Gone South

Javier Guzman was an undercover vice cop with the Tampa Police Department when the DEA recruited him to infiltrate the Cali cartel, then supplying roughly 80 percent of the world’s cocaine. Working alongside Robert Mazur, the agent behind The Infiltrator, on Operation PROMO, Javier posed as money launderer Antonio Ruiz and collected duffel bags of cartel cash across the country. But he grew too cl...

In 2015, Dr. Teresa Sievers, a holistic-medicine doctor in Bonita Springs, Florida, was beaten to death in her kitchen. The killers were her husband Mark’s childhood best friend and doppelgänger, Wayne, and a Missouri ex-con who called himself Jimmy the Hammer. Writer and psychoanalyst Mikita Brottman, author of A Double Life, explains how a swinging marriage, a rival anti-aging guru, and a murder...

In Gatesville, Texas, a group of contemplative nuns visits seven women on Death Row, teaching them the rhythms of convent life: prayer, song, silence, and confession. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Lawrence Wright (The Looming Tower, Going Clear) got rare access to watch it unfold, and the result is his new book, Redemption: Faith, Justice and Sisterhood on Death Row. He talks about persuading...

In 1999, two teenage girls, J.B. Beasley and Tracie Hawlett, were found shot in the trunk of a Mazda in Ozark, Alabama, a small town in the Wiregrass region of the Deep South. With no suspect and a police department already accused of corruption, locals suspected a cover-up. Twenty years later, genetic genealogy led to Coley McCraney, a Dothan truck driver and church deacon with no criminal record...

It started with a stolen parrot named Mango, who liked to dance to Doja Cat. When reporter Aidan McCahill wrote a quick, quirky story about the theft for The Advocate, he had no idea it would lead him down a monthslong rabbit hole into Magnolia Wilds, a Louisiana animal preserve already under fire from federal regulators — and its founder, Gabe Ligon, who'd just been arrested at a Texas airport on...

Part One left off with detectives certain that groundskeeper Brandon Nodier killed pet cemetery owner Dorothy Thompson — but unable to prove it. In Part Two, we dig into an even wilder theory: that Dorothy's own mother, Grace, may have shot two of Dorothy's husbands dead on the cemetery grounds. Because decades earlier, Grace had already gotten away with killing once — fleeing an insane asylum, a...

In 1985, two fishermen pulled a body wrapped in 200 pounds of chains from the Mississippi River. It was Dorothy Thompson, 63, who ran a strange and beloved roadside attraction outside New Orleans called the Azalea Original Pet Cemetery — final resting place for thousands of dogs, cats, and the occasional cheetah. Dorothy's disappearance opened up a murder investigation that quickly ran into a prob...

In 1982, 16-year-old Roxanne Sharp was raped and murdered in the woods outside Covington, Louisiana. Her case went cold for over 40 years, derailed early on by a serial killer's false confession. Then two Louisiana State Police officers walked into radio host Charles Dowdy's studio with a pitch: help us keep this case alive. The result was Charles's first true-crime podcast, Who Killed Roxanne?, m...

Part One left off with Jema Heffernan taking in a man named Javon Donahue — and Javon nearly strangling her to death. In Part Two, that single act of violence hardens into a decade-long "hostage relationship": Javon controls her money, her car, her ability to leave, and every time she manages to get away, he finds her. In 2017, after a four-hour standoff that ends with Javon forcing the gun into h...

Lloyd Lockridge: Journalist Justine van der Leun set out to find the untold stories of women serving murder sentences after surviving years of abuse — women whose only official record reads "guilty," with no mention of what came before. She mailed 10,000 letters to incarcerated women across the country and got back more than a thousand replies. One came from Jema Heffernan, a mother of three servi...

In the mid-1960s, McDonald's sued a tiny Mobile, Alabama fast-food chain called Colonel Dixie — over golden arches, green sidewalks, red and white trash cans, and a stolen operations manual. Colonel Dixie won on the trademark claim and went on to become a beloved local institution, famous for the Dixie Dog. But the brand still carries a whiff of scandal, because in 1983 its co-founder, Paul Levere...

Jacklean Davis was the first Black woman to make homicide detective in the New Orleans Police Department. She grew up in Central City, inspired by a Black patrol officer known on the street as Christy Love, and she rose fast — cracking the 1986 case of a killer who had been hiding in plain sight, presenting himself to detectives as a witness. Ebony asked whether she was the best homicide detective...

