Criminal - The Feather Lady

Episode Date: February 3, 2023

On October 4, 1960, Eastern Airlines Flight 375 took off from Boston’s Logan airport, and then, two minutes later, it crashed. 62 people died. Investigators couldn't figure out what had happened, and they decided to ask a scientist working at the Smithsonian for help. Roxie Laybourne's investigation helped launch a whole new field of science that changed aviation and forensics. Special thanks to the Smithsonian Institution Archives for letting us share audio of Roxie Laybourne. 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. Listen back through our archives at youtube.com/criminalpodcast.  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. On October 4th, 1960, Eastern Airlines Flight 375 took off from Boston's Logan Airport.

And then, two minutes later, the plane crashed into Boston Harbor. Sixty-two passengers died. Witnesses on the ground told investigators that they saw a puff of gray smoke coming from one of the engines. Others said they saw fire. Two surviving flight attendants said they felt the plane shake suddenly after takeoff.

Investigators recovered the plane wreckage from the harbor and began a nine-month investigation into what happened. They couldn't figure it out. And then one day, a box was delivered to the desk of a scientist in Washington, D.C. And, of course, in the beginning, it was what I called going fishing. Her name was Roxy Laybourne. She opened the box and got to work.

I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Roxy Laybourne was born in 1910 in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Growing up, she said her whole family was obsessed with cars and airplanes. Here she is speaking with archivists from the Smithsonian in 2001. I used to make airplanes, model planes, and design my own aircraft. When she was in college, Roxy snuck off campus to see Amelia Earhart land at the Raleigh Airport. And we saw her coming out of the aircraft and everything. And then I looked over there and I said, oh. Roxy saw her school's gym teacher and knew she was in trouble.

Because I said, I know she's going to report me. Sure enough, as soon as I got back to campus, my name was on the bulletin board to see the dean. She learned to work on plane engines, and she tried to go to aviation school to learn to fly. But she was refused entry because she was a woman. When she couldn't become a pilot, she turned to her second favorite thing, birds. As a child, she used to go out in the woods and climb trees to see owls close up.

She got a job at the North Carolina State Museum of Natural History, where she started learning taxidermy. I could mount birds, and I could do fish and deer heads, and I even tanned deer skin sometimes for myself. I learned all the rudiments of museum work. In 1944, Roxy got a job at the Smithsonian, preparing dead birds for the museum's collections. The process involves keeping the birds' feathers intact, while carefully removing all the muscle and most of the skeleton. It wasn't a huge staff by any means. I think it was, you know, just a handful of people kind of working on the taxidermy side of things at the Smithsonian back then.

Chris Sweeney is a journalist. He wrote a profile of Roxy for Audubon Magazine in 2020. Roxy was in a pretty small club, and it was mostly a boys' club too, so she was probably the first woman to do the taxidermy work at the Smithsonian. When you came to work at the museum back in those days, you came all dressed up because you didn't appear on the street of Washington without hat gloves and silk hose and all. And doing the work I was doing, I couldn't do it and not change clothes, so I changed to hospital pants.

We didn't call them slacks back in the 40s. Anyway, so this day, I went down to the restroom, and the matron said to me, men can't come in here. So I never quite forgot that. By 1960, Roxy was working full-time for the Smithsonian's Division of Birds. When the box arrived on her desk, she didn't know what to expect

or why she was being asked to help investigate a plane crash. When she opened it, there were bits of feathers inside. She described it as chewed-up feather material. Of course, I had made up bird skins. I knew a whole bird, and I also knew how to wash and dry whole birds. But getting single feathers that had gone through an aircraft, now that was a whole new ballgame. She tried to find some way to organize the evidence.

As we got into it, I realized if I was going to be able to identify these fragments of feathers, I had to find some character that would tell me what a family of birds were. I wouldn't give up. I guess what really the basis of the whole thing was, it was probably like a bulldog kept working at it. At the time, Roxy didn't have a microscope that would let her look at the samples from the plane and the feathers from the Smithsonian's collection at the same time. So she couldn't easily compare them. But she figured out a workaround. What I did, though, was make sketches of the unknown material.

