It’s fair to say that both your parents dying in one year, six months apart, is a lot to take in.
It’s awful damn hard to take.
And I’ve found that since Dad died on August 21, my mind has gone to an unexpected place, likely due to a kind of emotional shock—I feel blunted. Like the grief is always there, just around the corner, lurking like some kind of monster produced by an ancient curse.
But this is a bad horror movie. The monster never pounces. It just runs to the next corner to loom, to suggest itself in a twisted shadow.
So, what do I do now?
The thing that keeps occurring to me is that I must do something to ensure I honor those who have gone before me. I’m a storyteller, it’s one of maybe two-three things I do well. And yes, I know every writer from time immemorial has truly believed some aspect of their life worthy of extended narrative. I’m no different, but my instincts say regardless of my lack of objectivity on this subject, I may just be right.
I guess, then, there are stories to come. As I am able. As the spirits move me to tell their tales.
It’s just my sister and me now. My father died peacefully in his sleep on August 21, 2023. Below is the eulogy I delivered at his funeral service today.
My late father, CMSgt Bob Huff
Writing Mama’s eulogy just six months ago was hard because my mother was part of my heart. To write those words was to admit she was no longer with us. I’m as much my Dad’s son as I was hers and this is tough for similar reasons—and also because you can’t do a man like Bobby Richard Huff justice in just a few hundred words. The poet Walt Whitman wrote of containing multitudes; if there was ever a man in my life who truly contained such multitudes, it was my Dad.
Bobby Richard Huff — Dad — was born in Franklin, Tennessee on June 25, 1936, just one day after his mother Mildred’s birthday. The Huffs — Granny Mildred, Grandpa Ben, Uncle Jackie, and Dad — lived in a tiny tenant farmer’s house on Caldwell Farm. Dad made it clear to me that he both hated and loved the place. In an autobiography he wrote for family, he described his favorite moments in that little house. It’s worth a quote, if only to admire the fact that Daddy had a bit of the poet in him:
“In the summer the heat was awful … The narrow windows were kept open but there was rarely enough breeze to move the curtains. The only relief came during those rare summer storms. The first hope came with the sound of distant thunder. If we were lucky enough to be in its path, the curtains would begin to move. We listened for those first loud drops on that hot metal roof. It would break suddenly with bright flashes of lightning and the roar of rain and thunder. Water poured from the roof and we kept tubs and buckets where we could catch it. The drops would splatter on the screens and send a fine spray over the linoleum floor. The rush of wind would cool that small house before the prop was taken out and the window dropped. That night sleeping would be good.”
Some of my favorite memories are of how my Dad related to his mother. Granny Huff was chatty, smart, sensitive, and sweet, and I think Dad was one of her favorite people to talk to. They had loud, rapid-fire conversations about everything, and they often consisted of Granny declaring an opinion or asking a question and Dad teasing her relentlessly but somehow gently for an hour. And Granny enjoyed every moment.
From them, I learned to love words and conversation and the times when our house was full of people making all manner of noise. When we gathered like that the house was full of joy. That was why when several people came to visit Dad in his final days in hospice, I didn’t ask anyone to speak softly. The conversation flowed, overlapped, grew loud. I believe Dad could hear us, and I believe he loved it. I only wished he could come back to his place as the biggest, most entertaining voice in the room.
Daddy graduated from Antioch High School, the Salutatorian of the class of 1954. However, just as my mother’s class of ’56 yearbook revealed her as “H for most Honest” in the senior alphabet, Dad was — to no one’s surprise — elected most talkative.
He married Margaret Lovene Lane on Dec. 1, 1956. My sister Sherry was born a year later, brother David the following year. Rhonda came later in July 1960, and then after a seven year break, Mama finally had a big-headed carrot top like her husband. That was me.
Daddy had joined the Air National Guard in 1954. He stayed in the service for 41 years, retiring as Chief Master Sergeant — the top noncommissioned officer in his unit — in 1995. Walking through a New York airport for a layover on my flight from Massachusetts to Nashville, the late day light through the windows reminded me of being a boy and running through the grass to meet Dad when he came home from maneuvers each summer. He was often sunburnt and tired, but he’d let loose that big tenor laugh and give me some small souvenir from wherever he’d been. Macadamia nuts and an idol carved from Hawaiian lava rock. Ash from Mt. St. Helens in a jar. Photos of the ocean crashing against Italian coastline, of narrow cobblestone streets in Germany, of haze wrapping the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
Daddy went just about everywhere in the Air Guard and as a civilian. In order of fluency, he spoke Spanish, German, Italian, and some French. And he never stopped exploring languages — in his big upstairs office at the house in Smyrna I had to stop three different CDs he’d left on pause in various players. One was a woman singing German songs, another was a lecture on Roman history, and the third was conversational Spanish phrases. That gives you some idea of how my father’s mind worked.
