Commentary Culture Investigations

In 2001, six-year-old Haley Zega got lost on a family hike in the Arkansas wilderness. She was found after three days where she survived drinking river water. Now there’s a book about it. What does it take to be a book? Novelist and Bard College professor Benjamin Hale is Haley’s uncle, so he wrote an article about it in Harper’s. When an article is expanded into a book, you wonder how much extra filling you get in the reading. A lot of books should be articles, rather than the other way around. (A lot of articles should be Substack posts, a lot of posts should be tweets, and a lot of tweets shouldn’t exist at all.)
A psychic predicted where Haley would be (“next to a stream,” which doesn’t sound like any great feat of magic). Volunteers combed the area, using a computer software that predicts where the missing person might be. The software is given a map, plus the age of the missing person, and gives percentage chances of where the person might be found.
So many people showed up to help the search that the rescue experts first directed them to the high-propensity areas, then started turning them away. Among those turned away are two hunters who knew the topography. The two hunters found Haley where the software said she wouldn’t be in a great triumph of craft over industry.
It’s the sort of story that’s big on local news for a few days, then disappears. Is this enough for a book?
Hale fills out that story with a 1978 cult murder. The connection? The murder occurred near the place where Haley was found. The location is very remote, so there’s that. And young Haley spoke about how an imaginary friend helps her. Could this be the ghost of Bethany Allana Clark, murdered 23 years earlier? Even Hale can’t bring himself to believe the 1978 haint saved, or had anything to do with, the 2001 missing girl.
But. Hale goes deep on the 1978 killing. He does yeoman work tracking down people still alive from that incident, a number found after the original Harper’s article and new to the book: some lawyers, a retired sheriff, and some members of the Church of God in Christ Through the Holy Spirit, including some people long imprisoned for the murder. The county deputy sheriff is now an 85-year-old hardware store cashier at Bob’s Do It Best Hardware and Lumber.
The church had perhaps a dozen members in the 1970s and was one of those entities the filmmakers behind True Detective think typifies actual churches, that there’d be some terrifying charismatic leader and slack-jawed adherents who follow that leader blindly, and how a declaration of “anathema” throws someone out of the church or leads to a killing in the thick bramble.
Neither halves by themselves make for a book, and neither has much to do with the other, except one murder and one missing person were within a few miles of the other two decades apart.
And yet it’s still fascinating stuff for fans of the agrestic branch of the true crime genre. Newton County has never had much more than 7,000 people. The justice is rough. The more guilty get less time than the less guilty. A criminal court is, after all, just another county bureaucracy. A stupendously guilty person who races to the county prosecutor to reach a deal beats out actual innocence.
All this was shortly before the Jonestown Massacre. Apocalyptic cults weren’t yet the focus of the public. Much smaller than the Reverend Jim Jones’s San Francisco church, the Church of God in Christ Through the Holy Spirit never had more than nine adults. The founders were Royal and Edith Harris, authors of The Third Step to Joyful Living, or How to Stop Worrying. (Hale never could find a copy of this book.) Edith had been a Methodist minister in perhaps the least likely cult-leader origin story.
The Harrises brought along two sons, including Mark, who Edith declared a prophet when he was 13 years old. Early member Suzette Freeman took over from Edith after Edith’s death. Rather than being a sole cult leader, she grafted herself on to the preexisting declaration that Mark, now only 17, was a prophet. Mark “The Prophet” would make mystical pronouncements purportedly from God, and Suzette “The Interpreter” would act as intermediary. Soon a young child was tragically declared anathema. (The large cast of characters makes for hard following. As with Wuthering Heights, you’d appreciate a family tree published in the front of the book, but there isn’t one.)
At almost 300 well-written pages, there’s surplusage to wade through. Hale’s own opinions on religion occupy a lot of pages, but he did add a lot of reporting from after the original article. A fan of rural gothic crime will enjoy this tale of an eerie backwater.
Cave Mountain: A Disappearance and a Reckoning in the Ozarks
by Benjamin Hale
Harper, 304 pp., $30
Robert Little is a criminal trial lawyer in California.
The post Strange but True Crime appeared first on .

