Criminal - Ghostwatch

Episode Date: October 21, 2022

On Halloween night, in 1992, an unusual television special aired on the BBC. Nobody expected what happened next. “The technicians were looking up at the big screen in the lobby, saying to each other, ‘My God, what's going on in Studio One?'”  Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey

involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. The program you're about to watch is a unique live investigation of the supernatural.

It contains material which some viewers may find to be disturbing. No creaking gates, no gothic towers, no shutter windows. Yet for the past 10 months, this house has been the focus of an astonishing barrage of supernatural activity. On Halloween night in 1992, at 9.25 p.m, an unusual television show aired on the BBC. So welcome live this Halloween night to the first ever TV Ghost Watch. We're going to investigate one of the most baffling and fascinating areas of human experience, the supernatural. Tonight, television is going ghost hunting in an unprecedented scientific experiment where I hope to show you, for the first time, irrefutable proof that ghosts really do exist.

The host, a long-time BBC talk show host and journalist named Michael Parkinson, told viewers how the live investigation would work. The BBC's Sarah Green would be spending the night at a house that was said to be haunted with a small camera crew, reporting live on whatever happened at the house. During the show, people at home could call a phone number, broadcast on the screen, and share their own experiences with ghosts, and also to comment on whatever they were seeing on the show. This style of live broadcast was popular at the time. There was a show called Crime Watch, that also had a call-in element,

and one called Hospital Watch. This one, on Halloween night, was called Ghost Watch. The host, Michael Parkinson, introduced a woman in the studio with him as an expert on the paranormal, who would help explain what was going on during the show. She said she'd been investigating the haunted house, which was in London, on a street called Foxhill Drive, for months. We ran a computer program of all the haunted locations in the UK, and then we did a census of all the various investigators, and they were all unanimous that Foxall had more tangible phenomena on record

than, well, I was going to say any place in the world, but certainly any place in the UK. What's the chance, do you think, of us seeing anything tonight? I don't honestly know. Sometimes we saw nothing for weeks, and then other times things were coming through thick and fast. I mean, so much so that we had difficulty logging it all. I mean, some nights it was like being in a circus or a war zone.

A war zone? Mm, it was that bad. What about Halloween? Will that make any difference, do you think? Yeah, I think it will. Certainly there are more reports on Halloween than almost any other night of the year, but maybe that's because people expect to see things. I've always been interested in ghost stories. This is Stephen Volk.

By 1992, when Ghostwatch aired, he'd written a few horror movies. One of them was directed by the same person who directed The Exorcist. Another was a reimagining of the vacation to Switzerland that inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein. He'd been interested in the ways novels like Frankenstein or Bram Stoker's Dracula are constructed. Both novels are presented as non-fiction, a series of letters and journal entries. And it struck me that many, many literary ghost stories that you read begin, I'm going to tell you something that's quite unbelievable, but I really want you to know this really, really happened to me. I know you're not going to believe me, but it really did happen to me. And being a television writer, I always

thought to myself, what is the television equivalent of telling that kind of ghost story with that kind of authenticity? And it struck me, well, what they would do in TV, if they told a ghost story is just put a camera in someone's face. And the person would tell you, this really happened to me. This is, you know, what non-fiction TV is all about. You interview people straight to their face and they tell you the story. So Stephen decided to do just that. He wrote a ghost story and pitched the idea to the BBC. It would be a ghost story

presented as an actual live documentary investigation. Everything was designed to look as real as possible, but it only aired once. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Stephen Voigt was used to writing movies. But writing what was supposed to look like live television was something else altogether. Live TV was full of mistakes and interruptions, and you never knew what would happen. He studied telethons and roving reporter pieces in shows in front of live audiences. It was a bit of guesswork.