And I did them on little three-by-five cards because we had plenty of those in the bird mammal distribution site. And so I would make those little sketches on those parts and then try to figure out what was in the collection to make a slide. She would take out taxidermied birds and compare the feathers under the microscope to her drawings. She started focusing on microstructures at the base of the feathers to figure out what type of bird it was.

And Roxy Laybourne eventually identified what caused the crash of Flight 375. The fact was, the plane sucked in a flock of starlings. Their electric engine shut down, and the plane crashed. It was the deadliest bird strike in aviation history. Today, many aviation experts call starlings feathered bullets because of how easily they take down a plane due to their tendency to flock in large groups. And because of their size.

Starlings weigh just three ounces and measure about eight inches long. But their bodies are much denser than other birds. Roxy's work on bird strikes helped engineers design plane engines to withstand these kinds of strikes. Now planes can survive collisions with birds up to 8 pounds, about the size of a Canada goose. At the end of the FAA's investigation, they sent Roxy a new microscope

and ordered plane mechanics across the country to collect a feather or more of whatever bird remains they found and send them to Roxy. 95% of the bird strikes occur when the plane is taking off or when it's landing. This is Carla Dove, an ornithologist at the Smithsonian and one of Roxy's former students. So if we know the species that are being hit on these various airfields, the airport managers and the biologists can go there and modify the

habitat or do something to keep those birds from being attracted to that environment, thereby reducing the risk of a bird strike on that airfield. So it's all fundamental to the species of birds involved, and that's where Roxy realized that it's important to identify these bird strikes all the way down to species level. Roxy continued to work with the FAA. She got better with every case. She usually only knew a little about the accidents. Pilots often didn't notice what kind of bird they'd hit, or even when they'd hit it.

Sometimes, she'd only know where the plane took off from and where it landed. It's a puzzle, and you have to put the pieces together. And you don't know what pieces you have, and even it may be the same species, but it's a different arrangement of the parts. And so every one is like a new thing. but it's a different arrangement of the parts. And so every one is like a new thing. Every job is a custom job. You have a general method,

but whatever material you have has to be worked around this method. Roxy started to get a reputation for her ability to identify a bird from the smallest feather. Nobody could do what she could do. And then she started getting calls from the FBI. The FBI has worked with scientists from the Smithsonian since the 1930s. But until Roxy, no one had specialized in feathers. Her first criminal case was a homicide investigation. A woman had shot her husband while he was asleep. This woman had used a pillow for sounds. So when the bullet went into his head, some of the downy barbules from that feather material

in the pillow went in along with the bullet. And they brought that in to me to identify the material. She also worked a cold case in Alaska for the FBI. They sent Roxy feathers found inside a van that they thought had been used in the kidnap and murder of a woman 10 years earlier. The woman's body had never been found, but her down jacket had washed up on the shore. Roxy determined the feathers in the van were a match to the jacket. Roxy also worked with U.S. Fish and Wildlife on poaching and smuggling cases.

And once they asked her to go undercover. I didn't do so well undercover. She was supposed to go to a National Boy Scout jamboree to see whether the scouts were using headdresses with real eagle and hawk feathers. All Roxy had to do was to inspect the headdresses and keep a low profile. She wasn't supposed to let on. She was working with law enforcement. So I was supposed to go out there and talk to the scouts

and look around and see what I see. Well, of course, with my voice, there wasn't any point. One trip undercover, now that took care of me. That wasn't my calling at all. But she did determine that the scouts were using hawk feathers that were protected.

