In a Town of 11 People, Mysterious Disappearance Turns Neighbor Against Neighbor
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
> In 1912 a four-year-old boy named Bobby Dunbar went missing in a swamp in Louisiana. Eight months later, he was found in the hands of a wandering handyman in Mississippi. In 2004, Bobby Dunbar's granddaughter discovered a secret beneath the legend of her grandfather's kidnapping, a secret whose revelation would divide her own family, bring redemption to another, and become the answer to a third family's century-old prayer.
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/352/the-ghost-of-bobby-dunb...
> In March 2008, Public Radio International's This American Life featured The Ghost of Bobby Dunbar, a radio documentary about the investigation of the case by Margaret Dunbar Cutright. She expressed her own opinion that the real Bobby Dunbar most likely fell into Swayze Lake during the fishing trip and was eaten by an alligator.
Fake news..
[Edit: I was not a down voter, but perhaps the down voters shared my perspective]
But also that so much drama exists in such small community.
BTW, colloquially a "hotel" is a pub. Its not impossible town has two watering holes... not one. This is not that dissimilar to a situation I've seen in small Italian rural communities: one drinking hole which the left wing sit at, and one the right wing sit at. (or greece, or half a dozen other rural economies)
Last time I drove through it was more like a pub, a service/gas station and a crystal/woo shop.
I'm not sure why that combination is present in so many Australian towns.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Flying_Doctor_Service_of...
According to Big G and OSM, it also has a post office, a museum, and a Devonshire tea house. You can't miss the tea house. It's across the street from the road marked "Rubbish Dump."
Also be sure to check out the six-foot-tall plaster Pink Panther in the lawn chair next to the 20-foot-tall beer bottle.
http://ttnotes.com/larrimah-museum.html#gal_post_21157_larri...
Small towns are the same everywhere.
Also, it's worth noting that in Australia, a "hotel" is a bar/pub that may or may not have accommodation.
As a lover of small communities ... this part is bad.
In a vacuum, every bit of news is inflated. So the smallest thing becomes something to talk about.
I find European small communities are the right size - but also the right distance i.e. there are others close by, and usually a city not too far off.
In Midwest North America and Australia it's really very isolated.
You get into an argument with someone in NYC and you can go your own way and never see them again even if you live in the same city or even the same neighborhood. Get into an argument with someone in a small town and everyone knows about it by the time you get home and battle lines get drawn.
I'm kinda surprised that this ruled out something. Particularly in a rural area. I grew up in rural areas and there are often stories of massive searches, and the body didn't turn up until it was stumbled upon surprisingly close to civilization.
There is no such thing as impenetrable in an area that dry. Confirmed by the pictures.
Maybe they meant impenetrable.....as in walking too far off the road won't get you anywhere..... otherwise it seems pretty hikeabke.
Can you imagine? The whole fucking island swallowed a fratricide. Who's fit to judge such things?
One answer would be “a jury of his peers”, and perhaps the islanders decided that would be them?
(Also, I don’t think it was the right solution)
...the Eskimos have a word, kunlangeta, which means "his mind knows what to do but he does not do it." This is an abstract term for the breaking of many rules when awareness of the rules is not in question. It might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women-someone who does not pay attention to reprimands and who is always being brought to the elders for punishment. One Eskimo among the 499 was called kunlangeta. When asked what would have happened to such a person traditionally, an Eskimo said that probably "somebody would have pushed him off the ice when nobody else was looking." ... It is of considerable interest that kunlan- geta and arankan are not behaviors that the shamans and healers are believed to be able to cure or change.
Obviously, people know things. But, as a small community, there is a 'hang together, or hang separately' quality here. They are very isolated, and they have strong mutual dependencies even if they don't want to acknowledge it.
So.. sometimes the "best" outcome they work out for themselves is just not to talk to outsiders.
Reminds me of the plot of the movie Hot Fuzz.
I've heard good things about Shetland and Broadchurch, but I'm yet to watch them.
Also, 'Shetland' - you can't get more 'small town' than that (in the UK).
Deliverance (of course)
The Lottery ( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116924/ tv movie, based on a great short story)
The Wicker Man
Twin Peaks
Cold in July
When I see my partner watching it casually, I always joke that I don't understand how there are still survivors in Serramoura and how people still go live there, it would probably be less dangerous to go to a city in war.
I wouldn't exactly "recommend" the series and don't even know if it has been translated to any other languages than Galician, but just wanted to share because I find it funny.
(Source: until a couple of years ago, we lived in one of the Oxfordshire locations where it frequently films.)
Unlike Hot Fuzz, which is basically a documentary.
How does that scene belong in a film that is even slightly outside the realm of (attempted) comedy!?
‘You horrify me!’
‘But the reason is very obvious. The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser. Had this lady who appeals to us for help gone to live in Winchester, I should never have had a fear for her. It is the five miles of country which makes the danger.’”
Sherlock Holmes & Dr. Watson, The Adventure of the Copper Beeches, 1892
Really? I got the opposite impression from the article. Everyone is happy to talk about who they think did it, and everyone has their own theory.
After something got public. Small communities have things non-public for decades or forever as well.
