In the Footsteps of a Killer

A crime writer digs into the decades-long investigation of a serial killer in California, and finds a growing online community of amateur sleuths trying to solve the case:

“The Golden State Killer, though, has consumed me the most. In addition to 50 sexual assaults in Northern California, he was responsible for ten sadistic murders in Southern California. Here was a case that spanned a decade and ultimately changed DNA law in the state. Neither the Zodiac Killer, who terrorized San Francisco in the late 1960s and early ’70s, nor the Night Stalker, who had Southern Californians locking their windows in the ’80s, was as active. Yet the Golden State Killer has little recognition; he didn’t even have a catchy name until I coined one. His capture was too low to detect on any law enforcement agency’s list of priorities. If this coldest of cases is to be cracked, it may well be due to the work of citizen sleuths like me (and a handful of homicide detectives) who analyze and theorize, hoping to unearth that one clue that turns all the dead ends into a trail—the one detail that will bring us face-to-face with the psychopath who has occupied so many of our waking hours and our dreams.”

Published: Feb 27, 2013
Length: 32 minutes (8,054 words)

Rescuing Cesar

“Dog Whisperer” Cesar Millan is turning his life back around after a series of bad business deals and a messy divorce caused him to attempt to take his own life:

“I visited Millan at the ranch a few months after his suicide attempt. When I arrived he was lying on a bench in the shade, sweating through a purple polo shirt, with a bottle of Maalox resting on his chest. ‘I’m still managing the depression, the anger, the insecurity,’ he told me, ‘but I am moving forward.’ A pair of hyperactive huskies belonging to his close friend Jada Pinkett Smith ran through the hills pulling a sled Millan had modified for the rocky terrain. Junior, a sleek, gray three-year-old pit bull he was grooming to take Daddy’s place, lay quietly under the bench, watching Millan’s every move. ‘I couldn’t have done what I do without Daddy,’ he said, ‘and now I can’t do it without Junior. There’s always a pit bull there supporting me.’

“Millan is a short, stocky guy – ‘like a burrito,’ he says – but he carries himself with a straight back, chest jutted out, a natural alpha. When he arrived in the United States 22 years ago, he knew only a single English word – ‘OK’ – and he still talks in a loose, colloquial SoCal Spanglish, rolling through sentences with mixed-up tenses, calling his dog Blizzard a ‘Jello Lab,’ pronouncing buffet with a hard t and sushi as ‘su-chi.’ On ‘Dog Whisperer,’ Millan uses the language deficit to his advantage, putting clients at ease with his always polite, effortlessly funny broken-English banter as he (often painfully) dissects their troubled relationships with their dogs. In person he’s just as charming – open, inquisitive, with a quick mind and a slightly rough edge that makes him even more likable. For all his alpha-male poise, Millan also possesses humility, which he says comes with the job. ‘In my field, working with animals, they detest egotistical people,’ he says. ‘Dogs are wise. They don’t buy BS. . . . When you are egotistical, you’re not grounded. So it’s not even an option for me to become disconnected or lose my grounding.'”

Author: Jason Fine
Source: Men’s Journal
Published: Feb 18, 2013
Length: 23 minutes (5,817 words)

Miami Heist: The Brink’s Money Plane Job’s Messy Aftermath

How a group of thieves stole $7.4 million from Brink’s guards in a warehouse at Miami International Airport, and were caught by FBI investigators:

“Monzon’s plan, naturally, was to lie low. The crew sealed the money in vacuum packs and split up. Monzon stashed some of his money in PVC pipes and buried them under his family’s house in Homestead, a rural area halfway between Miami and the Florida Keys. Some went into the attic. He didn’t hide it all, though: He bought a Suzuki Hayabusa motorcycle worth about $14,000. But the everyday dramas of ordinary life continued. Monzon kept his job at the rental company. Cinnamon kept working as well, as a receptionist at Vista magazine. ‘I get up every day at six in the morning to come work like a slave,’ she complained months later in a phone conversation tapped by the FBI.”

“Boatwright took a different approach. He bought a Rolex and a set of gold caps for his teeth and began days-long drug binges at strip clubs. He dropped thousands of dollars partying with friends. Rumors spread to Monzon that he was doing drugs right out in the street.”