When I was a kid, Dad would make his time in the Air National Guard sound boring. Once he turned 80 he began telling stories and I learned it was anything but. From secret missions to Central America to riding horses in the Southwest desert to drinking wine in the Azores, Dad found joy in exploring, in learning, in observing. My father had a wild, adventurous side and it didn’t go away after he left the military. He and Mom moved to beautiful Lake Chapala in Mexico for a while, and I think that was as happy as he’d been in years. They moved back to the states after my brother passed, but Dad remained restless till the end — because a mind like Bob Huff’s was never content with sitting still, and that was one of the many things I loved about him. We were very alike that way.
Sorting through memories to share with you has been an impossible task. Some are too much about me, not enough about Dad. Others are too complicated to communicate with ease. I did think of one that seemed right because it revealed a side to my father he didn’t let many people see.
Dad and I went on a fishing trip with his friend James and James’s son Kelly when I was 15. I was put out, thinking I was too old — Kelly was younger than me, still a little kid — and also, hey, I was a teenager, you know how they can be. But Dad and James immediately surprised me by going to a store near the lake and buying nothing but junk food. We stayed in a cabin, and seeing how relaxed my father was with his friend, how at ease, making silly jokes, poking fun at James and James giving good as he got — it all made me realize for the first time that once he’d been a kid like me. Dad and his friend only got annoyed with us, their sons, one time — when we both caught fish and they didn’t catch a thing.
The best moment of the trip, though, was when we took the boat out at night to see if we could get any bites. It was a full moon and with his sharp eyes Dad navigated easily. We anchored in a cove surrounded by high, tree-lined cliffs, and dropped our lines in the water. After a while, I noticed that Dad had fallen silent. Then I did too, as did James and Kelly. And we sat there quietly in the cool summer night, just watching fireflies flicker in the trees above and listening to the water hush itself against the limestone walls around us. At some point, I realized that my loud, loquacious father was simply letting himself enjoy the silence. It was like that perfectly still moment that sometimes falls after a congregation has prayed aloud in church. In that instance I knew I’d never fully understood the depths of my father’s personality, just what a truly complex, brilliant, wonderful man he was.
Dad’s command of words was formidable, but he knew that living, like music, is made of silence as well as sound. He knew that sometimes you just let go of words and listened to the world breathe around you.
At this point I already feel like Dad would say I’ve gone on too long. After all, after my fourth child Dylan was born in 2003, Dad greeted me on the phone with a hearty, “Congratulations! You can stop now.”
Mom and Dad lost two of their four children. My brother David died in 2000, and my eldest sister Sherry died in 2016. I was worried both deaths would break them, but I should’ve given my parents more credit. And Dad surprised me again after Sherry passed. It was storming when she died. Just after the storm moved on, Dad said he stepped outside and for the first time in his life, saw the actual end, the termination point of a rainbow. In telling the story I always heard a little wonder in his voice.
A few days later, my family’s dear friends Silvia and Nacho brought Dad a cedar sapling. They showed him where they’d found it, and it was the exact place where he’d seen the rainbow end. So they planted the tree in one corner of the back yard as a memorial to my sister. Even though in life my father could very much seem like a practical, no-nonsense military man, he held strong spiritual beliefs and never stopped studying mythology, history, philosophy, and scriptures from various religions. Even after Bob Huff had trouble walking without assistance, he was ready for an adventure, if only in his kaleidoscopic mind.
I’ve read that seeing deer after the death of a loved one could be a sign “that our loved ones remain connected to us in spirit, even though they are no longer physically present.”
My father died at 2 am on the 21st. I stayed with him for a while, told him I loved him, that I would take care of my sister. Then I drove back to his house in Smyrna.
As I passed Stonecrest TriStar Medical Center, where my sister died and where Dad first went when he got sick the final time, I saw motion out of the corner of my eye. I glanced to the right and saw a young stag running through the grass beside the road. Mindful of the danger of hitting a deer — to the deer and to me — I slowed to about 10 mph. Sure enough, it bounded into the road, flashing through my headlights for a moment, then it leaped into the field on the other side. It was 3 in the morning, and I simply stopped the car on the empty road and watched it race away into the dark.
