Not even all the caffeine spilled in the Boston Harbor would be enough to keep us invigorated on a snowy Friday after a long week, so let’s start easing into the weekend, shall we?

This week, we had a Kennedy double feature for paid and unpaid subscribers.

Going out to everyone was “It was spring, perhaps.” With a recent focus on grooming cases, Kennedy reflects on memory and what we expect of victims and witnesses. How we hold onto the unremarkable, how we lose it just as easily, and what happens when systems demand precise detail from people whose experiences were never built to be remembered that way.

In paid inboxes was a slightly updated release of a Bullshit Hunting favourite, The Cult of Productivity. This one takes aim at hustle culture, productivity theatre, and the billion-dollar industry built on convincing you that exhaustion is a personal failure. From LinkedIn routines to influencers that contradict themselves, this is part rant, part investigation into the mythology of self-optimization.

What Kennedy Recommends

Book | No More Mediocre by Laura Danger

During the pandemic, many people found themselves spending more time on social media. While it’s not the place we oughta be, I was one of those people who used that strange and isolating moment in history to create content. It was a fun, creative way to pass the time and led to finding community in people I wouldn’t have otherwise met. One of those people was Laura Danger.

Laura began creating videos on domestic equity and quickly became a prominent voice in conversations about household dynamics, power, equity, and care. I clearly remember the moment I watched her first video about “weaponized incompetence.” Her way of simply distilling complex cultural, systemic, and gendered issues resonated with me, and clearly, many others.

I was quick to pre-order her book, both the physical and audio versions, and I’m glad I did.

Drawing from case studies, including nontraditional, intentionally developed family structures, and her own experience with mental illness and the demands of work and family life, Laura provides communication models and actionable steps you can take to restructure your household, home and partnerships to simply live better.

Available wherever you buy books.

Now, if you have any reading or watching suggestions for us, let us know!

Until we see you on the other side, rest easy and have a good time.

Love,

Your Bullshit Hunting Crew

Are you tired?

I’m pretty tired.

And you know what? I do a lot of the “right” things. I journal, I drink green juices, keep a tidy space, silence work chats from 7pm to 7am. I take probiotics and go to therapy. Motherfucker, I do cardio 6 out of 7 days of the week, and I’m child-free.

Sometimes, still, I’m so exhausted that I’m one Instagram notification a…

Read more

In this moment, one of us (Kennedy & Justin) is cursing the snow outside the window, the other is in that snow puffing a pipe tobacco. You guess who.

We hope that wherever you are, it’s far less frozen and far more pleasant.

Out to all this week was The ghost of sanctions yet to come. Oil, soap, candles, corsets, we know where those come from. Understood origins from a simpler time. Now? We can’t be so certain about where things come from. As AI infiltrates legal work and research, there’s much to learn about what is true and what could be hallucinated. If you haven’t already read, make sure to add it to your weekend reading list.

For paid subscribers, Kennedy muses on memory and how our expectations of witnesses and victims often bump up against the reality of how our brains process our experiences. To unlock “It was spring, perhaps” before it reaches all inboxes next week, upgrade your subscription.

Also in paid inboxes was High Spirits Volume 13. This week, Kennedy talks us through the mysterious death of the Isdal Woman. We talk 1970s espionage, poor tradecraft and what it might mean to have a variety of wigs in your luggage.

What Kennedy Recommends

Documentary | Trust Me: The False Prophet

Talk about boots on the ground journalism.

In this four-part docuseries, cult researcher Christine and her filmmaker husband Tolga share years’ worth of footage shot inside the FLDS community of Short Creek, Utah.

What started as an effort to help the community after a deadly flood unexpectedly turned into an explosive exposé as Christine and Tolga realized they were neighbours with a so-called Prophet who was “spiritually married” to at least 20 women and girls, at least 10 of whom were underage.

The unique nature of watching the filmmakers realize and reckon with what they’re witnessing and how they’ll handle it is a compelling part of the story that we rarely get to see.

If you’ve ever wanted to watch a predator make an absolute buffoon of himself by parkouring off boulders and willingly and thoroughly, and enthusiastically, documenting his crimes, this is the watch for you. Find it on Netflix.

Now, go have the weekend you deserve! (Whatever that means to you)

See you on the flip,

Your Bullshit Hunting Crew

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Once the season turns enough that the sun rises with me and the temperature is tolerable, I resume my ritual of a pre-coffee walk each morning. At any point between 6 and 8am throughout the week, you can find me slowly wandering the streets with headphones on, nothing playing, contemplating my mere existence.

This morning, I came back through the door with 4,200 steps in, filled a mug with peppermint tea and boiling water, stretched on my yoga mat and took my meds. I placed a jazz vinyl on my record player and cracked my laptop to begin the workday while espresso poured from the machine into a tiny cup.

This moment is as concrete as any.

It’s April 13th, 9:17am. My mood could most succinctly be described as “moderate.” I just used the last of my Greek yogurt and hemp hearts. The milk is running low. I need to call a lodge on a lake where a friend is getting married in September. I have case work to do that looks similar to any other case work. In two hours, Justin and I will have a phone call that sounds like most of our phone calls. I’m looking forward to painting on a fresh canvas later. I think maybe I’ll paint a frog smoking a cigarette.

By the end of the week, I won’t remember how long this morning’s walk was. At this point, I can’t remember which of the three perfumes I plucked from the table in my entrance before I left, needlessly spritzing myself, though I had yet to brush my teeth or hair. I can’t tell you what I wore to bed last night.

Nothing about this morning is memorable, but if, for some reason, in five months, you had to ask me about it, I’d probably be able to place it as early spring. I’d likely remember that it was grey, that the trees were still dead, and I might remember that I was annoyed with myself for wearing my white runners, not my boots, because there are still small mounds of dirtied snow melting into the ground, creating thick mud throughout the walking trails.

I might not be able to tell you if it was March or April, but you could cross my memory against the weather and snowfall. If I somehow remember that I called Wolf Ridge Lodge the morning of this particular walk, I could check my emails for a reservation confirmation or search my texts to see if I mentioned it to anyone I was booking accommodations with. If I happened to recall that I stopped to rub my sore back because I had my period, I could check my cycle tracker. If I give the smoking frog away to a friend, we might be able to smash our brain cells together to think of when.

Now, say, you ask me four years from now about this morning, what I can remember would depend on a few things. Nothing small or elaborate, just large life architecture stuff.

I’ve lived here for seven months. If I move when the lease is up, I’ll know it was spring of 2026, the only spring I had here. As we speak, my dad is sick. During my walk, I texted him to make dinner plans on Wednesday at a spot we’ve never been to. Because he’s sick, I catalogue these memories differently than I did pre-cancer. If that’s the first and last dinner we have there, I’ll probably be able to tell you with some level of accuracy that these two things happened around the same time. I’m expecting to hear from someone in the next few days that I don’t typically hear from. If I do, it could be another marker.

But all of these things rely on a hypothetical.

I have no reason to believe I’ll move. I think I’ll probably have more dinners with my dad. If I do hear from this person, it could be lacklustre. I could hear from them again, and those things could blur together.

I probably won’t remember this day at all.

I’m currently combing through materials related to two grooming cases. On a granular level, they’re not similar at all, but they do share some overlapping themes. The alleged perpetrators in each case are around the same age, the victims are too, and the “relationships” happened in the same time period.

