Unspeakable Acts
Page 31
“Improbable Cause” by Amy Dempsey (Toronto Star, April 2018)
“An Odd, Almost Senseless Series of Events” by Thomas Dybdahl (The Marshall Project, June 2018)
“The Strange, Spectacular Con of Bobby Charles Thompson” by Daniel Fromson (Washingtonian, March 2017)
“‘I Killed Them All’: The Life of One of America’s Bloodiest Hitmen” by Jessica Garrison (BuzzFeed, May 2018)
“Framed” by Christopher Goffard (Los Angeles Times, September 3, 2016)
“Home Free” by Jennifer Gonnerman (New Yorker, June 20, 2016)
“The Making of Dylann Roof” by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah (GQ, September 2017)
“A Positive Life” by Justin Heckert (GQ, April 28, 2016)
“The Fugitive, His Dead Wife, and the 9/11 Conspiracy That Could Explain Everything” by Evan Hughes (GQ, June 28, 2016)
“Accused” by Amber Hunt (Cincinnati Enquirer, 2016)
“The Final, Terrible Voyage of the ‘Nautilus’” by May Jeong (Wired, February 2018)
“Murder, He Calculated” by Bob Kolker (Bloomberg Businessweek, February 8, 2017)
“The Encyclopedia of the Missing” by Jeremy Lybarger (Longreads, January 2018)
“The Murder House” by Jeff Maysh (Medium, October 2015)
“Finding Lisa: A Story of Murders, Mysteries, Loss, and, Incredibly, New Life,” by Shelley Murphy (Boston Globe, May 2017)
“How an Aspiring ‘It Girl’ Tricked New York’s Party People” by Jessica Pressler (New York, May 2018)
“Bad Boys: How ‘Cops’ became the most polarizing reality TV show in America” by Tim Stelloh (The Marshall Project, January 2018)
“Ted Bundy’s Living Victim Tells Her Story” by Tori Telfer (Rolling Stone, March 2019)
BOOKS: NARRATIVE NONFICTION
Shane Bauer, American Prison (Penguin Press, 2018)
Maureen Callahan, American Predator (Viking, 2019)
Casey Cep, Furious Hours (Knopf, 2019)
Kate Winkler Dawson, Death in the Air (Hachette Books, 2017)
David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI (Doubleday, 2017)
Monica Hesse, American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land (Liveright, 2017)
Bill James and Rachel McCarthy James, The Man from the Train: The Solving of a Century-Old Serial Killer Mystery (Scribner, 2017)
Kirk Wallace Johnson, The Feather Thief (Viking, 2018)
Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing (Doubleday, 2019)
Jill Leovy, Ghettoside (Spiegel & Grau, 2015)
Wesley Lowery, They Can’t Kill Us All (Little, Brown, 2017)
Michelle McNamara, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark (Harper, 2018)
Hallie Rubenhold, The Five (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019)
Eli Sanders, While the City Slept (Viking, 2016)
Kate Summerscale, The Wicked Boy (Penguin Press, 2016)
Sarah Weinman, The Real Lolita: A Lost Girl, an Unthinkable Crime, and a Scandalous Masterpiece (Ecco, 2018)
Albert Woodfox, Solitary (Grove, 2019)
BOOKS: MEMOIR, ESSAYS, CRITICISM
Alice Bolin, Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession (William Morrow, 2018)
Leah Carroll, Down City (Grand Central, 2017)
Myriam Gurba, Mean (Coffee House Press, 2017)
David Kushner, Alligator Candy (Simon & Schuster, 2016)
Rachel Monroe, Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession (Scribner, 2019)
Carolyn Murnick, The Hot One (Simon & Schuster, 2017)
Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017)
Tori Telfer, Ladykillers (Harper, 2017)
Piper Weiss, You All Grow Up and Leave Me (Harper, 2018)
PODCASTS
Accused (Cincinnati Enquirer)
Bear Brook (New Hampshire Public Radio)
Bundyville (Oregon Public Radio/Longreads)
Crimetown (Gimlet Media)
Crime Writers On (Partners in Crime Media)
Criminal (Radiotopia)
Dirty John (LA Times/Wondery)
Dr. Death (ProPublica/Wondery)
Headlong: Running from COPS (Pineapple Street Media/Topic Studios)
In the Dark (American Public Media)
Serial (WBEZ/This American Life)
S-Town (WBEZ/This American Life)
Someone Knows Something (CBC)
The Ballad of Billy Balls (Cadence 13/Crimetown Presents)
The Clearing (Pineapple Street Media)
Uncover: The Village (CBC)