For a moment I felt real wonder cut through the lead-like grief sitting heavy on my heart.
The truth is that it was the coolest part of the day and the young male was taking advantage of it to seek out food and water. Yet I couldn’t help but feel it was also a message.
My father is gone, but his wild, wandering spirit will always be out there somewhere, looking for another adventure. Looking for more wonderful, colorful stories to tell.
The following was first published on my personal Substack on July 18, 2023.
In one corner of my father’s backyard is a small rock garden shaded by a young cedar tree. My sister Sherry’s ashes are buried beneath the tree, per her wishes. A plaque engraved with her name, birth, and death years on it leans against the base.
The day after my mom died earlier this year, I was pacing the yard in the cold and was drawn to the small green iron lawn chair my father had placed by Sherry’s resting place a year or two ago. I sat and stared at my sister’s name. Then I did something I never do. I said, “Sherry, I wish you were here. You’d know what to do.”
I have never talked to myself or the dead aloud, but I meant those words. She was ten years older than me and the very model of a capable oldest sibling, even though she sometimes hated that sense of responsibility. Confronted by our mom’s death, I felt overwhelmed by the enormity of the loss and, worse, facing it without the sibling I most often looked to for guidance when I couldn’t figure out what else to do. The sister who understood me better than anyone else in the family.
I never told anyone what I’d said aloud that day. It was such a small moment and so personal; why would I?
Yesterday my two youngest kids, Maggie and Dylan, were in my Dad’s yard, looking at his colorfully painted fence, crepe myrtle tree, and tomato patch. They went to the cedar where Sherry’s plaque is and stood looking at it. Then, according to my daughter Margaret, my son Dylan said aloud, “Sherry, I wish you were here. You’d know what to do.”
Again, I am sure I never told anyone what I’d said alone on that chilly February day. But my son, who is on the autism spectrum and rarely speaks without a good reason, had somehow said the exact same thing, completely unbidden.
I don’t know what to make of that. I really don’t. But I welcome the sense of wonder it brings.
And more. But, you know, there is a part of me that’s long been like, ‘screw newsletters, screw social media, just blog.’ Make it simple. Might try and do that.
Might still make notes here from time to time. However, if you want some in-depth writing about fascinating shit you might just become as obsessed with as I am, go there and subscribe. Paid subscribers get first looks at new posts and community access (comments, discussions).
I’m going to try to write something non-work-related every day for the rest of October.
I have sometimes compared my job to technical writing: There is an expected format, a style. Nothing wrong with that. I can easily roll it out. Not too personal but casual, very active voice. Humor is welcome but don’t be too gonzo.
When I write for the magazine it is enough my voice that I don’t feel like I’m faking–at the same time, I’ve grown aware of feeling frustrated at not just being me sometimes.
That’s when I remember I have a blog.
Next up: An expanded and corrected version of a tweet thread I posted on, well, Twitter a week ago. It’s one hell of a story. I don’t plan on confining it to this blog–I think it’s a book-length saga. About opera, the Nazis, Stalin’s NKVD in America, and much more. But it’s worth a more detailed recap, with some corrections (I did the Twitter thread from memory; got some stuff wrong.)
Stay tuned.
Incidentally, I wrote this with a physical keyboard but on my iPhone. That’s not unusual anymore, I guess, but it’s still cool to me.
…but really, there are a few reasons my desire to just blog for the heck of it ebbs and flows. And it’s more often ebbing. One is that I write and edit for a living so I see words all damn day. I never realized there would be moments when I just couldn’t read another thing or feel so emptied of eloquence I didn’t want to bother writing. But that’s been happening inside my head for years.
Also, there are rules to what makes blogging work, get new eyeballs, etc. At least in professional digital publishing. So when I get to my own blog I don’t want to fuck with those. Like, “Always have an image! People are more likely to read on if there’s an intriguing image!”
Well yeah, I get that. I have no objection in my day job to ensure every post I’m responsible for in any way has a grabby, interesting image as a draw. Even better if there’s a well-chosen video or I’ve padded it out with relevant tweets. That’s the job and I’m gonna do it right.
When it’s just me, I just want to write. I write a shocking amount by hand in journals and on notebooks to get my brain limbered up and working. One of the joys in that is I only have to please myself with what’s on the page. I get to a blank blogging CMS edit screen here, I don’t want to worry that no one will bother if there’s not an image. I kind of resent the feeling I need an extra hook, I guess. Plus, choosing that media is extra mental energy and creativity that could be directed at something more permanent.
