“Tom Brown’s Body” Is a Case Study in Toxic Masculinity
By: Kelley Silver
Tags: Toxic Masculinity, Podcast, Sexism, Texas, True Crime

Like most true crime junkies, I love a good true crime podcast. I recently came across the podcast Tom Brown’s Body (TBB) and was instantly riveted. Skip Hollandsworth, the host of the podcast, is a master of his craft and has done right by Thomas and his family. I have listened to TBB twice now, which is fairly normal for me. I like to go back and catch the things for which I had no context early on and piece it all together. The story is a truly sad one. A high school senior in the tiny town of Canadian, Texas, just up and vanished one night. Two years passed before his body was found. All of that is tragic enough on its own.

The main focus of this case should be getting justice for Tom Brown if a crime did occur or finding evidence of suicide if that is how he died. The sheriff, the private investigator, and the district attorney should not be part of the story except in a professional capacity, yet all three of them have made themselves part of the story by being inept, pompous, or unprofessional.

The focus should be Tom, but instead the sheriff and private investigator spend their time in never-ending pissing contests instead of working together to solve the case. The sheriff is worse than the PI but only by a frog’s hair, and almost on par with the sheriff and the PI is the district attorney.

To start with, (ex-)Sheriff Nathan Lewis introduces his love of policing by saying, “I love kicking doors down. It’s what I do.” Apparently, he loves the violent nature of intruding in someone’s home by physically entering through violence. I gave him the benefit of the doubt and thought to myself, “Oh, well, he just means he loves busting the bad guys.” I carried on listening. However, I cannot simply gloss over the fact that intruding in people’s homes is his favorite part of the job. No one should be eager to bust down someone’s door. This is how Breonna Taylor was killed. Busting down someone’s door should be a last resort. Personally, I think his favorite part of the job should be protecting and serving, not the violence. If I were administering a psych evaluation, that statement alone would persuade me to fail the examinee. A police officer should not revel in violence. A regular person should not revel in violence, but maybe that’s just me being hippie-dippie.

When the private investigator was introduced, I was equally suspicious. A braggart if I’ve ever heard one, Philip Klein is absolutely insufferable. I was raised not to brag — that your record will speak for itself — but cockiness isn’t a crime and doesn’t make him inept, so I carried on listening. But there again, I kept returning over and over again to his unprofessional touting of his record. An expert doesn’t have to tell people of their accomplishments; their accomplishments will speak for themselves. You don’t hear experts in their field bragging because they don’t have to. Liking to talk isn’t a sin or a crime, but it does make me wonder about the mental health of a person who constantly feels the need to be held in high esteem.

The rivalry between the sheriff and the private investigator is infuriating. They act like petulant children. From the second they meet, they are put off by one another and call each other names. “Cocky,” “arrogant,” “GQ,” etc. Grow up, gentlemen. Your job isn’t to be friends. Your job is to find out what happened to Tom. A true professional would NEVER badmouth another professional; they would obfuscate or decline comment.

Tom’s mother, Penny, is amazing. She has done everything a parent can do to advocate for her child, and all she has gotten in return is the paternalistic, “There there stop being so hysterical” spiel from two men charged with solving her son’s case. The sheriff and the D.A. are public SERVANTS. Their jobs literally exist to serve her and her fellow citizens. The private investigator literally works for her. The most egregious example of their behavior comes from the episode “The Wake.”

You can listen to the clip here (permission granted by Skip Hollandsworth to use this clip):

The district attorney, one Mr. Franklin McDonough, deserves a shoe up his behind for the way he spoke to Mrs. Meek during an information-sharing meeting. She is a grieving mother who has no idea what happened to her son. Before Tom’s death, she had already experienced a lifetime of trauma. Her grandparents died in what may have been a double-suicide, a murder-suicide, or a tragic accident; her father died from suicide. She has already had to accept and process two mysterious deaths in her life as well as a suicide, but accept them she did. I’m sure if she knew for sure that Tom died by suicide, she could process that tragedy and accept it the way she did her father’s. She can’t process that reality though because it hasn’t been proven. She can’t process that reality because it does not make sense. It doesn’t make sense that Tom’s car was found miles away from where his body was found. His cell phone and backpack were found in an entirely different location. His cell phone, when found in some grass, was in pristine condition. It wasn’t damaged by weather, time, or mowers though the area had recently been mown. Mrs. Meek has already proven herself capable of accepting a lack of answers. Did her grandparents die by double-suicide? Did one kill the other and then die by suicide? Did they die in an accident? She will never know, but one thing she does feel pretty sure of is that they were not murdered by anyone else. She doesn’t have that assurance in Tom’s case. How can anyone accept such uncertainty?

