David Grann might quietly be the most adapted magazine journalist in Hollywood. Killers of the Flower Moon became a Scorsese epic, The Lost City of Z went to James Gray, The Old Man and the Gun gave Robert Redford his farewell role, and the apparently bottomless well of his New Yorker archive keeps producing. But one of his most harrowing pieces has sat in development limbo for over a decade, probably because its subject matter is about as commercially radioactive as true crime gets.

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