obsession

A shocking murder rocks South Korea when a young woman, obsessed with true crime stories, kills a random stranger to satisfy her darkest curiosity. But how can fascination with real-life murder cases spiral into deadly actions?

Are true crime podcasts and shows fueling dangerous fantasies? Can constant exposure to violence blur the line between entertainment and reality? We investigate the chilling case, examine the media’s responsibility, and ask: Does true crime content do more harm than good?

In this episode:
-Dr. Alex Taek-Gwang Lee, professor of cultural studies at Kyong Hee University
-Craig Wainwright, victim of false allegations

Bill Anderson was close to 70 when he first spotted the clock.

It looked like a ship’s wheel, a kitschy bit of decor you might see at a nautically themed bar. But he was drawn to it because of its maker.

Timepieces from Chelsea Clock Co. were renowned for their design and precision. The company’s clocks could once be found on Navy battleships during World War II, and adorned mantels, walls and desks at the White House for presidents ranging from Dwight Eisenhower to Joe Biden.

Anderson, a retired watchmaker and collector, was particularly interested in the base of the Chelsea Comet, which was engraved with the initials “J.F.K.”

John Fitzgerald Kennedy?

Although watch collectors obsess over celebrity ownership, and a Camelot connection counts for a lot, the prospect of a payday was only part of the allure for Anderson.

Retired watchmaker Bill Anderson owns more than 200 timepieces, including a Chelsea Comet with a plaque featuring a “J.F.K.” engraving.

(Courtesy of Bill Anderson)

The mystery of the clock’s provenance — could it possibly be the real deal? — has animated his life for years. This, Anderson said, “is a nice game that I’ve got going here.”

He’d purchased the clock in 1999 from a seller on EBay, a New Hampshire dealer who’d picked it up at an estate sale in Wellesley, Mass., for $280.

In the intervening years, Anderson, who is 95, has plumbed the cloistered world of clock collectors. His hunt would take him to the online message boards of watch and clock aficionados, and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. It would eventually lead to a refrigerated vault 200 feet below ground in a former limestone mine in rural Pennsylvania.

Anderson, who lives in Eugene, Ore., may not use the word “obsession” to describe his interest in his J.F.K. clock, but others do. All those decades he’s spent trying to uncover its backstory are evidence of its almost gravitational pull.

Anderson, whose parents ran a grocery store, grew up in Roseburg, Ore., south of Eugene. In the late 1940s, he left the University of Oregon after just one quarter and enrolled in a watchmaking school run by the Elgin National Watch Co.

Anderson’s maternal grandfather had been in the trade. “I leaned over his watchmaker’s bench and watched him as a little boy,” he explained. “He let me have the insides of an alarm clock … that was the beginning of it.”

In time, Anderson became a retail liquidator, helping to close jewelry and watch stores and sell their remaining inventories. Along the way, Anderson married and started a family. He gained a reputation as an honest broker — and for being able to spot the value in merchandise that others couldn’t sell.

“Bill is like the George Washington of people — you know, ‘I cannot tell a lie,’ that type of thing,” said Errol Stewart, a Maine watchmaker who has known Anderson for about 40 years.

In 1974, Anderson paid $15,000 for the inventory of a jeweler in Baker City, Ore., selling what he could and bringing the leftovers home. Forty years later, he came across them while cleaning out his attic; among the wares was an old football helmet.

It turned out to be a rare Spalding head harness from the early 1900s. No more than 10 are believed to still be in existence, and Anderson sold it for about $14,000.

He has retained more than 200 timepieces for his collection, including several from Chelsea, and has watched the prices for celebrity-owned timepieces surge in the last few decades.

The market for those with ties to the Kennedys is particularly strong. Jacqueline Kennedy’s Cartier Tank sold for nearly $380,000 in 2017, and JFK’s Omega fetched $420,000 in 2005.

“With Kennedy you get the highest multiplication factor for any political figure,” said Paul Boutros, who heads the U.S. watch business for Phillips, a London-based auction house.

