Wrongful convictions can result from any number of cascading errors, blatant oversights, and outright slipups—some conscious and deliberate, some structural and circumstantial. Over 32 years, the investigation and prosecutions of the Schweitzers seem to have incorporated every possible one of them. There was intense media attention putting pressure on police to make an arrest—the “dead white girl” phenomenon. There was cultural bias against Native Hawaiians like the Schweitzers—the legacy, well known to Hawaiians, of lynchings of native men for alleged attacks on white women. There was investigative tunnel vision—going after the Schweitzer brothers even after the facts failed to support that case. There was blind faith in jailhouse informants—a slew of them, all hoping for special favors from prosecutors in return for their testimony. There was junk science—about teeth marks, and tire treads. There even may have been prosecutorial misconduct—a state lawyer misleading a judge about the outcome of one of the brothers’ polygraph tests.

Now that Ian has been exonerated, he needs to reacclimate to life in the world. He had to get a driver’s license and learn how to use a smartphone. He needs to get comfortable around people again. These towns were small enough already. For decades the Schweitzers were the area’s greatest villains; now they run into people and those people are nice. At the market and at restaurants, they congratulate Ian and ask if they can give him a hug. It’s weird. He can’t help but think: Where were those people for the past 30 years? But he knows there are others out there too—people who benefited from accusing him of a crime they knew he hadn’t committed. Chief among them is John Gonsalves.

As our conversation meandered over a sunny afternoon, Ian allowed himself to wonder about Gonsalves. What must it be like for him now, to know that the lie didn’t hold? If the brothers ever did confront him, what would he say?

The battle that was taking place on Buster Drive in Warren was but a small sideshow to the images playing on the nightly news and would soon be eclipsed by the devastating violence that would erupt a few miles away in Detroit in July. But what would transpire over the coming days and months and years on Buster Drive would actually have profound consequences for race relations in America and shape the national political landscape in ways that are still being felt today.

A telegenic housing secretary with presidential ambitions would use the Baileys’ plight to launch a bold plan to desgregate all of America’s suburbs.

Local officials in Warren, stoked by the rage of their white constituents, would stymie his efforts, even though it meant forfeiting millions of dollars of federal aid.

A Republican president facing reelection would torpedo his secretary’s plan, empowering the white middle-class voters he considered crucial to his victory.

Those voters, in turn, would make this corner of suburban Detroit the unofficial capital of America’s white middle class, and shape the strategy of presidential hopefuls of both parties for decades to come.

Ultimately, the whites-only fortress of Warren and surrounding Macomb County would crumble, overwhelmed by the consequences of self-defeating choices made decades before. Like suburbs across the country, it would become more diverse—and increasingly Democratic. But it would retain the scars of unhealed racial fault lines first laid down in 1967—a de facto segregation that would make Macomb County a prime target for populist conservatives bent on appealing to white working-class voters. Few suburbs would suffer the same headline-making unrest or the targeted federal scrutiny as Warren. But its prominent role in the massive demographic and political shifts of the last half century would ensure it remained an important bellwether heading into the 2024 presidential election when, once again, Macomb County would find itself a political battleground for the nation’s all-important suburban vote. 

But before any of that could happen, the Baileys had to outlast the mob.

Though he’ll be remembered as an inventive journalist who managed a moderately successful turn to popular fiction, Tom Wolfe was also a social theorist in natty but thin disguise—his work both espoused a mostly coherent worldview and made a case for a particular way of viewing the world. All told, the bulk of Wolfe’s writing is animated by a conviction that revolutions of style are also revolutions of substance—look closely enough at an aesthetic trend or fashionable consumer fad, he insists excitedly, time and time again, and you’ll find the elements of a social or cultural turn, and perhaps one that’s escaped the attentions of most cultural observers.

His Esquire feature on hot rods, for instance, the piece that brought him to prominence, is more than just the first major showcase for his pyrotechnic prose or an informative and engaging look at youth car culture. It’s an exhortation, one that he’d repeat often, to locate meaning in the putatively superficial—to examine the values underpinning artifice. “I don’t have to dwell on the point that cars mean more to these kids than architecture did in Europe’s great formal century, say, 1750 to 1850,” he wrote. “They are freedom, style, sex, power, motion, color—everything is right there. Things have been going on in the development of the kids’ formal attitude toward cars since 1945, things of great sophistication that adults have not been even remotely aware of, mainly because the kids are so inarticulate about it, especially the ones most hipped on the subject.”

Being articulate about the inarticulable, for Wolfe, demanded the adoption of a now standard critical posture—taking popular culture seriously and viewing its products and developments as worthy of close study, if not respect. Through this lens and in his hands, a figure like Phil Spector, for instance, the twentysomething tycoon savant of early ’60s pop, might additionally be understood as a cultural figure of almost world-historical importance. “Every baroque period has a flowering genius who rises up as the most glorious expression of its style of life,” he wrote in a 1965 profile. “In latter-day Rome, the Emperor Commodus; in Renaissance Italy, Benvenuto Cellini; in late Augustan England, the Earl of Chesterfield; in the sal volatile Victorian age, Dante Gabriel Rossetti; in late-fancy neo-Greek Federal America, Thomas Jefferson; and in Teen America Phil Spector is the bona-fide Genius of Teen.”

