- Did my leg shrink?

I can move them!

I mean, I knew Alaska Airlines, premium class had extra leg room, but this, this feels different.

Okay.

Crazy idea.

On the count of three, I'm going to try and cross my, oh boy!

That's nice!

Woo!

(upbeat classical music) (bright jingle) (relaxing music) - [Narrator] And now, the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival, featuring journalists, newsmakers and innovators from around the country, and conversation about the issues making headlines.

Thank you for joining us for Critics At Large: Crazy for Crime, with Patrick Radden Keefe, moderated by Alexandra Schwartz, Naomi Fry, and Vinson Cunningham.

Before we begin, a special thank you to our stage sponsor, Alaska Airlines and our founding sponsor, the Kerry and Linda Killinger Foundation.

Finally, thank you to our host sponsor, Amazon.

- Hello everyone.

Welcome to the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival.

I am Alex Schwartz, one of the hosts of critics at Large from the New Yorker.

I'm joined by my co-hosts, Naomi Fry and Vinson Cunningham.

Hi guys!

- Hey!

- Hi!

- Hello!

- How you doing?

- We're so excited to be here.

- We are very excited to be here, especially because today we are talking about true crime and the insatiable hunger that audiences have for stories about people who do or experience terrible things.

There is no shortage of examples.

I mean, I'm thinking of podcasts, like "Serial" or "My Favorite Murder" or of shows like "Making a Murderer" or "Tiger King."

I mean, the list goes on and on and on.

And as this genre has exploded in popularity, there's been more consideration of the ethics around it.

So stories like these raise a lot of questions.

You know, does true crime honor victims or does it exploit them?

Which stories get told, which don't?

Is it right that the families of victims have to relive these incredibly painful chapters of their lives for essentially our entertainment?

So I would say that all of these concerns really come down to one big central question.

Is there a right way to turn real life tragedy into mass entertainment or art?

So to help us answer that, we are getting help.

Patrick Radden Keefe is our fellow staff writer at the New Yorker, and he's one of the true masters of crime writing.

We are all big Patrick Radden Keefe fans.

Do you guys have any favorites of examples of his work?

- I mean, there's "Empire of Pain," his book from three years ago or so in which he investigated the notorious Sackler family and their pedaling of Oxycontin to disastrous results, for one, yeah.

- And then there's "Say Nothing," the story of a murder that happened in Northern Ireland during the time of The Troubles, which is actually now, I think to our point here, being turned into an FX show that's gonna come out later this year.

- Yeah, exactly.

- So we will get into all of that, and let's welcome Patrick Radden Keefe.

(audience applauding) Hi, Patrick.

- Hey guys.

- [Naomi] Hi, hello Patrick.

- [Alex] Hello.

So I think we can all say that true crime is an obsession in the culture right now.

In fact, I have data to offer us about this.

Earlier today, the three of us were at the Space Needle here in Seattle, and we approached a random sampling of fellow visitors to the Space Needle to ask them, do you like true crime.

And I was a little bit, to be honest, skeptical of this exercise.

I thought like, oh, we'll lead some fun audio for our show.

Every single one of them was like, "Yeah, I'm obsessed with it."

- Yeah.

- Every single one.

- We talked to somewhere in between five and 10 people, I guess, and it was actually shocking because they all had like, oh, I love this and I love that.

And they weren't just saying it.

They were like, I listen to it every night before going to sleep.

It plays as I'm slumbering.

And we were like, wow, you know?

- How do you sleep?

- It was astonishing, kind of the mass, kind of everyone saying how much they were a fan.

- Well, I basically have two questions, leading from this observation.

You know, one is kind of for all of us, and one is specifically for you, Patrick, but I'm gonna put both of 'em to you which is, what is the appeal of these stories for someone reading or watching them?

And also, what is the appeal of writing them, of writing about crime?

What does it let you do as a writer?

- I mean, I'm a little confused at times about the intensity of the appeal.

And when I look particularly at all the podcasts about true crime, all of the streaming stuff that you see, it can feel at times to me like there's a glut.

Like there's too much of it.

Like there's a kind of sameness.

And I sometimes wonder how it is that people have such a bottomless appetite for this stuff.

I think some of it is that you can go back to the dawn of literature and questions of good and evil have always fascinated us.

I mean, people aren't, generally speaking, reading "Paradise Lost" these days, but these questions of the terrible things that people do, I think are interesting, just fundamentally.

