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Review of The Other Dr. Gilmer

Review of The Other Dr. Gilmer: Two men, a Murder, and an Unlikely Fight for Justice
Rating **** 1/2

Dr. Benjamin Gilmer is eager to start his new position as a family physician, helping people in rural North Carolina. However, he soon learns from staff and former patients that the doctor he is replacing is serving a life sentence for murdering his father. He also discovers that the former doctor shared his last name.

The curiosity over the other Dr. Gilmer eventually leads Benjamin to contact the former doctor in prison. Unfortunately, that initial contact doesn’t go well. But soon after, Benjamin receives a letter from him with a simple request – help me.

It doesn’t take long for the author to realize that the man he replaced, Dr. Vince Gimer, has a mental illness. The more he learns, the more he becomes convinced that Vince Gilmer was a victim of not only his mental illness but also a victim of the criminal justice system.

In his efforts to uncover the details of the crime and the mental illness that led Vince to commit such a brutal act, the author touches on a wide range of related topics: mass incarceration, mental illness in today’s prisons, fair and equitable sentencing, the politics of pardons, and the role of prisons as punishment only institutions.

Benjamin Gilmer becomes an advocate for Vince and fights to have him released from prison where he can receive treatment for his illness. His efforts eventually lead Benjamin to consider writing a book about Vince’s plight. When Benjamin asked Vince what he wanted the book to say, he said the following:

Prison is torture
Sexual abuse changes you forever
We are all at the mercy of our brains
Listening is healing

That perfectly sums up the resulting book.

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Review of The Tinder Swindler

Review of the Netflix documentary The Tinder Swindler directed by Felicity Morris
Rating *****

Another con-man story. I’m pretty good at spotting scams. I’ve kept scammers on the phone, letting them think that I’m about to give them what they’re after, only to ask for their names to give to the FBI. The closest I have come to being scammed involved a text message I received with the title security alert. I contacted the person who sent the text message. It all sounded plausible. He asked for some information, which I foolishly provided. It was only after he asked me to verify an automated response from AT&T that I became suspicious. So I called AT&T directly. The guy had placed an order for a $1,000 iPhone. I canceled the transaction.

The con man in this story, Shimon Hayut, is a world-class scam artist. Shimon uses the dating app Tinder to find his victims. Once he locks on to a potential victim, Shimon plays the role of a wealthy businessman. He travels the world. He has a bodyguard. His social media profiles are full of images showing him surround by luxury and wealth.

As with all con-men, he is sketchy about his work. He uses fictitious names like Simon Leviev, making it difficult for women to learn his true identity. Once he gains their trust, he tells them a convoluted story about frozen bank accounts. Then, he asks for their help, promising to pay everything back. By this time, the women are so confident in his ability to pay them back that they fork over whatever he asks for, even if it means taking out a loan or loans.

It’s only after the creditors start calling and Shimon starts sending the women fake checks or fake Rolex watches to pay off their debts that they realize the truth.

This documentary is worth watching if for no other reason than to see how Shimon reacts when he is on the receiving end of a scam. But, like the scammer covered in the documentary series Bad Vegan, the punishment does not fit the crime.

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Review of Scrapped

Review of Scrapped: Justice and a Teen Informant by Lisa Peebles and Jon O’Brien rating ****

I’ve always been drawn to wrongful conviction stories. There’s just something about the idea of an innocent person wasting away in prison for something they didn’t do. Wrongful convictions happen for a variety of reasons. Coerced confessions, false testimony, mistaken eyewitness accounts, prosecutorial misconduct, and poor police work are just a few reasons. But, no matter the reason, it is a long and challenging process to correct the error once a wrongful conviction occurs.

Gary Thibodeau at trial

One of the biggest obstacles in fighting wrongful convictions is the obstruction from those who made the original errors. They make motions denying DNA testing. They claim that new witnesses who come forward with new information are not credible. Appeals courts seldom reverse lower court decisions. No one wants to admit an error. No one wants to be the guy who lets a guilty person go free. It’s an uphill battle with few successes.

