Heroes Behind the Badge

Tom Lange was the lead LAPD homicide detective on the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. In the second half of his return to Heroes Behind the Badge, Craig Floyd asks the question that has followed the case for more than three decades: if Simpson acted alone, how did he get rid of the bloody clothes, shoes and knife before catching a flight to Chicago that night? Tom starts with the...

Tom Lange was the lead LAPD homicide detective on the 1994 murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. His first appearance on Heroes Behind the Badge drew thousands of viewer questions, and he returns to answer them with hosts Dennis Collins, Craig Floyd and Bill Erfurth. The questions start in the courtroom. Tom has known Judge Lance Ito for years and calls him a good man, but he says allow...

For years, Gary Ridgway was at the top of the Green River task force's suspect list, but investigators lacked the evidence and the science to prove it. In Part 2, former King County Sheriff Dave Reichert describes how that changed. DNA evidence collected in 1982 was sent to an East Coast lab in 1999, which warned that testing might destroy the sample. In 2001 the lab had the technology, and that S...

Dave Reichert went into homicide at the King County Sheriff's Office in 1979. In 1982 he was assigned one of the first cases in what became the Green River murders, and he stayed with the investigation for two decades, from detective to task force member to King County Sheriff. The case began on a river. A rafter floating the Green River saw what he thought were mannequins under the water, then re...

Dave Hinners was a Wichita patrol officer, not quite three years on the job, when he became the first officer to speak with the lone survivor of the December 2000 Wichita Massacre. Today he is the executive director of the United States Deputy Sheriff's Association. In this second of two parts, he picks up with hosts Dennis Collins and Craig Floyd the morning after. By nine o'clock that morning, a...

Dave Hinners was not quite three years into his career with the Wichita Police Department in December 2000. Today he is the executive director of the United States Deputy Sheriff's Association. In this first of two parts, he tells hosts Dennis Collins and Craig Floyd what happened on the night he became the first officer to speak with the lone survivor of the Wichita Massacre. The call came in mid...

Bill Bratton led six police departments over fifty years, including the NYPD twice and the LAPD from 2002 to 2009. In the second half of this conversation, the policy arguments give way to the people who shaped him — and to the parts of the job that no one applies for. It opens in Watts. When Bratton arrived in Los Angeles, his community relations sergeant told him to go see Sweet Alice, a sharecr...

Bill Bratton is the only person ever to have led both the New York City Police Department and the Los Angeles Police Department. He joined the Boston Police Department in 1970 at twenty-three, badge 1190, and over the next five decades he ran six agencies, presided over the largest crime decline in modern American history, and became the most identifiable advocate for a philosophy of policing that...

Barry Black retired from the FBI after thirty-one years as a master bomb technician and master instructor. On April 19, 1995, he was one of only two FBI bomb technicians in the state of Oklahoma. Part 2 is about everything that came after the blast. The break was a confidential serial number, stamped on a 300-pound axle thrown into the street by the blast. It came back to Ryder, and Ryder to Ellio...

Barry Black spent thirty-one years in the FBI. He joined wanting white collar work, having changed his major and his university to get an accounting degree because that was what the Bureau was hiring. He retired a master bomb technician and a master instructor who trained NATO and allied special forces on every continent but Antarctica. On April 19, 1995, he was one of only two FBI bomb technician...

Part 1 covered what D.A.R.E. teaches now. This half is about the people who teach it, and about the criticism the program has carried for forty years. Frank Pegueros — retired LAPD captain, President and CEO of D.A.R.E. America — starts with something simple and easy to miss. For most parents, the officer in their child's school is the first police officer they have known as a person rather than a...

Francisco "Frank" Pegueros spent 26 years with the Los Angeles Police Department, retiring as a captain, and has spent the 30 years since as President and CEO of D.A.R.E. America. He has now been with the program longer than he was with the department. He told Dennis Collins, Craig Floyd and Bill Erfurth he has never had three bad days in a row — the standard he set when he took the job. Most peop...

Morgan Wright is the founder and CEO of the National Center for Open and Unsolved Cases, a nonprofit that works cold cases toward resolution rather than commentary. A former detective who went on to teach interview and interrogation, he now trains a team of volunteer case analysts in structured investigative method. This is the second half of his reconstruction of the JonBenét Ramsey homicide. Par...