And I had, you know, for instance, in a movie, when you're writing a movie, you never put exposition on the screen. You never have someone saying, oh, I moved into this house and it was haunted and my kids were scared. You just don't do it like that. And of course, that's the complete reverse of what you do on television. You always thrust a microphone into someone's face and have them tell you a story or

interview them and ask them questions straight. So I had to construct these kind of interview situations and question and answer sessions rather than the way I'd normally do it in a movie. And what was the reaction from the BBC when you first brought them this idea? I don't think they quite got what it was trying to be, which was basically something that looked like something else. So when the BBC saw what we were up to, it was a bit kind of taken aback and kind of bemused. I remember the executive producer, Richard Brook, when he saw the first cut that Leslie, the director, presented to him. He was quite amazed that there was a shot where one of the technicians kind of moved in the front of the camera and the camera kind of wobbled. And he said, why on earth have you left that in?

One of the things that I love about live TV or what I did love as a child watching live TV are the mistakes. This is Leslie Manning, the director of Ghostwatch. To do credit to the story as written, I wanted to present it as close to live TV as I possibly could. Like Stephen, Leslie says she watched a lot of live TV to prepare. She says she also watched a lot of documentaries to see how she could direct the actors.

She remembers telling them to dial back their performances. In addition to the actors, she included real people on camera talking about their own ghost stories. The Ghostwatch team also decided to use very well-known and respected BBC hosts on the show, people viewers would be used to seeing doing interviews or documentary programs. It was a gamble because we were casting people like Michael Parkinson, who's kind of like a Larry King kind of character, I guess you would say, in terms of America, to kind of be an actor. And there was no guarantee that he was going to be able to do any of it really. Leslie says they also didn't want actors playing the camera crew.

So we asked around the BBC if there was anybody, any of the studio camera guys who actually were happy to be on camera. And we got two people back, one Sam, one camera, and they got the job. There was a lot of handheld camera. Leslie tended to work out quite long takes so that the camera would be moving around the whole time, upstairs, downstairs, you know, around the corner and this kind of thing, which is not normally how you'd work on a movie, for instance. You know, you'd have hundreds of angles and hundreds of shifts of lighting in order to do one sequence or one scene. And it was low quality. It was a video

camera. I mean, I think that's what outraged the higher up people at the drama department because they were used to um something that was kind of well lit and kind of in a way kind of well acted and well presented and you know the composition of every shot was considered but because of the nature of this, none of those things really mattered. The only thing that mattered was it had to look like it was happening before your eyes. And if it's happening before your eyes, all those other considerations don't really matter. The point of it was really, do you believe everything you see on television? On the first page of the Ghostwatch script,

Stephen wrote, I won't believe it until I see it on TV. On Halloween night, on the BBC's drama time slot, when they usually showed movies, a short introduction indicated that what viewers were about to see was fictional, but it was vague. It described Ghostwatch as a film and the real BBC hosts in Ghostwatch as starring in it.

If you miss that, then goodness knows what you were expecting. According to the BBC, around 11 million people were watching on Halloween night. The program began with what looks like time-stamped research footage from a few months earlier. It shows two girls sleeping in their bedroom. Then, in the middle of the night, there's a loud banging sound, and they start screaming.

At one point, the light bulb in the bedside lamp bursts. Soon after that, the camera goes to what looks like a live feed of the reporter at the house, Sarah Green, interviewing the two girls, Kim and Suzanne, and their mother, Pam, all played by actresses, about the problems they've been having at the house over the last ten months. These terrible noises, like me me coming from the walls,

like a thudding. All around you? Yes, like the whole room was going to come apart. Did anybody else hear it? Yes, Suzanne Kim heard it. Kimmy, if you heard it too, what sort of a noise was it? I was screaming, I was shouting

what is it, what is it? Well I didn't know what to say they were that terrified so I said it was pipes near central heating so afterwards whenever Kim heard something she'd say it's pipes, pipes is here. In the studio someone had called into the phone line. The caller said they saw something

in the earlier footage of the girls' bedroom. You know, at the beginning, when you showed the real footage of that haunted bedroom, well, I know it was dark, but I was sure I could see a figure standing behind, against the wall, just by the curtain. Very, very vague, but definitely a figure there. Michael Parkinson asked to have the tape rewound so everyone could see it again. And then, you could make out a figure standing by the curtains. But the presenter, Michael Parkinson, says, I don't see anything, do you?