The story told in the book Scrapped is about the wrongful conviction of Gary Thibodeau. Gary and his brother Dick Thibodeau were charged with the kidnapping and murder of eighteen-year-old Heidi Allen. Dick Thibodeau made one of the last purchases at a convenience store where the victim worked. Witnesses claimed to have seen Heidi being dragged into a light blue or white van. Dick Thibodeau owned a white van. Witness accounts were that two or more people were involved in the kidnapping.

Both Dick and Gary would ultimately be arrested and put on trial for the kidnapping and murder of Heidi Allen. Dick was acquitted. Gary was not. Prosecutors used the same shaky evidence in both trials. The one difference was that Gary had had some minor run-ins with the law.

That’s the setup. The remainder of the book concerns the efforts of the two authors, Lisa Peebles and John O’Brien, to learn the truth and hopefully free an innocent man.

For Gary to go free, one of three things had to occur. First, the authors could locate Heidi’s remains and prove that the people they believe committed the murders were guilty. Secondly, they could interview new witnesses who could point to the real perpetrators. And lastly, they could show that the original investigators made substantive errors and hid evidence from the defense. The authors did all three.

One thing you hear a lot from detectives and prosecutors when confronted with the possibility that they may have convicted the wrong person is, “well, the jury thought we got it right.” In this case, their answer was they got it right in Gary’s case and blew it in Dick’s trial.

I won’t give away the ending. You can decide on your own whether or not the police, prosecutors, and jury got it right.

Gary after decades in prison

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Review of Bad Vegan

Review of the Netflix docuseries Bad Vegan rating *****

A successful businesswoman meets a mysterious man on the internet. She doesn’t question him when he starts draining her business of money. She’ll get it all back, he tells her. He needs the money because his life is in danger. He’s a navy seal now working in secret black ops operations all over the world. He also has mystical powers. When he completely drains the business of most of its operating funds, he demands that she find more investors. She can’t pay her employees. She can’t pay her bills or her investors back. Yet she keeps giving him money.

When those funds run out, he somehow convinces the woman’s mother to send him money. He drains her of over $400,000 of her savings. Where’s all the money going? It’s all going towards a lavish lifestyle of high-end hotels, travel, and entertainment.

How can someone so smart and successful fall prey to a serial con man? How can 86% of Russians back Putin? People want to believe. They want to trust their ability to distinguish fact from fiction. Look at how many Republicans still think Biden didn’t win the presidency? The Puppet Master, also on Netflix, tells a similar story.

The saddest part of this story is the inadequate sentence this con man receives once he is caught. Would you do two years of jail time for two years to spend six million dollars?

So, where did the money go? I won’t spoil it. let’s just say that it didn’t go to pay off warlords. This four-part docuseries is available on Netflix.

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Review of The Big Cheat

Review of The Big Cheat: How Donald Trump Fleeced American and Enriched Himself and His Family By David Cay Johnston rating ****

While this book doesn’t reveal anything I didn’t already know, it does a good job of exposing the litany of money-making scams that Trump and his gang have conducted before, during, and after his four years in office.

How he manages to stay relevant is beyond me. Trump’s shameless overcharging, backdoor transactions, and use of his real estate holdings to conduct government business is astounding. But Trump was not alone in his unethical practices. You can add to the list of scam artists the entire Trump family and a host of sycophants like Flynn, Bannon, Manafort, Gates, Ross, and many more.

However, the biggest scam of all is the one mentioned in the book’s closing pages. It has to do with Trump’s incessant fundraising efforts. During Trump’s four years in office, I wanted to see the nonsense they were pushing on their supporters. So, I clicked on a Facebook ad and got placed into the Trump conspiracy spin cycle. Towards the end of 2020, as the election neared, the Trump emails and text messages were nonstop. It wasn’t unusual to receive as many as fifteen or twenty requests for money a day. They usually came with a poll. Do you agree that Trump is the best president in history? Do you think Joe Biden would be a disaster for our country? Do you want the radical democrats to turn our country into a socialist nation? Stupid stuff like that. I tried unsubscribing. For a while, they had an actual link to unsubscribe. It didn’t do anything. Eventually, they just removed the unsubscribe link. But for the Trump loyalists who gave them their credit card number, that’s where the big cheat really happened. The donation page had a check box that said, “make this a monthly donation.” It was hard to see if you weren’t looking for it. It was only after people (Trump supporters) started noticing recurring charges on their credit card bills. Trump eventually had to refund $121 million of ill-gotten funds. How many people didn’t catch the theft?

