Samantha Josephson Thought She Stepped Into an Uber Cab, Not a Murderer's Vehicle

 

You’re tired after a night of carousing in a bar with your friends. It’s about 2:00 a.m. and you want to go home. None of fellow students has a car so you do the logical thing — call an Uber.

That’s what Samantha Josephson, a student at the University of South Carolina thought she was doing. Only it wasn’t an Uber.  But by the time she realized that it was too late.  She couldn’t escape  the car because the  child safety locks had been engaged.

It was video that led people to   Nathaniel Rowland, the man charged with her murder. You can see Samantha waiting calmly at the curb as the black 2017 model year Chevy Impala comes around the corner and pulls up at the curb. Samantha appears alert and entirely in command of herself as she gets into the back seat of the car.   That video is the last time anyone except the killer saw her alive.

The events leading to Nathaniel Rowland’s arrest unfolded in a matter of hours — fourteen hours after Samantha was reported missing to be exact. Next day, March 30, 2019 at about 3:00 a.m, an alert   police officer spotted the black Chevy   Impala only blocks from where Josephson disappeared.  

When the officer did a traffic stop, the suspect took off running but was caught.  Police say he had a companion with him who agreed to cooperate with the investigation. 

 In subsequent days, investigators found bloody clothes and cleaning products in a dumpster behind Maria’s house. Other video evidence shows Rowlands going into a store attempting to sell Samantha Josephson’s cell phone.  A forensics team found Samantha Josephson’s DNA, fingerprints, and strands of hair in Rowland’s car.  According to prosecutors, a bladed knife tool that Maria recognized as one she’d seen before was also found.

Today is the third day of the trial of Nathaniel David Rowland on charges of kidnapping and murder of the twenty-one year old woman.  The defense strategy is simple. They allege that Nathaniel was passed out drunk at a party when someone took his car, picked up Samantha and murdered her.   

The defense team hopes to create reasonable doubt by attacking the   evidence cops have accrued.  In   opening statements,  the lead defense said that DNA found on the murder victim did not come from the accused but from other unknown persons. 

The prosecution is led by Byron Gibson, a towering and articulate black man who led off with what seemed a damning opening statement. He revealed a host of facts to the jury and outlined for them what they would hear in the coming days.

Samantha’s cell phone was found in his car along with his own.  They were tracked together until approximately 2:27 a.m., just twenty minutes after she got into Rowland’s car.

According to prosecutor Gibson, Rowland’s phone continued to ping after Josephson’s powered off. Authorities were thus able to track the vehicle to the defendant’s family home in New Zion, South Carolina.   Rowland’s home is just two miles from  the isolated rural dirty road where two turkey hunters found the dead body of Samantha Josephson.  The location of the victim’s body is estimated to be sixty-five or seventy miles from where Samantha first stepped into a predator’s vehicle after an evening at the Bird Dog Lounge.

   If Rowlands is found guilty, it will be partly because he’s one of the dumbest criminals in homicide history as well as one of the most brutal.  Samantha had more than thirty stab wounds all over her body from head, neck, and even her feet. A forensics pathologist report says that she had over one hundred total wounds inflicted upon her person by her assailant.

All things considered I don’t see how any defense team could keep Rowlands from being convicted of the charges, barring an anomaly like jury nullification.

  

“My Brilliant Friend” was a book before it became a TV series.

 

You’re supposed to read the book before you watch the film (or the series) but I didn’t like the book  or thought I didn’t like the book and so I thought I wouldn’t watch the series.      I might have long ago called “My Brilliant Friend” a chick flick series and made excuses not to watch the film the same way I made excuses about not reading the book but I’m a reformed man and just a little bit smarter now.

In any case,  my wife had me watching the seasons one and two of the series with her. The reason I succumbed so easily was because when the pandemic hit I took the opportunity to  work on learning the Italian language. I’ve been watching lots of Italian movies — subtitled.

The “My Brilliant Friend” series is in Italian, with heavy use of Neapolitan dialect.  So the fact that these languages of Italy can be so dissimilar, and have such different expressions and meanings, is fascinating.

I absorbed a little Sicilian from my mother and grandparents who were born there.  My father came from a small town about seventy miles from Naples so I picked up a little of that dialect from him.  If my language acquisition proceeds at a snail’s pace, at least I got some validation from the series to sooth my insecurities about speaking in a bastard tongue.  I’m not sure whose tongue is really the bastard tongue but I digress. . .