Then there is the fact that I established I could get paid for this 16 years ago and have made a living doing it ever since. There comes a point when a personal site like this feels low-key like just giving it away for free. When I have what I think is a good story idea that might not fit the publication that employs me, I don’t think, “I’ll put it on my blog!”
I think, “wonder who I can sell this to as an article/book/show or documentary idea?” Because I know that possibility is always there for me (and make no mistake, I am eternally grateful for that; I know how lucky I’ve been). I tell myself sometimes that just putting it here will make it into a throwaway.
The word “throwaway” has nothing to do with those who do read it (you, whoever you are), it just has everything to do with the way Google and social media work.
That’s perhaps my buried lede, but again, this isn’t for work and if I want to present someone with a portfolio of my work it won’t be this blog, but stuff I got paid to do. I can bury all the ledes I want here.
People still blog plenty, but as Google kept adjusting itself to point away from personal sites owned by individuals who might not be able to produce professional-level reportage and writing, ranking sites, as Twitter and Facebook began coding all sorts of arcane rules based entirely on what Silicon Valley thinks is worthwhile, readership of workaday blogs dwindled to next to nothing.
Maybe that had to happen in some way, and there is no doubt I’ve benefited from it, too. But it slowly reduced the chances that you or I might really discover a site, or a writer.
My example of this: Fifteen years ago, I was googling about an unsolved crime from 2004 and the top result I got was TrueCrimeDiary.com — the crime blog established by the late author Michelle McNamara. At the time, no one in any online true crime community knew who she was, who she was married to, that she had real journalism training, etc. — but thanks to Google and Michelle’s innate gifts as a writer and journalist, I found her quickly and she became my first choice in “solo” bloggers to check out for reliable writing, reporting, conjecture, and thinking, in general.
We became friends and it still took me two more years to put it together that her “comedian husband” was Patton Oswalt. It was about the crime stories for us, especially the unsolved.
She said later that she’d found my blog within months of me beginning it pretty much the same way I’d found TCD.
Those connections are still possible online, and I’ve seen them happen a lot on Twitter, in particular. I’ve also made a ton of good friends on Twitter. It is hard to square in my head why that’s still possible, but keeping a blog up is hard because search engines have turned into Interstate highways steering between the big cities only. Personal blogging and whatever is left of the blogosphere seems to have become like Route 66 after Eisenhower’s big roads took over America — a pleasant, even quaint relic of an earlier time, one that is slowly pixellating over time and turning into so much digital sand. To extend the stupid metaphor.
I sat down to write this to work something out, as is probably obvious, and that’s another thing blogs provide to those interested — you sometimes get to watch someone work things through in their minds almost in real-time. That’s not too interesting to many people, but it is to me. The best we get now is Twitter threads, and those are hard to write and remain organized enough to permit the reader to follow your train of thought.
Work it out I did, though. In essence, I’m aware that the problem is almost entirely in my personal, subjective perception, though I’d submit it’s grounded in realities. A way for me to both be a lazy thinker and writer and not stretch. Something that becomes easier and easier to do with age.
(Side note: Something else I do to limit myself is constantly search for new online writing venues, even as I’m thinking the things I wrote about above. I tell myself I’m ensuring I’ve got my name and identity under control in that domain so no one can pretend to be me or whatever — which is something that can happen but is truly statistically rare — but I’m really putting off pushing myself a bit.)
I’ve got some story ideas I’ll work on this summer and I’m going to at least start here. One is simply too thin to make a book, or I’d consider it. Not enough information on it to flesh out a full read. I still feel compelled to write about it. It’s the story of a killer who might make you think of the Zodiac, or if you really know your true crime history, the Texarkana Phantom. This killer was neither, as far as I know. And there’s a possibility he never truly existed at all.
Giving myself a deadline on this would be setting up a situation I’d find easy to fail, so I’m just gonna say, soon.
And if you are reading this, especially all the blather above, thank you. However you got here, I’m glad you’re there.
Leroy Lane in the center, standing, holding packages.
Uncle Leroy died in January 1972. I was 4 years old, and would not turn 5 till November that year.
That surprised me when I looked up his obituary. I have always remembered him so clearly, I forgot just how young I was. He was tall with narrow shoulders and he walked with the kind of hybrid cane and crutch that has handles and elbow braces. That’s him standing in the center of the photo above, which was published in the Nashville Banner in 1957.
Uncle Leroy had a form of muscular dystrophy or he wouldn’t be in the photo, which was made at the Brentwood Country Club, some kind of Christmas charity event for MD adults and kids.