For wayward souls craving a dose of old-school, real-deal country music, there’s an obscure but surefire remedy, a 1973 low-budget cult movie called Payday. It stars wild-man actor Rip Torn in a career performance as Maury Dann, a pill-popping, pistol-toting, whiskey-swigging country singer with scimitar sideburns and a bad attitude working his way down the music-biz food chain.
Shot on location in the Alabama sticks, Payday revels in the seamy side of the honky-tonk circuit of that era, even as it pays homage to the craft of a one-hit coulda-been like Dann, up all night at a nowhere motel with a guitar and a fifth of Rebel Yell, writing an ode to his ex and the “slowly fading circle on her finger where my ring used to be.” Besides the music, there are backseat trysts, casual gunplay, and a parking lot stabbing: Call it hillbilly gangster cinema verité, a million miles from mainstream Hollywood C&W-inspired treacle like Tender Mercies and Honeysuckle Rose.
In one memorable scene, Dann coaxes a female fan whom he’d bedded the night before to join his entourage on the road to the next show. “We only pass this way once,” he says with a wolfish grin, “might as well pass by in a Cadillac.”
The line provides a chapter epigraph in I Am From the Honky Tonks, a riveting biography of Gary Stewart, whom many rate among the last of the authentic hardcore country singers. In a string of fiery, in-your-face hit records in the mid-to-late 1970s—”Drinkin’ Thing,” “Your Place Or Mine,” “She’s Actin’ Single (I’m Drinkin’ Doubles)”—Stewart transformed country’s drinking-and-cheating tropes into roadhouse hymns about edgy thrills and the wages of sin. Heady, exhilarating stuff, and catchy as all hell.
Stewart lived out his songs like a real-life Maury Dann. His unfettered and feral vibrato was a voice crying out in the wilderness, as if prophesying the Music City Babylon that has come to pass, a dire soundscape of Walmart cowboys crooning in auto-tuned, shit-eating drawls about their pick-up trucks. “Gary Stewart was a bona fide outlaw, not the kind concocted by a record company, and one that excelled in self-sabotage,” writes author Jimmy McDonough. “Nashville didn’t know how to package (or control) this kind of realness, and Gary’s brand of hillbilly was far more downhome than, say, a Rolling Stone-friendly Gram Parsons.”
One of our more adventurous music writers, McDonough has penned definitive and highly obsessive bios of Neil Young, Tammy Wynette, and Al Green. But he has also chronicled luminaries of oddball Americana, from exploitation film director Russ Meyer to vintage Vegas entertainer Georgette Dante. His affinity for underappreciated fringe-culture figures has met its match in Stewart, not only due to McDonough’s fanatical love for his hero’s mongrel roots music, which “at his best inspires awe,” but because for decades he was a friend and confidante.
By the late ’80s, Stewart’s career had fizzled. McDonough found the down-and-out 43-year-old living in a double-wide trailer with blacked-out windows, marooned in his drug-infested hometown of Fort Pierce, Fla. McDonough’s 1988 Village Voice profile helped spark an unlikely comeback for Stewart, who found fame of any sort just as hard to deal with the second time around. That was the seed of this sprawling 544-page tome, studded with ribald family photos (including a close-up of Gary’s dentures) and arcane footnotes that record-collector nuts will savor. The book takes its place next to Hellfire, Nick Tosches’s no-holds-barred biography of Jerry Lee Lewis, another tragedy-stalked Dixie-fried music visionary. Like Stewart’s jittery off-kilter singing, the book may be an acquired taste, but once acquired, it’s highly addictive.
After Stewart’s suicide in 2003, his star faded fast. As McDonough notes, there’ve been no retrospective box sets or documentaries, not to mention any hint of an induction to the Country Music Hall of Fame. He says major publishers weren’t interested so he took his project to an indie that let him go whole-hog. For McDonough, Stewart’s musical legacy “needs to be exalted to the place in history it deserves.”