Whereas it has been on screen. So I imagined everyone at home going, but I did see something. He's saying he didn't see anything. And I love that idea. It's an idea that's purely television. You couldn't do it in a movie. You couldn't do it in a book.

It's purely the relationship between the presenter and the audience making that moment work. As the program continued, more calls came in about the figure. Well, the strange thing is that we're still getting calls about that shadowy figure that was seen in the haunted bedroom, or people think they've seen in the haunted bedroom. Now, what's really weird is these are all tallying with the description these are all different phone calls they're generally all saying that it's an old man or a woman uh bald with a skull-like head dark eyes or some are just saying holes for eyes and wearing a black robe or a dress which is buttoned up to the neck things got stranger and stranger at the house.

There are cat sounds coming from the walls. Do you hear it? And one of the girls suddenly has scratches all over her face. What's wrong, Susie? At that point, about an hour into the program, Michael Parkinson tells viewers that they're extending coverage beyond the scheduled window. I should tell you, if you're joined to see the next program,

that in fact we're staying with what we have here from Fox Hill Drive because the events are so remarkable and dramatic that we'll be staying with them for as long as we have to. Things continue to escalate in the house. It seems as if at one point one of the girls becomes possessed. Stop it! Stop it, Susie! Then the connection with the studio is lost. And after it comes back, the reporter, Sarah Green, gets trapped in the small closet under the stairs with whatever is haunting the house.

Sarah? Sarah? Yeah, at that point, Ruth, the producer, always said, you know, everyone's going to realise it's a drama now so we can do what we like. So we kind of went a bit crazy in the last five minutes. Back at the studio, unmanned cameras start rolling across the stage. Studio lights are exploding. And Michael Parkinson seems totally confused.

We haven't got a emergency generator. Whether or not we should bring it in, I don't know. I'm not going. Studio's completely dark. Just blackness now. All the lights are filled, the power's gone off. We've got some lights in the studio. I don't know, there's cameras, but I don't know which one's working.

I mean, there are no cameramen. I mean, it's difficult to know, even if anybody's still with us. But if they are, this is the scene in this studio, this totally deserted studio. He slowly walks towards the camera. Water keeps working. And it becomes clear that he's become possessed by something as the camera feeds to black. Round and round the garden like a teddy bear. We'll be right back.

Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these Series Essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey

involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence. We're answering all your questions.

What should you use it for? What tools are right for you? And what privacy issues should you ultimately watch out for? And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. The night Ghostwatch aired, everyone who worked on it got together to have a party and to watch the show. In part, so that no one would see Sarah Green at a restaurant when she was supposed to be trapped in a haunted house. The producer, Ruth Baumgarten, was at the BBC studios to make sure everything was going well. She wanted to keep an eye on the phone lines.

They'd posted the normal BBC number on the screen during Ghostwatch, both to give the illusion that the calls on the show were really coming in live and to allow viewers at home to call in and react. Towards the end of the night, Ruth joined the rest of the crew at the party. She said that as she was leaving, the technicians were looking up at the big screen in the lobby, saying to each other, my God, what's going on in Studio One? And that was the first time she thought, oh my God, even the technicians watching the thing go out are starting to worry about what's happening. And by the time she got to us, she said,

the phone system at the BBC was jammed. There were hundreds of complaints logged, and it all went a bit crazy. Ruth and director Leslie Manning had prepared for some worried callers during the show. They had operators ready to tell anyone who called that the whole thing was fake, just a Halloween special. But there were too many calls and not enough operators. The BBC estimated that 20,000 people called that night.

The people that complained, there was quite a wide range of different reactions. Some people were genuinely scared. Some people were outraged because they feel they were made a mug, like someone had played a trick on them, you know, like a candid camera. And also there was this additional level of the trust that's invested in the BBC to tell the truth, you know, and to be the nation's protector in a way. BBC was the first television station and for decades, the only television station. So all the way through the Second World War, both in radio and TV, the BBC was relied on for national news.

