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?

I felt caught in a peculiar quandary. If I repeated details that G had already written down, was I relying on a primary source or appropriating what my peers in creative-writing workshops would call her “lived experience”? The tautology maddened me. I had lived the experience, too, yet I felt like either a mimic, reciting my family’s recollections, or a fabulist, mistaking my imagination for fact. My ignorance isolated me from G and our mom. I had a sense that I was hammering on a bolted door, begging them to admit me to an awful place. And why would I want to get in? Well, because they were there.

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.

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This week’s edition highlights a series of dispatches from Gaza, a true-crime story about a family of turtle hunters, an essay on the literal messiness of death, a portrait of the last lighthouse keeper in the US, and a can’t-miss profile of a legendary basketball coach with a complicated legacy.

1. “I Am Still Alive. Gaza Is No Longer Gaza.” 

Atef Abu Saif | The Washington Post | October 30, 2023 | 5,279 words

This week marks a month since, in response to attacks by Hamas, Israel launched a campaign of unconscionable violence against the Palestinian people. As of this writing, Israel has slaughtered more than 10,000 men, women, and children. Much has been written about the unfolding genocide—it should not be controversial to use that word—and this stark diary of life under siege is among the most arresting. A raw draft of history, its contents began as voice notes that Atef Abu Saif, a novelist and the minister of culture for the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, sent to friends abroad. He was in Gaza, enjoying a morning swim, when the bombing began, and he describes the horrors of the present through the crucial lens of the past. “I often think about the time I was shot as a kid, during the first intifada, and how my mother told me I actually died for a few minutes before being brought back to life,” he says. “Maybe I can do the same this time.” This memory, like many in the diary, is a stark reminder that Israel has oppressed Palestinians in a system of apartheid built on the heels of the mass dispossession of their land 75 years ago. And that is the wellspring: the violence that begets more violence in a devastating cycle. “Just as life is a pause between two deaths,” Atef Abu Saif says, “Palestine, as a place and as an idea, is a timeout in the middle of many wars.” —SD

2. The Great Cajun Turtle Heist

Sonia Smith | Texas Monthly | November 7, 2023 | 5,973 words

I was hooked from the first line of Sonia Smith’s true-crime tale about the elusive alligator snapper—a large species of turtle found in the southeast US—and the Louisiana family of prolific hunters who poached them for decades. The snapper was declared endangered in the ’70s in Texas, which allowed a protected population to multiply. But that didn’t stop the Dietzes from crossing the border to capture and smuggle them home to sell, the carloads of turtles so heavy they’d sometimes blow out the engine or overwhelm the brakes. Smith’s piece unravels like an engrossing movie. The Dietz relatives, whose lives are deeply embedded in the bayou, are fascinating characters, and so is the Marine-turned-wildlife inspector who grows determined to catch them. My favorites, though, are the two enormous turtles, Brutus and Caesar, who are undoubtedly the most memorable characters by far. —CLR

3. Flipping Grief

James McNaughton | Guernica | November 6, 2023 | 5,369 words

James McNaughton’s brother Conor died of an overdose at 27, relapsing after two years of sobriety during which he built a successful roofing business. McNaughton bookends this essay with scenes where he and his family are clearing out Conor’s apartment, literally cleaning up what his brother left behind. Death and grief are messy, and Conor’s passing was no different. But in the face of the sheer force of death, it’s the subtlety of McNaughton’s writing that will knock you flat: “We stopped by Publix and rented a Rug Doctor. We signed a contract on the counter that said we would return it clean.” That last sentence is filthy with nuance, as is the whole piece. McNaughton deftly juxtaposes those there to help with those who prey on vulnerable people like Conor, struggling to stay sober. He exposes the scurrying cockroaches using Conor to further their own agenda, those out to make a quick buck off a distressed sale, off the distressed family of the deceased. This is by no means an easy read, whether you’ve lost someone dear to you or not. But sometimes braving what’s dark and messy—equipped with only words as a beam of light to shine on the dirty work of grief—is the one way you can try to get clean. —KS

4. The Last Lighthouse Keeper in America

 Dorothy Wickenden | The New Yorker | October 30, 2923 | 4,500 words

Sally Snowman is the 70th keeper in the history of Boston Light lighthouse. She is also the first woman. And the last. When Snowman retires, the station will be “unmanned”—“unwomaned,” as she puts it—and Boston Light will go the way of many a lighthouse before it. (The United States currently has about 850 lighthouses, but only half are active, and these use automated eclectic lamps.) In this lovely ode to a dying profession, Dorothy Wickenden looks at the history of Boston Light: tragic deaths, minimal pay, unbearable loneliness, and madness. It’s a ride. There’s also stuff on the mechanics of lighthouse lenses, if you’re into that sort of thing, but for me, it was Wickenden’s honest descriptions of lightkeeper life, with only the “moan of the foghorn and the ceaseless crashing of the waves” for company, that drew me in. A piece of history worth remembering. —CW

