7 new true-crime podcasts to dip into this month
What's new in audio true crime? Here's what to listen for
the true crime that's worth your time
Is there an official podcast season? I guess not — unlike outdated notions like “sweeps,” podcasts seem to be released all year long. And unlike TV, I suppose, they’re not beholden to subscription drops in the summer months, as travel and podcasts are a natural pair. That’s why we have a bumper crop of new podcasts and episodes to tell you about this month. Let’s get to it. — EB
A missing California college student's case had gone cold. Then came a podcast. [USA Today]
And, look, I am already full of crap because this isn’t about a new show, it’s about Your Own Backyard, a show that ran in 2019. This podcast from admitted hobbyist Chris Lambert about the Kristin Smart case got a shout out from San Luis Obispo County Sheriff Ian Parkinson when an arrest was finally made in the case from 1996. As of this month, Lambert is covering the court case for the man accused of killing Smart, a man that police say might not have been nabbed without his show. How trippy and meta is that?
I Was Never There
This mom and daughter podcast seeks to investigate the cold case disappearance of Marsha “Mudd” Ferber, a commune founder who vanished from her farm in Calhoun County, West Virginia in 1988. Hosts Jamie Zelermyer and her mom, Karen, have put two years of work into this show, which according to its logline, is “as much true crime show as it is an ode to Appalachian countercultural movements of the 1970s and 1980s.” It dropped earlier this month and is five eps in.
New podcast 'Deliberate Indifference' amplifies the impact of prison failures in Ala. [NPR]
Birmingham NPR affiliate WBHM is behind this show, which reflects on a 2019 DoJ report on violence in the state’s prisons. The show actually slipped by me in May, so there are already six episodes to listen to; the latest is about how the nationwide staffing crisis is hitting the prison biz. The host is health and science reporter Mary Scott Hodgin, who approaches each episode with a clear-eyed and thorough perspective.
New true crime podcast explores chilling cold case of missing 9-year-old girl [News4SA]
Another cold-case disappearance podcast? Yes, indeed, it is. Missing Erica Baker isn’t challenging any conventions with its newscaster-driven podcast on the 1999 disappearance of 9-year-old Erica Baker, who was last seen walking her family dog in a suburban Ohio park. But, as counter-intuitive as it sounds when we’re talking about a podcast about a missing child, sometimes the traditional approach works just fine. We’re only two episodes in, but so far I have found this to tick all the traditional boxes and to keep my mind engaged in the case and away from other more current matters, which is a lot of what I’m looking for these days.
Sonoma County-born consultant, author Joseph Rodota launches true crime podcast about the Hillside Strangler [Press Democrat]
I came across Hillside after a Copycat rewatch (tangent: y’all, how much would you love a Copycat sequel? Wouldn’t that just kick ass?), when I realized I had forgotten most of what I knew about Buono and Bianchi. The show host is a bit of a surprising character — Joseph Rodota Jr. is a political consultant for a bygone era of Republican (Reagan, Schwarzenegger) and novelist who says he first got into the case when working with aspiring CA Gov Pete Wilson, whose Democratic opponent had been the DA on the case. A podcast from a man who has worked in the service of that party might not be on your list right now, but people keep saying it’s good, so I leave that to you.
Spectacle: True Crime
”Spectacle is a series that analyzes the cultural and societal implications of your guilty pleasures,” reads the introductory sentence of this podcast, the third season of which is focused on true crime. I find the concept of “guilty pleasure” a gross, bogus, laughable one so I’m already predisposed to be annoyed at this show, which made its debut just last week. The first episode, however, does a nice job of illustrating how both In Cold Blood and Serial capitalized on the same content class divide to bring true crime to a wider audience, a job that belies the show’s classist use of the phrase “guilty pleasure” so…? I’m sticking around for now to see how that duality plays out. We’ll see how it goes.
Witnessed: Friendly Fire
Sean Flynn has been covering the death of Sgt. Hubert “John John” Yancey since 2008 (here’s his longread on the 2003 case), a K9 officer in Tennessee who was fatally shot by his partner in 2003. “It's not a whodunit; it's a whydunit,” Flynn says of the podcast, and that’s dead on — decades later, there’s still a running debate on if the shooting was accidental or intentional. Every episode of this slick and well-produced show (it’s a Sony product) are available now if you subscribe to Apple’s The Binge service; otherwise they drop every Monday. Thus far, I’m really engrossed.
A roundup with some roundups? Why not. “People Are Sharing The True Crime Podcasts That Got Them Hooked, And I Really Need To Free Up Some Listening Time” is a very standard Buzzfeed listicle that probably took less time to assemble than I spent on any one of the above write-ups. But still, if you’re desperately looking for something, anything to listen to to drown out the ever-louder thought that we soon might be owned by our husbands/brothers/dads, one of the recs here might do the trick.
On the other hand, while the Crimereads headline “10 True Crime Podcasts You Need to Listen to This Summer” feels like SEO bullshit, it’s written with the same thoughtful thoroughness as everything else on that excellent true crime site. Columnist Lizzy Steiner just talked me into checking out Stolen: Surviving St. Michaels (crimes at a Canadian Indian school) based on her writeup, and there are a couple other shows on her list I might come back to when I run dry.
This week on Best Evidence: The interview between two alleged miscreants that no one wants or needs.
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