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LUNCH BREAK READS

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01 • 25 Minute Read
The Guardian Masha Hamilton
The children who loved a killer
Traci Carr sits in her garage in Plainfield, Indiana
Traci Carr was seven when her mother led her to the coffin and told her to touch the body. Inside was Steven Judy, the foster brother who had shared Froot Loops with her and chased the monsters from her room. Three days earlier Indiana had electrocuted him for raping and murdering Terry Lee Chasteen and drowning her three children. Masha Hamilton covered the execution for the AP in 1981 and kept returning to the family for 45 years. Randy Carr broke jaws defending him. Traci keeps a bin of his belts and watches. She cannot throw it away.
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02 • 23 Minute Read
The Atlantic Barbara Bradley Hagerty
The Other Victims of a Wrongful Conviction
Jay Young holding a photograph of his father, Jeffrey Young
Jay Young texted Barbara Bradley Hagerty in March 2021 to accuse her and the rest of the media of fawning over the man convicted of killing his father. Days later Benjamine Spencer walked free after 34 years, and Hagerty's own reporting had helped get him there. Two men cracked Jeffrey Young's skull in 1987 and left him bleeding in a West Dallas street. His son spent three decades at parole hearings defending a conviction built on paid witnesses and a lying informant. Then the state flipped. Nobody has ever been charged with the murder.
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03 • 25 Minute Read
The New Yorker Jennifer Gonnerman
How a Chinese Immigrant Driver Got Entangled in a Drug Bust
Illustration of a minivan on a road near the Canadian border
Wenjian Zhuo took a $940 job driving 400 miles north from Queens to pick up a passenger who never got in the car. Twelve boxes went in the back instead. Driving home he called a friend and asked what marijuana smells like, then Border Patrol pulled him over with 207 pounds of it stacked behind him. Jennifer Gonnerman followed the case through a trial that turned on willful blindness, a doctrine that convicts people for what they chose not to find out. Prosecutors offered Zhuo a misdemeanor. He refused it and lost. He has never met his daughter.
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04 • 12 Minute Read
Texas Highways Ben Markovits
A Londoner Pedals Back to His Hill Country Home
[ALT TEXT PENDING]
The suitcases were designed to hold Bromptons, the small-wheeled English folding bike you see all over London. Ben Markovits packed two of them and flew home to Austin, where he grew up, to ride the Hill Country with his 16-year-old son. The bike shop of his childhood was a jewelry store now. The barbecue joints were gone. Out past Pedernales Falls the land was still empty, until a woman taking out her trash told him it was starting to fill in. A gate down the road carried the name of his London neighborhood.
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