So that's why, colloquially, it's known as Auntie, because the BBC is relied on as kind of one of the family, if you like, for reliability and trust, which I think added to their sense of outrage. The phrase that sort of stuck was that Aunty had broken faith with the nation. Director Leslie Manning. I was totally surprised by the whole reaction. The BBC show Points of View read letters from viewers after Ghostwatch aired. One person said the BBC should be locked up.

Someone else said the show was brilliant and that it wasn't the BBC's fault that people didn't understand that it was fiction. Another BBC show, called Bite Back, also responded. Hello and welcome to Bite Back, the program in which you, the viewer, take the program makers to task. And there are hundreds of you who want to do exactly that,

following Halloween night, when the BBC pretended to investigate the supernatural in Ghostwatch. The switchboard was jammed with complaints, reports that children were terrified, pregnant women had gone into labour, and intelligent people felt duped. Conversely, many of the 11 million who watched it thought it was a brilliant piece of television. Well, what was it, a treat or a dangerous trick? This wasn't the first time the BBC had aired a hoax. 35 years earlier, on April Fool's Day in 1957, the BBC aired a very short segment on a current affairs programme

about farmers in Switzerland who grew spaghetti. After picking, the spaghetti is laid out to dry in the warm alpine sun. Many people are often puzzled by the fact that spaghetti is produced at such uniform length. But this is the result of many years of patient endeavor by plant breeders who've succeeded in producing the perfect spaghetti. A lot of people believed it. In part because not many people cook spaghetti at home in England in the 1950s, but also because the fake documentary looks real. Even the director general of the BBC tried to look up spaghetti

in the Encyclopedia Britannica after he watched the segment. But the encyclopedia didn't even have an entry for spaghetti at the time. Some viewers called in to ask where they could get a spaghetti tree for themselves, and whether it would grow in English weather. BBC operators had been coached to stick with the joke and say, place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best. One viewer said he thought

the program had used trick photography because, quote, spaghetti grows horizontally, not vertically. But the BBC reported that most of the callers, quote, did not quite grasp what was going on, but somehow felt spaghetti does not grow on trees,

and that most of the people who called in took the joke well. The viewers of Ghostwatch were much more upset. Even though the show ran after 9pm, the publicized time when the BBC transitioned to content that might not be appropriate for children, many children did watch it, and many of them were

scared. One viewer on the Bite Back program said she knew it was a spoof, but her son didn't. He reacted instantly. He was very spoof, but her son didn't. He reacted instantly. He was very distressed instantly to something very sinister in the presentation, and nothing had actually happened.

And I think you mentioned that you were anxious to put it against the ghost story, against a contemporary background. I think it's that, actually, that made it most sinister. Martin Plum, you want to make a point? I didn't know it was a drama. I've got three children, 14, 12 and 10, and I just thought that it was going to be a very safe... And were they frightened?

Well, yes, to the degree that my youngest child, who was 10, rushed out of the room, vomited in the hall, was absolutely ashen-faced, wouldn't even talk about the thing for two or three hours. It was at one o'clock in the morning that I got her to talk about it, and she wouldn't sleep in her own bed for two nights. Five days after Ghostwatch aired in 1992, a teenager with intellectual disabilities died by suicide. His parents said the show caused their son's death. They said he had seemed hypnotized by the show and that when the pipes in their house made the same banging sound

as the ghost in Ghostwatch, he became upset. He asked to move bedrooms and spoke to his parents often about ghosts. The note he left read, Please don't worry. If there are ghosts, I will be a ghost, and I will be with you always as a ghost. His stepfather told reporters,

In my own mind, I hold the BBC completely responsible for his death. His parents sent in a formal complaint to the Broadcasting Standards Council, which eventually concluded that the BBC had quote, a duty to do

more than simply hint at the deception it was practising on the audience. The BBC reaction was really to batten down the hatches and pretend the programme never happened. I think a memo went round that nobody should ever mention it again. Seven years later, the movie The Blair Witch Project used a similar documentary-style approach. The movie was presented as found footage that had been shot by three film students who had decided to take recording equipment into the woods to investigate a series of murders

rumored to have been committed by a witch. The students never make it out of the woods, but what they recorded eventually does. The way the movie was marketed made it hard to tell if it was real or not. It was 1999, and the marketing team used the relatively new internet to create confusion. They posted missing persons photos in chat rooms, and even the movie's IMDb page made it seem like the cast was missing. Three years later, the British Film Institute released a 10-year anniversary DVD of Ghostwatch, and many people were finally able to see it for the first time. Since then, the documentary-style format has become popular in horror movies, like Paranormal Activity.

