The pursuit of justice is often imagined as a straight line: a crime committed, an investigation launched, the evidence examined, and a resolution reached.
Real justice rarely follows such a simple path.
UNJUST is a true-crime anthology franchise that places a widely recognized criminal case beside a lesser-known, seemingly unrelated case, telling their stories side by side.
Their juxtaposition reveals something about the American justice system that neither story reveals on its own.
Why do some cases command extraordinary resources and attention while others barely register?
Why do some become permanently embedded in the American consciousness while others are almost forgotten?
This is Unjust.
FLOWERS working title-in progress
Monday, July 15, 1996. Winona, Mississippi.
Sixteen-year-old Derrick “Bobo” Stewart stands on the pitcher's mound. His baseball cap is pulled low, his glove tucked against his chest. The number [JERSEY NUMBER] is stitched across the back of his uniform.
Two outs. One more to go.
Bobo digs his cleats into the dirt, draws his glove and throwing hand together, and stares toward home plate.
He winds up.
The ball leaves his hand.
Strike three.
For a moment, Bobo stands motionless on the mound. Then his teammates come charging toward him. Gloves fly into the air. Arms wrap around shoulders. Boys are shouting, laughing, pounding one another on the back.
Seven to nothing.
A SHUTOUT!
The teenager with the 92-mile-an-hour fastball has just pitched the game of his life.
Beyond the celebration, Randy Stewart watches his son.
Bobo finally breaks away from his teammates and heads toward his father, still carrying his glove, his cap pushed back on his sweaty head.
Randy looks at him for a moment.“Not bad,” he says 2and laughs.
They start walking toward the parking lot. Bobo is still talking about the game, occasionally turning back toward the field.
Randy lets him talk. His son continues excitedly, occasionally recreating pitches and narrating play-by-plays, imitating Bud, the announcer on the old PA system that nobody could ever quite understand.
“Up next, number twenty-two, Bobby!”
“A swing and a miss!”
That morning, Bobo had started his first job, loading furniture at Tardy Furniture in downtown Winona. And now he had a 7–0 shutout to celebrate.
Tomorrow, he would be back at his new job.
But tonight is about celebrating. He and his dad continue talking, reliving each inning. Each pitch. A fastball, a change-up that they didn't expect. His dad listens to his son relive the last few hours. He smiles.
Tuesday, July 16, 1996.
Tardy Furniture stood at the end of a row of old-fashioned storefronts along Front Street in downtown Winona. A red-brick building with large plate-glass windows, its showroom was crowded with overstuffed armchairs upholstered in brown and tan plaid, floral-patterned sofas, polished wooden coffee tables, and shiny lacquer bedroom suites with matching dressers and nightstands. Brass floor lamps stood beside upholstered recliners.
The store had been a fixture in the small Mississippi town since World War II. Bertha Tardy had worked there for decades before purchasing the business in 1985. While other downtown stores had closed, Tardy Furniture remained open.
Bobo’s mother had bought her furniture there. He recognized some of the same colorful yellow and mauve floral patterns from her home. Personally, he thought most of it looked like old people’s furniture.
That didn’t matter much to Bobo. He had landed his first job, making $4.25 an hour. He was scheduled to work five hours today. Five times $4.25. That was $21.25. A few more days like that and he could finally buy that portable CD player he'd seen at Radio Shack.
On his way to work that morning, Bobo remembered there was supposed to be another new guy starting.
He couldn't remember his name. Well, at least that gave him a little seniority.
He was still smiling about last night's win, and thinking about that cute girl who'd sat in front of him in geography.
At 9:17 a.m. Bobo clocked in, ready to start his day.
“This case is unprecedented in the history of the American legal system.”
Rob McDuff
Mississippi Center for Justice
Attorney for Curtis Flowers 60 Minutes, 2021
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MONSTER Manuscript Complete 75K+ words | Available for Adaptation
Sabrina Butler was a seventeen-year-old mother from Columbus, Mississippi. She was arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death in just 111 days following the death of her baby, Walter.
She would become the first woman exonerated from death row in U.S. history. Yet few know her name.
Nearly thirty years after the murder of six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey, her name remains recognized around the world.
Her murder remains unsolved.
UNJUST: MONSTER places these seemingly unrelated cases side by side, examining what their differences reveal about the American justice system.
This book begins with those two names: Sabrina Butler and JonBenét Ramsey.