Once Trump left office, his money train came to an end, or at least you would have thought. Not so for Trump. Only Trump could come up with a way to steal even more money from supporters. His new money-making scheme was to form a Political Action Committee called Save America. The pitch this time was that Trump needed cash for his Stop the Steal efforts. A former president, twice impeached, raised $255 million. Once again, he required donors to uncheck the recurring donation checkbox. Trump told his unsuspecting donors that he needed the money to pay lawyers to prove election fraud. So, how much of that $255 million went for lawyer fees? How about less than $9 million. Trump is free to use the money however he likes. Trump’s blatant money grab continues to this day.

The author closes the book with several suggestions for improving campaign finance laws and other regulations dealing with business and political service.

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Review of The Murders at Starved Rock

Review of The Murders at Starved Rock HBO rating ****

Did he or didn’t he murder three women at Starved Rock Park in 1961? That’s the question that this three-part HBO docuseries tries to answer. Chester Weger was just 22 when he was arrested and eventually convicted of the triple murder. He confessed to the crime. He knew things only the killer could have known, or so it seemed.

Chester Weger recanted his confession. He has maintained his innocence for the past sixty years. David Raccuglia is the son of the prosecutor who prosecuted Chester. David Raccugklia grew up fearful of the man his father put away for life. At some point, however, he wanted to prove one way or the other whether or not Chester was guilty. So, he set out on a multi-year journey to answer that very question.

The people who put Chester behind bars remain adamant that they got the right person. When you look at the scant evidence used against him, however, the conviction starts to falter. You can start with the confession. It’s no secret that police were known to use coercion in order to get people to confess to crimes they did not commit. Uneducated males between the ages of 16 and 24 are the most likely to falsely confess. Add in sleep deprivation, physical abuse, and the threat of a death sentence and it’s even easier to get a false confession. The police used all of those tactics with Chester.

What other evidence was used to convict Chester? There was a suede jacket that had a few spots of blood on it. The three women were bludgeoned to death with a log. Chester maintained that the blood on his jacket was animal blood. They didn’t have DNA testing in 1961, and it can’t be tested now due to cross-contamination. Then there was the red airplane. According to Chester’s confession, after murdering the three women, Chester saw a red airplane fly overhead, so he moved the bodies into a cave to prevent them from being spotted from above. A check at the local airport confirmed that the owner of such a plane had indeed flown over the area around the time when the murders had occurred. How could Chester have known about the plane if he wasn’t actually there? But what if the police knew about the plane and fed Chester the information?

By the end of the second episode, the evidence is higher on the side of innocence. By the third episode, however, the filmmakers seem to conclude that they aren’t sure one way or the other. Some hair found on the gloves of the victims is currently being tested for DNA, but the results won’t be released until sometime later this year.

The filmmakers bemoan the lack of a smoking gun. The problem, though, is that they have their smoking gun in the form of a handwritten letter written by the prosecutor who originally brought the case. This particular prosecutor was up for re-election. Solving the murder could possibly help him get re-elected. When Chester failed a polygraph, this prosecutor and a pair of investigators set out to fit the evidence to their suspect, and according to the prosecutor’s handwritten letter, they also manufactured evidence to make it stick. What more do you need?

Chester Weger was eventually paroled after serving nearly sixty years in prison. Years before his parole, he was interviewed by David Raccuglia. If you ever wanted to know what it would be like to serve decades in prison for something you didn’t do, watch the interview. You can’t fake heartbreak.