I find these sorts of articles to be very frustrating to read. It seems like a bunch of people trying to make themselves look good, whilst mostly being full of shit. How are you supposed to trust people who have a criminal case hanging over their heads? They have no incentive to tell the truth, and lots of incentive to lie about their involvement, for fear of being prosecuted. What am I supposed to learn from this? That people are vain and disingenuous? Running a large scale criminal operation can blow up in your face? The most annoying thing about this article is that it has a ton of boring minutia about events, but few of these supposed events are verifiable, and each person's account drastically diverges from the other, not to mention that none of these people are particularly trustworthy. So why get bogged down in the details? The whole thing made me feel sick, what a bunch of assholes.
You don't have to learn something from an article for it to be worthy of existence. From my perspective, this piece aimed to delve you into the world and events of Skinner and Co, and in that way it succeeded. Is everyone's testimonies intrinsically untrustworthy? Perhaps. But even though they all differ, they all skirt around events that actually happened. It's not like everything in this article is one giant falsification. These things, some of them absolute heinous things, occurred. So what if everyone involved recounts a different story? It's a key, unavoidable part to the whole retelling. This article didn't seek or claim to give you answers or point you towards some truth from all this crazy world. It is what it is.
I guess what I was getting at is that I find the article to be sensationalistic, and I didn't think it had much merit apart from its shocking source material. It's almost as if the authors revel in the fact that the narrators are unreliable, because they can retell the same gruesome story multiple times with new lurid details each time. We learn nothing about the real people behind the case, nor about their operation, because they're all lying about each other and themselves. All we get are fantastical stories about how wild their parties were, and how brilliant Skinner is. This information is useless, especially when it feels so disingenuous as this did. It didn't ring true to me, and I felt like I had wasted my time by the end of it.