But Stephen says that when Ghostwatch came out, this kind of style wasn't so well-known. And even people close to him, who knew exactly what he was trying to make, were still confused by the show. A couple of weeks before it aired on Halloween, I spent some time with a friend of mine and said as I was leaving,

oh, by the way, I've got this drama going out on Halloween night. Let me know what you think, as one does. And I spoke to her after the event and she said, oh, I thought it was real. And I said, what do you mean you thought it was real? I told you I'd written it. And she said, oh, yeah, but when I saw Michael Parkinson, I thought you must have got something wrong.

And that maybe is the power of the kind of image of TV that however much you tell people it might not be real you know perceptually it feels real and that for me was the whole purpose of it is to actually get the audience to think what what am I looking at? What am I listening to? Do I believe this? You know, can I believe my eyes? You know, one of the things that happened that was kind of part of our psyche, if you like, when we made Ghostwatch, was it was during the time of the first Gulf War. We remember seeing some footage by CNN, would it be, or NBC, news footage of the bombing of Baghdad.

And the news station had put music over it. And Ruth, the producer, said, look at this. They put music over the bombing. And it's kind of like that's a drama convention, but they've used it on news, you know? And I was seeing, you know, like shows like Kill Street Blues or NYPD Blue where documentary techniques like handheld cameras were being used in drama to make it look like documentary. And documentaries like Rescue 999 were using actors to reenact scenes that had happened to people. So actors were being used in nonfiction, and fiction was starting to look like documentary.

So it's a blurring of the edges between these things in the early 90s, and that was very much what we were playing with, you know, what is truth and what is made up. Many publications have called Ghostwatch a descendant of the most famous broadcast hoax. Orson Welles' 1938 radio drama adaptation of H.G. Welles' The War of the Worlds. It was broadcast on October 30th, just before Halloween. If you don't know it, the War of the Worlds was presented as breaking news about a strange object landing on a farm in New Jersey, and what happened after it opened. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most terrifying thing I've ever witnessed. Wait a minute.

Someone's crawling out of something. I can see it coming out of that black hole through luminous disks. The eyes, it might be a face, it might be almost heaven. Something breaking out of the shadow like a gray snake. Now it's another one and another one and another one. They look like tentacles to me. During the rest of the broadcast, reports continue to come in about Martians invading New Jersey and New York,

and possibly the rest of the country. But the broadcast ends with an announcement from Orson Welles. This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen. Out of character to assure you that the War of the Worlds has no further significance than at the holiday offering it was intended to be. The Mercury Theater's own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying boo. So goodbye, everybody, and remember, please, for the next day or so, the terrible lesson you learned tonight. That grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and nobody's there, that was no Martian. It's Halloween.

The next day, newspapers reported that listeners had really believed that there was a Martian invasion and had panicked. Orson Welles told papers that he didn't expect most people to believe the broadcast was real, but said that, we can only suppose that the special nature of radio, which is often heard in fragments or in parts disconnected from the whole, has led to this misunderstanding. The FCC received more than 600 letters, telegrams, and petitions in response to War of the Worlds, many of them asking it to do something to punish the people who'd made it

or something to prevent this from happening again. But many of the letters the FCC received also praised the War of the Worlds and warned against any move that might promote censorship. One letter from North Carolina read, If you take them to task over this, won't you also have to stop fairy tales and stories about Santa Claus to keep a gullible public from becoming excited? The FCC conducted a formal investigation,

