech coolies,” says Mount Holyoke College associate professor Iyko Day, pointedly using the slur, derived from the Tamil word kuli, as in “wages.” South Asian and Syrian merchants traveled across the American South into the early 20th century, hawking rugs and fabric, or chinoiserie. Then Methodist missionaries began recruiting students from Korea, Japan, and the Philippines to study at Duke, Emory, and Vanderbilt universities.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, known as Hart-Celler, ended the quota-based immigration system and specifically encouraged immigration from Asia and Africa. The Asian population in America grew from 63,000 people in 1870 to 12 million in 2000, and that number has nearly doubled since. They came to America as members of educated professional classes who, in the new country, became Gujarati hotel operators, Korean shopkeepers, Vietnamese nail salon owners, and Hmong chicken farmers.
Woodstock, Georgia, was Cherokee country before its original inhabitants, who had been in the area for 11,000 years, were displaced by white settlers around the mid-1700s. On May 28, 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, codifying into law the forcible removal of 15,000 Cherokee people from what is today their namesake county. The white settlers panned for gold in nearby rivers, purchased Black people as slaves, and opened chicken-processing plants, still in operation nearly two centuries later.
Woodstock....today is almost 80 percent white. It is the hometown of at least two notable figures: Dean Rusk and Eugene Booth. Rusk, who later became secretary of state, was responsible for splitting the Korean peninsula in two using a foldout map from a copy of National Geographic. The line “made no sense economically or geographically,” he later admitted, but it allowed American occupying forces to take control of Seoul, a decision that would divide families for generations. Booth was a nuclear physicist and core member of the Manhattan Project, which led to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, killing as many as 250,000 civilians, according to some estimates.
He was a typical mass shooter in that he was white and male. He was unusual in his age—21; the average is 33—and in the fact that, unlike 60 percent of American mass shooters, he did not appear to have a violent history, nor any prior convictions, at least none in the public record. There had been no known childhood trauma, either. He was a product of his social world.
PART II: THE TRUE CRIME STORIES WE TELL:
-Who Owns Amanda Knox? by Amanda Knox. Originally published in the Atlantic, July 2021.
[Rudy Guede convicted of murdering Meredith Kercher. Knox convicted, acquitted, as was her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito. Now, she has a podcast ‘Labyrinths’ and has ‘written journalism’.]
Does my name belong to me? Does my face? What about my life? My story? Why is my name used to refer to events I had no hand in? I return to these questions again and again because others continue to profit off my identity, and my trauma, without my consent.My name is the only name that shouldn’t be in that headline.
- Tie a Tourniquet on Your Heart: Revisiting Edna Buchanan, America’s Greatest Police Reporter by Diana Moskovitz. Originally published in Popula, July 2020.
(1987 book by Buchanan ‘The Corpse had a Familiar Face’) What struck me, from page one onward, was how police positive it was. How it is littered with calls for tougher justice, using victims as props to demand harsher sentences, and how it ignored all the ways American society sets people up to break the law in the first place. How bad behavior by officers—even the one Buchanan briefly married—is condemned, but never really traced back to any larger issue.
There are moments when she seems to be upholding the values of each and every life....“There is no dirt-bag murder.” But elsewhere she offers the startling observation that most people have nothing to fear in Miami, because the vast majority of victims “contribute to their own demise.”
“They deal drugs, steal, rob, or stray with somebody else’s mate until a stop is put to them,” Buchanan writes. “Most Miami murder victims have arrest records, most have drugs, alcohol, or both aboard when somebody sinks their ship.” “You should not pity most criminals, either; tie a tourniquet on your heart. Sad and sleazy losers are easy to feel sorry for, until you recall what they have done, over and over and over, and will continue to do, given the chance. They say all they need is a break, but if you check it out, you find they’ve used up lots of them.”
To be a great police reporter—the kind editors champion, the kind that gets raises and promotions, the kind that wins a Pulitzer—you have to be friends with a lot of cops.
The older I get, the more I wonder why nobody ever asked why my job was necessary, why everyone believes we live in a world filled with crime (we do not) and that it must include crime reporters.
- The True Crime Junkies and the Curious Case of a Missing Husband by RF Jurjevics. Originally published in Vice, August 2021.
[True Crime Junkies, a Facebook group, started and co-administered by Melania Boninsegna.