The book earns its length, as it also does double-duty telling the Southern-Gothic saga of the Stewart clan, which an acquaintance likened to the Addams Family, and whose members granted full access to McDonough, who warmed up to the “lusty, lively, close-knit bunch.” Gary was the oldest of nine, all with names beginning with the letter G like their parents. His father George hailed from eastern Kentucky and was injured in the coal mines and moved the family to Florida when Gary was 12. Family matriarch Georgia ruled the house Ma Barker-style, whether doling out chores or the illegal narcotics that helped pay the bills. There are stretches of transcribed oral history from family and friends that emphasize blood ties and affection even as they detail incidents of Stewart kin-driven mayhem that could be straight out of the TV show Cops.
The musically gifted and work-averse Gary was marked by the cultural whiplash between his Appalachian roots and his wild teen years in the hedonist port town of Fort Pierce. He soaked up the disparate influences, which spawned a genre-hopping performer with a full arsenal of Southern music styles at his disposal, from barrelhouse boogie woogie on down. “A singer, songwriter, guitarist, and piano player, Stewart’s sound was forged in Kentucky hollers and Florida honky-tonks,” McDonough writes, “and his high, thrilling tenor could tackle rock, ballads, blues, bluegrass, all of it sounding authentic.”
It was the time as well as the place that made Stewart so unique, one of the first country performers to tap into the cathartic energy of early ’70s Southern rock longhairs like his favorites, the Allman Brothers, with whom he often performed. But after he stormed the country charts, Stewart recoiled from the spotlight and the large-venue show dates; his idea of success was playing the sweaty, intimate tonks where he could feed off the heat on the dance floor. “I love music because it’s the best drug there is—it’s adrenaline,” he tells McDonough. “Get him into some backwoods shithole and he’d really fly,” said his soundman. “Stewart was just one of those downward mobility guys.”
By the early ’80s, there were drug arrests and a car accident that got him addicted to painkillers. One of his best songs, “Harlan County Highway,” about his old Kentucky stomping grounds, is a clear-eyed lament addressing his epic flameout: “What started out as heaven/Got lost along the way.”
By the time McDonough showed up at the trailer, he found a pill-head who’d called it quits (ironically, Stewart was never a big drinker). But they bonded over a devotion for roots music—the more obscure 45 rpm rockabilly single, the better—and soon Stewart relished his role as a redneck Samuel Johnson to McDonough’s Boswell. (“Tell it the Jimmy way,” he instructs him.) Their repartee is at the heart of the book, with the acolyte disparaging an overproduced ’80s song of his idol and its “stink of Jimmy Buffett marimbas,” while Stewart is revealed as a trailer-park aesthete, once ruminating, “I want to write like Thomas Hart Benton paints.” And a prickly character as well. At one point, he throws a knife at McDonough, hissing, “Stranger, you don’t know me,” as he recites from a 1977 poem, “Appalachia,” by West Virginia native Muriel Miller Dressler, dear to mountain people for generations.
And bad news kept knocking on Stewart’s door. There was the suicide of his son Joey at age 25, years after his sister Griselda had done the same. When Stewart’s muse and wife of 43 years, Mary Lou, died in 2003, he shot himself a few weeks later. According to McDonough, it was meant to be that way: “If one goes, the other will follow—this was their romance.”
Fittingly, in his final years, Stewart returned to the roadhouse circuit where he’d started out, “in the dusty honky-tonks of Texas, Louisiana and Florida,” writes McDonough, where “Gary remains King.” He traveled in style, à la Maury Dann, in a white Caddy owned by one of his handlers, who recalled: “When we got with Gary, we enjoyed every bit of it, because we didn’t have to be professional. We were runnin’ up the road like a bunch of banshees, gettin’ paid cash money, not havin’ to answer to nobody.”
Doin’ things the Gary Stewart way.
Gary Stewart: I Am From the Honky Tonks
by Jimmy McDonough
Wolf + Salmon, 544 pp., $40
Eddie Dean is the coauthor of Dr. Ralph Stanley’s Man of Constant Sorrow: My Life and Times.
The post Hardcore Country Hero appeared first on .

