Domino Effect of Murder

Kimberly Womack's death certificate says she died from homicide due to blunt force trauma to the left side of her head and multiple broken ribs. Yet, County Coroner Bo Clark had her cremated almost immediately, violating Louisianna state law. (This is one of over 100 such cases of Dr. Clark's and one of over 800 in the state of Louisianna). No one is providing answers to her only child, her now-gr...

Eric Christiansen is on a mission as a filmmaker-documentarian. After losing his home to the 1990 Santa Barbara Painted Cave Fire (one of California's most destructive man-made disasters on record) he devoted his talent, time, resources and energy to creating stunning, powerful accounts of survivors who have had a front-row seat to suffering. His subjects are trauma survivors: those who endured 91...

Sharon McConnel Dickerson is a study in contrasts. She is a blind international artist. She is petite yet intrepid. She does not speak Spanish, never traveled to Panama, never studied crime scene investigation, yet stopped the serial killer who murdered her close friend in Boco del Toro, Panama. She accomplished this with only a phone and determination born out of grief for her pal, Beau. Listen a...

Kevin McCall, a grieving father, allows us a private retelling of events surrounding the senseless murder of his 21-year old son, Ryan, at U of Tampa and the long wait before the assailant was captured. Kevin reveals the toll it took on his family and the lack of closure brought by a conviction. Kevin kept a personal journal throughout the ordeal, never intending to publish it, but that is eventua...

Journalist /podcast host Javier Leiva (Pretend Radio and Criminal Conduct) worked alongside future murderer Vester Lee Flanagan II (aka Bryce Williams) at CBS affiliate WDBJ in Roanoke, Virginia. They lost contact, but Javier vividly remembers the morning Vester opened fire on two colleagues (Alison Parker and Adam Ward) on live television, August 26, 2015. This explicit, public tragedy even caugh...

A grisly vehicular homicide on a very hilly, rural Ohio road changed the trajectory of our next guest's life forever. Tammy Ward describes the depth and breadth of her loss when her sister Cindy perished along with four of her high school friends after being broadsided by an airborne vehicle. The irony is that that same road, Roller Coaster Road, guaranteed joy decades earlier when the family woul...

Ned Barnett's life began to unravel in September of 1999 when he lost his son to a vehicular fatality. The family imploded. Seven years later, his wife revealed the depth of her grief by placing a gun to her chest and pulling the trigger. Ned found her shortly afterward. But it was about to get worse. When the sheriff arrived he charged Ned with homicide. Since they had recently relocated to the t...

There is a room in a home in Pennsylvania where purple dinosaur Barney stuffed animals wait silently for a little girl who will never come. The collection is in memory of the petite toddler who loved Barney, loved life and was loved in return by her mother, aunt, grandparents, and others. But on the evening of March 12, 1994, tiny Lisa Marie McGhee was brutally murdered by her mother's live-in boy...

When Professor Bill Jenkins's teenage son was murdered at work in 1997, resources to help homicide survivors after receiving the death notification were sorely missing. In this segment of Bill Jenkins's two-part interview, we hear how he negotiated those first tough weeks and took the scattered notes and printouts to create the backbone of a unique book that eventually won awards "What To Do When...

When Speech and Set Design Professor Bill Jenkins' 16-year-old son was murdered his second day of employment in 1997, it forcibly directed our guest on a different path. Since then Bill Jenkins has worked tirelessly on behalf of homicide survivors. In this first segment of a two-part interview, he introduces us to his wonderful son that was senselessly taken from him and the world, then addresses...

First. Where did the idea for the show originate? What makes the host an expert on coping with homicide's aftermath? What sets the show apart from true crime podcasts? What can listeners gain? These and other questions will be answered in this episode. (For more info on my backstory, read excerpts of my manuscript on the Facebook page: "A Life Divided: A psychologist's memoir about the double life...