Eve Batey joins me to take on a Lifetime true-story two-fer. We tackled two recent Lifetime films, the first about the notorious and crassly named "texting suicide" case, and the second a 34-year-old kidnapping whose escaped victim helped police catch a serial killer...once someone finally believed her story. Is either movie worth 90 minutes of your time? Is Bella Thorne almost TOO good as Michelle Carter? What's with the Veronica Mars mini-reunion in C&M? And why isn't Believe Me on the IMDb?

We discuss whether it's possible to hew too faithfully to source materials, how glad we are texting didn't exist back in the seventeenth century when we were adolescents, and whether the portrayal of Bobby Joe Long put us in mind of Jack Bauer. Don't order a tuna sand at a donut shop; listen to The Blotter Presents Episode 071 instead.

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Special Guest: Eve Batey.

You probably haven't heard anything about this, but: Serial is back for Season 3. Stephanie Green is also back to discuss the first two episodes; the heralded podcast's less appealing qualities; and versions of S3's stories This American Life may have done better in the Most Wanted section.

As our Cold Case, we're looking at the rise and rise and fall of Theranos via John Carreyrou's outstanding bestseller, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup. What's with Elizabeth Holmes's odd, affected voice? Which other con artists (Trump) and cults (Scientology) did the Theranos story remind us of? And can Carreyrou hurry up and write some more books? From the "mistake by the lake" to the city by the Bay, it's The Blotter Presents, Episode 70.

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American Vandal Season...Number Two (tee hee) dropped (its brown friends by the lake, tee hee) last Friday, and Jeb Lund joins me for an...exposition dump? Tee hee. We're discussion the show's compassion for its characters, what it says about other crimes sand crime properties, and whether we liked S1 better.

Later, we'll talk about the Doodler murders, and why it's remained mostly overlooked as a major case. Should a Ryan Murphy or a Nick Broomfield take it on? And if not, why not? Put down that lemonade and give a listen to The Blotter Presents, Episode 69.

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Toby Ball FINALLY returns to his dedicated spot on the Blotter HQ sofa to talk about the latest limited series from Joe Berlinger for Oxygen, Unspeakable Crime: The Killing Of Jessica Chambers. It's better than we expected, but we're still waiting for it to address certain issues teased in the opener -- inconsistent racism; the classism we're not sure we're supposed to note, or object to; the Heisenberging of the case by the internet -- and wondering whether the occasional meta moment is intentional. With bonus references to at least a dozen other crime properties both accoladed and annoying!

Later, we talk about Kennedy-assassination conspiracy journey The RFK Tapes, and what it says about the human drive to bring order out of chaos by seeing conspiracies in what might be straight-ahead murders. Toby adds to Sarah's history-book reading list, Sarah can't unknow Bugliosi sounds like a Simpsons character, and more as we discuss whether this well-regarded podcast is about Robert Kennedy's death, or about the listener.

(Corrections department! I mispronounced RFK host Zac Stuart-Pontier's last name at least once, and I apologize; pretty sure it's actually "Pon-tee-ay." As well, I guessed the wrong Kennedy as director of HBO docu Ethel; it's Rory, not Kerry.)

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Did either of the podcasts we considered in this week's tennis-crime-centric podcast ace their topics? Alas, we got bageled, as Week 2 of the U.S. Open finds me and the COURT-eous Dan Patrick Brady considering alleged match-fixing in tennis in a The Documentary Podcast from early '16, plus a seventies star who found himself down a break at being a grown-up on Crime In Sports. Do these puns deserve even...BACKHANDED compliments? No, but serve yourself up some The Blotter Presents, Episode 67.

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Anna Beth Chao returns to look at Hulu's original documentary on quota policing in New York City, Crime + Punishment. It's a bit too filler-y, but does it need to be shorter -- or to divide itself into the two, or maybe three, documentaries fighting for space within it? Later, we talk about Paramount's Rest In Power, and how recent the murder of Trayvon Martin still seems after six years; why Sanford PD didn't just call-block George Zimmerman; and learning movement leadership on the job. Boston accents, bribe promotions, and why Sarah likes Live PD in The Blotter Presents, Episode 66.

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Eve Batey is back to assess which of these Pam Smart properties is worth your time; whether the old-school newsmag model of true crime needs to be retired in 2018; how the Heisenberg principle relates to Smart's ability to get a fair trial; and why cops interviewed on TV can't just say "smoking weed" like everyone else in America. Don't traumatize the dog or anything, but this The Blotter Presents is pretty metal.

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Last week, the Slow Burn podcast turned its attention to the pettily tawdry period in American politics known as "the Bill Clinton Impeachment," and Canadian Alex Collins has politely agreed to turn HER attention to the Slate podcast's second season. Do we think differently about Clinton's "high crimes" -- and their victims -- than we did back then? And how will Slow Burn tell us something new about a time those of us who lived through it thought we'd never want to hear about again?

Later, we talk about CNN's podcast Patty Has A Gun, something of an audio companion to the network's miniseries on the kidnapping of Hearst heiress Patricia...and her subsequent "conversion" to the beliefs of her captors. We find a number of striking parallels between Monica Lewinsky's situation and "Tania"'s, and a number of similarities in solid storytelling between our Cold Case podcast and our Most Wanted. Begin communique: it's The Blotter Presents, Episode 64.

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In Episode 048, Mike Dunn and I talked about Michelle McNamara's I'll Be Gone In The Dark and the adjacent TV special, Golden State Killer: It's Not Over. It's...over now! Well, until the trial (and the HBO documentary series, which Mike will no doubt return for also). Authorities took Joseph D'Angelo into custody six weeks after we recorded; last Saturday, Oxygen aired its update special, Golden State Killer: Main Suspect, and Mike and I convened the Carol Daly Appreciation Society's Northeast Chapter to discuss everything from new witness accounts to Daly's bitchin' beehive to tacky sound cues to...the Red Sox?

In the Cold Case section, I spend the dog days of August cooling off in the New Yorker archives with a Calvin Trillin crime reader (and an assist from Dan) that appreciates both his trademark bone-dry understatement and the unfortunate relevance of his work years and decades later. Look directly into the camera: it's The Blotter Presents, Episode 63.

This week's episode was recorded in part at King Killer Studios, with technical assistance from Dave Bunting Jr. Additional research by Alex Collins and Daniel MacEachern.

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Our previous GSK discussion

It's a new season of Old-Hollywood podcast You Must Remember This, and Kevin Smokler joins me to unpack Karina Longworth's captivating take on the unsolved murder of William Desmond Taylor, with a look back at 2015's "Charles Manson's Hollywood" season. Later, we get a chuckle out of Ernest Tubb's bunny slippers (note: he wasn't really wearing bunny slippers) in the Cold Case section as we talk about a couple of episodes -- one funny, one harrowing -- of Tyler Mahan Coe's Cocaine & Rhinestones. What did it mean to challenge a drunk country superstar to a fight in mid-century Nashville? Was that butler really Taylor's brother...and is it possible the butler, you know, did it? And which of us quotes Longworth to his or her feline? Bourbon, Reagan, and even a little OJ Simpson: it's an all-new The Blotter Presents.

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