In 2019, it covered the case of Tatiana Badra’s ‘husband’ Ethan Rendlen, missing, later found dead, undetermined causes]
It was a maddening situation for the family. Rendlen was unable to see what those who loved him found obvious: he was being conned. But, like any good scam, Badra’s had begun with developing a powerful psychological hold over Rendlen. Those mechanics of manipulation don’t “happen overnight,” said Alexandra Stein, a visiting research fellow at London South Bank University who specializes in the study of cults and dangerous social relationships. “This is a process. You get the initial come-on, which is very nice and flattering, and creates rapport and starts building trust.” Badra’s seeming generosity with her inherited money, coupled with constant tales of distress, made for a persuasive lure: a “love-bomb,” in which the victim is showered with attention, affection, and sometimes gifts. Rendlen’s appointment as a knight in shining armor to her constant distress was the clincher. Badra also kept Rendlen isolated from his family, managing to convince him that he had been molested as a child by a relative. “Scammers work with fear,” Stein explained. “A corollary relatedness is urgency: ‘if you don’t help me now, I’m going to lose my child, my house, my life.’ And also the threat that you might lose a relationship that purports to be beneficial to you, but is actually causing you chronic stress. That creates a trauma bond. All of these things work to prevent you [from] using your systematic thinking.”
- Has Reality Caught Up to the “Murder Police”? by Lara Bazelon. Originally published on the Cut, in partnership with the Garrison Project, January 2022, as “David Simon Made Baltimore Detectives Famous. Now Their Cases Are Falling Apart.”
[1986: Faheem Ali killed by ____ ; Baltimore homicide detectives Thomas Pellegrini, Richard Fahlteich, and Oscar “The Bunk” Reque pressured 12-year-old Otis Robinson who falsely identified 25 year old black man Gary Washington. Washington's lawyers presented witnesses who said the killer was Lawrence Thomas. In 2018 conviction was overturned. At 57, he walked free.]
Since 1989, 25 men convicted of murder in Baltimore have been exonerated, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
PART III: SHARDS OF JUSTICE:
- Will You Ever Change? by Amelia Schonbek. Originally published in New York Magazine, July 2021.
[About Domestic Violence Safe Dialogue program and its participants.]
- The Prisoner-Run Radio Station That’s Reaching Men on Death Row by Keri Blakinger
Originally published by the Marshall Project, in partnership with the Guardian, December 2021.
[106.5 FM The Tank, Texas’ Polunsky prison’s own radio station, started in 2020, doesn’t have the fame or following of San Quentin’s Ear Hustle podcast.]
- To the Son of the Victim by Sophie Haigney. Originally published in Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us, edited by Colleen Kinder, and republished in the Paris Review, March 2022.
You were generous to me on a day when you had no reason to be. I wish I’d been kinder in return.
- Three Bodies in Texas by Mallika Rao. Originally published in the Believer, March 2022.
[In Jan. 2014: A stay-at-home mom & former software engineer, Pallavi Dhawan accused of murdering her 10 year old son Arnav, who suffered from health problems; COD undetermined. She was depressed, husband wanted to leave, all allegedly.]
On September 4, 2014, Pallavi and Sumeet Dhawan were both found dead at their home. They were determined to have ingested sleeping pills—Pallavi, a fatal dose; Sumeet, not enough to kill him, according to an autopsy report. He’d died from a fatal blow to the head by a cricket bat. Pallavi had drowned in the backyard swimming pool. The couple were days away from the grand jury trial that would either convict or acquit her.
February 26, 2023
A collection of true crime adjacent essays that tackle a lot of important concepts. These essays have been published in other places previously so if you read a lot of magazines, this may not be new to you. However, I learned a lot of stories I’d never heard of before!
I received my copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
I received my copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
July 22, 2024
1.5 stars rounded up. There were two really great 5-star essays (#3 "No Choice But To Do It": Why Women Go to Prison and #4 The Golden Age of White Collar Crime). Those essays changed the way I think about women in prison (too many are domestic violence victims coerced into crimes) and about tax evasion/audits/corporate malpractice (pervasive crime we somehow care less about than petty crime). The rest of the essays were less revelatory, less compelling, and too long.
I listened to the audiobook. The reader used what I can only call a hesitant, wistful voice for almost every line in a way that had me feeling like the book couldn't end too soon.
I found this book on a Goodreads nonfiction list.
