The Decibel - How to make a true crime podcast

Episode Date: October 25, 2024

14 years ago, a young woman disappeared in Edmonton... two years later, police released a chilling recording from the final moments of her life. Ever since she heard it, The Globe’s Jana Pruden hasn’t been able to shake the voices of Amber Tuccaro and the man suspected of killing her, so she took a trip to Amber’s home community of Fort Chipewyan, Alberta to look into the case.Jana joins the show to share how and why she made the second season of In Her Defence: 50th Street, and what she learned reporting on Amber’s unsolved murder.You can listen to season two of In Her Defence wherever you get your podcasts.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

This audio clip may be disturbing to some listeners, but it's important that the public listens to the voice and helps investigators identify the driver of that vehicle. This is a recording of a phone call from 14 years ago. Where are we by? We're just heading south of Beaumont, north of Beaumont. We're heading north of Beaumont. It's the voice of 20-year-old Amber Tuckeroe and the man suspected of killing her. The police shared this recording at a press conference in Edmonton. 50th Street. 50th Street. Are you sure? Absolutely.

The police shared this recording at a press conference in Edmonton. And Jana Pruden was there. It's a conversation between Amber and an unknown man who's clearly driving her somewhere. And she wants to go into the city. And he's telling her that he is taking her into the city. But as the recording goes on, we can hear that she's becoming more and more doubtful of what he's telling her. And once you hear it, those voices are really in your head forever. Jana's a feature writer at The Globe and the host of the Globe and Mail podcast In Her Defense. Since she heard that recording, Jana hasn't stopped thinking about it

and how, after more than a decade, that man still hasn't been identified. So the new season of In Her Defense, 50th Street, examines Amber Tuckerow's disappearance and the investigation into her unsolved murder. And today, Jana's here to talk about it. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Jana, thank you so much for being here today.

Thank you so much for being here today. Thank you so much for having me on. So for people who haven't yet listened to this season, who was Amber Tuckeroe? Amber Tuckeroe was a 20-year-old woman from Fort Chippewa in Alberta, way up in northern Alberta. She was a young mom. And like many people at that age, she was just starting her life and I think figuring out who she was in a lot of ways. She loved music. She had, I think, an adventurous spirit and had been planning to go back to school. And then she went missing in 2010. What do we know about her disappearance? Yeah, we know that she'd been

living in Fort McMurray at the time, and she traveled from Fort McMurray to the Edmonton area with a new friend that she'd met, a woman named Evangeline McLean, and also Amber's baby, Jacob. So they traveled down together. They flew from Fort McMurray and they checked into a hotel just near the airport, which is outside of Edmonton city limits, probably about half an hour, even 40 minutes from downtown. They checked into a motel and Amber left the baby with her friend and left for the evening. And she was never seen alive again. That was August 18, 2010. And then it was about two years later when the police shared that recording from the night of Amber's disappearance.

You better not take me. You better not take me anywhere I don't want to go. I want to go into the city. Janet, you've been on The Crime Beat for years, and you've reported on a number of different cases, but it sounds like it was this recording that really drew you back to Amber's case. Yeah. So as you know, I'm a print reporter normally. I'm a writer. And last year, we did the first season of In Her Defense, which was about a woman in

Alberta who had killed her abusive husband. And that season went very well and really affirmed to me, this won't be anything new for you, but affirmed to me just how powerful the medium of audio is in storytelling. I mean, I've always been a radio listener. I love podcasts, but I felt for myself what I could maybe do with this medium. And so when we started talking about the potential of a season two, right away, I thought about Amber's case where this piece of audio is really at the heart of the case. And like many people, I also thought, well, if enough people hear this recording, someone's going to recognize the man's voice and this murder is going to be solved.