I also think that there's a way in which, I mean, I often think to analogize about disaster movies or, you know, zombie movies or what have you, these types of scenarios in which from the comfort of our living room, we watch a story of apocalypse, of something that is sort of even more terrifying in the moment we happen to be living through.

Can you imagine?

And I think that there's maybe an element of that in true crime as well, that there's something sort of strangely comforting about, in your own life, watching disaster befall someone else and kind of knowing that you are sort of secure.

To answer your second question, I would sort of pivot because I think that that explanation I just offered would suggest that when you watch true crime, you're really kind of empathizing with the victim or the victim's family.

You're sort of thinking, oh look at those evil people who are so different from me, so alien for me.

And for me as a writer, it's actually kind of the opposite where what I'm really intrigued by is, why do people do bad things and what are the ways in which those people are not different from me, but actually similar to me?

And so, you know, I haven't written much over the years about people who are kind of inexplicably just sort of pure evil, because those people aren't that intriguing to me.

I mean, the thing I always think about is, I wrote a story years ago.

There was a mass shooter, a woman named Amy Bishop, and she'd been a professor at the University of Alabama.

And in 2010, some of you may recall, she walked into a faculty meeting and shot six of her colleagues.

And my editor called me and said, "Hey, do you wanna write a story about that case?"

And initially I said, no, because a mass shooter is not that interesting to me.

I don't really care why she did it.

You know, newsflash, like, she's a little bit nuts and that's not actually a place that I feel the need to go.

But then my editor said, there's a really interesting backstory here, which is when she was young, like a kind of college age kid, she actually shot and killed her little brother with a shotgun.

And there was only one witness to that shooting.

It was their mother.

And so their mother only had two kids, and she walked into the kitchen one day and she saw her daughter shoot and kill her son, and the cops were on the way.

And when they came, she said, "I saw the whole thing.

It was an accident."

And the choice of that mother, right, you've just lost one child and you may be about to lose the other.

What do you say to the police?

That to me was really intriguing and that was something I wanted to understand.

And in this case, I think in some ways, that choice she made helped create a situation in which her daughter, all these years later, shot these other people.

So that's what intrigues me most, is sort of getting up close as I can and trying to understand the ways in which some people deviate from conventional morality.

- Well, we wanna take a deeper look at one of your recent pieces, "The Oligarch's Son," because I think it really gets into these questions.

This is a story that you recently published in the magazine, in the New Yorker.

Tell us a little bit about the story.

You know, it would be great if you could give us a little synopsis of what it is, but also, I'm super curious about how you came to it and how you started reporting it.

- Yeah, it came to me in a strange way.

I mean, I don't know what it's like for you guys, but when I go out looking for good stories, I never find them.

And I just sort of look and look and I don't come up with anything any good.

And then when I just move through the world, occasionally, incredible stories fall in my lap.

And I was living in London over the summer because we were producing this series, "Say Nothing."

And I was on set one day and there was a guy who was visiting the set, he was a guest of one of the directors, and we got to chatting and he told me about a family he knew in London.

They lived in Maida Vale, a nice neighborhood in West London.

And they had a 19-year-old boy named Zach.

And Zach had died in 2019.

He was in a luxury building, a luxury apartment building on the Thames and he went off the balcony and into the Thames and he died.

And after he died, his parents learned that he had had a kind of double identity.

He had been a fabulist, and he'd been moving around London pretending that he was the son of a Russian oligarch.

And he got mixed up with some people that turned out to be quite dangerous people, and he ended up dead.

And the authorities had kind of looked at this and thought it was maybe a suicide.

But it turns out that the moment that he went off the balcony, he'd been in that apartment with a guy who was a notorious gangster.

And so the piece that I wrote was about the parents, actually, Matthew and Rochelle Brettler are their names, and how after their son died, it's a mystery in a way.

They're both kind of coming to understand the circumstances of his death, but also in the process, they're coming to understand who their son had actually been in his life in a way that they didn't really fully grasp when he was alive.

- Can I ask you to read an excerpt from the story to give people a sense?

- [Patrick] You can indeed.

So this is actually, it's sort of partway through the piece, but it's at the point where I met Matthew and Rochelle, the parents.

"In a chill rain last fall, I visited the Brettlers.

I'd initially connected with them over the summer and we'd since had several long and sometimes painful conversations about their son.

The Maida Vale apartment is spare and modern.