I listened to the audiobook. The reader used what I can only call a hesitant, wistful voice for almost every line in a way that had me feeling like the book couldn't end too soon.
I found this book on a Goodreads nonfiction list.
September 6, 2023
Curation of articles A+.
I wish the publisher had spruced the print book up a bit. I didn’t look up every article/essay included in the anthology but those I did were easily accessible and included graphics/pictures/etc. I wouldn’t buy the book for that reason.
If you are an avid true crime reader, this is a must read but take your time. It’s rough stuff and I found I needed time between each article.
I wish the publisher had spruced the print book up a bit. I didn’t look up every article/essay included in the anthology but those I did were easily accessible and included graphics/pictures/etc. I wouldn’t buy the book for that reason.
If you are an avid true crime reader, this is a must read but take your time. It’s rough stuff and I found I needed time between each article.
February 3, 2023
I really enjoyed this true crime anthology, thought not as much as Sarah Weinman's first edited collection. I really appreciate the attention to detail and the ethical writing these writers brought to their stories.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the free e-copy.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the free e-copy.
July 10, 2023
This is a collection of essays about criminology and criminal justice I didn’t even know I needed. I feel like I’ve just been injected with a huge dose of knowledge that’s going to take some time to totally soak in, but it feels almost like a vaccine: now that I have read and know these things I can’t unknow them and unthink them. Honestly, I don’t want to. I would rather have this inoculation–this knowledge–in my system than not. Because I have taken a bite of this apple and even though that apple was bitter, I am all the better for that bitter apple. The bitterness will help me remember to stay angry and remind me of my sadness while reading some of these essays.
Evidence of Things Seen is split up into three parts: What We Reckon With (essays about the types of crimes that highlight the social inequities in this country and why they continue to be an issue); The True Crime Stories We Tell (essays about how social media intersects with true crime and how that can affect the time in which a crime is solved or how it can negatively affect the parties involved); and, Shards of Justice (essays featuring discourse on the future of criminal justice).
The first part of the book, What We Reckon With, is by far the largest section of the book, as it takes up almost half of the collection. None of the essays in this collection are bad, but in this section, I found that I was captivated and felt most passionate about an essay called “‘No Choice but to Do It’: Why Women Go to Prison”, by Justine van der Leun, which calls into question why women who are forced to commit heinous crimes by their abusers under extreme duress (like the threat of murder) are charged alongside their abusers as if they are just as guilty of the crime instead of the victim of one. “The Golden Age of White-Collar Crime” by Michael Hobbes is a long essay I thought would bore me (which is a point made about white-collar crime in the essay itself) but actually managed to ensnare me instead by explaining very well how is it that every time another old, white man gets arrested for doing something heinous with money and destroying a bunch of people’s lives all he seems to manage to get is a couple of years in Club Fed. It’s a long but rewarding read. “Picturesque California Conceals a Crisis of Missing Indigenous Women” by Brandi Morin reports on a phenomenon that’s well-known to anyone who lives in Northern California (which I do, though not as far north as she’s reporting on), and that’s the extremely high rate of indigenous Native American women who just up and disappear from reservation lands in the upper third section of the state. If you’ve ever seen the true crime docuseries “Murder Mountain” or read up on “trimmigrants” (the migrant workers, largely female, who make the trek up to the Emerald Triangle every year to harvest the marijuana crop), you might be familiar with how during harvest season it’s not only indigenous women who go missing. It’s a serious problem in general in Northern California; but for Native American women it’s so much worse, because they just get snatched up off their reservations and are never seen again.
In part two, The True Crime Stories We Tell, there’s only one essay I didn’t like too much, and that was “Who Owns Amanda Knox?” by Amanda Knox. The essay itself brings up plenty of valid points about how it feels sometimes that she has a doppelganger walking around that is the Amanda Knox everyone thinks she is instead of the Amanda Knox she actually is and that’s the Amanda Knox people keep thinking they can vilify and make money off of. The only reason I disliked this essay is because it felt a bit whiny. I understand she feels truly victimized after being wrongfully convicted by the Italian government twice, but she has her own podcast and a platform with which to voice her frustrations. I just felt like her essay wasn’t at the same level as the rest included in this collection. The other three essays in this section are all equally interesting and well-written.
