Early True Crime

A retired investigator begins corresponding with a convicted murderer whose series of cryptic, poetic letters claimed to have killed dozens of people around the United States.  We chose this protopodcast from 2015 because of the bridge it creates to the contemporary true crime landscape. The story is dripping in intrigue, and the work has all the trappings of the first podcast renaissance includin...

Narrated by Warden Jim Willett, Witness to an Execution creates a minute-by-minute account of carrying out an execution by lethal injection.  We hear narration from warden Jim Willett, and the experience of members of the “tie down” team, press, chaplains, and others that have participated in executions at the Walls Unit in Huntsville, Texas.  One voice is conspicuously missing, but it’s impossibl...

Calling this work sound-rich would be a gross understatement.  It is also silence- and emotion-rich.  It expertly uses the medium to take the listener somewhere they may never be and immerse them in that experience.  Dave Isay’s work is unquestionably canonical and Tossing Away the Keys is a masterclass in audio documentary.   Recorded in Angola Prison, the piece features voices of lifetime inmate...

To quote Jay Allison: “Some stories take a long time. This one is an hour long, and took two and a half years to produce, after twenty years of living with it.”  And you can hear it in this piece.  On the one hand, narrator Samantha Broun methodically takes the listener through the details of what happened to her mother, and the choices it sparked in her own life.  Twenty years later, Broun revisi...