Anderson knew if he could confirm the ownership, it would be a boon — perhaps a capstone to his legacy as a watchmaker and collector. The first thing he did was get in touch with Chelsea to request the clock’s certificate of origin.

When it arrived, the spot for the original buyer’s name was marked “no record.” Could that have been a courtesy extended to a VIP customer? JFK’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., had visited the company’s headquarters in Massachusetts — home to the Kennedy clan — where he purchased several items.

Chelsea had published a feature on its website about in-house master clockmaker Jean Yeo that touched on that celebrity connection. She said that she began working at Chelsea in 1951, a time when “all of the Kennedys came in here” and had special praise for the family’s patriarch, calling him a “nice guy” who talked to her about her work.

But Anderson wasn’t sure what to think. The growing allure of watches with A-list history was enticing people to peddle dubious timepieces.

In 2005, a Rolex that was said to be a gift from Marilyn Monroe to JFK was auctioned for $120,000. The gold Day-Date, reportedly given by the actress to the president in 1962 on the occasion of his 45th birthday, featured an inscription that reads, “Jack / With love as always / from / Marilyn.” But collectors and watch scholars have noted that the timepiece in question featured a serial number that dated it to 1965.

At one point in his search, Anderson had a breakthrough when he discovered an online photograph of the future president and his wife at home in 1954. A clock was positioned on a desk, and it looked just like Anderson’s Comet, but the low-resolution picture was so blurry that any engraving it may have had was impossible to discern.

Then-Sen. John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, at their home in Washington, D.C., in 1954. A Chelsea Comet clock sits on the desk.

(Bettmann Archive)

James Archer Abbott, co-author of “Designing Camelot: The Kennedy White House Restoration and Its Legacy,” said there was no record of the Comet having been displayed at the White House, and cautioned that if it were important to the family, it probably would have been earmarked for JFK’s presidential library. A representative of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum said that it has no record of or information on the Comet clock.

But Tony LaChapelle, president of Chelsea, was open to the possibility that it had once been owned by JFK.

“Could somebody who had nothing better to do in their life take that photo of JFK, Jackie and that clock, and get a Comet clock and try to capitalize on that? I suppose they could,” he said. “We look at [Anderson’s ] clock and we look at that photo of [JFK’s clock] sitting out on the table, and in our opinion it is highly probable” they were one and the same.

Anderson tried to find the original high-resolution image for years but couldn’t turn anything up. No one seemed to know the source of the photo. There were tens of thousands of pictures of JFK to comb through online. Or more.

But eventually, after a serpentine, multiyear effort, the whereabouts of the original negative were finally uncovered. It was in a photo archive stored inside a Boyers, Pa., facility known as the Iron Mountain, a formidable place that securely maintains records of all types, including for the federal government.

The Bettmann Archive, which comprises millions of photos and is managed by Getty Images, is housed in a section of the Mountain that’s more than 10 stories underground.

Last year, an archivist located the negative and brought it to one of Bettmann’s labs, where she placed it on a flatbed scanner. Soon, a new, ultra-high-resolution version of the 1954 image glowed on her computer screen. The clarity was remarkable.

The Comet could be clearly seen in the photo, including the clock’s wooden base.

It was blank.

When he heard the news — relayed via telephone — Anderson grew quiet.

But he offered no lamentations and later he said he wasn’t disappointed: “Not a bit.” He’d come to realize how important the hunt had been for him, especially after his wife, Sallie, died in July 2023. She was 93.

“She understood that I loved that kind of stuff,” he said.

The research made a dark time just a little easier.

During a recent interview, Anderson sat at his dining room table, where there was an array of photos of his wife. The Comet was there too. He explained that over the last year or so, he has asked each of his five children to select clocks from his collection that they will inherit when he dies.

Marilyn Monroe, seen in a 1962 photograph, is said to have gifted President Kennedy a Rolex that was later auctioned for $120,000.