FILM AND TELEVISION
American Crime Story (Season 1: The People v. O.J. Simpson; Season 2: The Assassination of Gianni Versace)
American Vandal
Evil Genius
Making a Murderer
Mindhunter
Mommy Dead and Dearest
O.J.: Made in America
Tales of the Grim Sleeper
The Jinx
The Keepers
The Last Resort
Unbelievable
When They See Us
Wild Wild Country
Contributors
ALICE BOLIN is the author of Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession, a New York Times Notable Book of 2018. She is an assistant professor of creative nonfiction writing at the University of Memphis.
PAMELA COLLOFF is a senior reporter at ProPublica and a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine. She was previously a staff writer and executive editor at Texas Monthly. Colloff has been nominated for six National Magazine Awards, more than any other female writer in the award’s history, and won for feature writing, for “The Innocent Man,” in 2013. The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University awarded her the Louis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism the following year. Her oral history, “96 Minutes,” about the 1966 University of Texas shootings, served as the basis for the 2016 documentary “Tower,” which was short-listed for an Academy Award in Best Documentary Film. She lives in Austin, Texas.
MICHELLE DEAN is the author of Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion (Grove Press) and cocreator of The Act, which aired on Hulu in May 2018 and was adapted from her BuzzFeed feature, reprinted in this anthology. Dean received the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing in 2016, and her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Nation, and Elle. She lives in Los Angeles.
MELISSA DEL BOSQUE is an investigative reporter based in Mexico City. Her work has appeared in ProPublica, the Wall Street Journal, the Texas Observer, the Guardian, The Intercept, and Harper’s Magazine, among other publications. In 2016 del Bosque won the Hillman Prize for “Death on Sevenmile Road.” In 2015 del Bosque’s four-part series with the Guardian on migrant deaths in South Texas won an Emmy and a National Magazine Award. Her 2012 investigative feature “Valley of Death,” about the drug war and massacres in Juarez Valley, Mexico, was a finalist for the National Magazine Award. Del Bosque is also the author of Bloodlines: The True Story of a Drug Cartel, the FBI, and the Battle for a Horse-Racing Dynasty (Ecco, 2017).
EMMA COPLEY EISENBERG is the author of The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia, published by Hachette Books in 2020. Her fiction, essays, and reportage have appeared in McSweeney’s, The Paris Review online, Granta, Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House, Guernica, AGNI, the Los Angeles Review of Books, American Short Fiction, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, The New Republic, Pacific Standard, Slate, VICE, 100 Days in Appalachia, and others. She is the recipient of fellowships or awards from the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and Lambda Literary. She lives in Philadelphia, where she directs Blue Stoop, a hub for the literary arts.
JASON FAGONE is an investigative reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle and the author of The Wo
man Who Smashed Codes (Dey Street Books). Previously a contributing editor at Huffington Post Highline, his work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Wired, GQ, Grantland, Washingtonian, and NewYorker.com.
ELON GREEN is the author of Last Call, forthcoming from Celadon Books. He lives in Port Washington, New York.
KAREN K. HO is a business and culture reporter based in New York City. She has been published in Time, GQ, Glamour, The Globe and Mail, Vox, Refinery29, Interview, and The Walrus. “Jennifer Pan’s Revenge” was her first magazine story, and Toronto Life’s first story translated into another language.
PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE is a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of the New York Times bestseller Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, which won the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Writing, as well as two previous books, The Snakehead and Chatter.
ALEX MAR is a writer based in her hometown of New York City. Her first book, Witches of America, was a New York Times Notable Book in nonfiction, a New York Times Editors’ Pick, and included in multiple year-end lists for 2015. Some of her work has appeared in The Believer, Wired, New York, The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, Elle, Virginia Quarterly Review, Oxford American, and The Best American Magazine Writing 2018. She was nominated for a 2018 National Magazine Award (ASME) for Feature Writing. Formerly an editor at Rolling Stone, she is also the director of the feature-length documentary American Mystic, now streaming on Amazon. Mar is currently at work on her second nonfiction book, for Penguin Press.
SARAH MARSHALL grew up in Oregon and Hawaii and earned an MFA in fiction at Portland State University. Her writing has appeared in The New Republic, BuzzFeed, and The Believer, among other publications, and she cohosts You’re Wrong About . . ., a podcast on misremembered history.
RACHEL MONROE is the author of Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession. She was a 2016 finalist for a Livingston Award for Young Journalists and was named one of the “queens of nonfiction,” along with Susan Orlean, Rebecca Solnit, and Joan Didion, by New York. Her essay about murder fandom and adolescence, “Outside the Manson Pinkberry,” originally published in The Believer, is anthologized in The Best American Travel Writing 2018. She is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and regularly writes for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Texas Monthly, The Guardian, Bookforum, and elsewhere.
LEORA SMITH is a lawyer and writer living in Toronto. Her research and writing have appeared in ProPublica, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s The Fifth Estate, and The Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review.
SARAH WEINMAN is the award-winning author of The Real Lolita: A Lost Girl, an Unthinkable Crime, and a Scandalous Masterpiece, and editor of the anthologies Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s and Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, New York, and CrimeReads, where she is a contributing editor and columnist. Weinman also publishes the “Crime Lady” newsletter, covering crime fiction, true crime, and all points in between. She lives in New York City.
Permissions
Introduction © 2020 Patrick Radden Keefe.
“Dee Dee Wanted Her Daughter to Be Sick, Gypsy Wanted Her Mom Murdered” © 2020 Michelle Dean. Reprinted with permission of the David Black Literary Agency.
“The Reckoning” © 2016 Texas Monthly. Reprinted with permission.
“Jennifer Pan’s Revenge” © 2015 Karen K. Ho. Reprinted with permission of Transatlantic Literary Agency Inc.
“The Perfect Man Who Wasn’t” © 2018 Rachel Monroe. Reprinted with permission of Janklow & Nesbit.
“Out Came the Girls” © 2017 Alex Mar. Reprinted with permission of Gernert & Company.
“The End of Evil” © 2019 Sarah Marshall. Reprinted with permission of the author.
“The Ethical Dilemma of Highbrow True Crime” © 2018 Alice Bolin. Reprinted with permission of New York Media.
“The Lost Children of ‘Runaway Train’” © 2016 Elon Green. Reprinted with permission of the author.
“The True Crime Story Behind a 1970 Cult Feminist Film Classic” © 2017 Sarah Weinman. Reprinted with permission of the author.
“What Bullets Do to Bodies” © Jason Fagone. Reprinted with permission of the author.
“Checkpoint Nation” © 2018 Texas Observer. Reprinted with permission.
“How a Dubious Forensic Science Spread Like a Virus” © 2018 ProPublica. Reprinted with permission.
“‘I Am a Girl Now,’ Sage Smith Wrote. Then She Went Missing.” © 2017 Emma Copley Eisenberg. Reprinted with permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.
Copyright
UNSPEAKABLE ACTS. Copyright © 2020 by Sarah Weinman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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FIRST EDITION
Cover design by Alex Camlin
Cover photograph courtesy of Marion County Sheriff’s Office via FOIA
Digital Edition JULY 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-283999-2
Version 05272020
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-283988-6
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