Source: Businessweek
Published: Feb 22, 2013
Length: 12 minutes (3,185 words)

Working Girl

Remembering poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, who became a literary sensation during the first half of the 20th century:

“Millay’s reach was remarkable, particularly in an age before television. Biographer Nancy Milford recounts how, after winning the Pulitzer, Millay started traveling around the country giving readings to packed auditoriums, and for her audiences, whatever line may have existed between her life and her art was completely obscured by these performances. Onstage she appeared an astonishing creature, a real live New Yorker and honest-to-god poetess who looked and played the part: loose velvet robes dwarfed her pale, tiny frame, making her resonant voice with its clipped consonants and plummy vowels seem all the more dramatic in comparison. By then she was bobbing her hair, and after her visit to Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the campus newspaper noted that the percentage of bobbed hairstyles among students shot up from 9 percent to 63 percent.”

Published: Feb 12, 2013
Length: 9 minutes (2,347 words)

The Ghost Writes Back

The writer reflects on her old part-time job—ghostwriting the Sweet Valley High book series:

“Sweet Valley High set its fables of ‘same and different’ in a 1980s world of new wealth and upward mobility, latching on to an innovative publishing reality: create a mass-market paperback series for young female readers, keep the price point low enough that it could be absorbed by a middle-class allowance, and use the books themselves to advertise each other by ‘seeding’ the plots of each subsequent book in the final chapters. After almost a decade of new realism offered to teen readers by Judy Blume, whose heroines had scoliosis or weight problems or pimples and worried about getting their periods and struggled about whether or not to believe in God, Sweet Valley High offered a pastel, romantic antidote: a world of action instead of contemplation, a world in which bodies were seen soft-focus, free of the slightest blemish or appetite. Mysterious illnesses aside, this was a disembodied world, where corporeality was hinted at solely through actions: the twins ‘sped’ in their shiny red Fiat Spider convertible; ‘dashed’ to the mall; or ‘raced’ upstairs to phone a friend. Rhetoric mattered here as much as action—the books were filled with dialogue, and talk was everywhere—gossip, confidences, promises, avowals, protests, demurrals. I never knew, before I started writing for Sweet Valley, how many synonyms there were for the verb ‘said.’ The twins by and large didn’t ‘say’ things—instead, they chuckled and giggled and whispered and murmured and sighed. They ‘gasped’ over good news or bad. They lived in a fantasy world, these girls, and as long as I was writing about them, to some extent, so did I.”

Author: Amy Boesky
Source: Kenyon Review
Published: Feb 25, 2013
Length: 20 minutes (5,173 words)

The Last Hat Salesman

A writer recalls his family’s move to Dallas, and what he learned from his father about work and life:

“Because my dad had preached the importance of critical acumen in all areas, I couldn’t help but apply that principle to him. I studied his sales techniques and concluded that, although he seemed to have mastered complex economic matters, he had major limitations. I was not surprised that in the course of his 25-year career he did only moderately well. At a time when many of his colleagues became wealthy, wealth eluded him. He earned little more than a middle-class income and at times barely that. When he and my mother fought, which was often, she would ask the question that I believe haunted him until the end of his life. ‘If you’re so smart, Milton,’ she’d say, ‘why aren’t you making more money?’

“The answer had to do with his style and the imperfect nature of his reinvention. My father was amiable. He was also charismatic. He bristled with energy and had his own distinct charm. He was gregarious and curious about people. He expressed interest in their stories and was sympathetic with their problems. He also believed in his own vision of the world. These are the qualities of a great salesman, and yet, by large measure, he missed that mark. The reason was obvious: in selling others, he was also attempting to sell himself. Because his self-doubts cut so deep, that process was exhausting. As a result, he overexplained and oversold.”

Author: David Ritz
Source: D Magazine
Published: Feb 24, 2013
Length: 16 minutes (4,205 words)

I’m a Shut-In. This is My Story

A man explains why he became a recluse, and why he now wants to leave the house:

“Being different means constant pressure from culture to conform. You can’t avoid the pressure, you can’t rebel against it, you can’t rise up and punch it, and you certainly can’t ignore it. Normal is everywhere.