The Massachusetts Attorney General’s lawsuit is the latest in a series of state legal actions against one of the world’s largest crypto ATM operators.

Saturday’s 2026 White House Correspondents Dinner was expected to be an unprecedented affair with President Trump and members of his Cabinet entering political enemy territory on liberal, elite media’s biggest single annual day of self-adulating slop.

Trump later joked he had prepared “the most inappropriate speech ever made,” but he was unable to deliver it as a gunman tore through a security checkpoint just after 8:30 p.m. Eastern during dinner. In CNN’s case, they abruptly pulled out of a commercial break.

Below are some of the big moments from CNN’s coverage of what was already going to be a history-making evening, but came that for all the wrong reasons.

Before the shooting, CNN’s Brian Stelter argued to Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt that, while “you say he’s been very accessible,” the President “tries to demonize the press.”

Stelter also offered standard fare, bemoaning Trump “has gone on the warpath against news outlets,” “called journalists…nasty names,” and “defunded PBS and NPR.” He even speculated a long Trump speech would cause questions to be raised “about his fitness for office.”

But, as we’ll see, Stelter became a real, genuine source of information once the evening took a turn.

But back to life before the shooting, Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) sufferer S.E. Cupp dropped at 8:08 p.m. Eastern the hottest take of the night, which was made scalding hot when violence erupted (click the tweet to read the lunacy in full):

CNN’s SE Cupp, chronically miserable and stricken with TDS, on the #WHCD, says “Trump wants us dead, figuratively”…
“[The @WHCA] made it real easy for him to attend. And I, you know, glad to see everyone’s in great spirits. And this is a party. I’m real bummed. Real bummed… pic.twitter.com/nxlrJnJQlb
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) April 26, 2026

Fellow CNN liberal Van Jones wasn’t having any of this. Instead, he said the WHCD “is a wonderful evening in Washington, D.C., where people come together and put aside their partisan differences,” which “is awesome” and “I don’t care about what anybody says.”

Our friend and 2025 MRC Bulldog Award winner Scott Jennings was also jubilant and directly addressed Cupp by opining, “journalism has never had more access to the leader of the free world than they have right now.”

“[H]e may roast the press, and they spend 24 hours a day roasting him, and they need to have a little bit of thick skin and put on their big boy pants and take it…I think the press is thriving in the Trump era. The access we have and the information that we get to bring to the American people, because he allows it is a good thing, objectively a good thing,” he added.

Following more banter and then White House Correspondents Association President Weijia Jiang’s opening remarks, CNN went to break. Here was the movement they jolted out to share the disturbing turn:

BREAKING: The #WHCD is cleared, people sent scattering and President cleared from the stage after a loud commotion seen inside pic.twitter.com/7Md7qToqHV
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) April 26, 2026
Less than five minutes later, co-hosts John Berman and Laura Coates went to Stelter inside the Washington Hilton ballroom as he had taken out his phone and began streaming to describe what was happening:

.@BrianStelter at 838 pm Eastern inside the #WHCD: “Hey, John. I’m going to be honest. Nobody knows what’s going on. But you’ll see there are people literally hiding under tables inside the ballroom of the Washington. We have seen many different security officers, some of them… pic.twitter.com/U92SksOI5v
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) April 26, 2026

CNN host Kaitlan Collins also called in (with someone else streaming her vantage point, alongside Secretary of Education Linda McMahon):

BREAKING: At 843 pm Eastern, CNN’s @KaitlanCollins says there was a shooter INSIDE the #WHCD in the Hilton lobby pic.twitter.com/z1gB6cNns5
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) April 26, 2026
Stelter then returned to talk things through with CNN’s congressional Republican chaser Manu Raju:

Credit to @BrianStelter for taking out his cellphone and streaming for @CNN, discussing with @KaitlanCollins and @MajorCBS earlier and now @MKRaju, admitting at 849pm Eastern that the #WHCD shooting has a lot of people shook up pic.twitter.com/ms6PlY4oJ9
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) April 26, 2026
The most bizarre moment of all this came next when The Lead and State of the Union host Jake Tapper not only took Stelter’s phone, but kept spinning around. Do with that as you may:

CNN’s Jake Tapper — with @BrianStelter’s phone — took viewers on quite the spin after spin while describing the chaos inside the Washington Hilton after the #WHCD shooting pic.twitter.com/BZDWKCiiqV
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) April 26, 2026
Back on-set and with word Trump and the WHCA had wanted to resume the event (before security put their foot down), Jones said “there is some strength that’s trying to be shown here” in “[t]hat you don’t stop this country and you don’t stop the celebration of the First Amendment because you’re a crazy person with a gun.”