Morgan Wright is the founder and CEO of the National Center for Open and Unsolved Cases, a nonprofit that takes on cold cases and works them toward resolution rather than commentary. He is a former detective who went on to teach interview and interrogation, and he now trains more than thirty volunteer case analysts in structured investigative methods. He returns to Heroes Behind the Badge for the...

In Part 2 of this two-part conversation, retired ATF agent Bill Buford takes listeners back inside the gun room during the February 28, 1993 raid on the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas. He walks through the exact sequence of the firefight: the moment a rifle round came up through the floor and hit him, the two AK-47 rounds that followed, and the fellow agent bleeding out beside him from...

Bill Buford spent nearly three decades in federal law enforcement, first as a Green Beret in Vietnam, then as a Special Agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. In 1993, he led the ATF Special Response Team out of Little Rock, Arkansas, and was one of a small group of agents who made it inside the compound at Mount Carmel during the raid on the Branch Davidians. On Febru...

Jim Freeman spent 32 years as an FBI Special Agent, rising to Special Agent in Charge of the Bureau's San Francisco field office. In the final two years of the 17-year hunt for the Unabomber, Freeman took direct control of the UNABOM Task Force. In Part 2, Freeman picks up moments after Ted Kaczynski's arrest outside his remote cabin near Lincoln, Montana. With no electricity and no safe way to en...

Jim Freeman spent 32 years as an FBI Special Agent, rising to Special Agent in Charge of the Bureau's San Francisco field office. In the final two years of the 17-year hunt for the Unabomber, Freeman took direct control of the UNABOM Task Force — reporting straight to FBI Director Louis Freeh and Attorney General Janet Reno. This episode centers on the case's most consequential turning point: the...

Rick Harcrow spent 37 years as a correctional officer at Attica Correctional Facility — home of the deadliest prison riot in American history. In Part 2, the conversation goes deeper: from the daily realities of working inside one of America's most dangerous institutions to the political decisions that shaped how officers and their families were treated for decades. Rick opens the episode with a s...

Rick Harcrow spent 37 years as a correctional officer in the New York State prison system — 30 of them at Attica Correctional Facility. He wasn't there on September 9, 1971, when the riot began. But he worked with the men who were. He heard their stories, sat with their families, and spent three decades living in the shadow of the deadliest prison riot in American history. This is what he knows. T...

Tom Lange was the lead homicide detective for the Los Angeles Police Department assigned to the OJ Simpson murder case — one of the most watched criminal trials in American history. In this second part of a two-part conversation, Lange picks up where Part 1 left off, going deeper into the evidence, the decision-making, and the failures that defined the case. The interview opens with OJ's first int...

Tom Lange was the lead homicide detective for the LAPD on the night of June 12, 1994. When a call came in about a double homicide on the west side of Los Angeles, Lange and his partner Phil Vannatter were the detectives the department trusted with its highest-profile cases. What they were about to work would become the most watched criminal trial in American history. In this first of two parts, La...

Sheriff Michael Neal was a wildlife officer with no business being at a West Memphis crime scene the afternoon of May 20th, 2010. He was over an hour away when two police officers were shot and killed during a traffic stop. He drove there anyway. Part 2 of this conversation is the story of what happened when he got there — and what he carried home from it. The episode opens with Neal describing hi...

Sheriff Michael Neal is a law enforcement officer, a combat veteran of one of the most dramatic police incidents in modern American history, and today the elected Sheriff of Lee County, Arkansas. In May 2010, he was a wildlife officer who drove over an hour, lights and sirens, to respond to a cop-killer ambush in West Memphis and ended it himself in a Walmart parking lot with dozens of rounds hitt...

In Part 2 of his Heroes Behind the Badge conversation, Rafael Mangual opens with the story that drove him to write his book. In July 2019, Brittany Hill, 24 years old, holding her one-year-old daughter outside her home on Chicago's west side, was shot dead when a car pulled up and opened fire. She turned, shielded her daughter, took the bullets, stumbled three steps, and collapsed with the child s...