The New Yorker Radio Hour - Introducing: “In The Dark”

Episode Date: March 9, 2023

“In The Dark,” the acclaimed investigative podcast from American Public Media, is joining The New Yorker and Condé Nast Entertainment. In its first two seasons, “In The Dark,” hosted by the reporter Madeleine Baran, has taken a close look at the criminal-justice system in America. The first season examined the abduction and murder, in 1989, of eleven-year-old Jacob Wetterling, and exposed devastating failures on the part of law enforcement. The second season focussed on Curtis Flowers, a Black man from Winona, Mississippi, who was tried six times for the same crime. When the show’s reporters began looking into the case, Flowers was on death row. After their reporting, the Supreme Court reversed Flowers’s conviction. Today, he is a free man. A third season of “In The Dark,” which will be the show’s most ambitious one yet, is on its way. David Remnick recently sat down with Baran and the show’s managing producer, Samara Freemark, to talk about the remarkable first two seasons of the show, and what to expect in the future. To listen to the entirety of the “In The Dark” catalogue, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

Hi, this is David Remnick, and I have some really exciting news I'd like to share with you. The New Yorker and Condi Nast have acquired In the Dark, an investigative podcast that was created by American Public Media. In The Dark is known for its deeply researched audio journalism, and it's received just an enormous amount of awards. Their first season examined the horrific, unsolved abduction and murder in 1989 of the 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling and exposed. devastating failures on the part of law enforcement. The second season focused on the criminally

unjust prosecution of Curtis Flowers, a black man who was tried six times for the same crime, and who, when in the dark, started their reporting, was on death row at Mississippi's parchment prison. And now, thanks to their work, Curtis Flowers is a free man. In the Dark is both meticulously crafted and compelling listening, and I'm a huge fan. Of course, this also means that a third season of the show is on the way. And I recently sat down with In the Dark's host Madeline Barron and managing producer Samara Fremark. Madeline Samara, hi and welcome. Hello. Thanks so much for having us. It's a real pleasure. It's so good to talk to you. It's a great pleasure. I'm curious how both of you came to journalism in the first place and how in the

dark really came about. I come from audio documentary. Madeline's an investigative reporter. and we met when we joined an investigations and documentary unit at American Public Media together. And I should say that from the moment we started working in the same team, I was really scheming to meet Madeline because she had just come off of this really bombshell reporting project on sex abuse in the Catholic Church in Minnesota. And this reporting she had done was just incredible. It exposed all kinds of wrongdoing and it had a huge impact. It eventually led to the diocese filing for bankruptcy. So when this investigations and documentary unit was created, I was like, I would really like to work with this woman. And one day we took a walk together. Madeline, you want to take it from there?

Yeah, it was one of these walks that really altered the course of my career. I mean, in about 30 minutes, we had decided, we're going to report this story, which became season one of In the dark, and we're going to create a podcast to do it. And that began this collaboration. And the story was a story that I had kind of kicking around in the back of my mind as a reporter in the local newsroom at Minnesota Public Radio, which is there was this notorious child abduction case that had never been solved. I'm not really a crime person. I'm not that interested. I don't seek out crime stories. So I didn't really know very much about this case. And then just sort of by chance one day, I started hearing some basic facts about this abduction. And I had always pictured a notorious unsolved child abduction as like an unsolvable crime, you know, the worst case if you're a detective. to have to try to solve. But I had just happened to just Google it one day, almost out of boredom with another story, and realized that, no, actually, there were witnesses to the subduction. The police got there right away. It happened on a dead end road in a tiny town, all of which, as a reporter, of course, leads you to the question of why hasn't this been solved? Why is this an epic mystery? And so I was explaining all this to Samara while walking around this very bleak, indoor skyway in St. Paul, Minnesota. And she got very excited about the story. and actually made me more excited about it than I had been myself. Because, you know, it's like with reporters, we always have a list of old stories or ideas for stories.

