Listen, I love true crime. And obviously, I’m not alone. For many of us, Sarah Koenig is Mother (and Jad Abumrad is Father, but that’s for another day). Has true crime already had its moment? I don’t know. Probably? I don’t care. I love it anyway. I even find it oddly soothing: The hauntingly tense yet familiar soundscape. The inevitable small-town cast of characters. The chase. The feeling that you’re on the right side of a crusade.
There’s a legitimate case to be made against true crime. I read the New York Times article shaming us for indulging our bloodlust, while the families of victims are robbed of a private space to grieve. I get that. I do. Salient points abound.
Will I stop listening? No. I’m sorry, I won’t. But you should. Seriously, stop. Don’t be a bad person.
Assuming we’ve all silently agreed to keep bingeing, maybe it’s time to demand more of the genre than mere aural-ambulance-chasing. Does true crime have to be so Plug-and-Play, or can we play with the framework? Could it even serve a nobler purpose?
Recent series Love + Radio: Blood Memory, for example, makes good work of the former by elevating the production style to something akin to arthouse audio-doc. And I would argue Bone Valley’s latest season The Devil’s Quarry is angling to tackle both questions.
Quick context for the uninitiated: Bone Valley follows wrongful convictions and other miscarriages of justice in the American legal system, focusing on a different case each of its seasons. So, true crime, but with a heart of gold? The most recent season is hosted by veteran investigative journalist Paul Solotaroff, and is based on his 2021 Rolling Stone article 'The Devil You Know.'
On its face, The Devil’s Quarry is about the rape and murder of 12-year-old Josette Wright in New York’s Putnam County, the corrupt police department investigating the crime, and the wrongful convictions of two local lost boys, who spent decades behind bars.
Slithering in and out of the shadows of this case is the specter of the real killer, his trail of victims and survivors, and the prospect of a future attack. And thus, The Devil’s Quarry finds its true form: a ghost story.
As Solotaroff guides the listener backwards and forwards through time, he evokes the uncanny atmosphere of a haunted house; with a voice that sounds like a gravel driveway, one gets the sense he’s shining a flashlight up from under his chin, and we might fall victim to a jump scare at any moment.
But the jump scare never comes. Instead, we are forced to look over our shoulder for the entire ride through history. It’s an effective emotional hook. We don’t just come back for more of the case; we’re also coming back for the prospect of the monster jumping out of the closet.
In the first episode of The Devil's Quarry, Solotaroff whispers, “In 2021, I’d have laughed in your face if you asked me about the Devil. But soon, very soon, you’ll know what I know: that the Devil is real, and walks among us.”
Nightmare fuel? Yes. True crime junkie fix? We’ll see. “The Devil” doesn’t remain nameless for long. We learn the name Howard Gombert, and are admonished to never forget it. Solotaroff argues Gombert is the real killer.
The Devil is real, and walks among us.
I was taken aback by this lack of equivocation. To be clear, Howard Gombert had never even been investigated for the death of Josette Wright, let alone convicted. But you won’t find the word “allegedly” anywhere in Devil’s Quarry. Solotaroff doesn’t simply offer up the facts and ask the listener to come to their own conclusions, like Blood Memory. No, The Devil’s Quarry ditches the objectivity schtick, takes 30 years of evidence, and issues a howling full-throated accusation at one man: Howard John Gombert Jr. He, we’re told, is the one who lurks in the shadows. The one we check over our shoulder for. It’s audacious, and frankly, quite naughty in the wider field of true crime journalism.
Traversing the narrative, we follow three points of view: Paul Solotaroff is our host, and our ghost hunter. His tales of the killer’s violence are dark and raw. It feels like he’s daring us to flinch. “Are you just going to sit there and listen to this?” he seems to ask.
The second point of view is Anthony DiPippo, one of the wrongly convicted. Production provides the setting. Britt Spangler’s soundscape, built from dive-bar guitar riffs and crunchy bass lines, is reminiscent of Nick Cave’s “Red Right Hand,” taking us inside DiPippo’s natural habitat — and is a departure from the typical pre-installed true crime music bed. Haunting and suspenseful, but more Wes Craven than Dateline.
The third, and most horrifying, is our look through the eyes of the victims and survivors. Survivors, we’re told, of Howard Gombert. Here, the "ghost story" is unleashed. Each victim tells a sickeningly similar tale of a life poisoned by a demon. We hear of Gombert’s supernatural ability to sense when his victims are alone. We hear of his temper, his black, rat-like eyes. For these women, even uttering his name is to summon darkness.
Their accounts are most impactful in later episodes. Early on in the podcast, Solotaroff gives us tastes of events. Vignettes of a hard life in Putnam County, with a bit of “Just the facts, ma’am" about the crimes. But later, he takes us back in time through the eyes of these women. It’s a familiar scene; we’ve heard the details before. But take a closer look, won’t you? You’ll find the Devil has been looking back all along. It’s an impressive narrative trick. From a pacing standpoint, it mercifully withholds the worst details until we’ve developed a stomach for them.
I wondered if the ghost story motif could possibly pay off. Most days, I don’t believe in ghosts. But once we fully confront the details of these crimes, details I frankly can’t bring myself to put to paper, Solotaroff’s liberal use of words like “evil,” “demon,” and “devil” earns its place. When someone walks the earth and commits acts that so defy any semblance of humanity, it doesn’t matter what you call it. We know in our bones what it is.
Howard Gombert is currently serving a 30-year sentence in a Connecticut prison for a separate crime. As Solotaroff tells it, he knew he had to revisit the story when he learned that Gombert was due to be released this fall. The Devil’s Quarry is his attempt to harness listeners’ outrage, in order to pressure Putnam County to investigate Gombert. In an interview with Gilbert King he said, “We need your outrage to make sure Howard Gombert doesn’t harm again.” A noble cause indeed.
As I referenced in my article about this year’s Tribeca Festival, I sat down with Solotaroff to ask him about this call to action, and lobbed a potentially unfair question at him. Are there any risks to provoking listener outrage? What would the nightmare scenario be, having summoned a different kind of demon — the angry mob?
His answer made me realize I was underestimating the Devil, and the ghost story wasn’t quite over.
“From the age of 12,” Solotaroff told me, “Howard Gombert grew up in the woods. . . Through grueling northeast Januarys. This is a man who is not only an extremely skilled woodsman, but someone who is used to living rough and wild, and far off the grid. . . My suspicion is if he’s released, he won’t return to the house his father bequeathed him. He will go back to those woods and will emerge at a time and place of his choosing.”
We’ve been telling ghost stories for thousands of years. We tell them to scare each other. To process grief, to examine the unknowable. Hell, just to break up the day. We also tell them to keep each other safe. To steer our most vulnerable away from the entrance of the dark woods, by casting the flickering shadow of those who weren’t as lucky.
For anyone still experiencing shades of guilt for the vice of true crime bingery, I submit The Devil’s Quarry might serve as a satisfying (and chilling) loophole.
Oh, about that call to action — as of this writing, a recently formed Putnam County task force has reopened Josette Wright’s 30-year-old case. They have requested the help of Paul Solotaroff and his team.