and in the end, they decided not to take any action. And broadcast hoaxes continued. This is Kevin Reiter. I work at KLOS in the afternoon, and I was part of the Kevin and Bean Morning Radio Show in Los Angeles at KROQ. We'll be right back. and empty calories? You don't need to wait for the new year to start fresh. New year, new me? How about same year, new me? You just need a different approach. According to Noom, losing weight has less to do with discipline and more to do with psychology. Noom is the

weight loss management program that focuses on the science behind food cravings and building sustainable eating habits. Noom wants to help you stay focused on what's important to you with their psychology and biology-based approach. Noom takes into account your unique biological factors, Bye. And since everyone's journey is different, so are your daily lessons. They're personalized to help you reach your goal. Stay focused on what's important to you with Noom's psychology and biology-based approach. Sign up for your trial today at Noom.com. Support for this podcast comes from Klaviyo. You know that feeling when your favorite brand really gets you. Deliver that feeling to your customers every time.

Klaviyo turns your customer data into real-time connections across AI-powered email, SMS, and more, making every moment count. Over 100,000 brands trust Klaviyo's unified data and marketing platform to build smarter digital relationships with their customers during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and beyond. Make every moment count with Klaviyo. Learn more at klaviyo.com slash BFCM. 33 years ago, in 1989, Kevin Ryder got his dream job as a radio DJ at K-Rock in Los Angeles. He had DJ'd before, but this would be his first morning drive-time call-in show. Which was, it's insanity to think that I got my first morning show in Los Angeles at a station like K-Rock. For people who aren't from Los Angeles, what is K-Rock? How big of a station is it? K-Rock is a legendary station mainly because it was really kind of a nothing station with a terrible signal. And people that got it started playing interesting music,

like punk music in the late 70s, that no one else in Los Angeles was playing. And then in the 80s came New Wave, and you've got Depeche Mode, and you've got The Cure, and no other radio station in Los Angeles was playing that either. And the impact that K-Rock had through the years is, it's impossible to measure. I mean, we were the first station to play the Ramones, first persons to play Van Halen. And from that standpoint, it was a monstrous station, even though it was run like a five

and dime store. Kevin says he wasn't qualified for the job, but there was no way he was going to say no. He hosted the show each weekday morning with another DJ, Gene Bean Baxter. Kevin says they got up around 4 a.m. every day to start getting ready. The format was they'd play four songs an hour and talk four times an hour. Sometimes it wouldn't be until the songs were fading that they'd come up with what they'd talk about.

Kevin says that every day they'd try to find a way to get people to call in. And one day, they came up with an idea they called Confess Your Crime. It started out as just everybody commits crimes, however small they may be. Maybe you go 56 in a 55 mile per hour, that's committing a crime. So, you know, there's a whole scale of sizes of the crimes that you commit. So we thought it would be funny for people to call in and tell us the crime that they had done and most likely gotten away with. And we thought it would be stupid stuff like I stole a car and I got caught the next morning because I was sleeping in it alongside the road. Or something like – it was a very lighthearted suggestion at first.

And it wasn't going incredibly well. You get that feeling when you're in the middle of something that it's not really what you hoped it would be. Listeners called in to confess that they'd stolen bowling balls, that they'd run over a cat, or that they were sleeping with their girlfriend's mother. The calls we were getting were really lame. You know, I parked in a no parking zone kind of stuff that's not interesting. And so, you know, we were screening for people and we were trying to get calls and it was really difficult because sometimes stuff just doesn't work. And then this person calls and says, I think I may have killed my girlfriend.

106.7 KROQ, it's KROQ, Wednesday morning, 10 till 9, we're doing Confess Your Crime. We have some more on hold, and let's go to those now. Hello? Hi, what's your name? I'd really rather not say. You want to confess a crime this morning? Yeah, I heard you guys talking, and I just kind of, you know, I don't know, I just kind of felt like I really needed to tell somebody about

this. This guy sounds serious. Well, what happened? Tell us about it. Well, I had this, you know, girlfriend for, you know, like about six years, and we were right on the verge of getting married and all this stuff, and I came home, and I caught her with somebody. You caught your girlfriend with another man? Yeah. Okay. And a good friend of mine, as a matter of fact. Oh, really? All right. So what'd you do? And I don't, you know, honestly, I don't, I don't know what happened. I don't know if she's, uh... Sir, what are you saying? Well, I don't know if she's, I don't, I don't even know if she's still, uh, if she made it through, actually.