In both cases, the legal proceedings happened a number of years after the fact.

A big point of contention and confusion is the timelines. The “relationships” went on for years; the court is focused on a relatively small number of specific incidents over all those years that blur into other incidents; we’re relying on the memories of kids who have become adults, and memories are a fickle thing.

I reached “throw your keyboard across a room” levels of defeat one day when I hit page 637 of a trial transcript. Nothing made sense; the dates didn’t add up, the lawyers were confusing themselves, littering the transcript with a dozen half-thoughts that only led to more confusion. I found myself placing events on the timeline that happened between two people months before they supposedly met. Under cross-examination, things didn’t get a hell of a lot clearer.

I wasn’t frustrated because I needed one thing to have happened or because I had an opinion on what happened at all. I don’t. Whether or not the timelines don’t make sense because someone is misremembering or because they’re lying is not relevant to my work of putting down on paper who said what about whom and when. In fact, inconsistencies are valuable.

But I have a brain that, like many brains, likes order, and having to break a massive timeline into tables of anomalies in a different document is not the kind of order my brain craves.

Once I was thoroughly bamboozled and in need of a break, I switched to the other case, where I was glad to have more than just transcripts. I had trial audio.

Having audio or video in a case, particularly those that happened 10 or 20 years ago, is a beautiful thing. The way information is contextualized through these mediums is vastly different than the words you can read on paper. For me, at least, it’s much simpler to follow someone’s train of thought audibly than it is to read it transcribed.

I was prepared to settle in, let the information synthesize in my brain, get the basics into my skull, and restart the audio to take my notes.

Unsurprisingly, this case was also riddled with memory failures. It was a bit more straightforward in that the victim rarely asserted their recall as fact. Because they were apprehensive about naming dates for things they couldn’t clearly remember, there was little contradiction. Instead, they provided large ranges that evidently frustrated defence counsel.

So much of the cross-examination focused on narrowing those dates.

But the victim in this case had an atypical childhood experience.

They were in an accelerated program for gifted students, shuffling schools at a different rate than their peers. When prompted, they couldn’t remember what grade they were in during certain events because their grade didn’t correspond with their age. They lived with different parents in different households with no formal custody agreement or schedule; narrowing down where they were staying was unhelpful. They’d known their abuser for many years as their coach, so trying to recall certain games, of which there were hundreds and dozens of tournaments for years, was also futile. Even the weather was largely debatable. “A bit of snow on the ground” could be fall, could be an unseasonally warm winter week, could be early spring.

When asked for the tenth time to try to give a more accurate date, there’s an objection. The victim has tried, in every conceivable way, to give a more accurate date. They cannot. The objection is sustained.

There’s a particular kind of scrutiny placed on memory in cases involving children and grooming that feels, at times, fundamentally mismatched with how memory actually works. We ask for specificity from people who were, at the time, still building the frameworks that allow memory to organize itself at all. Most people, let alone children, don’t catalogue their lives in dates and sequences. They remember in fragments of people, places, sensations, and disruptions. Add grooming to that, and those fragments are also shaped by power, confusion, normalization, and, often, a slow and purposeful erosion of what should have stood out as unusual, and what should be understood.

Grooming, by design, blurs reality. When something happens once, it can be easier to isolate. When it happens repeatedly, incrementally, and within a relationship that is already part of a child’s life, those moments don’t always register. They accumulate and become part of the background. Years later, when asked to recall them, what surfaces isn’t clean or isolated events, but overlapping layers of detail—this happened when I was still going to that school, when I was staying at that house, when it was cold out.

Time, in these cases, is rarely linear. It’s anchored to structures like school, sports seasons, holidays, who they were living with, whether there was a broken curfew, a first cell phone or messages on the family computer. Even those anchors can shift. A child moving between households, switching schools, or living in instability, not uncommon for grooming victims, may not have consistency to rely on. And over time, memory fades. Early spring becomes “summer” or a spring from a different year. Late fall becomes “before winter.”

And yet, we bring those memories into systems that demand chronology. We ask for dates, sequences, and order. We narrow, and we press, and we try to fix things in place. Sometimes that produces clarity. Sometimes it produces a contradiction. Often, it simply exposes the gap between what memory can offer and what we expect it to provide.

I probably won’t remember this morning.

If you asked me about it years from now, I’d try to give you a painted frog smoking a cigarette or an empty spot on the shelf where my dark cherry yogurt should be, but I’d probably have a failure of memory on any of those details. So, I wouldn’t give you a timeline or much for nuance, I’d give you a season. I’d give you the feeling of wet pavement and stubborn snow, and hope we could make something of it.

Usually, I write to you at the end of a Thursday workday with bloodshot laptop eyes and cluttered thoughts, or first thing in the morning on a Friday, pre-espresso. Today, I come to you from a Thursday evening with a warm breeze and Mini Eggs™ (not sponsored) cookies baking in the oven. Scenic, right? Hoping you feel the bliss through osmosis.

As you ease into your weekend, revisit our week in words.

In all inboxes was Exposure Expertise Is Screwing Criminal Defendants and their Appeals, and not to spoil it, but it’s pretty much exactly how it sounds. In this piece, Justin shares his experience as an expert, and how the court struggles to understand the difference between vague familiarity and true capability.

Going out to paid subscribers was The ghost of sanctions yet to come. One of your favourites, Some Lawyer, is back in the fold, painting a picture of a courtroom built on whale oil wealth. A legal system built on citation and proof, which now could be slipping through the cracks. This one asks the dystopian question: What happens when AI hallucinates evidence?

What Kennedy Recommends

Television Show | The Burbs

I wasn’t sure what to expect when a friend recommended The Burbs because, fine, I haven’t seen the OG Tom Hanks movie it’s based on. Sue me. I turned it on while picking away at my diamond art (highly recommend for the not-so-artistic crafters out there), and found myself deeply charmed.

For those who love and miss the light campy horror comedies of the 80s and 90s, think Beetlejuice and The Addams Family, The Burbs hits that sweet spot.

Rob and Samira Fisher move into his childhood home in a quiet suburb, but their fresh start unravels when a mysterious man takes up residence in a long-abandoned house across the street. While on maternity leave, Samira teams up with a group of quirky neighbours to investigate, uncovering dark secrets that threaten their town’s “safest in America” reputation, and her own family and sanity.

Available on Peacock in the US and Stack TV (Amazon Prime) in Canada.

Alright, folks, that’s that on that.

We’re wishing you a weekend of whatever tickles your fancy.

Enjoy, and we’ll meet you on the other side.

Your Bullshit Hunting Crew

Earlier today, I was at Bristol County Superior Court. New Bedford. The courthouse — which is, like many of its era, objectively gorgeous — was built at the height of the whaling era, when New Bedford, Massachusetts, was, per capita, the wealthiest town in the United States.

Whale was something everybody needed, it seemed. Industrialists used blubber for grease. Whale oil made the best candles — they burned without smoking, it’s said — and ointment, and soap. Whalebone was used for corsets, and trinkets, and furniture, and tools, and ambergris, in perfume.

It must have seemed like the era would never end. Every product. Every industry. Every conceivable use. No need to ask. Just cram it full of whale. Don’t ask where it came from. Or how many more there are out there. Or what the process was, by which living animal became soft glow from a hurricane lamp.

