Seth Allen – Details, episodes & analysis

For decades someone or someones or SOMETHING has been killing cows in remote parts of central and eastern Oregon. The bodies are found mutilated, some of their organs having been surgically removed, and drained of blood. Investigators have ruled out shooting, stabbing, strangulation, animal attack, and even lightening strike as potential causes of death. The locations of the killings require extensive off-road travel to reach yet no tracks have been found. Theories range from clandestine cult ritual to alien research to just some weirdo. There are no leads and the killings continue.

I’ve been fascinated by the cow killings since I first read about them a few years ago. I was born and spent parts of my childhood in Eastern Oregon, and the personal connection combined with the bizarreness of the crime have given the mystery a permanent home in my mind. I can imagine walking through Ponderosa Pines to the top of a ridge, taking a deep breath of the clean desert dry air that carries sage and juniper, and realizing the only other person within a hundred miles might be a guy that’s spent decades stealthily killing cows and removing their udders.

In the audio episode I talk with my wife Shelly, a life-long true crime fan and self-described “murder connoisseur.” We review the evidence, explore theories, and outline a plan to finally crack the case.

Sources:

“Another Mutilated Cow In Central Oregon Rattles Ranchers”

“‘Not one Drop Of Blood’: Cattle Mysteriously Mutilated In Oregon”

“Investigators perplexed by death, mutilation of cow”

“Crook County steps up rural patrols after several cattle deaths, possible metalations”

If you ever need to charm me when I’m at my most uncharmable, fate of the Universe on the line or the Martians have the death beam pointed at Earth you better hit it: Bring a die-hard fan of a perpetually hopeless team from an unglamorous place. The combination of failure and lack of interest from outsiders seems to force a spirit of humor and humility onto them that I can’t resist. They are experts on the causes of their team’s failure and will give an impromptu dissertation on the lack of money, poor management, undesirability of their locale, and consistent bad luck that doom their team’s past, present, and future. Then, after presenting overwhelming evidence that the team they love can’t possibly succeed, they turn around and renew their hope that this is their year. Be still my heart.

This episode consists of two interviews with exemplary sad sack lifers. The first is Andy Clark, comedian and co-host of The Payton Years, the very best podcast dedicated solely to Oregon State Men’s basketball and, as Andy points out, literally the only one. The second interview is with Chris Nakis (@chris_nakis), comedian and co-creator of Sad CLE Sports (@SadCleveland), a twitter account celebrating Cleveland’s long and storied tradition of sports failure. Taken together the interviews finally put on record everything I love about this type of fan. They confess to their team’s futility like murderers relieved to finally clear their conscious decades after the act. They turn their unwavering support into a badge of honor. They bring jokes.

I was charmed. The Martians packed up their death beam and went home.

The audio for this episode is a reading from a collection of childhood memories written by my great-grandmother, Lydia Johnston, when she was 92 years old. Six years later, in 1988, Lydia’s daughter-in-law Florence typed out Lydia’s longhand and mailed copies to my grandparents and other family. Some years later Florence’s pages were digitally scanned. Comedian Tory Ward (@toryleeward) did the reading, which has already drawn rave reviews from family.

I’ve shared Lydia’s stories a few times since my Dad emailed them to me five years ago. They never fail to invite discussion. Partly it’s the novelty of a first-hand account from an era outside one’s own, and partly it’s the hardship of the events themselves. Lydia knew hard-labor, danger, and the feeling of opportunities denied early in life. At an age when I was playing Ninja Turtles, Lydia was sick with Measles asking her father to let her work inside instead of outside. I wonder what it was like for her to watch us kids with our toys and our books, to see the privilege of what we now think of as “a childhood” come too late for her.

Lydia describes these personal events like a reporter giving you just the facts. She doesn’t refer to herself as abused, but tells of one of her father’s beatings being so bad she could still feel it. She doesn’t call herself oppressed, but mentions being denied opportunities to pursue her own interests. Lydia’s style always leads the discussion to the same place: How did Lydia feel about all this?

