Evil Genius
Rating - 3.5/5
John B McLemore was a horologist, a person who studies time. McLemore repaired antique clocks in his backyard, which was at his ancestral property deep in the American Bible Belt. In 2012, McLemore, a deeply progressive man trapped in a shockingly regressive town, made a call to This American Life producer Brian Reed. He had a story, about an alleged murder and its subsequent cover up, that everyone in town knew of but didn’t breathe a word about.
The story of this investigation is documented in the podcast S-Town, a spinoff to the game-changing Serial. We’ve never really done podcast recommendations here, but if it weren’t for Sarah Koenig and Serial, we wouldn’t have seen this current boom in the true crime genre. Needless to say, you should give them a listen. But the reason I invoke S-Town here is that, as I watched Evil Genius, the new true crime documentary on Netflix, I couldn’t help but notice the striking similarities between the two.
Upon his arrival in Woodstock, Alabama, to corroborate John B McLemore’s claims, Brian Reed discovered a town stuck in time, and a horologist who’d taken it upon himself to help it evolve. Woodstock was plagued by rampant poverty and unshakable devotion to religion. John B, as he was known to his friends, was the outsider - a man who could spend hours and hours discussing every subject under the sun with great insight, even as the townsfolk around him engaged in drug abuse and petty crime, desecrated their bodies in ink and disregarded the law. Climate change and informing people - who still believed in angels - about it, was a personal quest for him. He was an unusual man, as Reed would soon discover - in his spare time, when he wasn’t writing dissertations online, he had made a maze in his backyard.
Watch the Evil Genius trailer here
Shortly after his arrival, Reed learned that there had been no murder in Woodstock, Alabama. But he couldn’t bring himself to leave. In the subsequent episodes after this disappointing discovery, he began investigating the man who had summoned him. John B, he learned, was a genius - a strikingly intelligent man who had never escaped the confines of his s#!t town. And now, realising that it was too late, he had dedicated his life to changing it, one person at a time.
The central characters - or people, rather - in both S-Town and Evil Genius are some of the most broken you’ll ever see, or hear about. They’re all ex this or half that - no relationship is sacred, fewer are honoured. They discuss past suicide attempts like yesterday’s lunch. Both John B McLemore and Marjorie Diehl Anderson, the central subject of Evil Genius, were larger than life figures, but they occupied opposite ends of the spectrum.
Armstrong, as you’d probably have gathered from the title, was also an unheralded genius, but unlike John B, didn’t have the integrity to overcome the challenges life had thrown her way.
Evil Genius, embellished with the tall claim that it’s ‘the true story of America’s most diabolical bank heist’, explores the aftermath of a police standoff that ended with a bank robber dying, on live TV, after a collar bomb latched onto his neck went off. The deceased was a man named Brian Wells, who just moments ago had robbed a bank with shocking nonchalance captured on security footage. He walked in twirling a cane - ‘like Charlie Chaplin,’ as a witness later described - and even took one of the lollipops laid out in a bowl.
But a few minutes later, sprawled out on street with dozens of policemen’s guns pointed in his direction, hands cuffed behind his back, a time bomb ticking around his neck, with roughly $8000 in a bag beside him - the bank didn’t have the $250,000 he’d demanded - the look on Wells’ face betrayed shock, and realisation. He was in too deep. “It’s going to go off,” he kept repeating to the cops, his voice quivering with fear. It did.
The police found nine pages of thorough instructions, neatly written, with added diagrams for clarity, in his car. They surmised that Wells was a hostage - a cog in a larger scheme that involved someone forcing him into carrying out the robbery, and sending him on a scavenger hunt around town that would end with him dropping off the loot and winning the keys to his freedom, literally. He never made it.
What begins as a true crime story, like S-Town, turns into a character study. Marjorie Diehl Armstrong is a loud woman with mental health issues and a chilling past. Five of her ex-boyfriends died under mysterious circumstances. Two she’s admitted to having murdered. One week after the failed bank heist, the body of her current boyfriend is found in her freezer, and her house is on the same street where the cops believe Brian Wells was taken hostage with the collar bomb.
The two cases must be connected.
Of course they are. Evil Genius is an insightful tale about an America we rarely see. It comes from the eclectic Duplass Brothers - geniuses in their own right - the men behind the recent phenomenon, Wild Wild Country. Their careers deserve a Netflix documentary of their own - the brothers were the masterminds behind the Mumblecore movement, after which they moved on to great success in television, horror movies, and now true crime documentaries.
Evil Genius isn’t quite as immaculately conceived as Wild Wild Country, or, for that matter, Making a Murderer - there is an ambiguity in the storytelling that could be frustrating for some viewers, and those looking for a larger comment on systemic problems would be disappointed. It is, however, an unnervingly intimate profile of a fascinatingly evil character - a worthy addition to this Golden Age of True Crime. And for fans of this sort of stuff, it’s four hours of bliss.
Follow @htshowbiz for more
The author tweets @RohanNaahar