Roxy kept getting calls. Sometimes she received feathers to examine. Sometimes whole birds. One year I had over a thousand carcasses sent to me from different agents. And I worked out a streamlined method for identifying the species using the sternum and the carcords. And I usually always kept a wing bone and a leg bone, femur. But that material was much easier to learn and identify than any feather stuff. Roxy found she didn't like to work on violent crimes. But she did like testifying in court.

On a poaching case, a man had been caught illegally buying and selling eagle feathers. American Indian tribes can get permits to use feathers for ceremonial purposes, but not to sell. He'd used the feathers in a headdress he'd tried to sell to tourists. At the trial, Roxy revealed that she had marked the feathers with blacklight powder before the man bought them. I get up and testify, holding the bonnet in front of the jury and turn the blacklight on. It lights up like a Christmas tree, and my little code marks just shine up on every feather. For a homicide and assault trial in Utah, Roxy testified that feathers found on the

victim's clothing were made up of duck and goose down, similar to the duck and goose down feathers in the defendant's coat. Once you swear in, you're playing a whole different role. You're there as this expert actor giving this testimony for the audience, which is a jury. And so you are very choice with your words. But I won't say you don't have butterflies before you step up there and raise that hand. And so you never knew what question was coming at you. She said that when she would testify in court, defense lawyers liked to zero in on her place in the chain of custody, how she got and returned the evidence to police. With her FBI work, agents

brought the evidence to her and stayed with her while she worked. But with Fish and Wildlife, she usually walked over to pick up evidence and bring it back herself. She went so often to their offices that she learned to time her walks so she didn't hit any red lights. When she described this walk in court, one lawyer commented on how dangerous Washington, D.C. could be. But I'm afraid to walk the streets of Washington, says the defense attorney. Now, what are you going to say? How are you going to answer that? Because he's already harangued about chain of custody. And you are trying to figure out a way to stop it before it gets out of your hand. Because that's all he wants, for you to make one misstep,

then all you have to do, the least little doubt in the minds of that jury, and you're banished, and that's not what you're there for. So, how are you going to answer? Well, all I could think of was, well, I walked fast. And I stopped. That's all I said. That was like a bombshell to him, and he didn't know what to come up with. I've been there when some of the jurors were asleep. You've got to wake them up.

They've got to hear your testimony. They love those kind of answers. And the best way is to say something in such a way that they'll laugh. Once you get them to laugh, then you got to keep them. And you're not going to keep them if you harangue. And they don't want to listen to all your accomplishments, because that would then is looking to talking down to them. And you can't talk up to them, or else you'll be patronized. You've got to stay right on the same level, make them feel you are one of them. Now, this is not anything I've read in the book. It's just me.

She said defense lawyers often tried to trip her up, to make her seem less credible as a witness. At one trial, a defense attorney asked Roxy, why do you think you're an expert in feather identification? I told him, well, I don't know what all my colleagues say I am, so I guess I am. 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 Thank you. WCWS, wherever you get your podcasts. With casework from the FBI, Fish and Wildlife, and the FAA, Roxy Laybourne often worked through weekends and holidays. Students recalled she never took a vacation.

So in 1980, she started training an assistant. It felt like when we were doing bird strikes, all I saw were ring-billed gulls. You know, we were identifying wing feathers of ring-billed gulls that went through a jet engine. And so to this day, I can't see a ring-billed gull without thinking about Roxy. Bethann Sabo was 22 and a master's student when she started working with Roxy, who was by then in her 70s. During the day, Bethann worked at the museum doing inventory for the bird collections. In the evenings, she would go to Roxy's lab for her training. And so I had already worked a full-time job that day, and I was usually tired by the end of an evening. But we always took a break halfway through. We went down through the Smithsonian to the little break room.

She got a Coke and peanuts. I'd get a diet Coke and peanuts. And then back up we'd go. And we'd sit and have our Coke and peanuts. And that was our break. And then we'd get right back to work. And I remember the Division of Birds had 560,000 birds in it at that time, study skins, and then about 200,000 to 250,000 skeletons.