On political violence, he said “this is the sort of stuff that has to stop” and “[t]his is the level of violence and crazy stuff on all sides of this country, is leading people to think that this is the right thing to do.”

Jennings agreed with his friend and went even further:

CNN’s @ScottJenningsKy on the #WHCD shooting: “I couldn’t agree with [@VanJones68] more actually about the need to continue. You can’t let people who are committed to using violence to silence our political process win. You cannot do it. The country is built on speech and debate,… pic.twitter.com/tZCdKNwpo0
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) April 26, 2026

After Jiang’s first update to the room, CNN had a series of calls over the next hour-plus with The Situation Room co-host Wolf Blitzer recounting his harrowing experience of being steps away from the shooter and being tackled and shielded by a police officer:

NEW: At 9pm Eastern, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer calls into describe his recollections of being STEPS AWAY from the shooting at the #WHCD, including being thrown to the ground and covered by a police officer pic.twitter.com/42CRGCh9QU
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) April 26, 2026

About ten minutes later, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer shares more about how he was FEET away from the #WHCD gunman and saw him being neutralized by police pic.twitter.com/MzO6SpsaTd
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) April 26, 2026

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer found someone’s cellphone camera, so he could explain on-air at 915pm Eastern what happened and saw the gunman “just maybe three, four, or five feet away,” so he was tackled and protected by a police officer pic.twitter.com/B4OnWmkX8Y
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) April 26, 2026

CNN’s @WolfBlitzer: “The shooter seemed to have gone through the metal detectors, but he had a weapon, and he was firing a weapon at least a half a dozen, maybe six or more shots. And the noise was so powerful it scared all of us. I, of course, immediately knew what that noise… pic.twitter.com/lWsebva5Q2
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) April 26, 2026
CNN eventually came back to Cupp and, at 9:24 p.m. Eastern, she stepped on another proverbial rake by demanding viewers keep an open mind and that the target may have been journalists, not the President:

CNN’s SE Cupp says the #WHCD cannot continue b/c of the ongoing “violence against journalists” and “politicians”…
“Can I just say something? While I appreciate the courage and stoicism from my colleagues here and @Weijia at — at the — at the dais to continue this night, what… pic.twitter.com/Hg5KlOWurp
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) April 26, 2026
Jones delivered a respectful but forceful response to Cupp about the need to show resilience:

CNN’s @VanJones68 on the #WHCD shooting: “I think that there’s a number of things that are being balanced here. SE spoke well to the human dimension. People are probably shaken up. To the logistical dimension, can you do this? To a political dimension here, and this is the… pic.twitter.com/EI7XF5pR5i
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) April 26, 2026

Jennings backed him up after Jiang announced the dinner’s postponement: “I think Van, you said it right earlier that the political element here is that we cannot allow people to believe they can show up with weapons and shut down anything that the President or the press or anything else we’re doing that causes our it makes our country run on a daily basis. We cannot allow it.”