Two children lost—one to a failing body, the other to an act of violence.
What followed their deaths revealed not only the limits of the law, but the deep disparities in how justice is served.
Prologue
PRIVILEGE working title - in progress
Who was Barry Gibbs?
He was a blue-collar postal worker. He worked for the U.S. Postal Service for nineteen years. He was a Navy vet. He was a divorced father. He was a complicated man.
He lived in an old brick Brooklyn walk-up. Cracked sidewalks, steam hissing from the grates, the city’s noise pressing through thin walls.
On his workdays, he crossed from Brooklyn in the dark of morning into another world. Sutton Place on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, a neighborhood of wealth and heavy brass doors buffed to a shine.
No one noticed the postal worker with his frayed jacket, his worn canvas bag slung at his side, his black-soled shoes that had seen better days squeaking against polished stone floors.
He spent seventeen years in prison for a murder he did not commit. He had been framed by a corrupt NYPD detective on the payroll of the mob.
Orenthal James Simpson. O.J. “The Juice” Simpson. One of America's most beloved celebrities, whose fame extended from the football field to television and Hollywood.
He had wealth, fame, and a national audience. And when he stood accused of a double homicide, he had something else: the “Dream Team.”
This is Privilege.
A handsome Black man with a big smile and a short Afro is running through an airport.
Wearing a tan three-piece suit and stripped tie, briefcase in hand, he leaps over luggage, bobbing and weaving through cheering travelers. Young Girl Scouts cheer him on. An elderly grandmother with neatly curled silver hair claps enthusiastically, calling out, “Go, O.J., go!”
He flashes that smile, grabs the keys to a sparkling Hertz rental car, and drives off.
This was the image America was sold.
And it sold well.
47%
Increase in Hertz net profits in 1976, following the launch of its O.J. Simpson advertising campaign.
SCANDAL working title - in progress
“Fatty” Arbuckle was one of Hollywood’s most celebrated stars of the silent-film era. He was adored by audiences and respected by his peers. In the early 1920s, Paramount Pictures signed him to a contract worth $1 million a year. He was THE highest-paid entertainer in the world. At that time, the average American manufacturing worker earned just $26.02 a week.
His career was shattered by allegations surrounding the rape and death of actress Virginia Rappe following a party at San Francisco’s prestigious St. Francis Hotel. What followed were newspapers with salacious headlines, and three sensational trials. He was ultimately acquitted, with the jury issuing an extraordinary statement of apology. Despite this, he never regained his reputation or the extraordinary position he once held in Hollywood.
His fall from grace was staggering. One of Hollywood's most celebrated and beloved stars had become a pariah, even after a jury declared him not guilty.
Nearly a century later, Sean “Diddy” Combs was one of the most powerful figures in the music industry. He had risen from the world of hip-hop to become a fixture of mainstream American celebrity culture.
Iced-out bling, beautiful women on his arm, and paparazzi cameras flashing as he arrived at red-carpet events. His Bad Boy Records empire produced some of hip-hop’s biggest stars. His Sean John clothing line had crossed into mainstream America, with its own dedicated retail space and clothing sold in more than 400 Macy’s department stores across the country.
Suddenly, suburban dads in Kansas were showing up to their kids’ Saturday morning Little League games decked out in Sean John.
His legendary White Parties attracted Hollywood actors, fashion icons, and some of the most recognizable names in entertainment. In 2022, Forbes estimated his personal fortune at $1 billion.
Then came allegations of sexual abuse. Federal charges of sex trafficking, racketeering, and RICO conspiracy. Extraordinary media scrutiny. Combs was ultimately convicted of federal offenses, yet even today, he remains a celebrity with a loyal following and public support.
Their cases examine the divide between the verdict reached inside a courtroom and the one reached in the public arena.
This is SCANDAL.
September 3, 1921. San Francisco.
A custom-built, iridescent purple-blue Pierce-Arrow convertible slowly pulls up outside San Francisco's prestigious St. Francis Hotel. It’s a damp, gloomy September afternoon.
An almost invisible doorman steps forward to open the magnificent machine’s door.
Beyond the hotel's imposing granite pillars, an opulent lobby of polished marble and glittering chandeliers awaits Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle.
Room 1219.
NOTE: MONSTER is the first installment of UNJUST. The sequence of subsequent titles remains flexible and may be determined in consultation with publishing and production partners.