And you climbed up these big ladders and into these three tiers of cabinets. They were metal cabinets with wooden trays in them. And pull those out, and inside would be a whole tray of study skins of birds. Roxy had done the taxidermy on many of these birds herself. There's a picture of her taken by a Smithsonian photographer. She's surrounded on all sides by dozens of open trays filled with dead birds. Each drawer has birds arranged in neat, colorful rows. Bright red parrots in one drawer, giant geese in another,

and dozens of tiny yellow warblers in another. The birds' eyes are sewn closed. They almost look like they're sleeping. Their legs are crossed and tied with an ID tag with information about when and where the bird was collected. Beth Ann had to memorize where all the birds were. She'd say, Beth Ann, I think we need a mallard duck. And so I'd scurry over to the mallard duck section, because I was 22,

and I would scurry up that ladder, and then I would look in the mallard duck drawer, you know, looking for a male, and no doubt I would bring it down, and she'd go, Bethann, that's the wrong bird. And off I'd go again. Bethann says they get a box and open it to find what looked like pocket lint. And she'd say, okay, we've got this from Kansas. All right. So then she would start talking her way through it. And, you know, you start with kind of what birds are there and then what size of bird is it and which part of the bird is this feather from or this piece of down or whatever and work from there. And so there would be all these little trays.

And then other days I would go in or go to work with her and we would go down to the marine mammal lab. And the marine mammal lab is in the courtyard at Natural History Museum, Smithsonian. And it has a very sweet smell. It's sickeningly sweet. But those days, we were going to identify lots and lots of bird carcasses, and they were typically from duck hunting overkill. So it's legal to hunt ducks, but it's not legal to kill too many. So we would have to identify, what we would do is strip off the meat, strip off all the tissue, and then put them into the domesticestid beetle colony, the remaining skeletons. And the dermestid beetles would do their work, clean them up. And then we'd go back a few weeks later, get them, clean them up, and take them up to the collection and compare them against the study skins.

So the work was very varied. So this isn't just like a nice little tray of cleaned feathers that you and Roxy were going through. I mean, you were really in these birds. We were. And often they weren't whole birds, like those duck carcasses had no heads. They were just what you would sell somebody or put in the oven. In 1988, Beth Ann went with Roxy on a raid with Fish and Wildlife in Charlottesville, Virginia. At the crack of dawn, 6 o'clock in the morning, we're all driving in a convoy of black police cars and SUVs out to this farm. Beth Ann was riding in the back seat of one of the cars with Roxy. Roxy had on her usual uniform, a white lab coat and white KED sneakers. They were driving to the estate of billionaire and media mogul John Kluge.

In the 80s, he was one of the richest men in America. I had no idea what it would be like when we got there, but we went back on this beautiful, beautiful farm, and there we parked by this hole in the ground, and they called it the pit. The pit was the crime scene. It was full of dead birds. So Roger Gebhardt was the youngest, newest agent. They made him jump down in the pit, and it stunk

because this was just like any other pit, and it stunk, because this was just like any other dump, but it was all decaying animals. How big was it? Probably like two suburbans in the ground. It must have smelled horrible. Oh, it was awful. Agent Gephardt told a reporter that it was, quote, the most vile crime scene he'd ever worked.

Roxy, who was 76 at the time, said that the smell didn't really bother her. She said, as a rule, mammals smell worse than birds. Fish and Wildlife parked a pickup truck next to the pit. Beth Ann and Roxy set up on the tailgate. Agent Gephardt handed up one body at a time. Some were badly decomposed. Others were only skeletons. And he would hand me what he thought was a carcass. I would put it up there on some kind of a tray, and Roxy and I would look it over. She would identify it and write notes. So she kept her hands clean.

I had on gloves, of course, but I was handling the birds, the in-between of the birds. And poor Roger Gephardt was in the pit. John Kluge ran an English-style shooting preserve on his estate. His wife was British, and she wanted something that reminded her of home.