So maybe the right people haven't heard it yet, but I can help put this voice out there more broadly and someone will recognize it. I now realize that it's not that simple. Yeah, and you get into this in the podcast about the difficulties of actually using this voice recording to solve a case like this. But I want to just pick up on what you were saying there, Jenna, about the difference between audio and print storytelling. And for a story like Amber Tucker Rose, I guess, what is it about this medium of audio that, I don't know, maybe makes it a little bit easier to connect with people? Or what did you find during this process? Yeah, there's a few aspects of that. And one of them does have to do with the different way that I wanted to report this story, a different

approach that I wanted to take. You know, Amber's story is very specifically about her, but it's also about the broader context of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada. We've not always reported Indigenous stories well. So that was one of the things in my approach, I wanted to think about how we could do this differently. We sometimes hear this idea of the media, and particularly telling Indigenous stories, being story takers, that we show up in a community and we sort of take the story. So thinking about how to tell Amber's story in a different way, in a good way, one of the things that I did, I went back and read the recommendations from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and from the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls Inquiry.

And one of the recommendations to media, the calls to media in the MMIW inquiry is actually specifically around letting people tell their stories in their own words. And there's a little section that we cut out, copied and lived at the top of our script document. And I read that every single day when we started work. And sorry, Jenna, this is an excerpt from the inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. Yeah. Yeah, I could read it. Yeah. So, yeah, this is at the very top of our script document. And it says, MMIW report direction to media.

Specific call to media. 6.1. Ensure authentic and appropriate representation of Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people. Support Indigenous people sharing their stories from their perspectives free of biased discrimination and that hyper-sexualize and demean Indigenous women, girls, and to SLGBTQQIA people. So that's a reminder on the top of all your scripts, then. You see that every day. Yeah. So, and particularly this idea of supporting Indigenous people sharing their perspectives or sharing their stories from their perspectives. That's something that I think is so powerful about audio, is that I, as the story writer, as the reporter, that I can get out of

the way for long periods of time. And in fact, that's always my goal is to be in here as little as possible. I am obviously the host, and I want to lead the listener through the story. I'm the reporter. But to me, it's been so powerful to have people be able to listen to Amber's mother, Tootsie, Amber's brother, Paul, Amber's sister-in-law, Judy Ann Cardinal. To hear everybody in their own voices telling their story, how it's affected them, to me is so incredibly powerful. And it really resonates with people. Amber's story has been out there quite a bit, and it lives in various places on, you know, the true crime internet on TikTok and places like that. But so many of those stories, they just repeat the same things over and over. They're using old, you know, the Wikipedia post about her case. And that's one of the things that's been really powerful for me to

hear as the reporter is people telling me that they've heard this story so many times, but they feel like they know Amber now. Or the way that people connect with Amber's mother, Tootsie, I think is very special. And that's all part of allowing people to tell their stories and to talk about how the loss of someone, the loss of Amber has affected them. Yeah. And we do hear, as you say, her mother's voice in the podcast. We hear from her quite a bit and other family members. I guess I wonder, Jana, as a reporter, when you're going and doing this work, I mean, you're talking to people who've gone through a significant amount of trauma here. How do you approach that as a reporter when you're talking to them?

I mean, there's some things that I do with every family, which is, of course, that this is their choice whether to talk to me or not. That I try to make interviews comfortable and where people feel empowered that if they need a break, you know, if they're having a glass of water, if they need a smoke, they can do all of that. If, if they want to put up a boundary with me, that they can do that too. They can tell me they don't want to answer a question or, um, I think that's really important that, you know, that they feel like an equal partner in the interview in many ways. Um, and then with Amber's family in particular, and with this story, we really wanted to take a more decolonial approach to it. And that took a number of forms, actually, one of which was offering tobacco before interviews. So this is a cultural practice

where you get ceremonial tobacco or a cigarette would work in a pinch, but we bought ceremonial tobacco. Then you wrap it in cotton and ribbon. And it's really not only a gift that you give someone, it really is a symbol of a humble request that you're making. And we tried to really bring that approach. It was not only like a symbolic gesture, but I really tried to use that idea to in fact, change how I approach an interview, which is that when I'm offering tobacco, I truly am asking for assistance. I'm asking for it humbly, not in a sense that I'm entitled to it, but I'm, I'm asking someone to share what they know, to share it with me so that I can share it with our listeners. And I found that to be a very powerful practice. And there were other aspects of that too, including sometimes smudging with people and really trying to honor Amber and trying