Anyway.

I have just about lost track of the latest and largest sanctions issued to lawyers for turning in briefs with what we’re presently referring to, euphemistically, as “hallucinated” citations, but it seems as if the rhythms have changed, slightly.

Where initially counsel would claim that they thought some new-to-them “tool” they’d used was something akin to a search engine, and the results as reliable as any other “research,” it seems like the current “mea culpa” is “I didn’t think it could do…this.”

“This” being fabricating snippets of records. Or false quotes, and holdings from real cases. Or citations that do, in fact, point to a single word — which appears — for a principle that does not.

Sanctions for use of hallucinated cases have become almost routine, and, unfortunately, are likely to remain so. Careful lawyers will return to the practice of cite-checking everything, personally. Other lawyers will roll the dice. And some percentage of them will get caught.

This does not keep me up at night. I don’t use LLMs for legal research. It would ruin all the fun.

What keeps me up at night is something else.

Hallucinated evidence.

Documents and information presented as if “retrieved” by some “AI-assisted search” rather than as something “generated” by AI.

Hallucinated cases are easy to prove false. Published legal cases have one, and usually several, unique identifiers, which follow a known system and can be checked against multiple outside sources.

They can even be checked without using a computer at all, by walking up to the right shelf in a law library, and taking the volume down from the shelf, and opening it to the indicated page.1

Not only is it easy to determine if a case is hallucinated, it’s not difficult to avoid being in a position to use hallucinated cases. No matter how much whale AI they keep cramming into everything, the legal research tools that existed before, continue to exist.

Documents are trickier. No citation. No universally-recognized unique identifier. How would a careful attorney know that the very-important-seeming-several-page-something bundled into a lengthy production existed prior to the prompt that “retrieved2” it?

That is what keeps me up at night.

Not hallucinated cases.

Inadvertent forgery.

Evidence that isn’t.

The ghost of sanctions-yet-to-come.

And sometimes whales.

A Good Friday, indeed. Not because anyone has risen or anything like that but because, hey, maybe we’ll all find some time to rest. Maybe eat some chocolate. Glaze a ham. Live your dreams.

This week, out to everyone was For once, this shouldn’t be an email from Kennedy. This one manages to cover a local PR disaster, a massage table realization, and a bigger question about how we communicate in a world with no pause button. What happens when the immediacy of technology clashes with the urgency of our human emotions, and we find ourselves answering to a response we hadn’t fully processed yet?

In the inboxes of paid subscribers was a new Justin original: Exposure Expertise Is Screwing Criminal Defendants and their Appeals. In this piece, he explores some of the cognitive dissonance with technology in the courtroom, and how bad assumptions don’t just evaporate, they snowball.
From trial to appeal, one misunderstood idea can pick up speed, weight, and consequences. Out to all next week, or unlock with a subscription today.

What Kennedy Recommends

Podcast | Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel

I had to search the archives as I thought to myself, “There’s simply no way I haven’t recommended this already.” Where Should We Begin is Belgian psychotherapist Esther Perel’s podcast. Every episode is a one time session with Esther, unpacking everything from mother wounds to couples therapy, sex addiction, infidelity, and, in a recent episode, AI.

In this episode, Esther meets with a young man who set out to build an AI personal assistant, but instead, built himself the perfect romantic partner.

Listening to this was confirmation of what we already knew to be true: as society continues to collapse inward and we lose the in-person communities and third places we once had, relationships will be replaced with customizable and optimizable companions.

Available wherever you listen to podcasts.

That’s all folks.

Rest up.

Your Bullshit Hunting Crew

“I don’t believe Mr. Seitz understands how the term ‘hacking’ is used in common language…”1

“…this [investigation] is a fishing expedition…”

“…I think to the extent that there are further delays going down that rabbit hole, that those delays be unnecessary and I’d-I’d call off your expert [yours truly] on that particular front.”

Yep, they’re all talking about me. Me and my relative lack of expertise, or apparently, my command of the English language. It’s also demonstrating a strange form of cognitive bias that I have no psychology degree to explain.

I’ll do my best though…

Herein lies the problem with what I call ‘exposure expertise’ — that being someone (usually a lawyer or judge) who is simply exposed to a technology makes them an expert at it. Or in common legal parlance, that the judge or lawyer would possess technical knowledge that an average juror would not.

I can tell you, this is objectively not true in any case I have ever worked.

Ever.

Before we get to my thicc-boi-footnote, let’s slow the conversation down a whole lot.

How could a Court even understand what would define a ‘fishing expedition’ or ‘rabbit hole’, for an expert conducting a technical investigation?

Wouldn’t that opinion from the Court itself require expert guidance first?

As someone who investigates shit for a living, I usually associate ‘rabbit holes’ and ‘fishing expeditions’ with thoroughness at best, resource mismanagement at worst. The latter referring to the real risk of a rabbit hole — that if you’re in the wrong one and you run out of time or resources on your case, then you fucked up. You may, in the Court’s eyes, also be wasting their time and money.

Plain and simple.

Experience teaches you that you can dive deep enough, but still crawl out to make sure every rabbit hole gets at least a peek. Contemporaneous note-taking, information synthesis and continued report drafting help to slow you down, to contemplate and incorporate.

So I would hope that we can all agree: it’s unwise to point to another person’s investigation and apply a label such as ‘fishing expedition’ without having any expertise in what that person is doing in the first place, right?

We can agree on that part, yes?

Ignorance isn’t a defense.

So let’s get to the footnote.

A Simple Expertise Test

After sealing a 19,000-word report on a wrongful conviction in Kansas, it was not the heft of the report but a single footnote that I felt was most illustrative of the problem in this case, and numerous others.

The case involved a DHS ICE agent who was a digital forensics practitioner. Already a level of expertise above the average juror. However, the judge intercepted the expert certification of this witness and just decided that the officer was a ‘fact witness’ simply speaking to what he was seeing on a compooper.

Now, that is batshit. It is one thing to bring documents, a timeline, and exhibits and lay them out as a fact witness. As soon as “MD5” or “Encase” is uttered, that is not a fact witness. Unless that fact witness is synthesizing the work of an expert, and that expert has already laid down a foundation for that fact witness. The foundation must be built upon the expert’s training, expertise, and the application of the same to the case at hand. One would hope you have a properly formed expert report as well, something that is truly deficient in a high number of cases.2

Why is that?

Well here is where the thicc-boi comes in, which I have modified slightly for readability:

A simple test that I often offer to those who feel that the ‘average juror’ understands as much as the average computer specialist is to pose the question to them: Describe to me in as many steps and detail as possible, including any network protocols, encryption or other technologies involved , that occur when I browse to Google[.]com with my laptop.

The true answer covers multiple textbooks, years of schooling, and likely is not feasible to understand at every level by a single human being. A computer expert will be able to explain a significant number of steps in detail – and a sign of their expertise is their clear assertion they couldn’t know all the details, of course. A ‘computer nerd’ might be able to answer in some level of detail, generally not to the scope of an expert.

The average juror, including the defendant, judges, lawyers, and clerks have no idea, other than perhaps the basics of interacting with the software such as the computer itself, or opening a web browser. However, an average juror may not even understand the definitions of some of the words posed in the question itself.

