Wally is joined by J. Reuben Appelman to talk about the ethics and complications of covering and consuming true crime.
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J. Reuben Appelman’s true-crime crime memoir, The Kill Jar, was published by Gallery/Simon & Schuster (2018) and was among the first of the new true-crime memoir genre. Published in all formats, The Kill Jar inspired the popular Hulu docuseries, “Children of the Snow” (2020), with Appelman serving as on-camera investigator and Executive Producer. The TV Series based on Appelman’s book has streamed tens of millions of times in America and abroad, and The Kill Jar was noted as among the best true-crime books of the year by The New York Times Book Review, Elle, Oxygen, Bustle, Crime Reads, and the USA Today network of newspapers.
To write The Kill Jar, freshly chronicling Detroit’s most notorious, and officially unsolved, serial killer case, Appelman meticulously studied thousands of pages of local, state, and FBI case documents, including previously private witness statements, autopsy reports, catalogs of evidence, crime scene photos, interrogation transcription, polygraph results, and personal correspondences and interviews highlighted within piles of bankers boxers obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. He conducted hundreds of interviews and built relationships and correspondences with original task force members. Appelman also worked closely with surviving family members of the victims, one of whom wrote the foreword to The Kill Jar.
Appelman has also written for a variety of successful film projects, including the Netflix-streamed documentaries, Jens Pulver | Driven and Playground: The Child Sex Trade in America, produced by George Clooney, Steven Soderberg, and Abigail Disney and now used as a tool for law enforcement studying the commercialized sex industry. Appelman’s scholarly research and practical experience in the field have earned him a multi-year guest lectureship on the issue of Human Trafficking for the Honor’s College at Boise State University, where he received his MFA. He has published across all genres, is a two-time State of Idaho Literature Fellow, and has been labeled a “full-grown oracle of language” by National Public Radio literary critic, Andrei Codrescu.
Appelman's latest book, While Idaho Slept, tells the horrific story of the University of Idaho murders that gripped the world's attention from Moscow, Idaho in November of 2022.
Appelman spent five years working as a rigidly vetted fraud investigator, packaging felony-level referrals for prosecution in the states of Idaho, Montana, Washington, Oregon, California, and Nevada. A native Detroiter, he currently works as a private investigator from his base in Boise, Idaho, where he has lived for almost 25 years.