5. Bonefishing Off Bimini With Bobby Knight

Kevin Koenig | GQ Magazine | November 7, 2023 | 6,248 words

I spent this past weekend in the college town where I grew up. This college town also happens to be where legendary basketball coach Bob Knight cemented his complicated legacy. (Yes, I was at the game where he threw the chair.) Through three national championships and more wins than any college coach at the time, he loomed over the place like a god—a temperamental, wrathful god, but a god all the same. After Knight died last week, a deluge of remembrances followed. To a one, they celebrated the man’s accomplishments and acknowledged his flaws. Yet none of them came close to capturing him the way Kevin Koenig’s 2015 profile in Angler’s Journal did. Three days with Knight fishing in the Bahamas. Three days of witnessing his locker-room joviality giving way to a tempest. Three days of conversation and combat, drama and détente. It’s a portrait that feels complete, and a portrait I never thought I’d read. I missed it the first time around; thankfully, GQ reprinted it this week, with a foreword from Koenig unpacking the aftermath of his warts-and-all approach. If you love sports, it’s a can’t-miss. Even if you don’t, it’s still mandatory reading. Rarely these days do profiles steep you in a sense of place, but Koenig’s bucks that trend. You’ll feel the spray in your face, the sun on your arms—and in the many moments where Koenig’s questions encounter Knight’s volatility, the burn of shame on your neck. —PR

Audience Award

Our most-read editor’s pick this week:

The sale of alligator snapping turtle meat was banned in Louisiana in 2004 (and has long been illegal in Texas), but Colo, Viola, and other local sellers had no trouble finding a wide array of buyers for their catches, including a former starting pitcher for the Boston Red Sox, an auto mechanic, and a local businessman who has since been elected to the Louisiana House of Representatives.

Guidry asked him to estimate how many turtles weighing more than one hundred pounds he had caught in Toledo Bend. Without hesitation, Colo answered “five hundred.” “There ain’t nobody gonna ever catch as many turtles as I caught, because you could wipe out all the rest that they’ve got in Louisiana and Texas and never have as much as I caught,” Colo boasted. “That’s all I used to do. Twice a week I’d go.”

Dispatches from a fracturing America spread across the front page of the Chronicle on Nov. 11, 1969. Richard Nixon’s administration railed against anti-war protesters; police in Memphis sprayed tear gas into a crowd of young Black people opposing segregation. But the lead story that day was Alcatraz. “A war party” of 14 “young Indian invaders” had claimed the island, calling themselves the Indians of All Tribes and naming Oakes their “president-elect.”

Celebrities including Jane Fonda and Anthony Quinn soon declared their support, sailing to Alcatraz one day on a boat purchased for the protesters by the band Creedence Clearwater Revival. The occupation was becoming a ’60s event, tugging at politics and pop culture. But another set of visitors went largely unnoticed by the media. In the last weeks of 1969, delegations from tribes across the country journeyed to the island, curious to see what this new nation looked like. Oakes asked these elders for guidance, and they in turn asked for advice on land fights in their own territories.

But in 1973, Mitchel’s and Bonnie’s families had nowhere to turn. With no help from police and no private groups to support them, the families soon ran out of money and resources. Bonnie’s mother, Raye, anguished and exasperated, sought help from psychics. (One told her she “saw” the teens lying in a gravel pit.)

The hunt for Mitchel and Bonnie soon faded, as heartbroken friends and family tried to move on with their lives. Inevitably, the story faded from the public and the press.

In 1984, Mitchel’s parents moved to Arizona due to his father’s asthma. But they continued to pay $2.39 every month to New York’s telephone company to keep their name and Arizona telephone number in the Brooklyn phone directory — for when their son would return. 

Cops love a good code name, and by the fall of 2022 the investigation in Tulsa had one: Operation Heavy Metal. In the Riverside precinct, officers began to joke that Kansas Core had never taken a day off, he was so obsessed. Someone posted a printout featuring a meme in which a wild-looking Charlie from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia stands before a wall crowded with papers and lines, cigarette in hand. “Larceny from a vehicle?” they’d typed in. “You mean the greatest criminal conspiracy ever devised.”

Operation Heavy Metal now involved not just Homeland Security Investigations, but the IRS, the FBI and dozens of local police departments. Between manpower and geographic reach, some of Staggs’ veteran colleagues reckoned Camp 2 had launched the Tulsa PD’s largest investigation. By chance, law enforcement agents in California had been working a completely independent case involving buyers, which had also led them to DG. The investigations merged into one, soon becoming so unwieldy that agents had to gather in Philadelphia for three days to coordinate the endgame.

On the morning of Nov. 2, Jeremy Jones was in his office at JT Auto, next to Curtis Cores on Highway 51. “I was getting a cup of coffee,” he says. “I look out the window and something caught my eye—it was like a SWAT team. There’s a tank. There’s guys with assault rifles and military gear.” His first instinct was that Curtis had been secretly dealing drugs or guns. When he wandered out to talk to the cops and found out it was in fact the catalytic converter business they were taking down, “it did seem like a little overkill.”

Showmanship came easily to von Bredow. A natural raconteur, he could mesmerize strangers with his verve, comic voices and seemingly endless collection of esoteric facts. “He was one of the most authentic people I’ve ever met,” says Martin Schleske, a luthier who became one of von Bredow’s friends. “He didn’t care about any conventions. They were just not important for him.”

He gave me a look of almost cartoonish wariness; he knew that I knew who he was. What he could not have known was that my reaction was not just to seeing a famous murderer walking around campus, but to encountering a character from a novel in the realm of supposed reality. It was as though the fabric separating fact from fiction had been torn.