Cupp and fellow liberal Van Lathan invoked gun violence and that this shooting reinforces the fact that “this country is sick” and nothing is supposedly being done about it, with no one, again, supposedly willing to acknowledge it:

Liberal CNN panelists SE Cupp and Van Lantan say the #WHCD shooting is proof the “country is sick” and nothing is being done to address that fact pic.twitter.com/XmePRlxN7f
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) April 26, 2026
Reporting outside the Hilton, weekday morning CNN News Central co-host Sara Sidner shared upsetting video she took after the attack of Erika Kirk being escorted out in tears and saying she wanted to get out:

I cannot imagine how Erika Kirk felt being in the room when the #WHCD shooting happened
CNN’s Sara Sidner passed her leaving the Washington Hilton and said she was extremely upset and in tears, saying “I just want to leave” pic.twitter.com/sjI81XF0RU
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) April 26, 2026
Moving into the 10:00 p.n. Eastern hour and before the President addressed the nation, Jennings reminded CNN’s liberal audience that many of those who protected the journalists and politicians assembled have been gone over 70 days without pay due to the partial government shutdown:

.@ScottJennings at 1005pm Eastern on the #WHCD shooting: “You know, I saw a post from Congressman Jared Moskowitz, a Democrat from Florida who said that when this happened, it was Steve Scalise, the House Republican Majority Leader, who grabbed him and threw him into a secure… pic.twitter.com/GsjJRU4qB4
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) April 26, 2026

On a different but vital topic, Jones noted everyone there will experience the trauma differently:

CNN’s @VanJones68 at 1006pm Eastern on the #WHCD shooting…
“I think that they obviously just did an extraordinary job. And the people — the people I’m hearing from are, are shaken up. Look, people respond differently. You know, I’ve — I’ve been shot at. You know, it’s a very… pic.twitter.com/JFHwJW3YTm
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) April 26, 2026

He also gave Blitzer a shout-out:

CNN’s @VanJones68 shouts-out @WolfBlitzer for his calmness and willingness to speak about having been feet away from the #WHCD shooting…
“And can we just give Wolf Blitzer some praise and some credit? He’s the best to ever do it. And for him to be able to go through that and… pic.twitter.com/ZP6bVAsMHe
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) April 26, 2026

Somehow, some way, Stelter made it across town to CNN’s D.C. bureau to join the panel and began sharing his recollections two hours post-gun shots:

CNN’s @BrianStelter on his instinct to take out his phone and start recording after the #WHCD shooting…
“The only other time that’s ever happened to me at CNN was a little bit like this night. It was the night there was a bomb threat at CNN in New York, and our colleague Don… pic.twitter.com/I7nygxaUM1
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) April 26, 2026

.@BrianStelter tells @ScottJenningsKY and @SECupp what he felt and experienced when he first felt the gunshots, plates crashing when chaos erupted pic.twitter.com/RYyrMgn35K
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) April 26, 2026

Following the President’s press conference, those assembled rendered their final thoughts. Jones hailed Trump’s remarks and warned the public to steel itself for the possibility that a portion of the populace will lionize the suspect like many have with Luigi Mangione:

CNN’s @VanJones68 says he fears there will be a portion of America that will seek to lionize the #WHCD shooter in much the same way Luigi Mangione has….
“Well, I thought the President did well. I’m starting to worry about something, though, which is that the shooter survived,… pic.twitter.com/c2gMYcRJsf
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) April 26, 2026

Jennings continued his theme of backing up his friend from across the political spectrum, stating Trump hit the “perfect tone” in showing unity with the press (despite the bombs both sides throw) and speed in delivering information to the public:

WATCH: @ScottJenningsKY on President Trump’s remarks about the #WHCD shooting…
“I couldn’t agree more with you, Van. And also anybody who attempts to rationalize it. You know, I think in the wake of some of these things, you get people who are saying, well, you know, you could… pic.twitter.com/0WvwOOABXX
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) April 26, 2026
Finally, we’ll end this round-up and mishmash of moments across six hours of CNN coverage where we began with Stelter, who shared one of the first people to make sure he was okay after shots fired was someone Stelter has perhaps been the most viciously critical towards:

WOW: CNN’s @BrianStelter says @BrendanCarrFCC — someone Brian is perhaps most critical of these days — was one of the first people who checked on him as the #WHCD shooting chaos unfolded… pic.twitter.com/qaxtcxfu6L
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) April 26, 2026

While the liberal, elite media will almost certainly go back to war against President Trump by Sunday morning and perhaps even cheerlead a third impeachment in the months or years to come, they were able to largely come together on one night when someone in either camp (the media or the President’s) could have lost their life.