These reasons are precisely why computer evidence and corroboration evidence requires expertise. It is not a ‘nice to have’.

Alternatively, another and more modern analogy is: simply because one owns and carries around a cellphone in their pocket, in no way means that the same person has an inkling of how it works.

Make sense, doesn’t it? It’s not about neckbeards at Comicon in a dick-measuring contest over who knows more. It’s truly crucial for criminal cases. Not a ‘nice to have’.

It’s not just at trial time in front of a jury, either, when this can really screw a defendant’s case.

It’s much worse at appeal and during post-conviction work.

The Appeal Snowball

“As trial counsel said, the Facebook messages were of no use to….”

I don’t even have to finish the sentence, do I?

Trial counsel.

Not ‘the expert witness at trial’.

Trial counsel.

A lawyer.

This is the wee little trial snowball that gets pissed on and slowly starts making its way down Sentencing Hill.

I’ve never met a lawyer who’s told me every possible way that Facebook messages can be used in a criminal investigation. Just like they’ve never had me tell them how to file an appeal.

The difference is that I don’t walk around with an ‘Appeal Court’ in my pocket, which makes me feel pretty comfortable talking about it3 — I am not constantly exposed to the ‘Appeal Court’ in this example. I don’t get random Friend requests on an Appeal Court. I don’t feel the ‘Appeal Court’ buzz at me from my sweatpants — take that to mean whatever you want.

But judges have cell phones. Lawyers run YouTube channels. They all type on compoopers. Many have Facebook accounts. This exposure, driven by a juror-like ‘lived experience’ principle, is fine when you’re at the pub, but it completely invades the territory of an expert the minute you utter it in Court or put it in a filing.

If you can’t convince a single trial judge, now you’re looking at an Appeal Panel.

That piss-stained snowball starts hurtling down the hill, picking up dogshit, sticks, and more snow. Every appeal that carries the incorrect statement makes the snowball bigger; it yellows it further. The farther that snowball is allowed to go, the harder it is to stop, and the less willing anyone is to touch it.

You start running into truly illogical arguments, such as: “The Facebook messages are a settled matter, and you are not getting an expert appointed.”

Yep, the snowball is now a block of immovable shit. Your only hope is to melt the whole thing down with a blowtorch, put on your gloves, pick through the shit and pull out the digital evidence that proves they’re wrong.

It is hard, thankless, ugly, messy work — all because of one little snowball, one little sentence uttered at trial.

No expert in sight?

No justice.

Just because you carry something around in your pocket does not mean you know a goddamn thing about it.

What’s your ideal Friday? Oh, mine? Well, wake up at tight 7am, brew a peppermint tea, then an espresso, and settle in with my favourite email from Bullshit Hunting, of course.

Another retrospective as we reach back into the archives to blow the dust off some of your favourites. This week, everyone got to peek back into A Free OSINT Lesson: Why RUMINT is the Unsung Hero of Intelligence Gathering. Before there were datasets, there were stories. And before there were analysts, there were people passing along what they’d heard. This article explores when the rumour mill is the appropriate place to be.

Hitting inboxes for those who throw us some monthly change, Kennedy takes us on an adventure from massage therapy to crisis communications with, For once, this shouldn’t be an email. When you have an emotional investment in your business, you want to defend it. But sometimes, the best way forward is simply to pause and listen. Coming to everyone next week.

Also for paid subscribers was High Spirits Volume 12. We’ll be honest, not our best but certainly not our worst! In our return, we bring you warranted complaints with the legal process and report writing, and some stories of unexplained Leprechaun-style creatures and weird road tales. We’re moving over to a bi-weekly schedule to ensure higher quality content.

What Kennedy Recommends

Alright, this one might be niche, but let’s go for it.

Last year, I was wandering through Shakespeare and Company, the famed Paris bookstore that I only knew as the bookstore Ethan Hawke has his reading in the beginning of Before Sunset.

While there, I picked up three books, one of which was No Modernism Without Lesbians. It quickly became a favourite.

No Modernism Without Lesbians by Diana Souhami is an engaging exploration of how lesbian relationships were central to the development of modernist art and literature in the early 20th century. Souhami reframes modernism as something deeply shaped by queer networks, partnerships, and creative collaborations. The women central to the story were not just participants in modernism but architects of it. It’s both a literary history and a kind of corrective.

Available wherever you buy books!

Alright, that’s all, folks.

Take care of yourselves. Get some rest.

Best,

Your Bullshit Hunting Crew

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Do me a favour, put your wariness aside. We’re getting woo woo for a moment.

The other day, I was on my massage therapist’s treatment table and noticed she was spending a lot of time on my hands. I was really feeling it, too. There was significant pain, then ease. We don’t typically spend a lot of time on my hands, so I asked what she was feeling.

She asked if I’d been dealing with emotionally difficult communication recently. When I asked her to clarify, she asked if there had been any particular work stress, life stress or relational stress that required communication via text or email. Yes, I said.

“I think about this often,” she mused. “In a world of technology, our words are in our hands and fingers. We spend time at our keyboards, writing and emoting. Think about how you feel when you’re writing something stressful or painful, or reading a text or an email that feels the same. Your body has a reaction, your shoulders are at your ears, and your hands are tense. I can feel all of it in here.”

The way she said it, simple and matter-of-fact, seemed so obvious. Yes, of course.

How are we going from massage to, well, anywhere relevant?

Stay with me here.

Last week, there was a PR mess unlike anything I’ve seen in a long time. Not a massive corporation or a client, but a local business. You couldn’t open Instagram, Facebook, or Reddit without seeing it and the endless pages of commentary.

The issue was this: the business was using video of an unhoused woman attempting to conceal (likely steal, but hey, I can’t know motive or intention from a 15-second video) a pair of socks. The video itself wasn’t really the problem. The problem was how it was made, with shitty crime-style TikTok music and a lame caption positioning themselves as “empaths.” An employee commented that she’d never laughed so hard while editing something.

People responded accordingly.

The woman in the video wasn’t violent. She wasn’t aggressive. The interaction was uncomfortable for the employee, yes, but ultimately benign. And the subject of the video was someone visibly vulnerable, trying to take socks. On a cold day.

People asked the business to take it down.

Within a day, they doubled down.

In a six-slide Instagram post, they reframed the video as an attempt to “start a conversation” about the hardships businesses face in areas disproportionately impacted by homelessness.

Here’s the thing.

That sentiment, in isolation, isn’t wrong.

I live in that area. I can practically see this business from my window. It’s in the downtown core of a mid-sized city, where unhoused people tend to be because it’s where they have access to resources, transportation, and public spaces. When I step outside for a run, a coffee, or my allergy medication at the pharmacy across the street, it’s not unusual to pass someone sleeping on the sidewalk or asking for change.

I don’t think much of it. This is where they live, too.

I’m also not naive. Mental illness and addiction can lead to erratic or unsafe behaviour. You adapt accordingly.

I don’t wear noise-cancelling headphones. I park in a secure, sheltered location. I carry naloxone, extra pads and tampons. When friends visit, I offer my extra stall or walk them to their cars. On the rare occasion I have cash or change, it’s up for grabs. I’ve been approached by a large man in a ski mask who said something I couldn’t make out through the muffling of a mouth against fabric. I told him to leave me the fuck alone, and he did.