And this was just one. But, I mean, Samara has a lot of challenge and strengths, but one of them that I knew the most about was just her ability as a storyteller. And, you know, as investigative reporters, we need people to care about the stories that we tell. It's so interesting to me as somebody who is a writer really has only worked alone,

that so many investigative people, people. Woodward and Bernstein is the classical example, but hardly alone. And even more and more lately, investigative reporters, whether it's an audio or in newspapers, even at the New Yorker we've had instances of this, which was never, never the case in the past, work in teams. Why is that? I love working on teams. I agree there is this sort of myth of the solo investigative reporter who's like a curmudgeon who doesn't let anyone peer into their notebooks, and it's a whole thing. But in my experience, especially when you're working so deeply on a story, I mean, some of the stories we've worked on in the dark, we worked on for years. And of course, you can't talk about them with anyone else. And so just the value of having a team where you can bounce ideas off of them.

And, you know, everybody on our team brings their own strengths. There are times where, you know, I'm not the right person to do a part of the story and someone else is. These are complex stories. I mean, the stories that we've done involve skills, you know, that not everybody on our team even has. You know, there's data reporting skills. There's public records request skills. There's audio production. And, you know, really the hallmark of In the Dark for us is combining this in-depth investigative journalism with powerful storytelling.

You were talking about how in the first season you're looking at this terrible case of Jacob Wetterling, who was 11-year-old kid who was kidnapped and murdered in 89. It was not a secret. This was a well-known story at the time, and it really occurs to me how very often an investigative reporting, you're not finding a story for the first time, but you're taking something that everybody thinks they know a lot about, and then you go in much, much deeper. What caused you to fasten onto this story and go much deeper and really completely, completely revolutionized the view of that case? Yeah, I think for us, like you said, that story had been covered in literally probably thousands of articles and TV spots.

It had been a story that had been dominant in the soda for a really long time. But the question that we were interested in that story was actually a question that in all of that news coverage had never been asked. A lot of the coverage had asked questions like, who kidnapped Jacob, or what happened to Jacob, or what is the effect on Jacob's family, or what is the effect on this community? And those are all really valid questions. But no one had actually ever asked the question of why has this case not been solved, which is truly an investigative question. And that's the question that drove season one of our reporting.

And once your question is different, everything about how you conduct the reporting and what you put out is different as well. And then, Madeline, the amazing thing, it's as you were finishing, the first season, a man named Danny Heinrich confessed. So talk a little bit about the scramble that you had to go through to adjust your work and backfill and get things right. Yeah, so this was an unsolved case. I mean, that was the whole premise of the investigation. The word unsolved was critical. And then literally days before the first episode was going to come out. So the reporting is done. We're ready to go. We're headed into a long weekend, Labor Day weekend, if I remember correctly,

we start hearing that this case is about to be solved and that the person who did it is confessing to the crime in exchange for what some would regard as a quite lenient plea deal for the murder and kidnapping of Jacob Wetterling. He essentially led them to the body, a short distance from where he had been living in 1989, the man Danny Heinrich. And so we've spent now months at that point with everybody involved law enforcement, the family, people who'd been wrongfully suspected. And so the first thing that went through my mind is what is going through everyone else's minds upon learning this. You know, Jacob's parents learning that their son's body has been found, this man who's lived under a shadow for his whole life because he was wrongfully accused. But then, of course, I'm thinking, okay, now what does this mean for our story? And it really allowed for a lot of clarity because we knew mistakes that law enforcement had made. We knew, you know, doors they hadn't knocked on, people they hadn't taken seriously, accounts they had dismissed, but we didn't know what really happened. And so all of it was somewhat speculative before that. It was like, well, maybe if they had paid attention to this person,

maybe that would have helped them solve the crime. Now that we knew exactly what happened and how it happened, as best as we're ever going to know, we could say, no, that specific mistake, dismissing, you know, someone who saw a car that it turns out Danny Heinrich drove to kidnap Jacob Wedderling. That was a pivotal error, not just a potential error. And so it really allowed us to just go in and remove all of these kind of like caveats in the reporting and the writing and strengthen it and say much more decisively what were the mistakes that led to this being unsolved for so long. And then also, you know, our job as investigative reporters is to hold law enforcement accountable for decisions that they make in charging, prosecuting. And so