Rochelle writes about crafts and design, and the space was elegantly decorated and brightened by colorful glass vases.

A framed snapshot on a bookshelf showed Zach and his brother Joe as little boys, dressed up in costumes at a school fair.

'Zach was a cute, fun goofball,' Rochelle said.

Both Brettler parents are now 61.

Matthew is bespectacled, athletic and bald.

He has a conspicuously analytical mind and an amiable intensity.

And he has coped with the devastation of losing a child by channeling his energies into investigating Zach's demise.

Rochelle is petite with lively eyes and a tendency to smile, even when she's relating a sad story.

Joe drifted in and out as we talked.

He's 25 with corkscrew curls and has a casually affectionate manner with his parents.

In the four years since Zach's death, the family has had to confront the extent to which the boy, they thought they knew, had been living a double existence.

Zach had always possessed a Walter Middy quality.

He had burnished his achievements, boasting to friends about his athletic prowess and his business prospects, or he would play up his supposed connections to prominent people, falsely claiming, for instance, that he knew Virgil Vandyke, the captain of Liverpool Football Club.

But none of the Brettlers had ever imagined that Zach might be moving about London, pretending to be someone else altogether."

- It strikes me that this story and the story that you told us before and this horrible story of a sort of fratricide involve crucially, as you mentioned, the parents.

And it just strikes me as such a tough part of the job it must be.

How do you talk, especially to parents and to family members to whom these horrible things have happened and in a certain, of course, being the chief character witnesses and the ones who are often kind of looking to you to solve things as well, this double role?

How do you deal with that part of it, the dealing with these families?

- It's really hard.

I mean, I'm sure this is something we'll talk about, but I think the ethics of true crime are pretty fraught in a bunch of ways.

And I don't exclusively write about crime, but I often do, and I'm very often thinking a lot about the victims.

You know, often the person at the center of your story is already gone by the time you start writing.

And I'm looking at the impact that that loss has had to the people around them, and that's pretty raw and devastating.

And I think that for a journalist, it creates these really interesting interactions because, I mean, this was true with the Brettlers, it was actually true with the parents of Amy Bishop, the woman I mentioned before who I spent time with.

Sometimes there's a reluctance to talk initially, but when you go in, you know, you're finding people in a way at their most isolated and vulnerable.

You know, they've been living with this anguish.

And sometimes the people in their lives don't necessarily, even kind of fully grasp the extent of it.

And as a journalist, part of what I'm doing is, I'm a good listener and I will go in and if you talk, like I will sit with you for three, four, five, seven hours and just kind of hear it all tumbling out.

The trick is, I'm not a therapist.

You know, I'm not a minister.

And so it's important for me to remind people that we're doing this intimate thing here.

You're telling me about the worst thing that happened in your life, but at a certain point it's like, I'm gonna throw the shades open and all the sunlight's gonna come in and like, this conversation that we have is gonna be reproduced in print and I don't want people, when that moment comes, to feel betrayed by it or to feel like I misled them.

And so I'm actually constantly, even in little ways, if I'm recording the conversation, I'll periodically just reach out and just tap my phone ostensibly to make sure that it's still recording, but also just to kind of remind them like, you are on the record here.

And when I go away to write, I'm not gonna be pulling punches.

Like I'm not in PR, I'm not out here trying to be, you know, your ventriloquist.

Like I'm gonna tell the story as I see it and I'm gonna use everything that you've given me.

- Do you find that you have to use different skill sets when you engage with, say, a victim's family, you know, who are obviously, these parents who have lost their sons, the sympathetic characters, but then also in "The Oligarch's Son and in general, in your work, you deal with a lot of unsavory elements.

You know, you deal, in this story, for instance, you're investigating this like, London underground of kind of Russian related mob figures potentially and so on, and you spend time with them and listen to them.

And it kind of strikes me that these are two very different types of engagement, but perhaps as you report, you find that you are using kind of like a similar manner in both cases, or not, maybe.

- Yeah, I mean I think I try and meet people where they are.

And sometimes, you know, I've interviewed murderers and drug runners and any number of other people.

I've written a lot about the Sinaloa drug cartel and Chapo Guzman.

I've written about IRA paramilitaries who've, you know, bombed cities.

And it's not that I suspend judgment at all, because I don't.

But I do think that, to go back to the kind of the Milton "Paradise Lost" thing, I don't think it helps anyone, I sort of fold my arms and I look at those people and I say, "Look at those evil people.