Lydia wrote these recollections when she knew the end was near. Sitting down to define herself for posterity, these are the memories she chose. At 92 years old witnesses to your childhood are rare if they exist at all. One can see the process of becoming forgotten is already well underway. I think Lydia wanted the record to show that these events happened and that she persevered, that the hardships and injustices that went unacknowledged in her own time did matter. Mostly I think Lydia faced the inevitable and claimed a small concession; proof that she had lived.

Looking at the scanned pages themselves expands the story. I think about Florence answering Lydia’s call, taking care to number every page, typing and re-typing until it’s perfect and ready to be sent to the family. The creases show the pages were folded in thirds, first for mailing, I imagine, and then again for storing in a safe place. The frays along the creases show the pages were taken out to be re-read, probably sometimes with others and other times alone.

I don’t remember Lydia. My Dad tells me I attended her ninety-ninth birthday party that gets described in an addendum attached after her death. Thanks to her writing I do get to have a sense of who she was, and my family’s dedication to preserving her stories tells me she remains loved. Tory told me I’m lucky to have something like this. I couldn’t agree more.

The Sports Card Investigator

When local comedy became a risk to public health instead of just a risk to public annoyance, it mostly shut down. I missed performing immediately but it took months to realize the sudden loss of the community was weighing on me as well. I was surprised. I’d thought of the scene as a nuisance that had to be endured, an always exploding mixture of small-timeness, self-aggrandizement, inane bickering, and the frauds, don’t get me started on the frauds. Yet somehow, insidiously, seeing the same people do the same jokes at the same places over and over had become integral to my mental health. I thought of a line from Seinfeld, “All these years I’m living in a community. I had no idea.”

In this episode I talk with Max Fortune (Back Of The Room podcast, @MaxTFortune) and Sam Whiteley (@SMcstank), two comics that stumbled into new communities during the pandemic. Max joined the freewheeling and tumultuous world of basketball card trading. He walks me through this complex community and introduces me to its unforgettable vocabulary of “raw,” “flippers,” “rippers,” “junk wax,” “Gem Mint 10,” “fire sales,” and the unforgivable sin of the “PWE.” Then there’s the Sports Card Investigator.

Sam landed in the world of basketball influencers, a destination the algorithm steered us both towards when competitive basketball went on hiatus. Like basketball cards it’s products are for children, unlike basketball cards the community seems to actually include children-children rather than children in their thirties and forties. We discuss what acceptable adult participation in a child’s world looks like, and why it’s good for our mental health. Maybe.

Talking with Max and Sam reminds me how much I enjoy discovering communities I never knew existed. People are always creating little escapes and social lives for each other everywhere. There’s more of them than one person could ever know, and as a bonus most of these little worlds happen to be funny.

AJ Lapray gets married

“Boy, I’m glad it’s over. I’m glad we don’t have practice this week or next week.” 

I’ve never seen a coach so openly defeated after a loss. There’s no stoicism here, no talk about being proud of his players, no looking forward to next year. There’s no energy left for that. Here is the great Jerry Tarkanian, a coach I’m used to seeing emanate such intensity that he has to bite on a towel during games, and boy, he’s just glad it’s over.

It’s one of the final scenes from Between The Madness, the 1998 documentary following the Fresno State men’s basketball team over the entirety of their disastrous season that year. A baby faced Andy Katz is standing with Tarkanian, looking in this moment more like a friend lending an ear than a sports reporter for the Fresno Bee. The two are in the bowels of Madison Square Garden after Tarkanian’s team lost a heartbreaker in the NIT. It feels like a private moment between the two, but there’s an unseen third party holding the camera, peering at Tark’s exhausted looking face from around Katz’s shoulder. Whoever holds that camera spent the better part of their year watching from close distance as the team broke apart in headline grabbing fashion. As I watch this scene I wonder if that person is glad it’s over, too.

