Not Cutting the Mustard

 “American Nightmare” Short Streaming Series, 2024

I rarely watch ‘true crime’ documentaries, as they are sensationalist and bloodthirsty voyeur experiences. This one has wider political resonance though, and it’s not bloody, so stick with me. It’s about the kidnapping of a woman in Vallejo, California in 2015. It shows the laziness, stupidity, sexism and inertia of the Vallejo police, the FBI and the media, the latter who, with promptings from the police, characterized it as a real life version of the movie “Gone Girl.”

Meet the victim suspects.

In that reactionary film a jealous woman stages her own kidnapping and death to get back at her husband. This was the tack ultimately taken by the all these real ‘institutions.’ They first blame the boyfriend as the kidnapper and killer, then blame the woman when she returns alive, saying she staged her own kidnapping. All this without evidence. So the victims become revictimized by police, FBI and media, with the vile Nancy Grace topping the list. By the way the two accused people are naïve and harmless middle class ‘white’ folks who worked as physical therapists.

The boyfriend’s convoluted and odd story of the nighttime kidnapping and home invasion convinces the cop he’s lying. It would make more sense to fake a conventional account actually, and not make up all these specific, weird details. They bully him for hours.  The lead detective's name is, I kid you not, Mike Mustard.  The FBI agent has a conflict of interest involving the boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend, who he is having an affair with. The police turn off the boyfriend’s cell phone for a day. This misses two phone calls from the kidnapper asking for money and would have geo-located the cabin the woman was being held in and perhaps prevented a second rape. Prior to this they ignored multiple reports of a peeping Tom in their town. After the woman shows up, the police interview her. They don’t understand rape and think all women scream and yell and fight like hell, as she alleges she was raped twice by her kidnapper. They seem to have absolutely no training on what rape really entails for a woman afraid for her life. So this woman, in a sense, ‘deserves’ it because she didn’t engage in a bloody fight - or she just made the story up. After her return, all the journalists, up to a national level, go along with the police when they announce that the couple has wasted the County’s time and money and could be prosecuted for a fake kidnapping. The head of the police is behind this tack, where he is quoted saying ‘burn the bitch.’

Only an observant female detective in another town, after the local arrest of a very odd man in a sexual assault, notices a blonde hair on a piece of evidence, blacked-out googles.  The hair is not connected to her victim. She starts looking into a string of sexual assaults, home invasions and peeping Toms in middle California and finally comes upon the “Gone Girl” case in Vallejo, where the abducted woman was blonde. She connects this to her weird perp and his other victims. That single strand of hair upends the whole lie promoted by the police, the FBI and the media because it connects directly to the odd aspects of the kidnapping. It's kind of a smart cop / stupid cop story in real life - which is also the theme of so many fictional detective stories.  Det. Mustard got an award that year from Vallejo P.D. for superior detective work, so facts don't matter.

This documentary is a perfect example of how police can blame the victim, especially women; do the laziest thing they can to close a case and ignore real evidence. It also highlights how the media are not so much reporters looking for facts as stenographers for officials. Journalism is now practiced by naïve, sensationalist and lazy practitioners evidently, produced by J Schools not doing their job to teach actual, fact-based reporting. 

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: Gone Girl,” “Really? Rape? Still?” “Missoula – Rape and Justice in a College Town” (Krakauer); “What is Behind Rape, Assault and Harassment,” “Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again.,” “FGM,” “Celebrate Indian Women,” "The Murdaugh Murders" or the words ‘feminism,’ ‘police’ or 'detective.'

The Cultural Marxist / July 10, 2024