I both read Hillbilly Elegy and also grew up in a small rural Ohio town near Kentucky, very much in the epicenter of the book’s described culture.
I don’t think the book or rural culture has any type of “cone of silence” like that. People do take the law into their own hands more often, but are usual quite loudmouth about it, especially to outsiders and law enforcement.
If anything, I think this type of culture breeds an entitlement complex where people believe their armchair opinions about local justice ought to be treated as serious matters of policy and law, and are more than happy to run their mouths about it and express anger at local law enforcement using accepted standards in an investigation.
I know he claims the subjects are his own family, but I’m not buying it. The subjects are his agenda.
are you literally saying he "made it up" or are you projecting something else here?
I don't think he "made it up", and I don't want to accuse him of blaming somebody, but I don't know how else to put it. In so many words, he basically says that, at the end of the day, the culture he's writing about is riddled with it's own shortcomings and needs to be brought to an end. Whether he alludes to historical economic strife or not (he does some), his ultimate assessment is that it's too late to do anything but save these poor souls. He communicates this idea with a lot of contention, because otherwise he would have been dismissed much sooner. A lot of the issues he writes about are legitimate, but he takes a mistaken turn towards accusing the traditions and personalities of his family.
It's not a 2-dimensional issue. Those traditions and parsonalities exist, but they are far more principled than the neoliberal traditions he promotes. And for whatever truth there is to his historical explanations, there is loads more that he avoids. His insistence on attributing present-day tensions to something like "outdatedness" is extremely ignorant.
The word for this turn that he takes is just hopelessly congruent with neoliberalism, and, unfortunately, it does serve his agenda quite well. He's got a partnership with a VC who aims to capitalize on techish business deals in the rust belt. Presumably, the VC aims to play savior and ultimately rip a lot of people off.
I’d suggest to also read the book Dreamland about the opioid and prescription drug epidemic in Appalachia.
Between base knowledge of how tribal morals work there, how skills gap unemployment had hit that area, and how the addiction crisis has hit them, it helps dramatically to understand why it creates a conservative-leaning voting bloc that feels scared of modern progressive politics and would generally vote modern Republican despite having deep historical roots in voting Democrat as a worker solidarity signal.
- Murder of Peter Falconio [1]
- Rod Ansell, inspiration for Crocodile Dundee dies in a police shoot out [2]
- Croc river murders of Darwin sex workers [3]
- Death of Azaria Chamberlain (Dingo ate my baby) [4]
- German backpacker who escaped the Bali bomb blast killed by a crocodile in Kakadu [5]
[2] https://www.tvovermind.com/entertainment-news/tragic-story-r...
[3] https://www.theage.com.au/national/teens-sentenced-to-life-f...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Azaria_Chamberlain
[5] https://www.smh.com.au/national/crocodile-victim-survived-ba...
(I get corrected on that all the time.)
> Mr. Laurie killed Mr. Moriarty with (gardening tools?) at the Tea House
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Royal_Marine_...
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/in-australia-town-...
(For those of you who don't read classic mysteries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_on_the_Orient_Express)
("Over the course of his life, McElroy was accused of dozens of felonies, including assault, child molestation, statutory rape, arson, hog and cattle rustling, and burglary." ... "McElroy was shot to death in broad daylight as he sat with his wife Trena in his pickup truck on Skidmore's main street. He was struck by bullets from at least two different firearms, in front of a crowd of people estimated as between 30 and 46. To date, no one has been charged in connection with McElroy's death.")
I think it's sad.
“Imagine me carrying a dog and a body, I mean come on,” Ms. Hodgetts said.
An inocent person typically just says “i didnt do it”, but this attempt at providing justification is suspicious.
She could have an accomplice that helped her carry the body and know a lot about it.
“I’ve had me septic done, me incinerators searched, me house done four times”
Incineration would be a way to make the bodies dissapear in the middle of the countryside, but its the woods they could be buried anywhere.
Again she is providing way too much detail and justifications, its like she knows something.
“Nobody found anything” - suggesting that there was something to be found.
It does not mean that she did it, but it could indicate deception, like she knows more of what she is letting on.
I couldn’t find other similar suspicious declarations from others, that is why i thought it was worth pointing out.
The fact that the journalist chose to include these statements might indicate that the journalist thinks the same, that there is something wrong with this lady story.
Over the course of a conversation innocent people say all sorts of things that can be used to implicate them when taken out of context. That's one of the reasons anyone with more brain cells than you can count on one hand doesn't talk to cops in an even remotely adversarial context.
"So you were going 89mph and knowingly operating a vehicle with a dangerous engine?"
That is how criminal investigators catch many guilty people, that and body language combined with context.
And saying things like: they even searched my house 4 times, I couldn't have carried the body, they even searched my incinerator, they couldn't find anything, shows an excessive and unnecessary intention to persuade, typical of guilty people.
It could just be her baseline, as an overly justificative person raised in a certain way.
Each sentence in isolation by itself is not indicative of guilt, but these are red flags that indicate a direction where to dig deeper, as there could be some deception going on here.
of course the full interview text would be needed, we cant conclude anything based on a couple of loose sentences here and there.