They're so different from you and me.

Like we have nothing in common with them."

To kind of demonize these people and like slam my fist on the pulpit, I don't think sheds any light on anything.

And so I am, as often as I can, trying to understand why they do the things that they do.

- Well, you know, Patrick, you said before that you're not a therapist and you're not a minister.

It's funny 'cause I think even reporting, you'd be surprised about how many non-crime subjects, or not even emotionally fraught subjects, a journalist can get into and then feel like a therapist in a weird way.

You are listening to people tell you big, big things about their lives, and you want that.

You want to reel it out.

But something you are is an investigator and I feel like that is kind of a tricky area with some of these crime stories where investigators who represent the law, which is not what you represent as an investigator, have failed.

You know, this is something that happened in the story of "The Oligarch's Son" where police failed to come up with substantive answers and this family is left reeling.

It certainly happened with "Say Nothing" where, you know, the book expands to take in The Troubles in Northern Ireland in the 70s, but it begins with the murder, the unsolved murder of a mother of 10.

And by the end of the book, we know who the murderer was through your investigation.

- I mean, you literally solved like a cold case.

- Patrick Keefe solved a cold case murder.

It's just true!

Give him a hand.

Come on.

This isn't easy work.

- [Patrick] Okay, okay, okay.

- This isn't a walk in the park.

So what I wanna know is, you know, that actually puts you in a very fraught position with your subjects because I would have to imagine that they feel a lot maybe riding on what you find out and on what you discover.

How do you approach that aspect of things?

You know, you can't promise to know in this case to find out what happened to Zach Brettler, but I know that you as a journalist want to.

So where do your interests converge and where do they diverge within that?

- And also we should mention that you're now expanding this.

- That piece into a book.

- Yeah, the investigation continued, exactly.

- From the magazine into a book that you're now reporting out and working.

- Yeah, I mean, a couple of things.

So one is that I think the role of the investigative journalist is sort of interesting, right?

Because on the one hand, there's all kinds of ways in which we're at a disadvantage, vis-a-vis the authorities.

Like I don't have subpoena power.

I can't force anyone to tell me anything.

- [Alex] God, wouldn't that be good though?

- Oh, it'd be the best.

- Ah.

Imagine if we had subpoena power.

I would love that.

- In the case of "Say Nothing," you know, it's a book about this terrible abduction and murder of a mother of 10 in 1972, a woman named Jean McConville.

And at the end of four years of researching this, I figured out who had actually pulled the trigger.

And after a lot of consultation with lawyers in the US and Ireland and Northern Ireland and London, I named this person in the book and the person had never been identified before and is still alive, but they weren't arrested because, I think for a very good reason, the police have a higher burden of proof than I do.

And so I would never have published the name if I wasn't a hundred percent certain that I was right, because it would be a grotesque thing to accuse somebody of.

But at the same time, this was a cold case murder from 1972.

No living witnesses, apart from the person I accused, no physical evidence.

And so nothing happened with it.

So I'm very mindful of that and I think the hard thing after "Say Nothing" is that in a way, there is a certain extent to which my reputation perceives.

Like if somebody Googles me, they do know that about me.

And so in the case of the Brettlers, from the first time I met with them, I said, if I write about this, I need you to know, it may be a mystery that I don't solve.

And I don't want you to talk with me on the assumption that I'm gonna crack the case, both because it puts a great deal of pressure on me, but also because it would be disingenuous of me, right, to make a promise that I'm not going to be able to deliver on.

So the one thing I can tell you is, I will get into this and throw everything I have at it and try and shed some new light on the situation.

And in this case, I think the authorities had done such a terrible, bumbling job trying to get to the bottom of the death of the Brettlers' son, that almost any effort on my part would be an improvement on what the police have done.

- So guys, I wanna widen our aperture a little bit.

I mean, I'd like to know, first of all from both of you, what your relationships are to true crime.

My own is a bit conflicted because I wanna just come clean and say, there are moments when the snobby side of me is like, oh, no, no, you know, all those people who were just gobbling up these stories of murder and one after another and they can't get enough, and the more gruesome the better and they're going to sleep listening to the stories and they're waking up.

I'm not like that.

And then of course, you know, something like "The Jinx" comes on.

And you're like, give me more.

- Yeah, you know, and I'm just glued to my seat thinking, well of course.

I'm an investigator.

