Everything Nonfiction

Reviews

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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.

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Best of Everything Nonfiction 2021

These are the best books, films, and documentaries reviewed this past year. As always, actual publication and release dates will vary.

Books

The Winter Fortress

The Pale Faced Lie

The Last Season

Kidnapped by a Client

Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World

Billion Dollar Loser

Radium Girls

The Woman They Could Not Silence

The Last Duel

Films

The Dig

Nomadland

White Boy Rick

Worth

The Last Duel

Documentaries & Docuseries

Kiss the Ground

A Thousand Cuts

Made You Look: A true story about fake art

Murder Among the Mormons

Lincoln: Divided We Stand

Docudramas

Radium Girls

Impeachment: American Crime Story

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Review of the Last Duel Book vs Film

The Last Duel written by Eric Jager rating ****
The Last Duel written by Nicole Holofcener, Matt Damon, and Ben Affleck directed by Ridley Scott
Rating ****

Book or film? I chose to do both. It’s been a while since I had a chance to read a book and then head out to a theatre to see the film version. I’m glad I did. I enjoyed both.

I’m not a fan of this era. The whole knights and armor thing just doesn’t appeal to me. But I was interested to see how this particular story would play out in the adaptation. The book by Eric Jager walks the reader through the quarrels, disagreements, and the alleged rape that led to the duel between Jean de Carrouges and Jacques la Gris. The author presents the accusation from Carrouges’s wife, Marguerite. He also describes several other alternatives to what may have happened.

The screenwriter Nicole Holofcener, along with help from Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, attempted to do the same thing but with mixed results. When you boil it down to its essence, this is a story of he said she said. So, either La Gris raped Marguerite, or it was a consensual relationship. In the film version, however, they decided to tell three versions. The problem is that in all three versions a rape occurs.

Adding to the confusion is an early scene in Jacques la Gris’s version where there seems to be a consensual relationship between La Gris and Marguerite, making the later rape scene seem implausible.

In my mind, they should have stuck with two versions. In one, there is rape. In the second, La Gris and Marguerite have consensual sex.

Visually the film is stunning, despite the darkness and muted colors. Ridley Scott knows how to make movies. I got to watch this sixty-million dollar movie on the big screen with only one other person in the theatre, which doesn’t bode well for the film’s financial return. That’s a shame, too. We need more films that tell stories that don’t involve special effects and superheroes.

The performances by Matt Damon and Adam Driver are noteworthy. Jodie Comer as Marguerite is also very good, though she stands out in the film like a spec of color and a sea of black and white.

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The Christian “Kit” Martin story

I’ve now watched the Dateline episode The Evil That Watches three times. While I gained a little more insight with each viewing, there remains a host of unanswered questions. I hope that supporters of Kit Martin will provide more clarity. If you know the answers to some of my questions or can provide additional information, please respond in the comments section. My knowledge of this case is based solely on the Dateline episode. I was not present at trial, nor have I read any trial transcripts.

As someone who writes about wrongful convictions, I feel that I can sense when someone is lying. I didn’t sense any deceit in Kit’s interview with Keith Morrison. But I know from past wrongful conviction cases that overturning a conviction is difficult and time-consuming. I believe his best chance for a reversal is by arguing that he had ineffective counsel. More on this later.

First, I do not believe that the evidence used against Kit at trial was planted, as suggested by his attorney—for example, the dog tag evidence. If you were going to plant evidence incriminating someone else, you wouldn’t use a dog tag on a string. That would be like painting on the wall that “Kit did it.” That makes zero sense. Additionally, if I’m planting evidence, I wouldn’t place it on the top of a bookshelf hoping that someone might find it. That’s nonsense. Now the defense attorney argued in court that Joan, Kit’s ex-wife, had access to Kit’s belongings, including his dog tags. In his interview with Keith Morrison, Kit claimed that those were not his dog tags. That his dog tags would not have had his nickname on them.