Leroy Lane kept going for as long as he could. He had four kids like his younger sister, my mom. Like my mom, he had those kids with a strongly-built, temperamental redhead for a spouse, his wife Lois. As a result of that coincidence, his kids looked more like my siblings than cousins.
I remember I loved Uncle Leroy because he and my mom were a lot alike. A unique combination of sly wit and kindness. I was still more toddler than pre-K age but I was often compared to him. It was partly us all just looking like Lanes — any photo of my maternal grandfather reveals I inherited his facial bone structure, as did mom and Uncle Leroy.
The funny thing is, Leroy and I really had a lot in common. Far more than I knew at the time. Like music. Listen to the video below.
That’s Uncle Leroy singing in his big, plain voice. If you go listen to any number of lesser-known country singers from that time — the record was pressed in 1968 — well, well, well, well-well-well, he was just about as good as any of them.
Especially considering he had a disease that affected his upper body musculature and lung capacity.
I don’t know if taking a keen interest in my family’s stories long after many firsthand sources have “gone home to Jesus” (good old Southern Protestant phrase for being dead) is a byproduct of my own aging or what. I mean, I’m sure it is to some degree, but I wouldn’t have some of these clear memories had I not always had some interest in family.
Because all families are full of stories that could inform you about yourself and your own choices.
It doesn’t help that I’ve finally read Tolstoy, who was masterful at writing about the real inner lives of people tied together by blood and marriage, and my wife and I are also into genealogy, though she is by far the expert on that subject. If anyone thinks I’m a gifted researcher, they just haven’t met her yet.
For years I felt my interest in my own family stories was self-centered, or solipsistic. And perhaps it is. I knew for a fact, too, that it was at odds with the way I relate to my family. I’m the only one who ever moved over 1,000 miles away to live, thoroughly establishing myself in another part of the country. I’m certainly the only one who has done the kinds of jobs I’ve had, especially writing and editing. I’m from a long line of men who worked with their hands, dropping out of school in 8th grade, 11th grade, getting whatever higher education they needed from the military or on the job.
Majoring in voice and focusing on classical music, I did for a time feel sheepish about my white trash background. But with age, I’ve turned around and in a way, it has become a source of pride.
I’ve also thought about how my family was full of talkers and storytellers. I inherited that impulse and channeled it into writing. No matter how loquacious I might seem, I’m outwardly kind of quiet compared to people like my late paternal grandmother, late sister, or my dad.
So, with Leroy above and with the preceding post, which was the first installment in what will be a longer (somewhat fictionalized) story about Dad’s maternal relatives, I’ve begun to tell family stories. I am, in part, doing it for myself. I’m doing it to answer questions I have been asking in some form since I could speak. Also, because the story I began in the preceding post is so in line with how I launched my writing career — with true crime — I’m trying to trace patterns through generations to try and understand how they produced me, and what in me is an echo of those people and the lives they led.
Like Uncle Leroy, a good man with ambitions who overcame some mighty challenges for as long as he could.
Sometimes, you can still find 45s of Leroy’s songs on eBay. So it cheers me up when I think about them and know he left a little legacy.
I might even sing a duet with him one day, if I can ever figure out the software.
It was cold out but fair that night as Arthur Jasper Heflin walked along Franklin Pike. Middle Tennessee wasn’t as suburban as it is now, a place of shopping malls and celebrity sightings at the Outback Steakhouse by the Cool Springs Galleria. It was quiet once you left the pools of light by roadhouses like The Lousy Duck. Then you were under the canopy of stars and in the country of night, where the November trees were dead claws rising from graves, the green that would come in March seeming a century away.
Heflin went by Jasper. He was a laborer and farmhand by occupation, married to a lively woman named Mamie Johnson.
At some point during his walk, headlights appeared. They swayed a bit as they came down the long, gentle hill toward him. He bowed his head to keep the glare out of his eyes. He tried to step a little further toward the fence running between the highway and farmland. But something was wrong. The car wasn’t quite on the road. The driver was perhaps sleepy or drunk.
Jasper was a little drunk himself. He decided not to worry about it. A man couldn’t go through life afraid of everything. There was not enough whiskey in the world to ease that kind of fear.
Jasper thought of his occasional boss, a man they called the Bull o’ the Woods. It was an ironic name if you saw the man at a distance. He was slender and not even 5’10”. But he had the presence of a 7-footer with shoulders wide enough to haul a calf. That was a fella who wasn’t afraid of much, thought Jasper.
He looked up. The headlights of the oncoming car grew until they swallowed him.