I choose to live here because I like it.

And choosing to live here means choosing to live in community with marginalized, economically disadvantaged, and vulnerable people.

This business made the same choice.

There is no argument against the fact that businesses are impacted by the socioeconomic conditions of the areas they operate in. That’s not controversial or up for debate. If you want to advocate for change, good. Do it. Talk to city council. Show up to public meetings. Write to the Business Improvement District. Implement internal policies that keep your staff safe.

What I don’t recommend is using a vulnerable person as content, framing it as humour, and then, when criticized, retrofitting it into “socially nuanced dialogue.”

The original post has since been deleted, so I can’t give you the exact language, but trust me, it was tone deaf, and it gave people exactly what they needed to tear it apart. It was almost comically bad.

From a communications perspective, it was baffling.

They had thousands of comments. Clear, immediate feedback, and a very obvious path forward: remove the video, acknowledge the misstep, apologize if you feel it’s warranted, and move on. Instead, they escalated. Two posts with thousands of comments and almost none of them supportive.

I don’t advocate for lying in your marketing and communications, but I do advocate for strategy. This was the opposite of strategic.

I couldn't make sense of it. No one I spoke to could make sense of the decision-making either.

And then I’m lying on this table, my hands being worked through, and my massage therapist is talking about how much of our emotional life now moves through our fingers and phones.

Something started clicking.

How many times have I sent a text that should’ve been a phone call?

How many times have I received something that should’ve been said face-to-face?

How many times have I posted something, carefully worded, punctuated, edited, only to realize afterward that it didn’t actually communicate what I meant? Or that, really, it was not something I needed to communicate at all, or actually, maybe I don’t even feel that way?

Because I hadn’t fully processed it yet. Or because the medium itself is limited in how it can portray what anyone is trying to say.

We have this constant access to instant expression, a constant output, and no friction between feeling something and publishing it.

When I reflect on this mess, I see an owner who was overwhelmed and defensive, rightfully frightened by a barrage of negative sentiment, too embedded in their own perspective to step outside of it long enough to hear what people were actually saying, and too eager to respond when what was needed was a pause.

It’s a human reaction to have.

But it’s a human reaction playing itself out in a space where the stakes are both unclear and amplified, using the same tools we use to post our coffee or our dogs or our pasta salad and to respond to crisis.

And once it’s out, it’s out.

So, let this be your reminder that just because you can doesn't mean you have to pick up the phone, send a message, publish a post. Sometimes the most strategic thing you can do, for your business, your relationships, or your own sanity, is to not say anything yet.

If for nothing else, do it for your hands that are holding your keyboard and all of the emotions flowing through it. It starts to get real crampy in there.

Knee deep in case work and swimming in litres of caffeine, this week we reached back into the archives to keep our focus where it needed to be. We know ya’ll understand.

You may have missed his voice and unique wit, so this week, we ran it back to a classic MJ article, A Free OSINT Lesson: Why RUMINT is the Unsung Hero of Intelligence Gathering. This piece breaks down how “RUMINT”, rumour, innuendo, the stuff people whisper about, can become one of the most powerful tools in your OSINT toolkit. From rural fraud cases to bot networks in Vietnam, this is about working the edges of truth.

This week, out to everyone was The $91 million dollar word from Some Lawyer. After a workplace accident on a Massachusetts bridge, insurers built their defense around one convenient claim: the injured worker caused his own fall. A decade later, their refusal to revisit that assumption resulted in a $90 million judgment and a reminder that in investigations, facts can become dangerously sticky.

What Kennedy Recommends

While I hoped the documentary would go deeper, Louis Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere is a wonderful introductory course into some of the content young men are being persuaded to participate in online.

“Louis Theroux immerses himself in the world of extreme online influencers and content creators who are redefining modern masculinity. He examines the appeal of these ideas and attitudes, and how these figures are influencing young men's values.”

If you’re in the mood to be a bit irritated, or a lot irritated by a social attitude that’s come as an extreme reaction to patriarchy, this one is a tidy Sunday watch.

Turn your phone off, put your feet up and enjoy some peace.

Take care,

Your Bullshit Hunting Crew

Gossip. Rumour. Innuendo. Humans are naturally hard-wired to love it. It’s built into our DNA, our love for that curious mix of truth and story, where knowledge and information are passed along via tales. 

This makes sense, though. Humans have evolved to tell stories about the world to shape and understand it. As we’ve moved along historically, we’ve slowly begun (and we still have a ways to go) to adjust our understanding of the world into two sides: fact and fiction. There are things that we know, and there are things we imagine. Opposing forces, or so they say.

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But people have never really been black and white about how they interpret the world, and there has always been that ‘in-between’ place where mixtures of the things we know and the things we imagine dwell. The place of ambiguity. And we’ve been mixing these two forces ever since our monkey brains, trapped on this spinning rock in space, looked up at the stars and told stories around fires. We have legends of ancient trickster gods like Anansi, Nanabozho, and Hermes, who shaped the world for humans but also sewed chaos as they went. We have myths of spirits and monsters and aliens, bizarre creatures created by our minds (maybe—your uncle may have something to say about it) to help us forge an understanding of certain phenomena but also confuse our interpretation of reality. Plenty of social concepts, even modern ones, fall into this same category. 

Humans, no matter how hard we try, are liminal thinkers. Investigators and analysts should embrace that.

“RUMINT” has played a role in a lot of my investigations. I know that some analysts look at RUMINT as a dirty word. It’s information that is not verified, and because it may be too difficult to verify, it isn’t worth pursuing. It leads down rabbit holes that may be distracting. It is too chaotic to be used as a possible data point. 

I get it. I do. Intelligence and investigations require facts, known knowns, and verifiable truths. 

But humans, those involved in the case you are working on, don’t operate in this dichotomy of fact versus fiction—both the good and bad actors, the client, the bystanders, the witnesses, and those “folks in the know.” RUMINT and using it in your investigation is not about letting chaos take hold, rather, much like the trickster gods of old, using that chaos to your advantage.

The Subtle Art of Developing Sources

Investigations and analysis work varies. Not every case is the same. That is the caveat to this whole lesson. However, one great way to utilize rumour as an OSINT tool is to develop sources who hang out around the edges of your investigative space. 

There may be journalists covering a local beat that ties into the investigation you are engaged in. Perhaps some activists and academics are working in a similar space and who themselves have cultivated their own sources. Moreover, they may have their own sources to supply them with information.

For example, a client tasked us with examining fraud in a very rural and remote area in Canada. Over a couple of years, a very large sum of money was shuffled around into a couple of shell companies and essentially vanished from the books. By the time the stakeholders noticed, it was long gone. Lawsuits and humiliations galore followed. Permanent Record was brought in to cover some of the investigative questions regarding the players involved in the fraud. Not to toot our horn, but we got the bastards. 

I digress. 

The use of sources on the ground and the local rumour mill in the community was INCREDIBLY useful. While Justin, my fearless wildman of a colleague, began crunching numbers, data points, and timelines, I began reaching out to people who had connections. 

I started with Facebook and found the local community groups of the towns and municipalities. I joined them and immediately found posts about the fraud that had shown up in the local newspaper. The subsequent comment chain of “shameful” and “those assholes” gave me a good chuckle, but the “I knew this was happening because I worked for that guy before…” and the “I heard he’s done this before at another company…” became key points of interest.