Did the defense attorney challenge the authenticity of the dog tags? Did he explain to the jury that dog tags don’t use nicknames? Did he provide Kit’s actual dog tags? Did he conduct any research on where the dog tags might have come from? Dateline was able to reproduce the dog tag.

Next, we have the shell casing. Once again, the defense attorney claimed that the evidence was planted. The police searched the house, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t have missed the shell casing. Once again, if you are planting evidence, you would not plant it at a later date in the hopes that someone might find it.

The prosecutor had an expert witness say that, in his opinion, the shell casing came from a gun owned by Kit. Did the defense attorney challenge that? Did the bullets that killed Cal come from the same gun? Was there any ballistics evidence at all?

Then there is Kit’s alibi. He says that his security video evidence proved that he was home the whole time. He claims that he could not use the front door because it didn’t work and was nailed shut. On the Dateline episode on this topic, the prosecutor stated that there was nothing wrong with the front door.

Did the defense attorney challenge this? Did he provide any evidence that the front door was, in fact, unusable and nailed shut? Did Laura Spencer testify at trial that Kit was with her at home during the time of the crime?

These are just a few of the questions I have about this case. Below are a few more.

There were apparently two guns used in the crime – a 22 and a 45. Would one person commit a crime with two different guns? Did they find the 22?

The police found a gun and phone near Ed’s house. Was the gun and phone Ed’s?

Did Kit have an explanation for the person who testified that he saw Kit a few days before the murder in the vicinity of where police found Pam’s burnt-out car?

Was the damage to Cal’s face caused before or after he was shot?

Did Kit appeal his conviction on the court marshall? Was there any attempt to question the children Kit supposedly abused?

Kit claims that he thought Cal would be helpful to his case with the court marshall because he claimed on audio that he never saw any abuse, but the audio has Cal saying that one of the kids told him that Kit abused him. That is just as damaging as witnessing the abuse.

At one point, Joan claims to have found a phone in her yard that later proved to be Pam’s phone. What yard did she supposedly find the phone?

A two-hour Dateline episode can not distill all the information about a case that took four years between crime and trial. My take is that the defense attorney should have spent more time attacking the evidence and less time talking about planted evidence. I do not believe the evidence was planted.

One last note. If you go to the site map page on this site and type in wrongful convictions in the search box, you will see that I have been covering this topic for a while. My last book, Scapegoat, tells the story of a flight crew wrongly blamed for causing a near-fatal crash. I’ve been looking for a story for my next book. As a professional pilot (soon to be retired) and author, this is a story that has piqued my interest.

To Kit’s supporters, please take as much space as needed to respond to this post. I will approve the response as soon as I can.

You can watch the Dateline episode here Watch Dateline Episode: The Evil That Watches – NBC.com

Update

I’ve now had a chance to watch the entire trial. My initial impression from the Dateline episode about Kit’s innocence remains. There’s no way he could have been involved. The security video and his alibi witnesses clear him of any involvement. As for the many questions I had after the Dateline episode, I now know the answers to all of them.

I won’t go over all of the questions and answers here, but I do want to address the comments I made about planted evidence. I still believe that the shell casing and dog tag were not planted, however, the defense attorney made some persuasive points in defense of his planted evidence theory. I only wish he would have emphasized that there were other possibilities. There was one piece of evidence, though, that I do believe was intentionally staged – the subpoenas. If you saw videos of the residence, you might agree. The house was a cluttered mess. What are the chances that amongst all that clutter the two subpoenas would be laid out on a table for investigators to find?

Lastly, I need to address my comment about the defense attorney. The Dateline episode only showed snippets of the trial. I suggested that he had ineffective counsel. After watching them in action, I now believe that the defense team gave everything they had. There were points in the trial where I felt could have been handled better, but overall I give them high marks. I thought the lead defense attorney did a great job in his closing statement. I thought the Prosecutor’s closing was one misstatement of fact after another. It was also a textbook example of reasonable doubt. Just listen to her explaining how anyone of Kit’s 22 guns “could have been” the murder weapon. She tried to paint Kit as a military killing machine who also happened to be a cell phone tower expert. It was a ridiculous theory of what happened.

