Crime: Reconstructed Podcast

Thank you Brenda Jorgensen , Michael Winstead , and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. 🎙️ Episode Overview Wednesday leans full weight on the six assumptions named Tuesday, in order of structural importance. The foundation — that the recovered DNA was the killer’s — breaks exactly as it did in TPD’s August 2019 announcement, and takes two other as...

🎙️ Episode Overview Tuesday names the assumptions that have governed the Brittany Phillips case — the reasonable inferences that hardened, over time, into things everyone treated as facts. The episode does not test them yet (that’s Wednesday); it lays them out, labeled, so they can be tested. The central point: the case went cold not through negligence but through a stack of plausible premises lea...

🎙️ Episode Overview Brittany Phillips was 18 years old, a chemistry student at Tulsa Community College who had recently moved back home to Tulsa. On September 30, 2004, at 2159 hours, officers entered her apartment at 9407 E. 65th Street, unit 3216, on a welfare check and found her deceased. She had been raped and strangled. The last verified contact had been three days earlier, on September 27 at...

A room full of good people cheered a slideshow of convicted killers like a game-winning goal. Then CrimeCon put two jurors onstage to walk a paying crowd through the deliberation room. Forty years a cop — here’s what crossed the line. — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — CrimeCon 2026 came back to the Las Vegas Strip the last weekend of May, and two things happened in that Caesars Palace ballro...

🎙️ Episode Overview The week closes with an after-action: what happened, why it happened, and what to carry forward. No resolution is offered — none exists — but the episode delivers a portable methodology finding and an honest accounting of what remains alive in the case. The central reframe: the most dangerous moment of June 27, 1995 was not a failure but a reassurance — the 4:10 a.m. phone call...

Thank you Brenda Jorgensen , Michael Winstead , Katrina Lantz , and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. 🎙️ Episode Overview The Master Class leaves the analytical altitude of the week and stands on the pavement. It reconstructs the morning of June 27, 1995 from zero, in three passes: the morning as it actually unfolded, the morning as it should hav...

🎙️ Episode Overview The hardest discipline in investigation is saying, out loud and without flinching, what you don’t know. The brain hates an open question and reaches for the nearest plausible answer to close it — and in a thirty-year case, those plastered-over gaps become the theories everyone repeats. This episode imposes the discipline by building the four-category map and sorting every fact...

🎙️ Episode Overview A wall looks solid until you lean on it. This episode takes the six assumptions named on Tuesday and tests each against the evidence — not to produce a clean scoreboard, but to find which beliefs are load-bearing and which are paint over a hole. The result reframes the case: the stranger-predator scenario, long subordinated to the acquaintance theory, turns out to be at least a...

Thank you Emily Dill , Mimi , Katrina Lantz , and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. 🎙️ Episode Overview Every long-cold case eventually stops running on evidence and starts running on belief. A theory gets formed, repeated, and after enough years it hardens into something that feels like fact. This episode does the unglamorous, necessary work: it...

🎙️ Episode Overview Jodi Huisentruit was 27 years old, the morning anchor at KIMT-TV in Mason City, Iowa. On June 27, 1995, she was due at the station at 3:30 a.m. for the Daybreak show. At 4:10 a.m., a producer called her apartment; Jodi answered, said she’d overslept, and that she was heading in. She never arrived. When the first officer reached the Key Apartments parking lot at 7:16 a.m. — more...

🎙️ Episode Overview Five days in. Today we close the books. The after-action is where the methodology finding gets extracted — not the emotional takeaway, though emotion belongs in the room. The methodology finding is the structural conclusion that generalizes beyond this case to the next one, and the one after that. The thing that was paid for here and can prevent something somewhere else if it’s...

Thank you Emily Dill , Katrina Lantz , Brenda Jorgensen , Sara Gerard , and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. 🎙️ Episode Overview Thursday nights, we put you in the room where the decisions get made. This week’s room is the Columbia Mall parking lot in Grand Forks, North Dakota. November 22, 2003. A Saturday afternoon. The temperature is in the l...

🎙️ Episode Overview Three days in — the inherited verdict, the assumption stack, the stress test. Today is where it converges. The four-category map is the methodology’s core analytical tool. In prior weeks we’ve applied it to cases where the central question was identity — whodunit. In this case, identity is settled. Rodriguez is in federal prison for life. The map is still essential here, but it...