that became a part of the story, too, giving this deal to this man who confessed that might result in him getting out of prison in his lifetime. Something that not a lot of people might understand is that a lot of what reporters do is between stories. They're looking out at the world, and they're trying to figure out what's important, what's a story, what can be found out. And in season two, you explore the unjust prosecution of Curtis Flowers, who was tried six times for the same crime. And you had a DA, Doug Evans, whose office was striking black people from juries, not just in Flowers' case, but in almost every case's office seemed to handle. How did you decide on that story as opposed to everything? else that's in your field of vision.

So after season one, we just got thousands of tips from the public, like literally thousands of people emailing us with story ideas, and we read through every single one of them. And we actually started reporting out a handful of them. But all of us kept coming back to this one tip that we had gotten from this woman in Mississippi who had written to us saying, there's a man here, he's on death row, he's been tried six times for the same crime, the evidence against him. if he at best, but he doesn't stand a chance, I think is what the tip said. And that tip was just so much more compelling than anything else we were looking at. And I think what was so compelling

about that tip to us wasn't just the wrongful conviction aspect, because, you know, wrongful convictions are interesting. But there was more to it than that. It was really the six times for the same crime thing that was really fascinating to us because it seemed to point at all of these larger questions of like what's going on with the prosecution, what's going on with the district attorney, What does this say about our system of criminal justice nationally, like for everybody who enters into that system? And so that was what was so appealing to us about that tip. He had been tried six times for the same crime by the same district attorney. And it just made us wonder, like, what is going on in this case?

And what does it say about our system that someone can get stuck in this unending cycle of being tried and having that conviction overturned and having being tried again and again? And so that was what really appealed to us about that story. How did you get to the fact of the bigotry of the DA's office? So for us, you know, the thing that stood out about the six trials was the reason he was having six trials was because of prosecutorial misconduct. So this was the ultimate kind of legal groundhog day, excess of prosecutorial power run amok where all of a sudden you have no check. It's very clear in Curtis Flowers' case how prosecutors have unchecked power, not just in his case, but in our country, that we have not set up a mechanism to do. deal with this. And so Curtis could keep having prosecutorial misconduct happen. He could keep getting a right to a new trial. He could have that new trial. And guess what would happen? The exact same thing

would happen as happened in the previous trial. And one of the things that was happening in Curtis's case pretty consistently was that this prosecutor, Doug Evans, was striking black people disproportionately from the jury. And it wasn't as though the defense didn't notice it. The defense was calling it out over and over and over again. Like, look, our client is getting tried by juries that are all white or mostly white every single time practically here. And therefore, he is not getting a fair trial and he's getting convicted. In some cases, the jury deliberated for, you know, less than an hour before sentencing him to death. I mean, so it was very clear that this was a problem in the case, but there was really no effective remedy because if your Curtis is like, okay, well, that was very blatant that discrimination

in jury selection. I have to still go through the whole trial, get convicted, get sentenced to death. then I'm going to play the appeal card and say, well, what happened in jury selection was extremely racist, and a court will agree with me. But then the only thing that's going to happen is I'm going to be tried again by the same prosecutor who's going to engage in the same tactic. And the whole time, Curtis is in prison or jail. You know, so he's never getting out. It's like even when he wins, he loses. And so what we wondered about was, okay, this is obviously happening in Curtis's case, but what about all the other cases that this DA is trying? You know, a really important question for us was, of course, whether or not this was a larger pattern by the district attorney to strike black people from the jury, not just in Curtis's case, but in all of his cases.

And so to answer that, we partnered up with Willcraft, a data reporter and a reporter on our team, Parker Yesco, to go to Mississippi and try to answer this question. What was happening in all the other cases in Doug Evans district? Samara, sometimes when we're reporting, we get so much information that it's hard to handle. And I think in the Curtis Flowers case, you got an enormous, an enormous, for one of a better word, a data dump. And you have now a data project related to this. What's that all about and what's its value? So when we started reporting this story, we realized very quickly that this was not a story that we could just report by calling some people on the phone. That's how we thought it would go initially.