In part three, “Shards of Justice”, the first essay, “Will You Ever Change?” by Amelia Schonbek completely floored me. It’s one of the best essays in this whole collection in part because it talks about restorative justice, which is one of my favorite rehabilitation tactics to avoid recidivism rates. In this case, the type of restorative justice they’re talking about is surrogate dialogue. Surrogate dialogue takes the victim of a crime and a perpetrator of the same crime (but a completely unrelated one), and puts them at the same table across from one another. Each of them has an advocate and there is a facilitator to keep everyone in line and stand witness for the non-profit running the program. In order to engage in this program, the victim has to approach the program themself and the perpetrator (who has to be out of jail and be evaluated before being approved for the program) has to want to use this surrogate dialogue to help victims heal. It’s a community service. I found this essay to be touching and thought-provoking, because even though programs like this show great potential to reduce recidivism rates, no one wants to fund them.
Another highlight of this section is “The Prisoner-Run Radio Station That’s Reaching Men on Death Row” by Keri Blakinger, which touches on how music is a universal language, even in prison. It’s a touching and emotional essay about how even the residents of Death Row, cut off from Gen Pop, can be part of the great prisoner community by being allowed to write into their prison radio station and have their words heard or their song requests played.
Don’t forget to read the introduction or the editor’s note. They’re both interesting and informational reads. The introduction has a whole lot to say about the late, great author James Baldwin, who was writing essays about how systemic racism ran long and deep in our criminal justice system long before anyone was willing to listen.
I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.
File Under: 5 Star Review/Anthology/Biography/History/Nonfiction/True Crime
Evidence of Things Seen is split up into three parts: What We Reckon With (essays about the types of crimes that highlight the social inequities in this country and why they continue to be an issue); The True Crime Stories We Tell (essays about how social media intersects with true crime and how that can affect the time in which a crime is solved or how it can negatively affect the parties involved); and, Shards of Justice (essays featuring discourse on the future of criminal justice).
The first part of the book, What We Reckon With, is by far the largest section of the book, as it takes up almost half of the collection. None of the essays in this collection are bad, but in this section, I found that I was captivated and felt most passionate about an essay called “‘No Choice but to Do It’: Why Women Go to Prison”, by Justine van der Leun, which calls into question why women who are forced to commit heinous crimes by their abusers under extreme duress (like the threat of murder) are charged alongside their abusers as if they are just as guilty of the crime instead of the victim of one. “The Golden Age of White-Collar Crime” by Michael Hobbes is a long essay I thought would bore me (which is a point made about white-collar crime in the essay itself) but actually managed to ensnare me instead by explaining very well how is it that every time another old, white man gets arrested for doing something heinous with money and destroying a bunch of people’s lives all he seems to manage to get is a couple of years in Club Fed. It’s a long but rewarding read. “Picturesque California Conceals a Crisis of Missing Indigenous Women” by Brandi Morin reports on a phenomenon that’s well-known to anyone who lives in Northern California (which I do, though not as far north as she’s reporting on), and that’s the extremely high rate of indigenous Native American women who just up and disappear from reservation lands in the upper third section of the state. If you’ve ever seen the true crime docuseries “Murder Mountain” or read up on “trimmigrants” (the migrant workers, largely female, who make the trek up to the Emerald Triangle every year to harvest the marijuana crop), you might be familiar with how during harvest season it’s not only indigenous women who go missing. It’s a serious problem in general in Northern California; but for Native American women it’s so much worse, because they just get snatched up off their reservations and are never seen again.
In part two, The True Crime Stories We Tell, there’s only one essay I didn’t like too much, and that was “Who Owns Amanda Knox?” by Amanda Knox. The essay itself brings up plenty of valid points about how it feels sometimes that she has a doppelganger walking around that is the Amanda Knox everyone thinks she is instead of the Amanda Knox she actually is and that’s the Amanda Knox people keep thinking they can vilify and make money off of. The only reason I disliked this essay is because it felt a bit whiny. I understand she feels truly victimized after being wrongfully convicted by the Italian government twice, but she has her own podcast and a platform with which to voice her frustrations. I just felt like her essay wasn’t at the same level as the rest included in this collection. The other three essays in this section are all equally interesting and well-written.