Len Davis was a New Orleans police officer known in the Desire projects as Robocop and the Desire Terrorist. In 1994 he ordered the murder of Kim Groves, a 32-year-old mother of three who had filed a brutality complaint against him — and he's since been called the most corrupt cop in the city's history. What brought him down was Operation Shattered Shield, and at the center of it was an undercover...

In 2019, John Fenley was 39, newly separated, and living in one of his mother's rental apartments in Provo, Utah. Searching LoopNet for the biggest building at the lowest price, he found a 220,000-square-foot warehouse on 17 acres in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, listed at $375,000. He assumed the price was a typo. He had never been to Arkansas. He bought it anyway — and then bought Murfie, a bankrupt Wis...

In 1996, a pipe bomb packed with masonry nails exploded in Atlanta's Centennial Olympic Park, killing two people and injuring more than a hundred. The FBI's first suspect was Richard Jewell, the security guard who'd found the bag and helped clear the area. By the time he was cleared 88 days later, investigators had no idea who they were looking for. Columnist John Archibald had covered the Olympic...

In October 1997, a vault supervisor named David Ghantt loaded $17 million into a van and drove out of a Loomis Fargo warehouse in Charlotte, North Carolina. It was the second-largest cash heist in American history. It took him about an hour, working alone. He stole two of the facility's three security tapes. The third one kept rolling. What followed was five months of botched getaways, wild spendi...

Paul Skalnik was a cop turned con artist turned jailhouse informant. Over two decades, he provided testimony or information in more than 40 criminal cases, trading confessions he claimed to have overheard for reduced sentences and early release. Prosecutors in Florida's Pinellas County knew what he was. They used him anyway. Four of the men he testified against were sent to death row. At least one...

n 1985, Charles McCrory was convicted of murdering his wife in their small Alabama hometown — a brutal crime scene with no blood on him, no witnesses, and no physical evidence tying him to the house. What sent him to prison for life was a celebrity forensic dentist who testified that two small marks on Julie's arm were a bite mark made by Charles's teeth. Forty years later, that same dentist has r...

When the federal case against Jim Sullivan was dismissed in 1992, Lita McClinton's family thought they'd lost their last chance at justice. They were wrong — but it would take another fourteen years, a tip from a receptionist in a Texas refinery town, an international manhunt, and a four-year fugitive run through Costa Rica and Thailand before Lita's killer finally stood trial. In the second of a...

In January 1987, Lita McClinton answered her doorbell in one of Atlanta's wealthiest neighborhoods and was shot dead by a man holding a white flower box with a pink rose. She was 35, the daughter of one of Atlanta's most prominent Black families, and on her way to court that morning for a pivotal hearing in her divorce from her white millionaire ex-husband, Jim Sullivan. Police were sure Jim had o...

In 1954, Dallas executed a 19-year-old Black man named Tommy Lee Walker for the rape and murder of a young white woman near Love Field. Walker had no criminal record, eight alibi witnesses placing him across town at the time, and he recanted his confession the moment he was returned to his cell. None of it mattered. Three months after his arrest, a jury sentenced him to die in the electric chair....

In 2016, nine men tied to the College of Charleston's Kappa Alpha fraternity were arrested in what police initially described as a 40,000-pill Xanax bust. The real number was closer to three and a half million, along with cocaine, LSD, weed, luxury watches, a fleet of cars, and a grenade launcher. The crew had spent years pressing counterfeit pills in rented beach houses and shipping them across t...

When Australian comedian John Safran flew to Rankin County, Mississippi to confront a white nationalist named Richard Barrett with a surprise DNA test, he had no idea the man would be killed eleven months later — by a 22-year-old Black neighbor he'd hired to do yard work. Safran returned to Mississippi to write his first true-crime book, expecting a clear-cut story about racism and a perfect victi...

In 2003, Dennis Perry was convicted of the 1985 murders of Harold and Thelma Swain at Rising Daughter Baptist Church in Spring Bluff, Georgia. He was innocent. He would spend the next 20 years, six months, and ten days behind bars. This episode of Gone South tells the Georgia Church Murders story through Dennis's eyes — from his arrest and interrogation by detective Dale Bundy, to his trial, his t...

In 1985, Harold and Thelma Swain were shot and killed during Bible study at Rising Daughter Baptist Church in Spring Bluff, Georgia. The double murder went unsolved for years — until a man named Dennis Perry was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to two life terms for a crime he almost certainly didn't commit. In 2019, Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Josh Sharpe began investigating the case...