Fresno State entered that season with a loaded roster predicted to make the Elite 8 by Sports Illustrated. Tarkanian assembled an unprecedented amount of talent for a Western Athletic Conference team with four players that would go on to play in the NBA, and more that had the potential to. Despite their talent the team never found consistency due to player suspensions for violations as trivial as smoking weed, as serious as domestic assault, and as unbelievable as threatening with a samurai sword. So much s**t hit the fan in Fresno that Mike Wallace brought his 60 Minutes crew to campus to file an expose on the program. I have to link to Wallace’s GOTCHYA segment on the program here, not because it’s good, but because it’s a chance to hear Mike Wallace muster up all his 60 Minutes gravitas to say the phrase “White (blanking) honkey b***h.”

Between The Madness first aired on Fox Sports One on Thanksgiving, 1998. The film’s producers agreed not to show NCAA violations (Fresno State would later vacate wins for the following season and the two after that), but otherwise had creative control and unprecedented access to the team for the duration of their season. The resulting raw behind the scenes feel was jarring to me as a modern viewer accustomed to careful brand curation that has a firm grasp on modern sports media. Before watching this film I didn’t realize how thoroughly conditioned my expectations have become by our era of Players’ Tribune, sportswriters guaranteeing brand-friendly coverage in exchange for access, broadcasters employed by the team, and player produced documentaries.

There are some similarities to The Last Dance, the docuseries that drew millions of viewers when it aired on ESPN earlier this year and now lives as a binge friendly hit on Netflix. Both make use of beyond the norm access to tell the inside story of a season, and incidentally both had cameras rolling in the same time of the same year. The differences are more interesting. While Dance uses interviews taking place in our time to look back, in Madness the viewer is trapped in the moment with no faces from the future guaranteeing a happy ending. Dance, being a product of our time, also required sign-off from it’s billionaire star subject so predictably avoids venturing far from corporate interests. Dance may make you feel like you’re finally getting the real story, but ultimately it’s the same story you’ve gotten all along, the tried and true one that has been told in two minute commercials for decades. The crew behind Madness had license to tell whatever story they felt was most worth telling, and the result feels a lot more human and interesting. While Jordan and Phil were masterminding their final triumphant season in Chicago, in Fresno there was a group of young players caught in bad situations made worse by draconian NCAA policy, while the national media shook their collective finger at them for having it too good for too long. If The Last Dance shows us the system working perfectly to reward talent and effort, Between The Madness suggests that’s more an exception than rule.

I’m hyping this film up knowing you can’t watch for yourself and disagree, because some years ago Between The Madness disappeared. Internet searches bring back only a few clips and some old message board posts written by fans trying to track down a copy for themselves. It can’t be found in any great online warehouses or auctions or pirate sites. The film is unavailable, but just because something is unavailable doesn’t mean that it’s entirely gone. 

I first heard of Between The Madness in a bar in Austin, Texas in 2016. I was there performing in my first ever comedy festival, which was being held during South by Southwest but was not an official part of that indie rock fest turned thinkfluencer/tech/media/music/whatever/free stuff bonanza that is modern South By. The fest I flew in for was an independent venture put on by the local alt-comedy club opportunistically timed to siphon off some SXSW asses for their seats and attract sponsor dollars from players too small to buy-in to the main event. Getting suckered into paying your own way to a bad festival is a stock comedian story, and this one turned out to be mine. The day of the festival I learned my involvement consisted of one ten minute set, to be performed in the lobby of the club, in the early afternoon, standing alongside sponsor booths as they handed out free samples. I’d had rough sets before but this was the first time I’d been upstaged by organic soybean chips.

The chips were not good but they were my compensation, so I finished my set and stuffed my bag full of them before heading back out into broad daylight to find a drink. Walking through the towering corporate absurdity of SXSW was a welcome distraction. I remember AMC promoting a new show about a Preacher teaming up with a vampire by constructing a massive upside down church. USA Network set up an entire carnival to promote Mr. Robot in all it’s corporate approved anti-corporate splendor. I saw handsome Canadian basketball legend Rick Fox for the second time in my life. My bleak festival debut was forced into the backseat.