I began reaching out to those folks, not saying that I was working a job, but discussing the fraud and the rumour with them like a concerned member of the public. I’d book phone calls and shoot the shit with them for 10 minutes before getting into it, but they would provide me with names and dates and even source names of people who probably knew more. 

I even had one source say that they heard one of the individuals was involved in the local party and drug scene. No judgement. However, it did lead down some interesting roads and provided some insight into their associates. 

While this was going on, I’d circle up with local journalists who covered the fraud, and while sometimes journalists are guarded, I explained I was investigating the matter and asked to talk off-record. Sometimes they’d oblige, and sometimes they’d tell me to fuck off. Regardless, there have been plenty of times a journalist has said to me, “Thank god someone is looking into this. I can’t… so here are my notes.” 

Another interesting place I’ve gone to for source and RUMINT is Reddit. It’s pretty much a cesspool, but I have used it twice to actually make contact with individuals. In one particular project involving a sort of bizarre romance/crypto scam in Argentina (not a paid gig, but a fun pro-bono projects for a pal), I was able to talk to two victims of the same scammer who both had different pieces of information regarding him that they posted to a scammer subreddit. Rumour mills milling, as a result of their posts, they were also contacted by a third victim who was scammed. 

And while they all had similar stories, they provided me with three different sets of data, such as photos, names, phone numbers, emails, and crypto-wallets. With all those selectors, correlating information became a bit of a breeze, and figuring out who this guy was became a fairly simple task.

In another situation, dealing with a wealthy and powerful asshole tech corporation, our client was interested in some possible corporate fraud. Money laundering stuff. Cooking the books stuff. Fun. 

Our client had heard rumours that this particular corporation had a bot problem, and in simple terms, user numbers weren’t actually user numbers. I can’t get into more than that. I’ve been NDA’d to secrecy. 

So what did we do? We began looking at online rumours of bot activity regarding this firm and where it originated. Many people pointed to Vietnam, so I started hanging out on Vietnamese Discord servers and Facebook groups and looking for discussions regarding this company.

In the span of 5 hours, I had messaged multiple Vietnamese bot herders. While most never got back to me (understandably), a few of the more curious parties did, and soon enough, we were having Telegram chats and calls at 2 AM, talking about the intricacies of how to launch this network and whether the company was trying to stop them or allowing them to stack their user counts with bullshit accounts. They were more than happy to chat, tell me stories of their exploits, and explain how this network operated

The overall lesson here is that people love to tell you what they know, especially if it's shady. Spilling the tea, as it were, is an international sport. The trick is getting people to confide in you, and that requires a bit of give. You need to talk to them. Tell them about yourself. Be human.

Gathering intelligence for an investigation or in OSINT isn't always about running these cool tools that can scan through the dark web or graph a zillion connections of data (this is cool shit, don't get me wrong), but a lot of "open source" stuff is just people gabbing. Talking to people who have boots on the ground, chatting with their neighbours, sharing a cup of coffee, or even just a phone call where you chat about your kids for a bit and their love of Bluey or your personal penchant for Coke Zero can get you through a lot of doors, and into some really solid intelligence.

Why?

People love to tell stories.

I'm reminded of the Greek god Hermes, who would often act as a sort of messenger between the gods and humans, carrying word between these two spheres. 

He's a real piece of work and a real troublemaker, but his whole ideological and mythological purpose to the Ancient Greek mind was to connect the world of knowledge and the world of the fanciful, and he dwells in this mixture of both. A liminal space.

Intelligence is similar. We sift through these worlds of "knowns" and "unknowns" in order to develop an understanding of what is going on. Data can do some of that, but getting a feel for that thing you are after and understanding the vibe, the zeitgeist, and the context often comes from the tales that form around the investigation. Like Hermes, we have to fly between fact and fiction, and when we do, we have good intelligence. 

Gossip. Rumour. Innuendo. RUMINT. Sure, it can be chaotic, but when harnessed well, it's invaluable. 

Reporting from inside the snow globe that is the prairie tundra, where I keep reminding myself, “three more weeks” to sustain my will to live. I have been saying it for the last three weeks, but it’s going to be ok… right?

This week, our paid subscribers got a Some Lawyer original with The $91 million dollar word. A worker falls from a scaffold. Investigators latch onto one convenient explanation. Even when the evidence contradicts it, they refuse to let it go. Eleven years later, that “fact” costs a whole lot. Read the whole thing by unlocking a paid subscription today.

In everyone’s inbox, we looked back at a classic Justin adventure with Bad Religion, Bad Checks & the Canadian Football League. A bounced check, a small-town interrogation room, and a suspect who casually admits he’s a former NFL player, a federal witness, and a serial killer working for a violent religious cult. This is the strange, winding story of how a $66 check in California ricocheted all the way to Saskatchewan.

Also in paid inboxes this morning was High Spirits Volume 11. Kennedy walks the audience through the case of Lindsay Clancy to discuss filicide, and disproportionate media coverage that ignores women’s issues and people of colour. Don’t feel like becoming a paid subscriber? You can redeem a single-use code to unlock paid content.

What Justin Recommends

Women Who Kill Men: California Courts, Gender and The Press

From the inside cover: “The period 1870-1958 was revolutionary in the lives of women. Society’s shifting perceptions of women and their role were apparent in the courtroom. Women Who Kill Men analyzes eighteen sensational cases of women on trial for murder in this period to identify the intersections of media, law, and gender in California.” This book is an infuriating, enlightening and heartbreaking, historical journey through the lens of California’s press, courts and law enforcement. Women still, many years later have to deal with not only their crimes, but their appearance, their stature, their weight, their speech. If there’s something to judge women by, you’ll find an example in this book.

This week, Justin and Kennedy start light with the trials and tribulations of being a man before turning into a more serious episode of High Spirits. Taking a look at the case of Lindsay Clancy, we discuss filicide and disproportionate media coverage. We let ourselves get a little angry, and we hope you will too.

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On May 9, 2014, a man working as a stonemason was injured in a fall from a scaffold or staging while repairing a bridge over the Charles River.

On December 1, 20251, a Massachusetts judge awarded him $90,971,6122. The sum was awarded not as damages for his physical injuries — he had already been compensated for those — but because of the way his claims had been investigated3, and subsequently handled, by the general contractor’s insurers.

Early in their investigation, an internal report from one of the insurance companies noted that a certain foreman said that the fall had not been caused by defects in the fall protection system, or the scaffold — items for which the general contractor would be responsible — but that the mason placed a single plank between the bridge and staging in violation of worksite rules, and was crossing that plank when he fell.

Based on the statement, the insurers concluded that the mason had been negligent, and his negligence caused the fall.4 The insurers declined to revisit this conclusion, even though:

• Meeting notes from shortly after the accident reflected an entirely different cause, i.e., that the fall protection system became caught, causing the mason to stumble and fall from the platform;

• An incident report prepared by the mason and his foreman reflected that the mason stumbled when he reached the end of his fall-protection lanyard;

• A handwritten report reflected a fall from scaffolding, not a plank;

• The foreman did not make the same statement when reinterviewed by counsel, nor when testifying under oath at his deposition;

• The mason testified consistent with the handwritten incident reports and meeting notes.