In part three, “Shards of Justice”, the first essay, “Will You Ever Change?” by Amelia Schonbek completely floored me. It’s one of the best essays in this whole collection in part because it talks about restorative justice, which is one of my favorite rehabilitation tactics to avoid recidivism rates. In this case, the type of restorative justice they’re talking about is surrogate dialogue. Surrogate dialogue takes the victim of a crime and a perpetrator of the same crime (but a completely unrelated one), and puts them at the same table across from one another. Each of them has an advocate and there is a facilitator to keep everyone in line and stand witness for the non-profit running the program. In order to engage in this program, the victim has to approach the program themself and the perpetrator (who has to be out of jail and be evaluated before being approved for the program) has to want to use this surrogate dialogue to help victims heal. It’s a community service. I found this essay to be touching and thought-provoking, because even though programs like this show great potential to reduce recidivism rates, no one wants to fund them.
Another highlight of this section is “The Prisoner-Run Radio Station That’s Reaching Men on Death Row” by Keri Blakinger, which touches on how music is a universal language, even in prison. It’s a touching and emotional essay about how even the residents of Death Row, cut off from Gen Pop, can be part of the great prisoner community by being allowed to write into their prison radio station and have their words heard or their song requests played.
Don’t forget to read the introduction or the editor’s note. They’re both interesting and informational reads. The introduction has a whole lot to say about the late, great author James Baldwin, who was writing essays about how systemic racism ran long and deep in our criminal justice system long before anyone was willing to listen.
I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.
File Under: 5 Star Review/Anthology/Biography/History/Nonfiction/True Crime
March 20, 2023
This book's subtitle is "True Crime in an Era of Reckoning" and Weinman is known for writing other books in this genre. What I really liked about the book is the framing around "who tells the story" determines what story gets told. She also writes that True Crime Media is a powerful advocacy tool. All of the essays in this book have been published in other publications but by sharing these in this book, she is helping us see that it is our responsibility to take what we see and do something with it. She covers the Atlanta Child Murders to women incarcerated who were abused to the surreal nature of an "Offshore Alert" conference and even skewers famous true crime reporter Edna Buchanan for her bias. I don't think I will consume true crime in the same way again -- I will now ask who is telling this story and around whom is it centered. I recommend this book for true crime lovers and those with an interest in social justice.
Thank you to Netgalley and Ecco for an ARC and I voluntarily left this review.
Thank you to Netgalley and Ecco for an ARC and I voluntarily left this review.
July 16, 2023
True crime has fascinated us for a long time, though perhaps we are seeing a heyday. Every week there are countless podcast episodes, books, television dramas and documentaries, and in-depth long-form essays. This is entertainment based on the pain, loss and suffering of strangers, curiosity about the depravity of the perpetrators, and horror that some survive and many do not. What are the responsibilities of the creators of these media tales? What does the consumption of true crime say about the audience? Whose voices are lost or vilified? Why are so many drawn to the genre?
In a new anthology edited by Sarah Weinman, these questions are confronted, turned over and over, and some compelling answers (and more important questions) are posited. EVIDENCE OF THINGS SEEN offers 14 previously published pieces from diverse authors, all wrestling with true crime as a genre and the real people who inhabit the stories.
The collection opens with an Introduction by Rabia Chaudry, who outlines some of the concerns and criticisms about the genre. The book’s selections, she suggests, are “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.” This optimistic perspective is shared by many of the writers here, even when they have been shown that the impact that truthful storytelling can have is sometimes not enough to result in justice.
All of the book’s selections are well written, fascinating, deeply researched and interesting. Many are frustrating as well, as the writers highlight the ways in which true crime can overlook key elements and silence critical voices. Wesley Lowery writes of the dreadfully slow wheels of justice as a criminal investigation into a horrific murder is thwarted by the investigators themselves and the reality of racism in the U.S. The killing of Toyin Salau, the subject of a piece by Samantha Schuyler, and the crisis of missing Indigenous women as analyzed by Brandi Morin each highlight how race, as well as gender, negatively impacts outcomes of missing person and murder investigations. May Jeong’s look at the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings addresses race and gender, in addition to issues of immigration. Justine van der Leun’s essay flips this script, discussing incarcerated women, and Michael Hobbes’ contribution takes on white-collar crime.
The book’s second section shifts perspective with an essay by Amanda Knox asking “Who Owns Amanda Knox?” By contrast, Diana Moskovitz “revisits” true crime writer Edna Buchanan, illustrating how personal bias and ignorance has had ripple effects in the field of crime reporting. The rise of true crime junkies and amateur social media sleuths is explored by RF Jurjevics, and the kinds of celebrity that cops and detectives can enjoy is the subject of Lara Bazelon’s work.