Sir, is there, is there a chance, chance seriously that you might have killed your girlfriend? Yeah, I know I did. Sir, let us try to get you some help. Can you hold on the phone just a minute? I think I'd really better go. I mean, if you want us to get you in contact with... No, I've been... Hello?

Hello? The call was fake. We had called a friend of ours in Phoenix, who we had known from working with him at a station there, and woke him up. And we said, hey, we need to juice up this topic a little bit. It's not really going well. So can you, you know, we're doing something called Confess Your Crime. Can you just say something that's a little bit, you know, that's got something that gets people's attention? And we were talking to a guy who was just waking up while the song was fading. And we threw out, you know, you stole a car, you got in a fight, you did whatever.

And somebody said something about hurting a girlfriend. And then when he said that on the air, he said, I think I may have killed my girlfriend. It was felt like getting hit in a head on collision because that was one billion miles further than we had hoped. And I just remember being in a fog. Like one second we were in charge of everything and the next second I didn't know what was happening and I couldn't process what was being said quick enough. So it felt like I was in a haze. I don't remember what we said back to him. I don't remember hanging up.

I don't remember any of it. And then the TV stations wanted to interview us about it. The timeline that I remember is our producer coming into the studio and saying, I just got a call from KCBS and KNBC and all these stations want to interview you. And I remember, this is the first thing that I remember clearly, is that I said to Bean, we have to go talk about this. And we went into the restroom. We made sure no one else was in there.

And I said, look, yes, it was faked, but we'll get fired if we tell the truth. Also, we know for a fact that there's no crime, that it was something somebody made up on the phone. So, you know, the police could search for the rest of their lives. They would find nothing because there was nothing because it was made up. So I said, because there's no crime for anyone to find, let's just deny, deny, deny, and it'll go away. So they agreed never to tell anyone. And within, I don't know, five minutes, we had requests from all the major TV stations to do interviews about that call.

And what did we know about it? And how did it come about? And did we know the person? And, you know, could we tell if it was true or not? And, you know, we didn't, we said we didn't have any of those answers. We said, we don't know. We don't know who calls us and if they're telling the truth or not. Later in the show, they apologized to their listeners for what they'd heard on air and read some helpline numbers.

Kevin says that when they finally finished their show, a sheriff was waiting for them in the station's lobby. Who was asking for a copy of the air check, the tape. And they gave it to a voice expert who said that who could it have been and does it match any of the cases that we're working on. And it just sort of started from there. Why do you think he was so convincing in the call? I can tell you exactly because I've talked to him about it. He was high, smoking marijuana, and had gone to bed two hours before that. So he was just in a complete haze. And he almost never answers the phone, but he saw it was us. And his room was dark and he picked up

the phone and he literally, I mean, literally had no idea what was going on. And we were probably talking a little too quickly because the song was fading and we needed him to do something. So that's, he was just out of it and was trying to help us out. As the days went on and you realize now the police were taking this seriously and trying and was trying to help us out. As the days went on and you realize now the police were taking this seriously and trying to investigate it, did you and Jean continue to check in and say, maybe it's gone too, maybe now we've got to say something? Oh, you mean with each other? Yeah.

No, not really. I think we sort of had cast the die. We sort of had said, okay, well, this is going to be our response. And every time somebody brought it up in any way, I wanted to crawl in a hole. And then the case was covered on the TV show Unsolved Mysteries, which reportedly resulted in 400 people getting in touch with the police. One of the things that I said, the only thing that I remember saying, other than the line that we had created the whole time, which is, we don't know who calls us, we don't know if what they say is real. For some reason, I didn't feel like that was enough for Unsolved Mysteries, so I actually said the sentence, there are definite lines that

you don't cross, and that's one of them. There are real definite lines that you do not cross. Obviously, everybody's trying to get ratings, trying to get noticed, trying to be this and that, but there are lines that you just don't cross, and that's one of them. I don't know that anyone could sit down and say, someone confessing to murder will make our ratings go up. Then Gene comes in. You know, all we could say is, you know, the experts feel that this guy was legitimate. It's no one we know, and as far as we're concerned,

you know, that's his story. We certainly hope it's not true. You know, I'd trade whatever publicity we got from it, you know, for the story not to be true, because it's pretty grim, really. For nearly ten months, they kept up the lie. K-Rock unknowingly ended up hiring the man who had called in, Doug Roberts. He had never told anyone either.

