It’s wedding and commencement season, and you know what that means! …Well, yes, bright futures, love is in the air, all that good stuff, but it also means a lot of waiting around for things to start, and a lot of C-plus speeches that would go by a lot quicker if you had something to read. (And a flask in your bag, but we can’t do everything.)

And now, while the bride is getting zhuzhed or the very nervous valedictorian is entering minute 34 or the parade marshal is changing a flat on the Pride float two ahead of yours? You have something to read.

Daniel Langlois, a VFX pioneer and Oscar-winner, and his partner Dominique Marchand, disappeared from the Caribbean island of Dominica last December. (Technically; the prime suspect’s lawyer is trying to spin a “they just bailed on the well-regarded eco-resort they’d worked on for years!” story, but what physical evidence there is suggests they were killed, then burned beyond identification.

Daniel Langlois at work on a character model for Tony de Peltrie. (InspirationTuts via Animation Magazine)
Burleigh’s account of their (…alleged) demises; the possible motives, and mysterious/possibly sketch past, of their neighbor and probable killer, Jonathan Lehrer; and the almost certainly corrupted citizen-investment practices of the island’s government is just straight-ahead top-notch genre reporting. The piece dropped over a month ago; a quick Google didn’t turn up any case updates.
Major crime is rare on the island. The police force is ill equipped to do basic forensics and has reportedly had to send the remains to labs in the U.S. or Canada, and asked the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to assist in the investigation into Langlois’ death. Meanwhile, inhabitants of the nearby hamlet of Soufriere have been open about their intent to do vigilante justice if Lehrer is released.

Matthew Perry promoting his memoir in 2022. (People)

Perry’s death last October (…jfc, it was that long ago already?) was “ruled an accident with no foul play suspected” in the autopsy, which itself was released last December. That report also noted that Perry had been undergoing ketamine therapy, with what looks to this civilian like certified physicians’ supervision – but the ME thinks that “Perry’s last treatment 1 1/2 weeks earlier wouldn’t explain the levels of ketamine in his blood. The drug is typically metabolized in a matter of hours.”
The actual crime here is a Ponzi scheme, for which Zach Horwitz (professional name: “Zach Avery”) has already gotten a couple decades in prison. But if you come for that, stay for Osnos’s gleeful implication that Horwitz’s acting was also a crime:

But even in Hollywood, where professional envy is as ubiquitous as dental veneers, people around Zach were unusually puzzled by the divide between his success and his talent. “He is the worst actor I’ve ever worked with,” a former colleague told me. Sharing a scene with Zach, he said, was like interacting with a banana. The director Michele Civetta, who worked with Zach, told me that he was forced to invent ways to help him unlock emotion; otherwise, it was like “dealing with a dead horse.” … A viewer of another of his films declared, “Zach Avery’s acting was like a cancer to this movie. Every time he was on screen it died a little more. Good god, how did he make it past the auditions?”

Well, he bought himself roles is how, and Osnos soon gets back to the malfeasance that let that happen. Along the way, Horwitz’s path from student athlete and tall-tale teller to studiedly “vanilla” person who always picked up the check – the kind of person that can sell a Ponzi scheme but not attract much notice at the same time – is carefully signposted. So is the film industry’s “ambivalent relationship with facts,” which simultaneously makes Hollywood aspirational, and makes cons like Horwitz’s possible.

There’s an upcoming doc on the case, Bad Actor (snerk), that premiered at Tribeca last week – but I’d urge you not to look it up. I’ll probably forget the meta twist by the time I get around to reviewing it but I don’t want to spoil you guys.

I have so many snarky responses to this headline at the Isle of Staten’s expense that I’m paralyzed, except to note that the real story isn’t so much which boroughs have the best clearance rates, but NYPD’s unsurprising intransigence in sharing useful data, at least with Gothamist:

In 2023 the NYPD switched its crime reporting process to the more robust National Incident Based Reporting System, according to NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Information Tarik Sheppard. But the NYPD has so far declined to share the raw numbers with Gothamist, making it impossible to compare 2023 with previous years and accurately measure the department’s progress.

The phone, which de Souza believes got lifted while she was waiting for an F train, is now providing excellent intel from afar on how phone fences operate, and de Souza is providing a real service to the consumer by tracking it.

There was something oddly soothing about being in touch with the people who’d stolen my phone. Instead of it disappearing into the ether, I knew more or less where it was, and thanks to these texts, I knew that it was a source of frustration to the people who’d gotten their hands on it. As the texts escalated in complexity and rage, I sympathized with their plight. I mean, not enough to unlock my phone. But we’ve all been there – sometimes you get stuck with a difficult project at work.

Things the guys/unlock it

Hee. As her old phone goes on a no-expenses-paid trip around the world, de Souza kicks back with figurative popcorn and messes with the thieves. Gorgeous.

You’ve no doubt heard that Rex Heuermann, “the man accused of killing four sex workers and dumping their bodies on Long Island’s Gilgo Beach in New York, was indicted [last] Thursday in the slayings of two more women.” The new indictments are notable for two reasons; first, per a criminologist expert who spoke to NBC News, one in particular indicates Heuermann could have started killing years before we thought – and claimed more victims.

The other striking intel may not qualify as “notable” to many, but our esteemed reader Claire tipped me to it on the shop’s Instagram the other day: Heuermann’s not just interest in, but apparently successful study of, multiple works by profiler John Douglas and Douglas’s co-author Mark Olshaker.

The NBC News story ends, “In his office, according to the indictment, police found a copy of a book by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker titled “The Cases That Haunt Us.” USA Today‘s reports on “a document on a hard drive recovered from Heuermann’s basement that [police] believe he used to plan the murders,” and adds,

Some notes from the document were sourced from “Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit,” a book by retired FBI agent John E. Douglas and author Mark Olshaker about the psychological profiles of serial killers and mass murderers, according to court documents. For example, prosecutors say one note from the document that reads, “look at the painting,” references a passage from the book: “If you want to understand the artist (the perpetrator), you have to look at the painting (the victim).”

[Suffolk County District Attorney Ray] Tierney said Heuermann referenced the book “not to gain insight into his own behavior or to modify or change it, but rather to use it as a means of improving his methodology and avoid capture by the authorities.”

No, you’re not the only one who just muttered something along the lines of “like these authorities required a ton of prep/research to elude.” My first thought, after that uncharitable one, was…another uncharitable one, namely that I felt sure Douglas has a line in The Cases That Haunt Us about how readers who think they can use the book as a guideline to jamming the signal of a profile are doomed to fail.

I looked it up, and sure enough, here’s Douglas partway through the Lindbergh-kidnapping chapter, after commenting that whoever had disposed of Charles Jr.’s remains had done so with telling carelessness:

In case you think I’m giving away trade secrets here – letting parents know how they can murder their children and avoid suspicion by treating the body in a certain manner – let me assure you in the plainest terms that any individual who think she or she can outsmart the law that way will make so many behavioral errors, leave so many other inadvertent behavioral cues in the commission of the crime and its aftermath, it will be easier rather than more difficult for us to crack the case. (154)

The Cases That Haunt Us, 1st HC edition

I’ll give Douglas the benefit of the doubt there – I think he was addressing the narrow point of children killed by family members or caretakers, plus he personally wasn’t called in on the Gilgo murders AFAIK; obviously none of this is “on him” – buuuuut…if this is what “easier” looked like?