Thank you Emily Dill , Ana Maria Sierra , and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. 🎙️ Episode Overview Yesterday we named six assumptions. Today we test them. Testing in this methodology means one thing: hold each assumption up against the evidence and ask whether it holds. If the assumption accurately predicted what would happen, it’s a valid premi...

🎙️ Episode Overview Every system is built on assumptions. Most of the time those assumptions live invisibly in the architecture — accepted, untested, taken as granted. They become visible in one of two ways: either someone deliberately pulls them out and audits them, or they fail catastrophically and the wreckage shows you what they were. In the Dru Sjodin case, it was the second kind of visibilit...

🎙️ Episode Overview Dru Sjodin was 22 years old, a University of North Dakota junior on the phone with her boyfriend, walking to her car after a shift at Victoria’s Secret in the Columbia Mall in Grand Forks, North Dakota. It was November 22, 2003 — the Saturday before Thanksgiving. The call ended mid-sentence. She said “Okay, okay.” Then silence. The man who took her from that parking lot was Alf...

🎙️ Episode Overview The Week 12 after-action. Morgan pulls back from the evidence and asks the methodology question: what does the Greenberg case actually teach us? Starting with January 2026 and the federal subpoenas, he works backward through three structural lessons — on scene classification, on institutional pressure, and on the permanence of scene erasure — before landing on the week’s method...

🎙️ Episode Overview The Thursday Night Master Class for Week 12 goes back to zero. Before the autopsies. Before the lawyers. Before the federal subpoenas. Back to 6:30 PM on January 26, 2011 — the moment Sam Goldberg called 911 and a Philadelphia officer pulled up to a sixth-floor apartment in Manayunk. Morgan walks through what a trained investigator should have seen, done, and documented at that...

🎙️ Episode Overview Thursday’s episode builds the analytical map the entire week has been leading toward. After Monday’s Inherited Verdict, Tuesday’s Assumption Stack, and Wednesday’s Stress Test, today we apply the Known vs. Knowable framework — a four-category system that forces precision about what kind of evidence we actually have. The categories: Established, Strongly Implied, Contested, and...

🎙️ Episode Overview Wednesday’s episode is the stress test. We take every system that touched the Ellen Greenberg case — police, medical examiner, attorneys, prosecutors — and run each one against the standard it should have met. Not to assign blame. To understand exactly where, when, and why the evidentiary foundation of this case collapsed. The answer: it collapsed in the first twenty-four hours...

🎙️ Episode Overview The suicide ruling in the Ellen Greenberg case is not based on physical evidence alone. It is built on a stack of assumptions — premises that were accepted rather than tested, inferences that were treated as conclusions. In today’s episode, Morgan names every assumption the ruling rests on and tests each one against the documented evidence. Five of the six fail. The sixth was n...

🎙️ Episode Overview Ellen Greenberg, 27, was found dead in her locked Philadelphia apartment on January 26, 2011 — a blizzard day — with 20 stab wounds, a kitchen knife still in her chest, and a swing latch engaged from the inside. The medical examiner initially ruled homicide. Three months later, under institutional pressure, he reversed it to suicide. Her parents have fought the ruling ever sinc...

🎙️ Episode Overview Friday closes Week 11 with the After-Action synthesis. Morgan draws together everything the week produced — the inherited verdict, the assumption stack, the systems stress test, the Known vs. Knowable map, and the First Officer on Scene Master Class — into the methodology finding for the Steinberg case. He evaluates the corrective mechanisms the case generated, names the three...

🔍 Episode Summary At 6:35 AM on November 2, 1987, NYPD officers walked into a Greenwich Village apartment and had approximately ninety seconds before they had to start making decisions. Tonight’s Master Class reconstructs the Steinberg case from the first moment — applying the First Officer on Scene framework to examine what the responding officers found, what the dual-victim problem required the...

🎙️ Episode Overview Wednesday maps the cascading failure architecture of the Steinberg case — five separate institutional systems, each making decisions defensible within its own narrow frame, collectively producing a result none of them would have chosen if they could see the full picture. This is the Systems Stress Test applied to institutional invisibility: the specific failure at each point, w...