(Cecil Stoughton / White House Photographs / John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum / Associated Press)

“I don’t know how many more miles down the road I’ve got,” he said.

But Anderson has yet to offer the Comet. “Why that hasn’t happened yet, I don’t know,” he said.

One of his sons, Mike Anderson, a watchmaker who owns Anderson Jewelers in Corvallis, Ore., has an idea. “There’s no doubt in my mind he wants to link [the clock] to JFK — he wants to believe that that was on his desk,” the younger Anderson said. “That’s what drives him.”

After all these years, Anderson still loves the chase.

At a minimalist matcha bar in Los Angeles, United States, powdered Japanese tea is prepared with precision, despite a global shortage driven by the bright green drink’s social media stardom.

Of the 25 types of matcha on the menu at Kettl Tea, which opened on Hollywood Boulevard this year, all but four were out of stock, according to the shop’s founder, Zach Mangan.

“One of the things we struggle with is telling customers that, unfortunately, we don’t have” what they want, he said.

With its deep grassy aroma, intense colour and pick-me-up effects, the popularity of matcha “has grown just exponentially over the last decade, but much more so in the last two to three years”, the 40-year-old explained.

It is now “a cultural touchpoint in the Western world” – found everywhere from ice-cream flavour boards to Starbucks.

This has caused matcha’s market to nearly double over a year, Mangan said.

“No matter what we try, there’s just not more to buy.”

In the Japanese city of Sayama, northwest of Tokyo, Masahiro Okutomi – the 15th generation to run his family’s tea production business – is overwhelmed by demand.

“I had to put on our website that we are not accepting any more matcha orders,” he said.

Producing the powder is an intensive process: the leaves, called “tencha”, are shaded for several weeks before harvest, to concentrate the taste and nutrients.

They are then carefully deveined by hand, dried and finely ground in a machine.

“It takes years of training” to make matcha properly, Okutomi said. “It’s a long-term endeavour requiring equipment, labour and investment.”

“I’m glad the world is taking an interest in our matcha … but in the short term, it’s almost a threat – we just can’t keep up,” he said.

The matcha boom has been propelled by online influencers like Andie Ella, who has more than 600,000 subscribers on YouTube and started her own brand of matcha products.

At the pastel-pink pop-up shop she opened in Tokyo’s hip Harajuku district, dozens of fans were excitedly waiting to take a photo with the 23-year-old Frenchwoman or buy her cans of strawberry or white chocolate-flavoured matcha.

“Matcha is visually very appealing,” said Ella.

To date, her matcha brand, produced in Japan’s rural Mie region, has sold 133,000 cans. Launched in November 2023, it now has eight employees.

“Demand has not stopped growing,” she said.

Last year, matcha accounted for more than half of the 8,798 tonnes of green tea exported from Japan, according to Japan’s Agriculture Ministry data – twice as much as 10 years ago.

Tokyo tea shop Jugetsudo, in the touristy former fish market area of Tsukiji, is trying to control its stock levels given the escalating demand.

“We don’t strictly impose purchase limits, but we sometimes refuse to sell large quantities to customers suspected of reselling,” said store manager Shigehito Nishikida.

“In the past two or three years, the craze has intensified. Customers now want to make matcha themselves, like they see on social media,” he added.

The global matcha market is estimated to be worth billions of dollars, but it could be hit by US President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Japanese products – currently 10 percent, with a rise to 24 percent in the cards.

Shortages and tariffs mean “we do have to raise prices. We don’t take it lightly”, said Mangan at Kettl Tea, though it has not dampened demand so far.

“Customers are saying, ‘I want matcha before it runs out’.”

Japan’s government is encouraging tea producers to farm on a larger scale to reduce costs.

But that risks sacrificing quality, and “in small rural areas, it’s almost impossible”, grower Okutomi said.

The number of tea plantations in Japan has fallen to a quarter of what it was 20 years ago, as farmers age and find it difficult to secure successors, he added.

“Training a new generation takes time… It can’t be improvised.”