A couple weeks after everyone else laid the subject to rest, Kevin Smokler is back to talk with me about Wild Wild Country, Netflix's six-part series on the poisonings, beaver-shakes, and other crimes against traditional values perpetrated by a free-love "cult" in 1980s Oregon. It's eminently watchable, but at the same time noticeably incurious about certain aspects of its subjects -- do the Way brothers try too hard not to take a position on either side of the myriad debates the series describes (and creates)? Did they not know how to end the last episode? And is there really a relationship between the Rajneeshi and Jonestown?

Lifetime's 2015 take on the Novack murders, Beautiful And Twisted, goes down a lot easier -- but thanks to a certain fundamental unseriousness about the severe-beating deaths of two of its protagonists, it still got stuck in our craw a little bit. Lifetime movies have come a long way from the damp Victoria Principal starrers of a bygone era, but is there maybe not a middle ground between moistly self-serious and disrespectfully UN-serious? All this plus St. Elmo's references, baseball docus, and The Serial Problem in an all-new XL The Blotter Presents.


SHOW NOTES

Almost 15 years ago, de Lestrade's The Staircase paved the way for the Making A Murderers and Jinxes after it with a lingering, textured look at the case against Michael Peterson. Did his wife Kathleen fall down the stairs? Did he push her or beat her with the notorious blowpoke? Was a wild creature responsible all along? And whose side are the filmmakers on as they slowly pile up the porn, infidelities, and other similar deaths in Peterson's past? Stephanie Early Green is back to talk about the case, the series, what we think really happened now versus when we first watched over a decade ago, and a defense attorney's spin-stinct.

Then we assess ID's condensed overview of the case on An American Murder Mystery. The franchise's look at Kathleen's death is economical, but also somehow filler-y and melodramatic, and we wonder if its judgments about Michael's sexuality aren't a worse look than the 2004 take on his alleged motive. Still, there's some new information here -- along with a whole bunch of nonsensical conclusions about flawed forensics -- but will we keep watching?


SHOW NOTES

Almost 15 years ago, de Lestrade's The Staircase paved the way for the Making A Murderers and Jinxes after it with a lingering, textured look at the case against Michael Peterson. Did his wife Kathleen fall down the stairs? Did he push her or beat her with the notorious blowpoke? Was a wild creature responsible all along? And whose side are the filmmakers on as they slowly pile up the porn, infidelities, and other similar deaths in Peterson's past? Stephanie Early Green is back to talk about the case, the series, what we think really happened now versus when we first watched over a decade ago, and a defense attorney's spin-stinct.

Then we assess ID's condensed overview of the case on An American Murder Mystery. The franchise's look at Kathleen's death is economical, but also somehow filler-y and melodramatic, and we wonder if its judgments about Michael's sexuality aren't a worse look than the 2004 take on his alleged motive. Still, there's some new information here -- along with a whole bunch of nonsensical conclusions about flawed forensics -- but will we keep watching?


SHOW NOTES

Given when In Ice Cold Blood premiered -- April 1st -- you might forgive me for thinking it was Oxygen's PR team tryna prank me. And it...might still be that, actually! But it's a pretty long con, if so, since we got screeners, and based on the first two episodes, guest Eve Batey and I are kind of about it: it's an interesting niche in terms of the crimes covered; the talking-heads and interrogation footage are, while nothing groundbreaking, used well; and the production chose its topics smartly. The only issue we have with IICB is...Ice-T himself. And it's not that he's bad; it's that we're not sure this is the right show for him.

We're very sure Mysteries & Scandals isn't the right show for Soledad O'Brien; we like her, but the writing, oo-fah. S01.E06 delves into the lethal falls from grace of Johnny Lewis, Lillo Brancato, and Ricardo Medina...if we can use "delve" to describe shallow 12-minute segments larded with platitudinous interstitials and hysteric sound design. But WE delved into whether true-crime shows need to craft themselves with an eye towards impatient Googling by their viewers, plus Aaron Hernandez, the return of the Sarah's Dad Zodiac Theory, Graceland's proprietary fabrics, and yet another Eve-'n'-Sarah show pitch -- on The Blotter Presents's 50th episode.


SHOW NOTES

FX splashed out on some expensive talent to tell the story of the infamously cheap J. Paul Getty's negotiations for the return of his kidnapped hippie grandson -- whom he and many others thought had engineered the situation to get himself some spending money. The network's really put itself on the map with prestige-crime series in the last couple of years, but when the action moves to 1970s Rome, does it have itself another water-cooler show? Toby Ball and I plan to keep watching, but even if we weren't having fun, Donald Sutherland is having the time of his life gnawing the scenery, and it's nice to see Brendan Fraser again.

It's also nice to see The Lost Tapes again; I liked the show when it debuted on Smithsonian Channel a couple years back, and its refreshingly stripped-down take on big cases and turning points -- no whorey talking-heads or goofy re-enactments, just contemporaneous footage and reports -- is perfect for a case like the Patty Hearst kidnapping. By not taking a position on how involved Hearst really was in ongoing events, The Lost Tapes made us question our own received wisdom on the case, and what "brainwashing" is really supposed to mean, anyway. And yes, I have a grand unifying theory about DB Cooper, because it's a day ending in Y -- and an all-new The Blotter Presents.