to tell the story of her life in a way that hadn't been done before. It's interesting to address these things, because as journalists, we're often trained to not involve ourselves in the story. There's usually kind of a barrier that we're supposed to maintain. But it sounds like from what you're saying, there has to be kind of a different way of understanding those things when you're reporting in a situation like this. Yeah, you know, I came up in old school journalism and there's a lot of old school rules. I had editors that believed that you shouldn't even have a glass of water if you're covering a meeting, like you shouldn't accept a glass of water if it's on the table or a cup of coffee. And some of those rules are really there for a reason, especially when we're dealing with

powerful institutions, you know, that we have guidelines and how we're going to operate to make sure those relationships don't get complicated or that someone's ability to tell a story doesn't become compromised. I think that it's a lot different when you're dealing with regular everyday families than when you're dealing with like the prime minister or the chief of police, those figures. And when you're dealing with everyday families after a traumatic event like a homicide in Amber's case. Jenna, I also want to ask you about the genre that you're operating within here, which is true crime, essentially true crime stories and podcasts are very popular these days.

But I guess there can be a bit of a distinction, right, of something that's being done in, you know, a good way, but also something that can be a little exploitative as well. So I guess, how do you weigh those two things? And what do you consider when you're doing this reporting? When I started covering court and crime at the Regina Leader Post, and then moved on to covering crime at the Edmonton Journal, and traditionally, the crime beat was sort of seen as like, you know, when you started at a paper, they gave you like the worst beat, which was chasing ambulances. And, you know, the honorable reporters eventually made their way to politics or other beats. But I always really was drawn to these stories. And I felt like they're so important and that they illustrate in the lives of people so many aspects of the human experience,

the way that structures impact individuals, all of these things that were really interesting to me. And I've always believed in ethical true crime and that it, you know, I sometimes remember as a kid being in the lineup at Safeway or something, and there would be these books that were like dripping in gold foil blood, you know, of someone who'd killed their family or something. And really that's sort of one aspect of the true crime. That would be a lot of the modern version of that. Some TikTok true crime, Facebook stories that come up that really are, I think, salacious and exploitive and often not respectful at all. And then on the other side of it, there are truly great works of

journalism, great works of literature, and well, nonfiction literature that are around true crime. And so crime stories really can connect with people and not in a bad way. People say that to me sometimes I'll meet people who are like, Oh, I love true crime. I don't know what's wrong with me. And they think that there's something bad about it. Now, I would say, you know, you do want to be careful what kind of true crime you're consuming. It is on a spectrum of good for you and not good for you. But the way that I approach these stories is not in any way trying to be salacious. I truly believe in how important they are in the lessons that they hold for us about our own lives and also in the way that we can help other people. And I think there are ways to do it well, where people

feel seen, where people feel understood. It's not always going to be comfortable or easy for the subjects or for the families, but I think it is possible to do it well and do it ethically and do, you know, hard hitting important journalism that is also in this genre that we call true crime. We'll be back after this message. When I think about, in her defense, like, yes, it is, it's a story about a missing woman, a potential serial killer, but you're actually giving us a lot more context as to how Amber's life went, as to the circumstances that she was in. So it actually does have kind of, I guess, in a way, an educational aspect to it as well. Yeah, I'm really glad to hear you say that. Thank you. That's really intentional. Kasia Mihailovic, that's my partner in making the show. We really intentionally use what we call like a Trojan horse model. This is another thing that lives at the top of our script document, which is here is the story. And it is a very sensational story in many ways that we have.

We have a recording from the last night of her life. We have a botched police investigation. We have all of these things that are really interesting and sensational. And the framework of many, you know, successful true crime stories have elements like this. But we also have other elements, the things inside the horse, which is, you know, where Amber's family fits in the history of the colonial experience of Canada, the role of residential schools, the way the environment in Fort Chippewan has been changed by industry. So there's many aspects to their lives that are tied into these broader structures in our lives. And both seasons that you've done so far, Jana, each focuses on the story of a woman. And I guess I just want to ask you about the title of this series,

In Her Defense. What does that phrase mean to you? So in the beginning, when we started season one, that name was suggested by one of our editors, Angela Pachenza. And we really liked the name right away which really was about defending a woman a woman who had received not an adequate defense in my opinion before the courts who had not received an adequate defense when she was dealing with the police actually and this idea that we could talk about her case and actually the people who ultimately came to her defense. In season two, it has a similar meaning in some ways. We know that Amber was physically harmed, but also that the way that she's been portrayed sometimes has been very unfair and dehumanizing.