The third section challenges readers in important and even unexpected ways. Amelia Schonbek writes about a program where victims and perpetrators of domestic violence meet in attempts at Restorative Justice. Keri Blakinger documents prisoner-run radio stations that offer some solace and community to incarcerated men. With “To the Son of the Victim,” Sophie Haigney imagines sharing her feelings, frustrations, condolences and apologies to the son of a couple murdered in their own home who she tried to interview as part of her work.
The book’s final piece is “Three Bodies in Texas” by Mallika Rao. In it, many of the complex and complicated themes and critiques of true crime as a sort of voyeuristic genre are examined with both a critical eye and a tenderness. Rao writes about an Indian immigrant accused of murdering her young son and the ways in which her culture, religion and identity were misunderstood. This is a story with no clear answers or satisfying resolution. It is heartbreakingly human and utterly exasperating. Rao does excellent work.
Fans of true crime will rethink some of their beliefs and choices. Those skeptical of the genre will find much that will resonate about culture, the legal system and the media beyond the popular podcasts and the latest sensational news bite.
Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman
In a new anthology edited by Sarah Weinman, these questions are confronted, turned over and over, and some compelling answers (and more important questions) are posited. EVIDENCE OF THINGS SEEN offers 14 previously published pieces from diverse authors, all wrestling with true crime as a genre and the real people who inhabit the stories.
The collection opens with an Introduction by Rabia Chaudry, who outlines some of the concerns and criticisms about the genre. The book’s selections, she suggests, are “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.” This optimistic perspective is shared by many of the writers here, even when they have been shown that the impact that truthful storytelling can have is sometimes not enough to result in justice.
All of the book’s selections are well written, fascinating, deeply researched and interesting. Many are frustrating as well, as the writers highlight the ways in which true crime can overlook key elements and silence critical voices. Wesley Lowery writes of the dreadfully slow wheels of justice as a criminal investigation into a horrific murder is thwarted by the investigators themselves and the reality of racism in the U.S. The killing of Toyin Salau, the subject of a piece by Samantha Schuyler, and the crisis of missing Indigenous women as analyzed by Brandi Morin each highlight how race, as well as gender, negatively impacts outcomes of missing person and murder investigations. May Jeong’s look at the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings addresses race and gender, in addition to issues of immigration. Justine van der Leun’s essay flips this script, discussing incarcerated women, and Michael Hobbes’ contribution takes on white-collar crime.
The book’s second section shifts perspective with an essay by Amanda Knox asking “Who Owns Amanda Knox?” By contrast, Diana Moskovitz “revisits” true crime writer Edna Buchanan, illustrating how personal bias and ignorance has had ripple effects in the field of crime reporting. The rise of true crime junkies and amateur social media sleuths is explored by RF Jurjevics, and the kinds of celebrity that cops and detectives can enjoy is the subject of Lara Bazelon’s work.
The third section challenges readers in important and even unexpected ways. Amelia Schonbek writes about a program where victims and perpetrators of domestic violence meet in attempts at Restorative Justice. Keri Blakinger documents prisoner-run radio stations that offer some solace and community to incarcerated men. With “To the Son of the Victim,” Sophie Haigney imagines sharing her feelings, frustrations, condolences and apologies to the son of a couple murdered in their own home who she tried to interview as part of her work.
The book’s final piece is “Three Bodies in Texas” by Mallika Rao. In it, many of the complex and complicated themes and critiques of true crime as a sort of voyeuristic genre are examined with both a critical eye and a tenderness. Rao writes about an Indian immigrant accused of murdering her young son and the ways in which her culture, religion and identity were misunderstood. This is a story with no clear answers or satisfying resolution. It is heartbreakingly human and utterly exasperating. Rao does excellent work.
Fans of true crime will rethink some of their beliefs and choices. Those skeptical of the genre will find much that will resonate about culture, the legal system and the media beyond the popular podcasts and the latest sensational news bite.
Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman
July 5, 2023
Overall: This collection of previously published essays and articles provides an overview of what’s on the minds of writers who engage with crime and the criminal justice system in America. As someone who reads the occasional non-fiction book about crime (The Art Thief, We Keep the Dead Close, The Trial of Lizzie Borden), I wanted to see what topics I was familiar with and what I still needed to explore. Could this book help me engage with these stories in an ethical way? Some of the essays took on this topic, especially “Who Owns Amanda Knox?”. I’m glad I took a look at this quick non-fiction read, even though it didn’t deepen and complicate my understanding of the crime writing landscape quite as much as I would have liked. If you’re just starting to read about crime in modern America, though, this might be a good place to start.