You know, I've got my investigative cap on.

I bet I can figure out what happened with Robert Durst.

And so clearly there's something about these stories that appeal to us for very good reason.

I mean, we're dealing with the extremity of human experience, whether it's about someone who commits crime or someone who, you know, is the victim of a crime or the family of a victim of a crime.

And we wanna look into these dark corners.

Whether true or not, you know, this is where great art comes from.

- [Naomi] Well, it's a kind of god's eye view, right?

It's a sort of like surveillance and almost complicity because it's like you almost wanna yell, like, "Don't, turn around!

He's there with a knife!"

You know?

- Who's saying that?

I don't say that.

- But you also care.

- One can't.

- You care.

Yeah, you care.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

- It's about the people that this happened to and the kind of level of engagement that you feel with their lives.

I get the sort of slightly eerie god's eye, I know that this person is going to die, but I think you feel that in your gut in a way that you wouldn't with just the kind of cheap scare of somebody who you meet and you only know them for five minutes before they're killed.

- I do wonder like, your experience of this, you know, working on something that's a magazine piece and then having it be a book and then, you know, working on it for the screen, having, you know, understanding as you do, maybe uniquely the life cycle of these stories.

One, like what do you think the entertainment industry wants and expects out of these stories?

And then two, maybe like, has there ever been a time when, you know, you're on a set or you're in a writer's room or something like that, and you notice that, you know, the way that things are going are straying wildly from your original intention in a way that makes you feel different ethically about it than you did when you were writing the story?

Have you had to like, intervene and say, that's not what this is, or?

- Yeah I mean, it's a hard, hard thing.

I think that I have thought about this a lot in the last few years because a number of things that I've worked on, you know, in the process are or have been turned into dramas.

And it's strange, right, 'cause for me, the North Star is fact.

It's that everything is factual.

And it is sometimes the case that people aren't crazy about what I publish or that they don't want me to be writing about it at all.

But I sort of move forward and to me, it feels important to tell these stories, but I'm always like, the constraint for me is always that I go out and I do the work and I tell a story.

That's true.

And the hard thing about drama is that if you do a very faithful adaptation of almost any book, it is going to be a bad adaptation, that the process of turning something into a televised drama is just, innately, if it's gonna be good, you actually need to sort of rough it up a bit and condense certain sections and expand certain others and take certain narrative shortcuts.

And that's a thing that as an author is like, it's a tricky thing, right, because you're sort of there on the sidelines, watching them do this.

I am pretty good about just making peace with the idea that there's like, a cultural product that I create with my hands and I put it out in the world and that's mine.

And then sometimes there's an adaptation of it that is just a more complicated thing.

What I have tried to do, particularly in the case of "Say Nothing" is, I'm a producer on "Say Nothing."

And I have tried to be there.

I was there on set.

I was trying to sort of say, we want to get this as right as possible.

There are some shortcuts you can take, absolutely, 'cause it's necessary, and then there are others that I would say, let's not do that because you have to remember that this is a real story about real people.

They're alive.

They're out there.

- [Alex] Let me ask an enormous question because we have one minute left.

And there's nothing better than taking 60 seconds to try to answer a huge question.

- Let's throw the grenade.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- You know, based on our informal yet highly scientific poll at the Space Needle earlier, I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that people are not tired of true crime, that the appetite is as big as ever.

Where do you guys think the genre should go?

- Let's let that guy answer.

- No way, no way.

- The clock is ticking.

Let's get some answers.

- Come on, 40, 45 seconds.

- Yes.

- If I knew that, I'd be a very rich man.

- Well I'll just say, okay let me, you know, attempt.

I would like to see a little less of the gleeful, you know, celebration of the murderistas or whatever it is.

- [Naomi] Yeah.

Murderinos.

- Murderinos.

Thank you very much.

- I really like the show "Only Murders in the Building" because I think it kind of gently sends up this culture of just absolutely salivating to get your hands on the next bloody story.

Yeah I mean, a strong dose of ethics never hurts, right?

- Never hurt anyone.

- Yeah, yeah.

Patrick, - Here, here.

- [Naomi] Yay.

- So on that note, we are officially out of time.

Patrick Radden Keefe, thank you so much for joining us today.

- Thank you.

This was fun.

(audience applauding) - And thank you all for being a part of the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival.

Thanks everybody.

- [Naomi] Thank you.

(audience applauding) (swelling piano music)