Because the insurance companies could not let go of their favorite “fact” — that the mason placed the plank himself, and caused his own injury — they did not settle with the mason, prior to suit, or during suit, or even, as it became more and more obvious that the “plank” defense was doomed.

The general contractor lost at trial. Of course. The defense was based on a “fact” that could never come into evidence. And the insurance companies lost the subsequent suit concerning the investigation and settlement of the claim.

There are likely some interesting things to be said about incentives and culture and group decision-making, here. But Bullshit Hunting is not a place to stash and dissect concepts I vaguely remember from Social Psychology.5

It is about investigation6. Or research. And on those topics, the take-away is:

Facts are sticky.

So goddamned sticky.

“Good” facts — particularly when presented to someone with a personal, or financial, or professional interest in them — are the stickiest kind. Stickier than long-forgotten lollipops melted to crud under a booster seat. Stickier than the muck that served as a metaphor for clinical depression in what was intended, somehow, as a children’s movie.7

Sticky enough to be dangerous.

What to do, then, apart from only taking on projects where no favorable information will ever be encountered, or holding anything even slightly hopeful so close to your chest that no one will ever be hurt by it?

Stay away from “facts.”

Or, slightly more professionally put, scrupulously maintain the distinctions between “information,8” “inferences” and “facts.”

Information is the raw material, gathered in the course of research or investigation. Statements, documents, things said, positions taken.

Information would include:

• Mr. X was a foreman.

• Mr. X was present during the incident.

• Mr. X participated in at least two meetings concerning the incident.

• Mr. X gave at least three statements. The dates, circumstances, and substance of these statements were…

Inferences are conclusions reached — or that could conceivably be reached — from the information presented, if the information is credited9.

There is a way to make make it completely unmistakable that an analysis is inferential. In fact, a single word: If.

For example:

“If the stonemason’s injury occurred as described, the fall-protection system could be implicated.”

“If the foreman’s second statement is true, the stonemason may bear some degree of fault…”

“If” is also key in placing information in the context of how it may, ultimately, be used:

“If the foreman testifies at trial consistent with the second statement, he could be impeached with the accident reports and meeting notes.”

“If” can also be used to express how information can be tested: Who or what would be expected to corroborate the information? What might disprove it?

Compared to an inferential analysis phrased in “if,” even a properly sourced is/because statement is static, a cognitive dead end:

“Based on the foreman’s statement, stonemason is comparatively negligent because he placed a plank between the bridge and the scaffold.10”

To keep things balanced this week, one of us ran out of meds, and the other took a double dose. Took us a couple days to regulate, but hey, here we are.

This week, hitting all inboxes was every Gen Z’s worst nightmare: Pick up the Phone. In this article, Kennedy unpacks the differences in the interviewing process between interviewing as a journalist and as an investigator, and how different practices lead to different results.

In paid inboxes was a retrospective of a March 2025 article from Justin: Bad Religion, Bad Checks & the Canadian Football League. A $66 bounced check in a small California town shouldn’t have mattered much. But this one unravelled a story involving an NFL draft pick, a federal witness, a cult executioner, and a string of brutal murders. Take a look back at this doozy.

Also in paid inboxes, High Spirits Volume 10. This week, Justin delivers a story that’s sure to make you feel unsettled. We take a look at the case that took the founder of the Sex Offense Bureau, Dr. de River, from a once celebrated forensic psychiatrist to a pariah of the LAPD.

What Justin Recommends

The Exorcist & Legion by William Peter Blatty

While I may indeed be a late bloomer, I am only 50 years late to this particular party, that’s not so bad. Of course, The Exorcist movies (I and III respectively) have been staples in my horror movie existence, but I truly had no idea just how good the books were. I had never read them, and boy was I in for a treat. Blatty weaves a whodunnit, creeping terror and deep, lingering questions about our existence and our beliefs. I laughed, I frowned, I cried, I stayed up past my bedtime and the books left me in my thoughts for days afterwards. If you’ve never read either of these titles before, now is definitely the time. If it’s been awhile? Try them on again and remind yourself why these are such powerful pieces of storytelling.

Enjoy your Friday, take it easy, and we’ll see you on the other side.

Love,

Your Bullshit Hunting Crew

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This week, we’re taking a look back at an article you loved from March 2025

A sixty-six dollar check bouncing in a small California town shouldn't have mattered much—except this one did, all the way to Regina, Saskatchewan. Like a jack-ball in a bathtub, it careened wildly, kicking up stranger and darker truths with every bounce until it finally came to rest. Behind it: a car detailer, a professional football player, a Federally protected witness, a prolific white-collar criminal, and—most disturbingly—a 404-year-old cult executioner with at least seven brutal deaths to his name.

Even stranger? They are all the same person.

The $66 check for brake shoes probably felt like a minor irritation to the manager of an auto parts store in Cameron Park, California. He called it in to local authorities, let them know that it was a ‘Robert Ramses’ who authored this piece of petty crime and with that, hung up. Annoying, sure—but hardly worth a second thought.

What the manager didn’t know was that the phone call he’d just made was less like reporting a bounced check and more like twisting the cap off a shaken bottle of rot. For three years, something rancid had been sealed tight in the Sacramento area. And now, it was about to explode.

El Dorado County deputies arrested Robert Ramses—the alleged check-kiter—and booked him into custody on February 5, 1999. They sat him down in a drab interrogation room, probably expecting to pass the time with a routine petty crime interview. Nothing about Ramses seemed particularly remarkable, aside from his hulking 6-foot-3, 260-lb. frame. Just a guy who owned a car detailing business, liked a cold beer at his favorite pub off Highway 46, and led a quiet, simple life.

What deputies didn’t know, but were about to find out, was that Robert Ramses wasn’t his real name. His quiet life in California was a relatively new invention. And with just the first question, Ramses started talking. The story he gave them was staggering—unraveling threads so strange, so impossibly tangled, that it was hard to know if it was too strange to be the truth or too strange to be a lie.

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Robert Ramses explained to detectives that his real name wasn’t Ramses at all—it was Robert Rozier. The name might sound familiar. Rozier had once been a California-born football phenom, drafted into the NFL by the St. Louis Cardinals1 in 19792. But that wasn’t what he wanted to discuss in their interrogation room.

Instead, Rozier told them about his time as a government witness—and why he was now enrolled in the Federal Witness Protection Program. His new name, his spotless criminal record, his quiet life in California—all of it, he said, was part of the deal. But that quiet, clean present was no reflection of a history anything but clean.

After his brief NFL career fizzled out, Rozier drifted. He bounced from city to city across the United States, eventually landing in Miami in late 1981 or early 1982. That’s where he crossed paths with a group called the Nation of Yahweh.

Founded in 1979 by a man named Hulon Mitchell Jr., the Nation of Yahweh presented itself as a Black Hebrew Israelite religious movement. Mitchell, who would later rename himself Yahweh Ben Yahweh— “God, Son of God”—preached a doctrine of racial supremacy. White people, according to him, were devils—“White Devil”—who deserved death. Mitchell, a preacher’s kid himself (one of fifteen siblings—sweet Jesus, indeed), claimed divine authority and demanded his followers address him as God.