Lastly, I have decided that this story is worthy of a book treatment. To stay up to date on my progress on the book, please visit my personal website at www.EmilioCorsetti.com. You can see all posts related to this project by selecting the “Kit Martin” category on the sitemap page.

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Review of The Premonition

Review of The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michael Lewis Rating ***

I’m a Michael Lewis fan. Premonition, however, fell short for me. The book lacked a narrative focus. Instead, it read more like a series of loosely connected anecdotes. I would have preferred more insight into how the Trump administration dropped the ball.

Trump’s initial reaction to the pending pandemic was to kill the messenger. Career civil servants tried to raise alarm bells, but Trump and his Republican allies did their best to silence those who didn’t fall in line with their nothing to see here approach. Take, for example, Trump’s solution to rising covid numbers, which was to reduce testing. Yeah, this guy was President.

When Trump saw the positive press that Governor Cumo received from his daily press conferences, Trump decided that he would be the new front person. That’s when we started getting nonsense like Trump’s suggestion to inject disinfectant.

The people who knew what steps the administration should have taken must have felt enormous frustration with the total lack of planning and foresight. But, unfortunately, I didn’t get that sense of frustration from the characters with whom Michael Lewis chose to focus.

Some give Trump credit for the rapid development of vaccines. I’ll go out on a limb here and say that Trump was more concerned about getting the pandemic behind him because of the upcoming election.

I believe Micahel Lewis missed the bigger picture. I wanted to know what Fauchi thought as Trump mucked things up. I wanted to know more about the CDC’s mishandling of covid tests, the mixed messages over masks. I would have liked more on the economic impact of completely shutting down the economy for nearly a year. That history has yet to be written.

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Review of LuLaRich

Review of LulaRich Directed by Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason Rating *****

This four-part documentary series covers the rise and fall of LuLaRoe, a multi-level marketing company that mainly catered to white working moms. Part one covers the backgrounds of company founders DeAnne and Mark Stidham. Interspersed throughout the series are interviews with past and current employees, consultants, and legal experts. The term consultant refers to women whose primary source of income came from recruiting other consultants.

From the first glimmer of inspiration from DeAnne, there is a sense that her idea for colorful maxi dresses and leggings had potential. She had a unique concept. But rather than focus on the product and the brand, she chose to grow her company by enlisting DeAnne clones. The resulting business turned into a very successful pyramid scheme.

DeAnne had great success selling her product directly to consumers through one on one interactions. At that point, she could have turned her company into a brand as relevant as Spandex or any other unique clothing company. Instead, she tried to duplicate her success by enlisting other women to do direct selling. In addition to earning income from the sales of LulaRoe clothing, women who signed up early on earned even more money in bonuses and commissions from women they recruited.

As the company expanded, thanks to social media platforms like Facebook live and Instagram, problems arose. It’s one thing when one person uses Facebook live to have pop-up sales events. It’s another thing when thousands of other women try to duplicate that success. Women who came in late to the process had to invest ten thousand dollars and up for inventory. They couldn’t order what they wanted. They had to sell what was shipped to them, which may not have been something they could sell. The quality of the product suffered. Design patterns passed off as LuLaRoe originals used patterns taken from other designers. Complaints grew.

At this point, the mostly family-run business let greed and self-importance interfere with their original intent, which was to empower women. Rather than admitting their mistakes, they accused others for their problems. They forced their religious viewpoints and values on their workforce. They tried to silence dissenters and voices of opposition. The result was a landslide of lawsuits and lost momentum.

This isn’t a story about a scam. LuLaRoe still has a unique product that has an audience. This story has more to do with what can happen when ambition gets in the way of ethics.

Catch this series on Amazon Prime.