The Weekender: June 13th-15th

The Weekender

The Weekender is your guide and open thread for the weekend, presented by the fine folks at Viva The Matadors. Things to quote, read, look, watch, and listen to for the weekend. Let's do this.

Read about 1982 murders in Waco, look at some beautiful photos of the Congo, watch whiskey being made at Mount Vernon and listen to Willie Nelson’s newest album.

Quote

"I was in the Air Force a while and they had what they call "policing the area." That's where you looked around and if there's anything wrong here, there, anywhere, you took care of your own area. And I think that's a pretty good thing to go by. If everyone just takes care of their own area then we won't have any problems. Be here. Be present. Wherever you are, be there. And look around you and see what needs to be changed."

--Willie Nelson (via Good Reads).

Read

This will take you a couple of hours to read, but oh my, what a terrific read. This is a Texas Monthly longread or mini-book about a triple homicide in Waco in 1982. Everything from confessions, to jailhouse informants, to questionable evidence. It’s all there and it is terrific (via Texas Monthly).

Every murder involves a vast web of people, from the witnesses and the detectives who first come to the scene, to the lawyers and the juries who examine the facts, to the families of the victims, who must make sense of the aftermath. The more traumatic the killing, the more intricate the web. In the summer of 1982 the city of Waco was confronted with the most vicious crime it had ever seen: three teenagers were savagely stabbed to death, for no apparent reason, at a park by a lake on the edge of town. Justice was eventually served when four men were found guilty of the crime, and two were sent to death row. In 1991, though, when one of the convicts got a new trial and was then found not guilty, some people wondered, Were these four actually the killers? Several years after that, one of the men was put to death, and the stakes were raised: Had Texas executed an innocent man?

This story examines the case through the viewpoint of five people: a patrol sergeant who investigated the crime; a police detective who became skeptical of the investigation; an appellate lawyer who tried to stop the execution; a journalist whose reporting has raised new doubts about the case; and a convict who pleaded guilty but now vehemently proclaims his innocence.

Look

This guy, Michael Christopher Brown, goes to interesting and dangerous places in the world, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, and takes some pretty amazing pictures (via Instagram).

Watch

Did you know that George Washington made his own whiskey? Me neither. In Mount Vernon in 1997 they found the remains of what they thought was an old distellery and so the folks at Mount Vernon reconstructed the whole thing (via Smithsonian Magazine).

Listen

Willie Nelson released his new album, Band of Brothers and you can listen to the whole thing on NPR (via NPR). I really enjoyed listening to it.