Rozier fell in hard. His towering, 6-foot-3 frame and unflinching devotion to Mitchell quickly earned him a high rank within the group. He was given a new name: Neariah Israel, and an unspoken job title—enforcer.

By the mid-1980s, the Nation of Yahweh wasn’t just a religious group; it was an empire. They were alleged to have thousands of followers and, “satellite temples around the country…a lucrative business empire of apartment complexes, hotels, stores and fleets of Greyhound buses and Rolls Royce cars, all painted stark white.”3

The Yahweh’s rise to wealth and power was anything but peaceful. Rumors of violence and intimidation had long circled the group, but it wasn’t until 1986 that the bloodshed spilled squarely into the public eye.

On October 30, 1986, two men were shot and killed near an apartment complex in Opa-Locka, Florida—a complex the Yahwehs had recently taken over. Tensions between the original residents and the incoming Yahweh members had been simmering for weeks, and local news crews captured footage of the conflict. Two of the men interviewed on camera that day, boldly stating they weren’t going anywhere, were the same two men found dead that night.

The next day, Robert Rozier was arrested. Booked into jail, asked his age, he wrote down: 404 years old. Which, I can only assume, is some poetic way of saying Age Not Found.

But this wasn’t just a routine arrest. Because once police had Rozier in custody, the murders started stacking up. Investigators, through a mix of fingerprints, interviews, and straight-up gumshoe work, began tying Rozier to killings not just in Florida, but as far north as New Jersey. The whispered rumours of Yahweh-backed violence weren’t rumours at all—they were a body count. And there was about to be a reckoning.

By this time, in 1986, the Yahwehs had access to a tremendous amount of money, but at some point, a falling out between Rozier and Yahweh Ben Yahweh meant that Rozier wasn’t going to access that money to get the top-notch legal representation he clearly needed. And the feud also meant Rozier turning against the Nation of Yahweh as a witness.

Alone, Rozier had been charged with four murders, and during 1992 testimony against leader Yahweh Ben Yahweh, Rozier admitted to seven—six of which were ordered by Yahweh. A trademark of a Yahweh hit? Severing the victim’s ear and bringing it back to Yahweh Ben Yahweh as proof of the kill. According to testimony, Yahweh would allegedly toss the ears in his hand like a bag of weed, completely unfazed. The seventh victim of Rozier’s was a panhandling man who simply angered Rozier with persistent requests for money, so Rozier killed him. Just like that.

By the time the dust settled, Hulon Mitchell Jr. (Yahweh Ben Yahweh) was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder and sentenced to 18 years in prison. Rozier, having served just 10 years of his 22-year sentence, was quietly released in 1996. The U.S. government tucked him neatly into the Federal Witness Protection Program, slapped a new name on him and shipped him off to California to start over.

And that’s how Robert Ramses was born.

Just like that. A former NFL player turned cult enforcer turned serial killer turned government witness—now bouncing $66 checks, and sitting across from two small-town detectives who, I’m sure, were not expecting their day to go this way.

I can only imagine the look on the detectives faces as they contemplated the words they were hearing from this local auto detailer, dive-bar-resident. I’m certain this was not playing out how they’d thought when they started their shift at the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office. A bounced check should take no longer than a coffee-break-length investigation to put to rest. This was another matter al-to-fucking-gether, boys.

And listen, let’s face it, would-be convicts can spin tales that get pretty elaborate. But this story must have been stretching it, even for these detectives.

The thing is?

It’s all true.

Rozier isn’t the only Nation of Yahweh escapee that could back up the entire story. In a 2019 interview with The Denver Post4, Khalil Amani, a former Nation of Yahweh member, detailed his own eye witness accounts of the brutality the cult dished out. Just like Rozier, Amani also had testified against the group’s leader, Yahweh Ben Yahweh in 1992, and as a result also had to enter the veiled umbrella of the Federal Witness Protection Program. Amani took up residence in Denver, Colorado instead of California, like Rozier5.

The inevitable question, without a doubt, that one must ask: How exactly did a drafted NFL player end up a 404-year old, serial-killer-in-charge for a murderous cult in Miami?

It seems when Rozier signed with the St. Louis Cardinals, his existing issues with substance abuse and petty fraud would start to pick up momentum. The St. Louis Cardinals promptly cut him, and like any drug-addled American fraudster, the next place to go is Canada. So in 1980, the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, a Canadian Football League (CFL) team signs him. Surely, they’d promptly come to regret this decision.

It isn’t clear what happened in Hamilton, Ontario, but allegations of habitual lying, bad debts and finally, missing a practice, got him cut from the Tiger-Cats.

He was then off to Regina, Saskatchewan to play for the Saskatchewan Roughriders6. Right here in my home province, baby.

Through an abysmal 1980 season, Rozier ends up playing just two games for the Roughriders, writes more bad checks, is involved in a commodities futures fraud and then flees to the United States with over 30 warrants from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) fluttering in the wind behind him. After trying out and getting cut from the Oakland Raiders in 1981, Rozier’s football career is over.

Rozier now has warrants out for him all over hell and back, including in California, so he hits the road and makes his way across the country, ending up in Miami, Florida where the rest is cult-killing-history.

The amusing thing to me? Rozier’s story is told all over YouTube and “serial killer” podcasts, some of them even going as far as mentioning Saskatchewan and our beloved Roughriders.

But here in Saskatchewan? No one I spoke with had heard of him.

Now, the truly fun part of local storytelling starts when you’re able to tie together the various parts of the story that to connect to people today—and to people you know.

Because everyone in Saskatchewan knows everyone. That’s a fact.7

To a lawyer friend of mine? Well, the Saskatchewan regulator that dealt with the aftermath of one of Rozier’s frauds in Regina was the founder of his law firm. Lawyer-friend was tickled pink—he had no idea.

That die-hard Roughrider-fan friend of mine? No idea there was a serial-killing nightmare who played under legendary coach, Ron Lancaster8.

The Roughrider quarterback during that abysmal 1980 season?

John Hufnagel9, five-time Grey Cup Champion, legend of the CFL and Tom Brady’s quarterback coach in the New England Patriots 2003 Super Bowl year. This trivia tidbit was also something one of my imprisoned homies didn’t know, and he’s an encyclopedia of NFL facts, stats and gotchas.

I can do this all day—from little ‘ole Saskatchewan.

When I hear that local journalism is dying, dead, or on its way, I think it’s an open challenge for those of us who want to tell stories in our backyard, struggling to get people to listen. We have to do the work to bring the wispy tendrils of facts and anecdotes and connect them to much larger things—like Netflix specials, celebrity podcasts and professional sports. Things that people are paying attention to, it seems.

I know in my small place, we already feel small, so we want to understand how and where this all *waves arms* matters. It makes us feel like even these wispy-tendrils connect us to a larger world—because they clearly do. What happens in Saskatchewan can certainly affect what happens in Miami.

It’s why we have to tell the story of Doug Mouser, in Modesto, California—to convince people here in Saskatchewan that Larry Hartwig and Brad Senger are innocent of driving Neil Stonechild to his death in November 1990.

First, we have to show the people in Saskatchewan that bad people did bad things in California before they came here. How something much larger connects to something much closer to home.

See how I did that?

For More on This Story

One of my favourite podcasters, Dan Cummins, did an excellent (and hilarious) episode on the Nation of Yahweh.