“It’s inevitable that anyone different starts to feel isolated and rejected by the world. When you’re constantly reminded that you don’t fit in, you eventually give up on fitting in. I gradually gave up on trying to fit in and focused on pretending to fit in.”

Author: K-2052
Published: Feb 20, 2013
Length: 60 minutes (15,092 words)

How to Stop the Bullies

How Facebook, computer scientists at MIT, and members of Anonymous are finding ways to address cyberbullying:

“Lieberman is most interested in catching the egregious instances of bullying and conflict that go destructively viral. So another of the tools he has created is a kind of air-traffic-control program for social-networking sites, with a dashboard that could show administrators where in the network an episode of bullying is turning into a pileup, with many users adding to a stream of comments—à la Let’s Start Drama. ‘Sites like Facebook and Formspring aren’t interested in every little incident, but they do care about the pileups,’ Lieberman told me. ‘For example, the week before prom, every year, you can see a spike in bullying against LGBT kids. With our tool, you can analyze how that spreads—you can make an epidemiological map. And then the social-network site can target its limited resources. They can also trace the outbreak back to its source.’ Lieberman’s dashboard could similarly track the escalation of an assault on one kid to the mounting threat of a gang war. That kind of data could be highly useful to schools and community groups as well as the sites themselves. (Lieberman is leery of seeing his program used in such a way that it would release the kids’ names beyond the social networks to real-world authorities, though plenty of teenagers have social-media profiles that are public or semipublic—meaning their behavior is as well.)”

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Feb 20, 2013
Length: 24 minutes (6,218 words)

The Princess and the Trolls

The story of Adalia Rose, a 6-year-old girl with progeria whose YouTube videos became an Internet sensation—and soon faced online attacks and death threats:

“Adalia knows she’s different. She can see she’s bald. She’s aware how small she is—at 14 pounds, she weighs less than Marcelo, and he’s one year old, a baby still, really. Unlike Mommy or Daddy or Gama, she doesn’t have eyebrows or eyelashes. Other children sometimes mistake her for a boy, even though she’s usually outfitted in pink. She needs help walking up a staircase. She can’t go outside alone to play. She doesn’t go to school. At the mall, people look at her funny. Her parents explain it’s ‘because they’ve never seen an angel.’

“Adalia knows that her difference has a diagnosis, progeria, a condition affecting approximately one child in four million. What she doesn’t know is how progeria ends: The average lifespan is 13 years. At six, there’s a distinct possibility she’s almost halfway through her short life. Natalia and Ryan refuse to talk about that. They focus on the present, not the future.”

Source: Gawker
Published: Feb 22, 2013
Length: 32 minutes (8,118 words)

Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us

An investigation into the complicated and costly world of medical billing in the U.S.:

“Out of work for a year, Janice S. had no insurance. Among the hospital’s charges were three ‘TROPONIN I’ tests for $199.50 each. According to a National Institutes of Health website, a troponin test “measures the levels of certain proteins in the blood” whose release from the heart is a strong indicator of a heart attack. Some labs like to have the test done at intervals, so the fact that Janice S. got three of them is not necessarily an issue. The price is the problem. Stamford Hospital spokesman Scott Orstad told me that the $199.50 figure for the troponin test was taken from what he called the hospital’s chargemaster. The chargemaster, I learned, is every hospital’s internal price list. Decades ago it was a document the size of a phone book; now it’s a massive computer file, thousands of items long, maintained by every hospital.

“Stamford Hospital’s chargemaster assigns prices to everything, including Janice S.’s blood tests. It would seem to be an important document. However, I quickly found that although every hospital has a chargemaster, officials treat it as if it were an eccentric uncle living in the attic. Whenever I asked, they deflected all conversation away from it. They even argued that it is irrelevant. I soon found that they have good reason to hope that outsiders pay no attention to the chargemaster or the process that produces it. For there seems to be no process, no rationale, behind the core document that is the basis for hundreds of billions of dollars in health care bills.”

Source: Time Magazine
Published: Feb 20, 2013
Length: 102 minutes (25,502 words)