And then, one day, it all fell apart during Doug's show. He called us off the air one time when he was doing a shift. Kevin says during the call they talked about the murder confession. They thought it was a private conversation. But the way the studio was set up, two colleagues overheard them, and one of them called a reporter at the L.A. Times. So she called our general manager, Tripp Reeb, and she said, Tripp, I'm really sorry to have to ask you this

because I know this is old, but is there any possibility that they faked it? And Tripp assured her that there wasn't. And she said, would you mind asking? And he said, yeah, I'll ask, no problem. So he called us in, and Tripp said, was that phone call fake? And we said, yeah, yes, it was. And he had to call the L.A. Times back and tell them that it was fake,

and then it all started again with the L.A. Times. The headline was, will K-Rock get away with murder? A morning DJ at another radio station was quoted in the article saying, I think that morning radio has gotten to be one giant trash bin that we need to examine a little bit. Another DJ said, to stoop to such a sleazy level, to get another tenth of a ratings point, spits in the face of everything Bob Dylan and John Lennon and the Rolling Stones and U2 stand for.

Another said, They couldn't have bought press like this. The general manager of another radio station told the reporter, I think they went so far and they couldn't get out. It's like a kid who steals. All of a sudden you tell a lie and you have to tell another lie to get out of the first lie. KROQ suspended Kevin and his co-host Gene Baxter without pay. And the whole time we just were assuming that that was our KROQ career. That was it.

We had the golden ticket, the great opportunity, and we threw it away. And there was really nothing else to be done at that point. Kevin and Jean weren't charged. But the company that owned KROQ told them to pay back the sheriff's department $12,170 for the money it had spent on the investigation, and to do 149 hours of community service to compensate for the 149 hours the homicide detective spent on the case. The homicide detective told the L.A. Times that he'd had multiple people contact him about their missing loved ones, hoping the on-air confession would be a clue.

One woman, whose daughter had been killed a couple of months before the prank call, was quoted saying, The DJs have obviously never had anything serious or painful happen in their lives. The FCC launched an investigation into the hoax to determine whether management ever knew about it. If they did, the station could lose its license. The commission heard testimony under oath from multiple KROQ staffers.

Kevin and Gene were both at the hearing. To be denied, this was the ultimate radio, this was the best radio station in the world. And it was devastating to think that this radio station that we worshipped might go down because we were idiots. It just felt like if this happens, I don't know how I'll ever get over that. In the end, K-Rock received a letter of reprimand, the lightest punishment the FCC could give. Kevin and Gene continued doing their morning show for the next 28 years.

And I do think since that happened, you know, that was 1991 when we went to court. I think we earned that trust back, but it took a while because people were a little hesitant and it took a while for us to, you know, help people understand that we're decent people that you can trust. And we're also idiots at times. But, you know, we're never going to be that level of idiot again. You know, one of the things that you, one of the only things that you have between a radio station and its listeners is trust. And that trust when it's, you know, when it's betrayed like that, feels like, you know, you've been betrayed by a family member. And I just, if there was one thing that I could edit out of my life, it would be that. I wish it didn't happen.

In our next episode, a broadcast hoax. The tour of City Apart. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajico, Libby Foster, and Samantha Brown. Our technical director is Rob Byers, engineering by Russ Henry. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. If you like the show, tell a friend or leave us

a review. It means a lot. We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show and Instagram at Criminal underscore Podcast We're on TikTok at Criminal underscore Podcast where we're posting some behind-the-scenes content Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Dratch. This is Criminal.

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