I was staying on the couch of my friend, the hoops writer Ananth Pandian, and I met up with Ananth and his friend Luke Bonner at a bar. Luke starting talking about Between The Madness. I had never heard of it. He told us he saw the film only once in his life, when he was heading into his freshman season at West Virginia, and called it one of the biggest learning experiences of his time in college. Sitting there in summer class, before his freshman season had even started, Madness gave Luke what he felt  was his first real look at the world he was entering as a college basketball player. Line cast and hook set, he reeled me in: He’d never been able to find the film again. He’d been trying for years, he said, and it didn’t seem to exist anymore.

Learning that an obscure and noteworthy documentary existed, and that was difficult (impossible?) to find was like a designer drug created specifically for the part of me I’ll describe as Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons but for basketball. I had to find it. I would find it. Then I would judge it. When I got back to Portland I started searching online and two things kept happening: I would not find the film, and I would learn a more about that team’s notoriety that made me want the film even more.

As my obsession grew and online searches failed I decided to start reaching out to anyone I could who was associated with the film over social media. I told them I was creating a podcast about my search for the film and that I’d like to talk and, oh yeah, do you happen to have a copy? That podcast never got off the ground as I imagined it but now, three years later and thanks to a pandemic putting stand-up in a choke hold, I had time to go back and re-listen to the interviews from 2017 and share them, finally.

I eventually watched the film courtesy of Paul Doyle, the Director, who I tracked down using LinkedIn. By that time Paul was living a different professional life running a business that helped seniors find various services. Along the way I also talked with Terrance Roberson, a star on the team and one of the main subjects of the documentary. Terrance is the first player interviewed in the film, as a sophomore sitting alone in the locker room he tells the story of his mother dying in front of him after suffering a heart attack in church, and the tone is set. Terrance was the only member of that team to play four seasons at Fresno State and talked about his standout career there,  regrets, and current life as a mentor to basketball talent and a mental health technician in his hometown of Saginaw, Michigan.

My first break, though, was talking with a member of the film’s crew named Stephen Mintz. I came across Stephen’s name on an old Fresno State message board where someone mentioned he made the film and had since become a stand-up comedian in Fresno. I found his comedian page on facebook and soon we were talking via Skype about his experience chasing around the team with a camera on his shoulder for six months. Mintz developed an attachment with the team that would strain after filming. After the season, still wanting to be close to the team, Mintz took a job as statistician and academic advisor. In the latter role he gained notoriety when he told a newspaper that he wrote papers for players in exchange for money, part of a scandal that got his name everywhere from the Fresno Bee to the New York Times and made him persona non grata to the program. He talked about all of it. Later I’d meet Mintz in person when he got me up on a stand-up show in Fresno and get to talk comedy-shop, basketball, and about his gig at the local Haunted House.

Paul, Terrance, and Stephen all spoke with reverence about Tark and shared stories of their time with him. They talked about the emotional toll of that season, the mixed feelings they have, and the impact the film had on their lives nearly twenty years later. And, of course, I got their inside perspectives on the samurai sword incident for the record. I forwarded the film to Luke Bonner, now retired from basketball, who finally got to see the film that hit him so hard as a teenager. Luke thinks the film is still great, and I agree. Since there are no plans to re-release the film these interviews are as close as anyone can get to the experience. I like to imagine another basketball obsessive will come across them while conducting their own search for the film.

Now with time to reflect I’ve been able to feel gratitude for how much better it was that I couldn’t simply order Between The Madness from Amazon. It’s unavailability gave me a quest and conversations with people I’ll never forget. Despite how bad that comedy festival was I’m glad I decided to use my “emergencies only” credit card to pay my own way. F**k all soybean chips forever, though.