But that was an utter failure from the very beginning. And it became clear very quickly that we needed to actually go to Mississippi. move into a house there and start knocking on doors. And so that's how we conducted most of the reporting was literally spending days on in, weeks on in, months on in, just knocking on doors, talking to people, hearing what they knew about the case. And this actually held true also for the documents in the case. So often with documents, you think that you can just, like, submit a request to an agency for, like, law enforcement records. But where we were reporting in Mississippi, this was not how things worked. The records were, in many cases, actually physical papers

that were stored in really unlikely places. And so, you know, we were going to local jails. We were going to abandoned warehouses. We were going to, like, every clerk's office in the region, just gathering hundreds of thousands of pages of documents that we needed to report this story. And the biggest of those was the records on what had happened in jury selection in Doug Evans case. Because we were interested in the question, we knew that Doug Evans had discriminated against black potential jurors and Curtis Flowers cases, but that raised the question of what is going on in all of the other cases that he has tried in his very long tenure as district attorney. And so we had to gather hundreds of thousands of pages of trial documents

to understand what was going on. And so we actually sent our reporter Parker Yesco out to go from courthouse to courthouse to gather and scan all of these documents. And And it took her months and hundreds of thousands of pages. I would say goodbye to Parker. We were all living together, and we lived there for nearly a year. So I would say goodbye to Parker in the morning. She would drive out to some clerk's office someplace. And she would spend eight hours in that clerk's office just scanning with the handheld

scanner documents. And then she would return the next day and do the same thing. And she did that for months. And this was really important because this was the only way to get this information about what was really happening in jury selection in these cases. And so then we went into this big. data reporting project and discovered a pattern of racial discrimination that goes well beyond Curtis's case and jury selection. And that's ultimately one of the things that got the attention

of the U.S. Supreme Court in the case. Right. The case goes all the way to Supreme Court, and now Curtis Flowers is a free man. You also had a chance to confront Doug Evans, the DA. What was that like, Madeline? You know, when you interview someone with a lot of power, and Doug Evans obviously fits into that category, I mean, there's certain things you're hoping. for specific things you want answered. But for me as a reporter, I also want a sense of how this person views their power. And to me, what was very effective in the conversation that Doug Fins offered to me, although it was relatively brief, was just his kind of almost like a nonchalance about his power. Like, oh, well, people don't really ask me a lot of questions. You ladies are coming into my office

to chit chat, and I don't have to tell you much of anything. And so I think what came through a lot in the interview is that he wasn't used to being questioned by journalists or members of the public. at all. And he just didn't really feel like he had to be accountable to the public. Now, I have to ask you a crucial question to both of you. Maybe we'll start with Samara. Season three is underway. You're reporting hard. How much can we reveal about that story? Very little about the specifics of this story. I'm sorry, David. You know how that's I do. I agree with you 100%. You've got to keep things close to the best. I can say that it is definitely the most ambitious story we've ever worked on. And we're extremely excited. And we're extremely

excited about it. We can't wait to bring it to listeners. I guess maybe the better question then for you, Madeline, is you've now had two seasons under your belt with your team and they're extraordinary. And now you're working on a third and the show has taken shape. It has a temperament and a quality and obviously a voice and an intelligence. At this point, you must have a sense of what makes an in the dark story. What is it? I think it's a story that is investigative, which means that it's exposing powerful people or institutions engaged in wrongdoing that has actual harm on people's lives. But it's also a story that is gripping and compelling with twists and turns that is something that people want to listen to. Because ultimately, you know, as investigative reporters, if we uncover lots of egregious wrongdoing, but we can't make anybody care about it, then what's the point? And so I think that really our stories combine those two elements.

And I should say, too, that's one of the reasons that it's so exciting to be working with The New Yorker, because I feel like we are kindred spirits in that sense, among many others. In the Dark's Madeline Barron and Samara Freemark. I hope you'll subscribe and listen to the last two seasons of In the Dark via the link in this episode's notes, or by searching for it wherever you're listening now.