Not only is she a grieving mother, she’s a human being. No person should ever be talked down to, scolded, and dismissed the way the DA dismissed her. The DA, with two other investigators, called a meeting to tell the family that there was not enough evidence to make any sort of ruling and therefore the investigation was being suspended. They could not determine suicide, homicide, foul play, natural causes, etc. All they could establish was that Tom Brown died. When she asked (like any parent would), if they could rule out suicide, Mr. McDonough went off on her about how the law isn’t in the disproving business. That is true, but most non-lawyers don’t understand that. Most people would reasonably think, “Well surely, we can prove that Joe Schmoe wasn’t in Texas in 2012.” No, all you can do is prove where Joe Schmoe WAS in 2012. You can prove a positive. You can’t prove a negative. That’s a hard concept for some people to wrap their heads around. You can’t expect the average person to understand that. It’s why judges always have to explain to juries that it’s not the job of the defense to prove that their client is innocent; it’s the job of the prosecutor to prove that they are guilty. You can’t prove a negative. Logically, the average person would say, if A, then not B. If I can prove that Joe Schmoe was in Alabama for all of 2012, then by default, he was NOT in Texas. A lawyer, client, or judge may stipulate to that, but it has not been proven. It has only been stipulated. Just like I will stipulate that gravity exists, but I can’t prove that it does or doesn’t.

Anyway, D.A. McDonough takes it upon himself to give a good old-fashioned dressing-down to the moms in the meeting in the most patriarchal, paternalistic tone I have heard in quite some time. He belittles one mom in particular, and you can literally hear her crumble. Her voice goes timid. He lectures her. He lectures a grown-ass woman. He has the audacity to say they should move on “out of respect for TOM.” Sir. Excuse me, sir. Respecting Tom would be finding out what happened to him. Respecting Tom would be respecting his mother. Respecting Tom would mean processing the car when you find out he is missing. Respecting Tom would mean forming a positive working relationship with the chosen private investigator his mother hired. Respecting Tom would be not using his name to justify shutting down the search for his killer. How dare you, sir?! How dare you tell a woman what is respectful regarding her own son? How dare you speak for the dead? You don’t know what Tom would want. You literally never met him.

The whole scene is infuriating. Basically, the sheriff and the DA want this woman to go away. They can’t solve the crime (or don’t want to) and want her to sit down, shut up, and go away. This whole scenario strikes me as straight out of an abuser’s playbook. The abuser puts a vulnerable person in an impossible situation, forcing them to react in the only way they can, and then the vulnerable person gets abused even more for playing the only hand they have. To give a clearer example, it’s like a man cheating on his wife and lying to her about it. Through his behavior, he forces her into the awkward position of searching his phone or following him to work, and then he becomes angry when she does those things. But it’s his fault she doesn’t feel secure in the relationship. It’s his fault she “acts crazy.”

At one point a lawyer in the case tells Hollandsworth that Mrs. Meek is a liar; I almost wrecked my car when I heard that. That’s a fightin’ word where I come from. Even the female investigator is incredibly rude to one of the moms in the “Moms for Tom” group. The subject of some yard signs comes up, and the lady investigator says, “I’m so sorry, are you going to forget him because there’s not a sign in your yard?” It is patronizing and unnecessary. The community will take down the signs when they decide to do so. If the authorities want the signs down, they should solve the crime.

Penny Meek does not want to be the grieving mother who won’t let it go. She would much rather be a mother who still has her son. She would even rather be a mother who misses her son but who can heal because she knows what happened to him. She is who she currently is because of the sheriff and district attorney’s inaction, incompetence, or inability to communicate.

Not all mysteries are solvable. Not all crimes are solvable. If indeed the mystery is unsolvable, all they have to do is sit down and communicate the following:

“Mr. and Mrs. Meek and Mr. Brown (Tom’s father), I am sorry to say we have reached a dead-end. We have exhausted every effort to find out what happened to your son. We sincerely wanted to provide you with answers, but despite our best efforts we have been unable to do so. We have followed every lead and interviewed everyone we can. We will continue to follow up on any leads as they come in, but unfortunately, we simply do not have answers for you. The investigation is being suspended, not because we’ve given up, but because there is no new direction in which to go. We know this must be difficult for you and your family, and it’s not the result we wanted, but it’s the reality of our current situation. The investigation will, of course, be reopened if any new information becomes available. Please let us know if there is anything else we can do for you.”