Audaciously, the German-language film invites us to regard its central couple not as calculating monsters, the way we’re used to seeing Nazis depicted onscreen, but as ordinary people acting on recognizable motives. For the most part, the Hösses want the things we want: comfort, security, the occasional treat. In an early scene, we see them chatting in their twin beds. Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) asks Rudolf (Christian Friedel) if he will take her back to the spa they once visited in Italy. “All that pampering,” she says, her head propped up on her hand, beginning to reminisce. “And the walks. And that nice couple we met.” Suddenly she succumbs to laughter as a further, Chekhovian detail bubbles up: “And that man who played the accordion to the cows.” Rudolf replies, “They loved it.” The conversation is so mundane and universal—this could be any wife addressing any husband—that it’s possible to forget, if only for a moment, just whose pillow talk we are listening in on.

“I wanted to humanize them,” Glazer, who is Jewish, said—in the sense, he quickly clarified, of showing the Hösses as only human, all too human. “I wanted to dismantle the idea of them as anomalies, as almost supernatural. You know, the idea that they came from the skies and ran amok, but thank God that’s not us and it’s never going to happen again. I wanted to show that these were crimes committed by Mr. and Mrs. Smith at No. 26.”

In doing so, he is pushing back against an edifice of conventional wisdom. Thinkers as varied as Jewish theologians and postmodern theorists have conceived of the Holocaust as a singular, almost transcendent disaster—[Eli] Wiesel’s “ultimate mystery.” This impulse to sequester the Nazi Judeocide from the rest of human experience is understandable, but in the words of the historian Robert Jan van Pelt, it inadvertently consigns the death camps “to the realm of myth, distancing us from an all too concrete historical reality.” It is this concrete historical reality that The Zone of Interest seeks to recover.

Their different personalities—Seo-Ran is sensitive but outspoken while Eo-Rie is more easy-going and nonchalant—complement each other well, Seo-Ran says.

“Eo-Rie accepted my hyper-sensitiveness with ease, and even joked once, ‘I feel like I have a high-end home cleaner’,” she says, laughing.

Their home life became “joyful, peaceful, and comforting”.

“I came to believe that a real family is those who share their lives while respecting and being loyal to each other, whether or not they are related by blood or marriage,” says Seo-Ran.

A few years later, with the arrangement working so well, they decided to buy their apartment together. But then, after Seo-Ran, who suffers from other health problems like chronic headaches, was rushed to the ER several times, they started talking about how if they were family they could sign medical consent forms for one another. South Korean hospitals, fearing legal action should something go wrong, customarily refuse to offer urgent care—including surgery—unless a patient’s legal family gives consent.

“We have helped and protected one another for years. But we were nothing but strangers when we needed each other most,” Seo-Ran explains.

Eventually, Stipe revealed to Antonoff and Healy that he was at Electric Lady working on his first solo record. (Healy responded with a drawn-out and reverent four-letter word.) Stipe had no qualms about sharing how tough the process had been so far, and how slow-going. Later he’d tell me: “I’m wildly insecure. I have impostor syndrome to the [expletive] max.” Sometimes Instagram served him clips of R.E.M. concerts, and he wondered: Where did it come from, the audacity to do that in front of tens of thousands of people? He told Antonoff and Healy, “It’s hard to be in competition with your former self.”

He said this with disarming sweetness. Antonoff tried to buck him up. He explained that, when he’s making something, he finds he just needs a few songs he’s proud of to make the entire project start to feel sufficiently sturdy. “You can wear them as armor,” he said.

But Stipe disagreed — definitively. He could remember, as a kid, adoring certain records, then hitting some total stinker somewhere on Side B and not being able to forgive the band for it.

For him, one weak song could ruin a whole album. It stained everything else.

To anyone who lives south of the Arctic Circle the problem can seem abstract—another distant note of sadness in an era heavy with extinctions. But this is not how it appears in the far north.

In small communities scattered along the tree line or set in the open tundra, towns such as Anaktuvuk Pass that are often isolated, often Indigenous, where imported food and gas can be astronomically expensive and hunting caribou is often the cheapest and fastest and certainly the most satisfying way to provide for a family, the decline brings a peculiar dread. An Inupiat elder in a coastal town told me it was like feeling the symptoms of a cold coming on. The cold arrives, and it lingers. You don’t get over it. Then it worsens, until you become gaunt and haunted, until you’re afraid it isn’t a cold at all but something deeper. Something that’s shot through your whole system.