The Kluges invited celebrities like Frank Sinatra and Arnold Palmer to hunt pheasants and ducks. Guests were served champagne in silver goblets and taken to the shooting grounds in horse-drawn carriages. Fish and wildlife agents received an anonymous letter that claimed the estate kept their game birds safe by killing anything that could hurt them, often birds of prey. Agents found a former employee who told them where they could find these dead birds. Fish and Wildlife brought Roxy to identify them

and see if they were protected under federal law. She worked fast. She would look at the body in Beth Ann's hand and then write her IDs on the report. Turkey vulture, partial skull, or red-tailed hawk immature, tail feathers. Beth Ann and I had enough to do. When they brought it up and we had to lay it out on the tailgate and identify it,

and we had to go as fast as you possibly could. At the end of the day, Roxy and Bethann cataloged more than 100 dead birds, mostly hawks and owls, that were protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. It can be a felony to kill them. They also found several neighborhood dogs who had been reported missing. As a matter of fact, I think they found the sheriff's beagle in that pit. The sheriff's beagle? Yeah, a dead dog.

They found, because they thought he was killing pheasants. And so I'm pretty sure that was the bottom line on that beagle. He had a collar on, of course. They didn't think to take the collar off. So the game's keepers had shot anything that they thought was, you know, going to prey on these poor pheasants. So we found red-tailed hawks and red-shouldered hawks, which would probably would not eat a pheasant. Neither of probably would not eat a pheasant. Neither of those species would eat a pheasant. It would have been raccoons and foxes preying on those pheasants.

Three estate employees were arrested and convicted of conspiring to kill the birds of prey. They were fined. No charges were brought against the Klugees at all. They were allowed to continue running a hunting preserve. Bethann remembers feeling amazed watching Roxy work. She just kept on. I mean, she was very dogged in her determination about solving puzzles. And so now I train competition search dogs.

One of the things we say is the search is the reward. It's that activity of solving that puzzle for the dog. And for me, that's the reward. And so I think that's one of the big things we had in common. Just loving to figure out what the heck happened here. We'll be right back. apps and ideas about the work we do can be radically changed by the tools we use to do it. So what is enterprise software anyway? What is productivity software? How will AI affect both? And how are these tools changing the way we use our computers to make stuff, communicate, and plan for the future? In this three-part special series, Decoder is surveying the IT landscape presented by AWS. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts.

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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. A few years into Bethann's time with Roxy, Fish and Wildlife asked them to fly out for a big poaching case. Roxy and I went to Mesa, Arizona to the Fish and Wildlife Service office there. We went through the garage. We had on our little white lab coats. We went into this double car garage room and there were two freezers on either side of the room. And all around the room were shelves of mounted birds, you know, so like taxidermy birds, fans with feathers made of feathers, single feather. I mean, it was just a crazy amount

of stuff. Fish and Wildlife needed Roxy and Bethann to identify every individual feather in the room. They knew they had illegal things there, but you can't take those things to court until they're positively identified as a protected species. So Roxy walked in and honest to God, she said, oh Bethann, oh my God. And I just started laughing because it was exactly how I was feeling. And so I said, I'll tell you what, we're going to do like we did with the pit. You just stand there, put your back to the room, and I'm going to bring you one item at a time. I'll do all the evidence handling. So the agents, you know, got things down and up on shelves,

and we just worked our way through, you know, a couple thousand. It felt like thousands of items. By this time, I was totally hooked on the puzzle solving. It was, you know, I mean, and here we were. It's the biggest test of all because it was just so much. I used to tell Beth Ann, I don't care how long you study feathers, you're never going to learn them.

