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I know, I know, I'm not around here much, and definitely not participating in the community here. It's a failing. But I need a place to post a long rant, and since I don't have my own website, this is it. Consider this part of my series of rants, in the same vein as my rant about "The Shall Not Grow Old."

One of my favorite podcasts is "In the Dark". Madeleine Baran and Samara Freemark are, I believe, the core of the team. Their first season was about the Jacob Wetterling murder, and it was brilliant. Their second season was about the wrongful conviction Curtis Flowers, and their work was cited in the appeal to the Supreme Court and was instrumental in getting his conviction overturned. Their third season was a harrowing investigation into a specific war crime in Afghanistan, a murder of civilians in Haditha, which also resulted in a publicly accessible and searchable database of alleged war crimes, most of which have not been investigated. So, my impression of them is that they definitely do the work. Their reporting is exhaustive, their research detailed, and they have a gift for good story telling. It's the whole package, and I don't feel either mislead or cheated when I listen to their work.

The most recent season is done by a different reporter, Heidi Blake. I listened to her series on captive princesses of Dubai, which she did in conjunction with Madeleine Baran. It was interesting, but ultimately unsatisfying. It was messy in the way that real life is messy, and the ending was both ambiguous and sad.

The most recent season of "In the Dark" is reported by Heidi Blake, working with Freemark and Baran, and I had high hopes. And it is an interesting and compelling story. But there are so many threads that she doesn't pull on, and so many questions she sets on the table but makes no effort to answer, and I am actually kind of angry. I feel manipulated, and I don't like it. At the same time, I can feel the "true crime podcast" pull of wanting to delve into details and _prove_ things from sketchy to non-existent data.

The podcast is called "Blood Relatives" and is about a very famous murder case in Britain, sometimes referred to as the Whitehouse Farm murders. I believe that if you are a Brit, this will ring a bell. I am not a Brit, and knew nothing of it. Real briefly, and based entirely on what i learned from the podcast: Neville and June Bamberg owned a quite prosperous farm somewhere in England. Unable to conceive, they adopted two children, Sheila and Jeremy. June was a very troubled woman, and was committed for inpatient psychiatric care multiple times. It is assumed that she underwent fairly radical treatments, such as ECT. Their daughter grew up to be a beautful, troubled woman. For a time, she was a model under the name Bambi. She made a bad marriage, had twin sons, and did too many drugs...allegedly. She also suffered from severe mental illness, and was being treated for psychosis. Jeremy was evidently an annoying ne'erdowell who preferred partying and doing drugs to working the farm. He was disliked by his cousins, the staff at the farm, and the village in which he lived. Sheila came home to visit her parents with her two six year old boys. Later evidence shows that the twins hated visiting their grandparents, and one of them had drawn a picture of their grandmother, June, with sharp teeth dripping blood. Jeremy reports having overheard a conversation where Sheila's parents were saying they thought she could not care for her sons and should put them into foster care. At about 3 in the morning, he got a call from his father saying "Sheila's gone mad, and she has a gun." Jeremy called the cops, went to the farm, and then the cops and Jeremy stood around until about 7:30 am, at which point, the cops went in and found everyone dead of gunshot. The presumption was that Sheila had murdered her family, then herself. The cousins were distraught, and certain that it was actually Jeremy that had done this despite the fact that the farmhouse was locked from the inside. They searched about, and found a silencer which forensics showed had Sheila's blood on the inside. Given that all the wounds were ruled to be instantly fatal, if Sheila's blood was in the silencer, that meant that someone must have removed the silencer after she had been shot, as Sheila could not have done it herself, what with her being dead and all. A jury asked if the blood in the silencer could have been anyone's blood but Sheila's, and was told no. They convicted Jeremy, and he is still in prison.

Heidi Blake uncovers a lot of police misconduct.  Like a lot of a lot.  It's interesting.  She also talks about the review process in Britain, and how there is only one body that can refer a case for re-hearing, and how they are under-resourced and over-worked, and how they generally act as cover for police incompetence.  All of this is super interesting.  But...there were so many questions and threads that she raises that she never follows up on.  

Probably my biggest issue is just the title.  "Blood Relatives."  The fact of Sheila and Jeremy's adoption should be important.  I do not believe that the prejudice against adopted children being "real" is just an American phenomenon.  Moreover, the Whitehouse Farm was a substantial piece of property  The cousins that didn't like Jeremy, the ones that found the silencer that ended up being a crucial piece of evidence, the ones that were convinced that Jeremy had done it in advance of any evidence?  Yeah, they inherited.  So, there's blood and there's blood and Blake never really delves into any of the ways in which being adopted might have influenced people's perception of the crime.  There's one allusion, where she asks a man who is part of the team trying to exonerate Bamberg, why is he so interested in the case.  The man answers, "Well, Jeremey's about the same age as me, and he was a Church of England foster like me" which suggests to me that there's something there, some particular social status of being an adoptee through the C of E that matters.  

Blood is also an issue with the silencer.  So, remember that the silencer had Sheila's blood on the inside.  It is also relevant that it had been found by the cousins, not by the police, that it was in the hands of the cousins for several days before being turned over to the police, and that one of the cousins actually had access to some of Sheila's blood (bloody panties) which she also retrieved from the crime scene.  So, there's certainly the suggestion that they might have tampered with it before turning it over.  But the thread that Blake doesn't pull on is this: the judge was incorrect when he said that the blood inside the silencer could only have belonged to Sheila.  According to Blake, forensics says that it might also have belonged to either of the two cousins.  What Blake does not make clear is how that is the case.  Like, were there multiple sources of blood?  Or...is it possible that the sample could have belonged to multiple different people.  I had the impression that the analysis was DNA.  Was it actually just blood type?  But if it _was_ DNA...Sheila was not blood-related to the cousins.  So how could this be?  And why does Blake not follow up on this, if only to clearly identify what the forensic analysis shows and what its limitations were?

Another thread never pulled on is what the Bamberg family was like.  There's a lot of indications that it was not a happy family.  June in and out of mental institutions, subjected to the most severe forms of intervention available in the 70s and 80s.  A grandchild telling his father that he hates to go to the farm, and drawing a picture of his grandmother with bloody teeth.  Both Sheila and Jeremy have substance abuse issues.  Jeremy says in an interview something along the lines of not being able to say anything negative about his father because it would look bad.  There is a lot not being investigated here.  And that would make sense, if the story Blake is telling is one of police malfeasance and bureaucratic fuck-ups.  But if she is telling Jeremy's story, then that is definitely a thread she should have drawn on.

There's a lot of other stuff, but those are the ones that are bothering me right now.  I think that maybe Blake is just...telling the wrong story?  But the overall feeling I have is that I have been manipulated, that important facts have been elided, and that the police are trash.  But I did know that last.  To be fair to Blake, a lot of what she has uncovered is important and may actually result in some useful reforms.  And while the story she tells has me convinced that Jeremy is probably innocent and that the initial impression of a murder/suicide is probably correct, I feel far less confident of this than I would like.  Because I can tell she's manipulating me into that impression.  Honestly, I suspect Jeremy is innocent and also kind of a self-involved asshole that no one liked for good reasons.  Just, you know, not a family annihilator.

Here endeth my rant.  For now.