So the  topic of this discussion is book v. film.  And I already said that my first encounter with the book was a fail.  I might have been smarter and looked into it more because only recently did I find out “My Brilliant Friend” was first written in Italian. This is pretty basic, I know, but did I ever say I was a genius?   

 One reason I rejected the first opportunity to read the book was because I was hearing about it everywhere  — on all the talk shows, the internet, and everywhere blah-blah-blah was being touted.   This kind of 4-walled publicity approach often indicates   the publisher is making a huge and expensive effort to create a blockbuster on somebody’s behalf while dozens of better books are unfunded, unsupported, and unnoticed.  I’m not saying that’s the case with “My Brilliant Friend.”  I don’t know yet.  I’ve only read ten pages of it so far in this second-life attempt.

   Yes, I’ve learned a few things since then.   As I look back I’m not even sure I didn’t like the book. I see now that maybe what I didn’t like was the translation.  I see now that the novel, because of its parochial nature, would be terrifically hard to translate into English.  Some of the things people say and do in Naples and Sicily cannot be understood anyplace but in those two regions.

  I have only recently understood what a difficult thing translation is, especially in a long novel which makes fundamental use of localisms and idioms.   A translation of a novel will always be quite a different book even while keeping  to the basic plot points.  The phenomenon is blatantly clear in translations of poetry, particularly where rhyme and metaphor are extant. 

What language transference cannot do with a novel such as "My Brilliant Friend"  is duplicate the actual feeling and meaning of words to   persons  not involved in the particular culture.  This unfortunate and difficult aspect of translation is experienced most  egregiously by those who watch ‘foreign’ films with sub-titles.  Just as there’s no direct translation of our Americanisms, there are no direct translation paths for many of the Italianisms in Elena Ferrante’s book. 

So this comparison of book to film  is of small importance to most people but that’s what I’ll try to do as I read Elena Ferrante’s “My Brilliant Friend.” 

Lina Wertmuller's "The Basilisks" (restoredI) and She's Just Not Into Me.

 I saw one of Lina Wertmuller’s films a few decades ago when I was crushing on my teacher, an attractive, intelligent   California socialist. I didn’t know any better, just that the films were beautiful and idealistic. So was our teacher.   

 She presented a    world as we’d like it to be.  This included being a great fan of Che Guevara, without the political murders the regime orchestrated to rub out all traces of the former Cuba.   

I was crushing on this professor pretty bad. She liked me, I could tell, but it never went anywhere.  Or it never went where I thought it might go.  I was torn between  my professor and my gf  who around the same time announced she was gay.

 I was a schizo-homophobic.  While I couldn’t conceive of male homosexual relationships, gay relationships between women didn’t bother me not at all. In fact, it turned me on. The gf of my gf is my gf too.

 But I lost on both counts. People come and go. The more people you know the more likely the go.  Well, we’ll always have Palo Alto.

  I’m watching Lina Wertmuller’s first solo film (she had worked with Fellini on 8 1/2 and he had a big influence on her)  tonight, several decades after I’d first heard of her.  It’s called   “The Basilisks” (I’ve yet to discover why that title)  and it’s about tough times in post-war Sicily. 

Lots of unemployment.  Grinding poverty everywhere.  Mothers were having a difficult time finding suitable men to marry their many daughters.  A communist party vying with the social democrats for political power.  Nostalgic fascists yearning for the good ole days of Mussolini.

People were fatalistic, giving up hope except to survive.   The film was made with high consciousness regarding social class identity and the unsteady relationship between the north and south of Italy. 

One of my favorite scenes  is at the end.  I involves ‘Antonio’ who finally breaks out of the rut of his listless and deeply rooted existence and goes to Rome.  He comes back dressed differently, speaking differently, boasting to his old amicis of how wonderful it is — attractive women everywhere, jobs, culture, beauty — a paradise on earth!  He tells his buds he’s going back the very next day but while he continues to talk up Rome day in an day out he never goes back and falls into the old habits of idling the hours playing cards and cherchez la femme etc…

The film has been restored only recently and if you’re into that kind of thing you might want to take a look.  It’s on Amazon Prime, I should mention, but maybe elsewhere too. As I kid I heard much of the Sicilian and Neapolitan dialects from my parents and grandparents, but when I went to Rome two years ago, I felt embarrassed to engage for it wasn’t the language I was hearing there.

Well thanks to Basilisks and a few other films located in southern Italy (I just watched 16 episodes of “My Brilliant Friend” on HBO and it’s central locus is Naples) I’m now speaking a hodge-podge of dialect and proper Roman with pride and entirely without embarrassment.

And I don't care any more. . .