November 14, 1937
The litany of injuries was gruesome:
Compound comminuted fracture of the right frontal bone & extensive injury to the brain (his skull had virtually exploded on the right side)
Fracture of both bones of both lower legs
Secondary shock — due to loss of blood
They formed a list of what a good 1930s American sedan of modest size could do to the human body in the wrong hands.
The wrong hands that night, according to a report in the Nashville Banner, belonged to Frank Allen of North First Street. The shattered body belonged to the former Arthur Jasper Heflin.
Heflin’s wife Mamie, that lively girl, was alone in the world.
But she still had her job. A crisp $3 a week, cooking and cleaning for Ms. Bertha, whose nerves were constantly shot. At least in part due to her marriage to Jasper’s off-again, on-again boss, The Bull o’ the Woods, Harry Brent Dalton.
Mamie knew that Harry–my great grandfather–would take good care of her.
Note
The preceding is the first installment in a work of fiction based closely on real events. Some names have been changed to protect me from the wrath of elderly, distant relatives.
While many dates will be accurate and events will be described as they were recorded in various legal and personal documents as well as aging memories, I elected to fashion the connecting tissues myself to lend structure to the narrative.
Sources: Nashville Banner and The Tennessean via newspapers.com; a variety of archived Tennessee state civil records found via ancestry.com.
Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel, about the mysterious death of Elisa Lam. This is very frustrating. I’ve started this post two or three times and deleted each draft because I don’t want to sound like a bastard toward people doing what I essentially launched my writing career doing: “websleuthing,” kinda.
This series troubles me because the ultimate truth of Elisa Lam’s death isn’t chilling, real world horror as if she’d found herself trapped in some real world version of The Overlook Hotel from Stephen King’s The Shining. Elisa Lam wrote openly about her struggles with mental health. Anyone who has ever witnessed another person in the throes of a psychotic state saw the infamous elevator video of Elisa at the Cecil and knew what they were seeing.
All the internet churn surrounding Elisa’s vanishing and death from amateur sleuth types was understandable — and ultimately pointless. People loaded up Youtube with hours upon hours of utterly pointless videos discussing this case, parsing every moment…and in the end it was a bipolar woman off her medication and actively psychotic.
Of course there are questions about Elisa’s death. There will always be. Many are legit, I don’t question asking them.
But as someone who has had a part in evolving online crime writing and websleuthing and as someone who has lost a sibling to mental illness, this particular series is really bothering me. I have no idea how it could’ve been made differently, but one thing that does occur to me is framing it as some kind of gritty true crime account is a disingenuous choice. It pulls the focus away from the person at the center of the story — this intelligent, creative, and sadly very troubled young woman — and onto the self-styled “sleuths,” especially.
But Steve, um, weren’t you kind of at the vanguard of this sort of thing? There were like, what, three crime blogs online when you started?
Yeah. I was. And I learned from every single thing I wrote about. One thing I learned is we begin immediately making up our own narratives about high-profile mysteries. And because most of us are not in law enforcement and privy to a huge load of actual, concrete evidence, we start reinforcing our theories. We put them online. People start coming up with counter-theories. Others question your interest, as if all humans aren’t immediately curious about the fates of others — because we are. That’s the root of so much interest from strangers in true crime cases, in real mysteries of any kind.
Elisa Lam’s death was a gruesome and incredibly sad mystery. The real story is about mental health, however. Crime Scene spends way too long framing its narrative like true crime before it finally digs into Elisa’s own writing about being bipolar.
It begins to feel, by the third installment, like this was a fascinating and complex 90-minute documentary shoved into multiple episodes. I say this as someone who has been in their position many times, too, but it relies far too much on the videos from “sleuths.” They feel by the end of the second episode like what they are: filler.
I’m watching Crime Scene to the end to give myself a chance to change my opinion because smart people I know who do genuinely good work with true crime are involved, and producer and director choices were not their call.
But maybe since I sat down today to record segments for a true crime show on an actual murder I wrote about 14 years ago when I ran crimeblog.us, I’m just thinking a lot about this whole true crime thing online and how it has evolved, especially since podcasting was revealed as perhaps the ideal web-centric format for it.
The subject is still a source of intense fascination for me. My best ideas for nonfiction books are true crime subjects. I am really finding out in the last couple of years, however, that my perspectives have changed. I don’t know if I just take it all much more seriously than I did or if this is a result of just aging and growing up, but there it is.
This is a demo store for testing purposes — no orders shall be fulfilled. Dismiss
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