Likes: Some of the articles dug deeply into topics that don’t receive a lot of attention – in particular, the essay on women in prison caught my eye. The original statistical analysis and research Justine van de Leun did for this piece, “‘No Choice But To Do It’: Why Women Go to Prison,” provided a combination of data and anecdotal evidence that was extremely compelling to me. Some of these writers are excellent storytellers creating balanced examinations of controversial topics (restorative justice for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault) or nuanced portraits of victims of crimes. The most impactful article for me was by Amanda Knox and in my opinion should be required reading for anyone interested in writing in the true crime genre.
Dislikes: The essays are uneven. While some contain fascinating statistical analysis and innovative reporting, others contain overblown language or random quotes from unattributed sources. Because this is meant as an overview, topics that are vast and nuanced sometimes receive what feels like only a glancing treatment. And I didn’t quite understand why two of the essays engaged with work largely produced during the 80s and early 90s, rather than with more recent books, articles, and podcasts. I wished more of the book had engaged with the conventions of true crime now – which I don’t think, based on my own true crime reading and listening – conform with some of the conventions of 30 years ago.
FYI: murder, violence, sexual assault, domestic violence, death of a child, lynching, racial violence, racism, substance abuse, wrongful conviction.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for my advance reader copy. All opinions are my own.
Likes: Some of the articles dug deeply into topics that don’t receive a lot of attention – in particular, the essay on women in prison caught my eye. The original statistical analysis and research Justine van de Leun did for this piece, “‘No Choice But To Do It’: Why Women Go to Prison,” provided a combination of data and anecdotal evidence that was extremely compelling to me. Some of these writers are excellent storytellers creating balanced examinations of controversial topics (restorative justice for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault) or nuanced portraits of victims of crimes. The most impactful article for me was by Amanda Knox and in my opinion should be required reading for anyone interested in writing in the true crime genre.
Dislikes: The essays are uneven. While some contain fascinating statistical analysis and innovative reporting, others contain overblown language or random quotes from unattributed sources. Because this is meant as an overview, topics that are vast and nuanced sometimes receive what feels like only a glancing treatment. And I didn’t quite understand why two of the essays engaged with work largely produced during the 80s and early 90s, rather than with more recent books, articles, and podcasts. I wished more of the book had engaged with the conventions of true crime now – which I don’t think, based on my own true crime reading and listening – conform with some of the conventions of 30 years ago.
FYI: murder, violence, sexual assault, domestic violence, death of a child, lynching, racial violence, racism, substance abuse, wrongful conviction.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for my advance reader copy. All opinions are my own.
September 21, 2023
This is an incredibly well-curated collection of previously published pieces (in magazines, newspapers, etc) that cover a range of cases that, for the most part, received far less attention than they deserved. But that issue is the crux of the entire book. And you'll feel the pain of it over and over again, as we all should. Discomfort about things like this, I believe, is what ultimately leads to collective action that spurs change.
Each writer has such a clear commitment to journalistic integrity, and brings to light the intersection of crime, our current "justice" system (the choice to place that word in quotes is my own), and factors of gender, socioconomic status, religion, nationality, race, intergenerational trauma, and many more. I appreciated that many of the essays also include what almost becomes self-analysis, in regards to the ethics of crime reporting itself, given the impact it necessarily does have on on all those closest to the crime, irrespective of what side of it they're on. And that what side they're on can be so easily misidentified if reporting is shoddy, police work is shoddy, or if we just don't have all the context and information necessary to draw conclusions.
If you were drawn in by the words "true crime" in the title in hopes of something salacious and juicy, you won't find that here. What you'll find is much more powerful: thoughtful and necessary critiques of various aspects of the justice system, police investigations, media coverage, and responses of the general public when it comes to crimes.
Who gets to be a victim? Who deserves empathy? Whose crimes can be overlooked and whose cannot? Who gets the harshest punishments? Who does the narrative serve? These are just a few of the questions contended with in this collection.