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When Michelle McNamara passed away unexpectedly in 2016, Mike Dunn and I both made sure to pre-order the book she'd left unfinished -- I'll Be Gone In The Dark, on a prolific rapist turned serial killer operating in two areas of California in the late '70s and early '80s. The book showed up at our houses a couple weeks ago, so we decided to turn the pod into a book club for an episode and discuss it...and then Investigation Discovery dropped its two-night, four-part take on the case, The Golden State Killer: It's Not Over, so we looped that in too.

Did the show need four parts and three total hours to get its work done? Is its attitude towards "internet sleuths" a little weird? And do you need to watch AND read the book? We dug into the show, the strength of its contributors, and whether it's a good supplement to McNamara's work. Later, I got frustrated at the writing tics an editor should have honored McNamara by cutting, and we talked about pacing, McNamara's skill at setting a scene, and whether Tom Hanks could have committed these crimes. (Ron Howard: "He couldn't have.") Let us know what you think of the show, the book, and the overall investigation on the forums after you listen to an all-new The Blotter Presents.


SHOW NOTES

• Watch The Golden State Killer: It's Not Over on Investigation Discovery

USA debuted yet another take on the still-open cases of the murders of Tupac Shakur and Christopher "Biggie" Wallace last week, this one featuring pretty much every procedural Hey, It's That Guy! you can think of (Brent Sexton, Jamie McShane) plus a couple top names (Black Mirror's Jimmi Simpson, Josh "Mr. Fergie" Duhamel, Dwayne Johnson) (...right? hey, the IMDb doesn't lie), and a great deal of table-setting exposition to locate us in three timelines. It's a little heavy-handed about explaining the challenges for investigators, at least for anyone who's familiar at all with true-crime material involving LAPD -- Rampart; OJ: Made In America -- but it's done well, and fairly economically. What's more, I felt no urge to Google during the runtime: always a sign of compelling quality. We'll let you know if you should keep watching.

We'll also let you know if The Family is too bleak to manage. The story of Anne Hamilton-Byrne's doomsday/LSD cult, whose primary hallmark was stealing babies and raising them in an intermittent-reinforcement hellscape of beatings, brainwashing, and shrooms, features interviews with former "members" of The Family, plus the journalists and cops who tried to get someone, anyone to agree the Hamilton-Byrnes needed to go to jail. Can kids starved of love (and literally starved) learn to make their ways in the world as adults -- and parents? Should the filmmakers have split the material up into several installments, to investigate claims of Illuminatoid contacts in Melbourne's power structure -- and to give viewers a break? And does The Family belong to the, uh, family of "extremely affecting; can never watch again" documentaries headed up by Dear Zachary? Toby and I mull these questions and more before marinating in some Powerpuff Girls to cleanse the palate, in The Blotter Presents Episode 47.

SHOW NOTES

The Huffs and I thought, based on the customary punnish titling of Love And Hate Crime, that we were in for predictable filler-y fare. We...were very much not, as a BBC-produced look at the murder of trans teen Mercedes Williamson by her much older Latin King boyfriend in rural Mississippi doesn't shy away from harsh crime-scene photos, even harsher language, and an unblinking look at the hypocrisy and denial of the community, not to mention Mercedes's killer.

Fortunately, Allison unearthed A Murder On Orchard Street, ABC News's clever repurposing of a 15-year-old non-fiction show to look at an NYC cold case. 1010 WINS, the pronunciation "demeanuh," hacky-sack bros, and peeks behind the process curtain make this unique "video podcast" -- there's also an actual podcast that goes with it -- a fast-paced and fun sit that we could totally let rock. See the Show Notes to check it out for yourself, then grab some breakfast with Jimmie for an all-new The Blotter Presents.

SHOW NOTES

[Note: Today's episode contains crackling that may annoy you. We apologize for the inconvenience and are working on ironing out the issue!]

A&E leans into its sub-branding as a cult-studies destination with Warren Jeffs: Prophet Of Evil. Dan and I leaned into the Warren Jeffs topic by watching not just A&E's outing but the 2015 documentary from Showtime, and discussed the similarities between LDS fundies and Scientology; what reminded us of Trump about Jeffs; Mormon naming conventions; and whether Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song should join In Cold Blood as a twin vintage pillar of the true-crime genre.

Did I miss any Mormon-adjacent properties? Take a break from barfing yourself inside out about the "custom bed" and recommend more reading, podcasts, and documentaries on the forums.

SHOW NOTES

California law enforcement has former Hart To Hart star and current fossil Robert Wagner as a person of interest in the death of his then wife, Natalie Wood, in 1981. My valentine, Dan Patrick Brady, is back to talk about whether the 48 Hours on the case worth watching, or if phrases like "the Banging Dinghy Theory" sink the episode. And in our Cold Case segment, a vintage Unsolved Mysteries has an unexpected recent update of its own (and absolutely nothing new to say about Bigfoot). We accept Walkens here on The Blotter Presents, Episode 44.

SHOW NOTES