This is how the caribou problem feels to many Native people in the north, including the Nunamiut. Their name means “people of the land,” but anyone will tell you that they are, most of all, a caribou people. They are also sometimes called America’s last nomads, because only in about 1950 did the Nunamiut give up a mobile life, a life spent hunting and following caribou. They chose to settle in Anaktuvuk Pass exactly because the herd poured through it like a river. The name Anaktuvuk means “the place of many caribou droppings.”

One night after I’d gone out hunting with Clyde Morry, his father, Mark, made a quiet comment about the choice his people had made. Mark Morry was a veteran of the Vietnam War. Thick gray hair, thick old glasses. He sat in a recliner by a window in the house he had built, watching his family eat caribou that Clyde had brought home.

“It was a big gamble for them to settle down like that,” Mark said of his own father and mother and uncles and aunts, the generation who gave up nomadism. “They figured the caribou would always be here.”

*This story is only accessible to National Geographic subscribers.

When Hüller was approached to play Hedwig, she was initially skeptical. “I always refused to play Fascists—which, of course, especially in international productions, come your way from time to time as a German actress,” she told me over lunch at a restaurant in Leipzig, where she lives with her twelve-year-old daughter. (Hüller is not with the girl’s father.) The neighborhood was filled with galleries and restaurants, and the pavement of its main street, Karl-Heine Strasse, was studded with Stolpersteine—memorial plaques outside buildings whose former residents were murdered in the Holocaust. We sat in a pleasant outdoor area, and Hüller’s dog, a Weimaraner mix, rested beside her on a blanket that Hüller had brought from home. (The dog appears in “The Zone of Interest” as the family pet.) “I didn’t like the idea of putting on a Nazi uniform like that, or using language like that—to get close to the energy of that, or to discover there would be fun in that,” Hüller went on. “I have seen colleagues that actually have fun doing it. Maybe it’s still in their bodies from former generations. They like to change their language and speak like that”—the tone of her voice changed, her usually soft-spoken, careful speech becoming harsh and rat-a-tat. Reverting to her own voice, she asked, “Why do they do it? They could speak like a normal person.”

Hüller also disapproves of projects that use the Nazi era as a canvas upon which to paint a dramatic story that has little to do with Fascism. (Netflix’s recent soapy drama “All the Light We Cannot See” could be considered a prime example.) She was therefore attracted to the pointed absence of drama in Glazer’s screenplay: nothing much happens beyond what we know is happening offscreen, as the murderous apparatus under Höss’s command becomes ever more efficient. She told me, “Jonathan and I had a lot of conversations about the traps in this kind of story we wanted to tell—which is not really a story. There is a couple, and one wants to leave, and the other doesn’t.

In San Francisco there’s always another video. New York and London are known for being blanketed with government-run CCTV coverage, but surveillance here is different: It is as privatized as it is pervasive, a culture of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, at scale.

In the city where Nextdoor’s offices sit right in the gritty Tenderloin, sharing Ring cam footage of porch thieves is a bonding exercise between neighbors who’ve never met. All over town, local nonprofits oversee neighborhood-wide networks of cameras funded in part by donations from crypto entrepreneur Chris Larsen. (“That’s the winning formula,” Larsen told The New York Times in 2020. “Pure coverage.”) Platoons of Waymo self-driving cars circulate the streets like Pac-Man ghosts, gathering up videofeeds that cops snag for evidence. You can watch a resident’s live cam to see who’s on the corner of Hyde and Ellis, right now.

True-crime video has become San Francisco’s civic language, the common vocabulary of local TV news broadcasts, the acid punch line to a million social media posts. The feeds intensified during the pandemic, when commuterless streets erupted with synthetic opioid use and property crime. Since then, the city has found itself hobbled through successive breakdowns—a police shortage, a 34 percent office vacancy rate, a federal injunction severely limiting the city from clearing homeless camps. No one seems to be solving San Francisco’s problems, the feeling goes, so by God, people are going to film the dysfunction and post the footage.

Since the case’s early days, law-enforcement officers have rarely spoken to the media. When I was reporting “Lost Girls,” my 2013 book about the case and victims, the police were largely silent. But after Heuermann’s arrest, some have been willing to discuss the investigation with a greater degree of detail and candor. Since July, I’ve conducted interviews with people close to the Gilgo case during every chapter of its bizarre 13-year timeline. (Several sources asked for anonymity, concerned that public statements by insiders might undercut the case against Heuermann before the trial.)

The story they tell—at times self-serving and at other times soul-searching—demonstrates, inadvertently and otherwise, how institutional rot helped contribute to the delays and paralysis of the investigation. What started out as indifference and apathy soon curdled into obstinance, willful ignorance and corruption. From the moment those women were found at Gilgo Beach, the law-enforcement culture of Suffolk County seemed so preternaturally ill suited to handle this case that a killer was allowed to roam free. Which was all the more galling, given what we know now—that everything the police needed to solve the case, they had almost on Day 1.