So many people are already so invested in true crime, and this book reminds us on how we must continue to be invested in it, but also alerts us to the necessity of us doing this in the most responsible way possible. At the heart of every single case sit fellow human beings of ours, and it is so very important that we engage with this content and share it with others in a way that respects their humanity above all else.
Each writer has such a clear commitment to journalistic integrity, and brings to light the intersection of crime, our current "justice" system (the choice to place that word in quotes is my own), and factors of gender, socioconomic status, religion, nationality, race, intergenerational trauma, and many more. I appreciated that many of the essays also include what almost becomes self-analysis, in regards to the ethics of crime reporting itself, given the impact it necessarily does have on on all those closest to the crime, irrespective of what side of it they're on. And that what side they're on can be so easily misidentified if reporting is shoddy, police work is shoddy, or if we just don't have all the context and information necessary to draw conclusions.
If you were drawn in by the words "true crime" in the title in hopes of something salacious and juicy, you won't find that here. What you'll find is much more powerful: thoughtful and necessary critiques of various aspects of the justice system, police investigations, media coverage, and responses of the general public when it comes to crimes.
Who gets to be a victim? Who deserves empathy? Whose crimes can be overlooked and whose cannot? Who gets the harshest punishments? Who does the narrative serve? These are just a few of the questions contended with in this collection.
So many people are already so invested in true crime, and this book reminds us on how we must continue to be invested in it, but also alerts us to the necessity of us doing this in the most responsible way possible. At the heart of every single case sit fellow human beings of ours, and it is so very important that we engage with this content and share it with others in a way that respects their humanity above all else.
November 12, 2023
It is also the ballad of white Miami, of white America, where stories of people at the bottom are spun into tales of heroism and tragedy while they are kept, by force, on the bottom.
Evidence of Things Seen is a strong collection of articles and essays, which are thoughtfully chosen, all well written, and highlight some of the most substantial revelations made by true crime media today: though there are differences in the details, crime broadly affects different populations disproportionately and, thus, reveals glaring differences in our society and its structures in relation to the system’s impact on one people versus another. Racism, sexism, and classism are on display in Evidence of Things Seem, painted for the reader as both the catalysts and the enforcers of harm, violence, and crime. The media’s influence is analyzed (and criticized), and in this analysis we are reminded of the presence of overt racism only a few decades ago and the extent that it may still exist now in the lawful individuals who perpetuated it at the time; we see the results of poor funding and judicial structures and methods by which the wealthy elite are excluded—due more to laziness and disinterest on the part of the system than anything else—and supported in their maintenance of white collar crime; we see how laws are structured to alienate victims and rechristen them perpetrators, as well as the means by which otherness and non-American cultures are incriminated.
A beneficial and effective collection, Evidence of Things Seen perhaps lacks two elements which would allow the book to stand more strongly. First, while each essay feels inherently linked to the others, the explicit purpose of this compilation seems somewhat unclear. The second fault perhaps stems from the first: there is no conclusion. Laid forth are a set of tremendous pieces that highlight the central facet of true crime; if this is true, remind us of the value in lining them all up like this in a row.
Evidence of Things Seen is a strong collection of articles and essays, which are thoughtfully chosen, all well written, and highlight some of the most substantial revelations made by true crime media today: though there are differences in the details, crime broadly affects different populations disproportionately and, thus, reveals glaring differences in our society and its structures in relation to the system’s impact on one people versus another. Racism, sexism, and classism are on display in Evidence of Things Seem, painted for the reader as both the catalysts and the enforcers of harm, violence, and crime. The media’s influence is analyzed (and criticized), and in this analysis we are reminded of the presence of overt racism only a few decades ago and the extent that it may still exist now in the lawful individuals who perpetuated it at the time; we see the results of poor funding and judicial structures and methods by which the wealthy elite are excluded—due more to laziness and disinterest on the part of the system than anything else—and supported in their maintenance of white collar crime; we see how laws are structured to alienate victims and rechristen them perpetrators, as well as the means by which otherness and non-American cultures are incriminated.
A beneficial and effective collection, Evidence of Things Seen perhaps lacks two elements which would allow the book to stand more strongly. First, while each essay feels inherently linked to the others, the explicit purpose of this compilation seems somewhat unclear. The second fault perhaps stems from the first: there is no conclusion. Laid forth are a set of tremendous pieces that highlight the central facet of true crime; if this is true, remind us of the value in lining them all up like this in a row.
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