The Binge Crimes: Night Shift - Introducing... Witnessed: Devil in the Ditch

Episode Date: March 20, 2023

Just because the police can’t solve a murder doesn’t mean other people won’t find someone to blame. In season 4 of Witnessed: Devil in the Ditch, journalist Larrison Campbell returns to her Mississippi hometown to reexamine one of its most notorious unsolved cold cases – the murder of her grandmother, Presh. What happens when a family and a community suspect one of their own? Available April 3, 2023, wherever you get your podcasts.  Witnessed: Devil in the Ditch is part of The Binge—a new podcast channel from Sony Music Entertainment. Subscribe now to unlock all shows on The Binge - All Episodes. All at Once... and you’ll be the first to access Devil in the Ditch as soon as it drops on April 1, 2023.  A Campside Media & Sony Music Entertainment production. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the Mississippi Delta, there's a certain way you do things. Weddings. People have nothing better to do than eat, drink, and be merry. Mortgage their house, hawk the farm, do whatever they can do to have the end-all, be-all wedding. Funerals. It's your last big party. Make it nice. You know, fried chicken, stuffed eggs, pimento cheese, and the right amount of whiskey. Even the death itself.

Well, for the most part. The nice way of dying and the old, the traditional way of dying has kind of gone by the wayside a little bit. Yeah, about that. About 20 years ago, I got a phone call from my dad. You were falling apart. My grandmother was dead. She was 85, but her death wasn't anything I could have ever prepared for. You just could not accept the fact that she was dead.

She had always been so alive, and particularly the circumstances of her death. Murder. Blunt force trauma. Likely with a brass candlestick. In her parlor on Friday the 13th. And if this is sounding more like a Southern Gothic game of Clue than a real story, well, just hang on. I'm Larison Campbell.

I'm a journalist, and I've just spent the last year trying to find out why the person who murdered my grandmother is probably walking around free and learn what not knowing has done to us. So I've been back in my hometown, Greenville, Mississippi. Is that where it happened? Yeah, that's where it happened. Talking to detectives? I really think it's somebody that knew her.

The fingerprints weren't run until that summer, a year later. I have a lot of unanswered questions myself. So does my family. My belief is that the police didn't do a good job back at the most critical time. It was a disaster. Because what I found is that this is every bit a family murder story. From the victim, to who found her body, even the person people have accused of killing her. There he is. Do you remember the day that Presh died? Yeah. So you were sitting here with,

well actually can you tell me what you remember? I don't know exactly what happened that day. That's what happens when you don't know. Secrets and mysteries metastasize. She was kind of shaking. It was, she looked the most nervous I've ever seen her look. Questions demand answers. I told your family I did this. I believe that as much as any case that I've ever worked.

Did you ever have a moment where you thought, my gosh, what if he did do this? No. No. We don't really have any evidence. You look for evidence and then try to find the person. You don't find the person and then look for the evidence anyway.

And if police won't supply those answers, the mind will. There's nothing people in the Delta like better than a good story. You described yesterday your sort of research as an obsession. When a psychic got involved, that caused me to lose even more enthusiasm. This is the story of my family and our family murder in a corner of the deep south where murders don't get solved, where a town becomes its own criminal justice system. This is season four of Witnessed, Devil in the Ditch, coming in April from Campside Media and Sony Music Entertainment.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts to binge all episodes, or listen weekly, wherever you get your podcasts. It is a poor bird who fouls its own nest. Uh-oh, well, I might be doing that.