And I think that's true. And I still don't know them, and I never will. I keep learning new things all the time. What made you stick around and want to learn from Roxy? I mean, could you tell that this was someone who knew their stuff? That if you wanted to know birds and you wanted to know bird feathers, that this was the right woman for you to be around? It was very clear she knew what she was talking about. I think what made me want to do it was, and stick with it was, I realized what a special position I was in. It was only me. And people began to know that Roxy had Bethann, the student, and that I would be there to facilitate both our growth. And so I just,

I really liked being with her. She was difficult because she worked so hard, but it was well worth the effort. She had a reputation for working late, sometimes until 1 o'clock in the morning. You know, I was 22, and I hadn't dated yet, and so I was starting to date. And she would say, I'd say, Roxy, I can't work on Wednesday night because I'm going to go on a date. I'm going to have dinner with somebody. And she said, Bethann, you don't need to have dinner. I was like, are you kidding me? And, you know, I didn't get it, but now I get it.

So she used to tell us, you know, your entertainment now is your work. Carla Dove, who worked with Roxy from 1989 to 1998. We used to stay late working on better cases, and we did that for years and years until I finally felt comfortable enough to do it myself. So she was a tough boss. She was tough, but she was fun. I mean, you know, she wasn't, like, she never would tell you what you had to do.

She would just keep working away. And she was a role model in that way. It's like, you do what she does, and that's how you learn. And I had to work with her on evenings and weekends and holidays. And so she would give me a ride home every evening. She had a 280Z, a black 280Z. That's a sports car? Yes, it was a very fast two-door sports car.

It turned out that I lived right around the corner from her, so she would drive me home. She loved to go fast. This woman in her 80s loved to drive that car, and she probably was not the best driver that should have been driving a little sports car. But we got some pretty strange looks sometimes as we were riding home on the express lane in her little 280ZX. Some of my favorite memories are talking to her in the car because I just, those times with her,

when I think you're often not lucky enough to get a relationship like that where you can talk with somebody and just have them to yourself for an hour. It was an hour drive easy to get from D.C. to Virginia. And what a great thing. Roxy was 80 years old when she finally stopped working on criminal cases. In 1990, Beth Ann became the resident feather expert

at the newly opened National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Lab. The lab is dedicated entirely to wildlife crime. Roxy's former student Carla still works at the Smithsonian. And I'm currently the director of the Feather Identification Lab. Carla is continuing Roxy's work with the FAA. She told us that last year she handled about 10,000 bird strike cases using a mix of Roxy's microscope techniques as well as DNA testing to identify birds.

Hopefully, when I retire, someone else will continue to do this after me, but it was all started by Roxy. But, you know, she had other things that came along with that, like lessons in life that just things like, you know, just do your work and don't worry about what your colleagues are doing or just do the best you can do at your job was, you know, one of her things. The other thing is, you know, keep an open mind all your life, you know, try to just treat people the way you would like to be treated. So to me, those personal things are also part of her legacy. I think that's Roxy's lesson is to pass it on, pass on something good to another person, because after you're gone, you're gone. People may or may not remember you, but you'll be remembered through your actions. To me, I feel that when you give an opportunity to learn, and why then is you have a responsibility to share it with someone else so you can have them build on your knowledge

and go farther forward than you could by yourself. And it's like we're at the bottom of the ladder and each student we go a little high and we'll never get to the top, but we'll keep climbing. Bird strikes are still common. Captain Sully Sullenberger crash-landed in the Hudson River after hitting a flock of geese in 2009. But fatal crashes from birds are much rarer. That's partly thanks to Roxy. Roxy retired as a forensic ornithologist from the Smithsonian in 1988, but she kept working on bird strike cases for years afterwards. She died in 2003, she was 92, and had become widely known as the Feather Lady.

You just had a job to do, and that was it. 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 Sachiko, 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. Special thanks to Chris Sweeney, Aaron Wade, and to the Smithsonian Institution Archives for letting us share audio of Roxy Laybourne herself. Roxy was interviewed by Marcy Hecker and Pamela Henson in 2001. In 2020, the Smithsonian made those conversations public for the first time. 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.

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