You know, people making a lot of wrong assumptions, which again, we see in many cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women. So I think there is this idea of both physical defense and defense of who Amber is and to tell her story in a way that's more fair to her and to her family. So, Jenna, the final episode of the second season, 50th Street, comes out on Monday. As you're nearing the end of this series, I guess, what are you thinking about? Obviously, we're waiting to see how people respond, how the family responds. There's all of that aspect of it.

Is the story getting to people? Is it touching them? Are they sharing it? Are people mad at me? You know, all the things that come with a story out. And then also self-reflection of, did I do justice to this story? And obviously, I would love for it to have an impact on Amber's case in particular in some way, that someone could hear it and it shakes something loose, it changes something.

And also how I hope it could affect other people, other families, other women. That was something that was so meaningful after season one was hearing about the way that that story, the way Helen's story affected people, just to hear it, to feel seen for people that had had a similar life experience, for people to learn something about domestic violence. You know, we, I learned something very meaningful last week that the Canadian Judicial Council is going to use excerpts of season one in their training for judges around intimate partner violence. And to me, that's an example of, you know, telling stories can change. It's all just people that work in the justice system and the police systems. And it hopefully can have an effect in holding people to account and making sure that they do their jobs well and fairly to all people and to women. Yeah. If I can ask, I mean, I imagine this process is quite emotional. And

I guess I wonder your own personal journey going through this kind of reporting. Is there anything that you're, I don't know, thinking about differently now at the end of this process? Yeah, there's many things that I think about differently. I think part of the idea of approaching it from a more decolonial way was not only in the reporting, it's even in the thinking. One example of that would be an encounter that I had with a raven that in regular reporting, you might say, oh, that's weird. And it would be nothing in this reporting. I, it's something that I actually talked to an elder about and it's in the podcast. So it's really, I guess, thinking about or bringing a different like framework to seeing the story. You know, I am a family where the

colonial experiment really worked. And although my great grandpa, you know, his name is etched in the Métis War Veterans Memorial. That's not something that my grandfather would ever acknowledge. And so it was never part of my life in any way. My father remembers when he was young that someone had mailed my grandpa something about the Prudent family and about the Métis lineage of our family. And my grandpa just threw it in the garbage. He wouldn't look at it. Honestly, it's not a space that I've ever wanted to take up any space in because in some ways I've never felt entitled to that identity. It's just not a lived experience that I have. But then at some point, it started to sort of make me mad that if I'm totally disconnected, it is because colonialism worked.

So I am a member of the Métis Nation of Alberta. At some point, I did decide to apply for my card, which is quite a rigorous process. And, you know, I received my card and it was sort of as a form of, I guess, ancestral reconciliation. I thought of it. So, yeah, I guess it's something that that I think about and and maybe is part of what I bring to some of these stories. You know, I don't believe the idea that you can only care about someone else's life if it like affect you or it seems like it could have happened to you. Right. I mean, sometimes I we groan when someone, you know, says, oh, as the father of a daughter, you know, I don't like I'm against sexual assault or something like that. I always experience to know that. Yes. Yes. Yeah. You know, I don't think anyone should be murdered. I don't think anyone should be sexually assaulted. But it isn't lost on me that if something was just slightly different in my life, in my lived experience, that my disappearance, my murder could be treated completely differently. Because as it is, if I had gone missing on August 18th, 2010,

a lot of things would have happened that didn't happen for Amber. There's no way around that. That is just the truth. Jana, thank you so much for being here. This season is an incredible listen and really appreciate your reporting. Thank you so much for this excellent conversation. You know, I'm a huge fan of yours and of the Decibel, so it's always a pleasure to come on the show. Well, I'm a huge fan of yours and of The Decibel, so it's always a pleasure to come on the show.

Well, I'm a huge fan of yours, so it works out well. Thank you. The final episode of 50th Street will be out on Monday. You can find it along with the first season of In Her Defense wherever you get your podcasts. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms. Our producers are Madeline White, Michal Stein, and Ali Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor.

Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.