But no. Instead of speaking to her in a respectful way, they scolded her like a child.

Second only to the district attorney’s scolding of Mrs. Meek was the sheriff talking about how “mistreated” he felt during a lie detector test and how the questions were so unfair. He just couldn’t believe that HE, a law enforcement officer, was being subjected to such treatment. He talked about how he has anxiety and was too wound up by his nerves to do well. Hey, guess what, Sheriff? Lots of us have anxiety, but you police officers put us on the box anyway. You ask unfair questions and misinterpret our responses the same way it happened to you. Turnabout is fair play. I loved your indignant declaration that you would NEVER be put on the box again. Maybe now you understand why some people might decline a request to submit to a polygraph! I know you have since resigned, but I seriously hope you learned a lesson from that experience, and that is to treat people the way you want to be treated. Somehow I think you’re still licking your wounds and thinking you’re the real victim here.

In a truly petty move, the private investigator now thinks Sheriff Lewis was in on the cover-up. I may not like Sheriff Lewis, but Klein asserts with zero evidence that the crime went down like this:

Tom drove to the high school parking lot to hang out before going home. Some kid was messing around with a .25 caliber gun and put it to Tom’s head as a joke, but it went off and killed him (this is not implausible as I know someone who died this way). The kid freaks out and calls his dad or some other influential adult. That adult calls Sheriff Lewis, and together they plan a cover-up. Klein claims Lewis agreed to the cover-up because the kid or the man (or both) were from prominent Canadian families. Lewis says there was no blood in the truck because a .25 caliber doesn’t make a mess. This would also explain why there was a single shell casing found in the truck.

As plausible as it may be, the theory is wild speculation with zero proof. It may absolutely be what happened, but if Klein has evidence, he hasn’t yet shared it.

Many moments in this podcast gave me the creeps or infuriated me, but the moment when I thought, “Oh my God, this sheriff is absolutely guilty of something,” comes when the podcast host, Skip Hollandsworth, tells Lewis about Klein’s aforementioned theory. All Lewis does is laugh. He laughs the fakest, creepiest laugh I have ever heard. Hollandsworth asks him a question, and Lewis purposely uses doublespeak to avoid answering. When Hollandsworth asks him another question, he doesn’t answer; instead, he obfuscates by acting offended. The entire encounter is bone-chilling. So while I may find Klein’s accusation petty, I also find Sheriff Lewis suspect as hell.

Lewis, making himself look even worse, is still trying to lay the blame on Mrs. Meek. He asserts that Tom died by suicide, and upon finding his body, she hid him because the town already thinks she’s cursed. He asserts that she didn’t react in the right way when her son went missing because she wasn’t pitching a fit. He said she was emotionless. Excuse me, EX-sheriff Lewis, some people (women included) react differently to stress. Some of us don’t pitch fits. Some of us go into emotional lockdown when there’s a job that needs doing. Mrs. Meek is a teacher, as am I. We are experts at shutting down our emotions in times of stress or emergency. We do not scream and flail about. We get to business. Penny Meek is about the business of finding out what happened to her son.

Also, and you should really know this as a law enforcement officer, how people act in times of stress is not evidence. It proves nothing. Just like it proved nothing when Amanda Knox did a cartwheel after Meredith Kercher’s murder, it proves nothing that Mrs. Meek didn’t scream at you.

Furthermore, if Mrs. Meek had disposed of her son’s dead body, WHY IN GOD’S NAME WOULD SHE BE PRESSURING YOU TO KEEP LOOKING FOR HIS KILLER? If she were involved, she would have accepted any resolution to the case, so it would just go away.

By the way, why is Sheriff Lewis now ex-Sheriff Lewis? Oh, well, he was caught falsifying training paperwork and was asked to resign. He sees this as proof that he was being persecuted. He thinks he is the victim in this whole affair. Everything is about HIM.

Philip Klein may be an insufferable blowhard, but at least he’s not blaming the grieving mother. Blaming her without evidence is inexcusable.

Nathan Lewis, Philip Klein, and Franklin McDonough all exhibited traits of toxic masculinity. They all mistreated Mrs. Meek, a grieving mother who just wants answers. They all owe her an apology for making themselves the center of the investigation instead of Tom.