Uncover - Introducing | Examined: The Backfire Effect from Pushkin

Episode Date: September 21, 2026

Nearly 40 years ago, in the parking lot of a community college in Port Huron, Michigan, a20-year-old student named Scott Macklem was shot dead in broad daylight. His murdershocked the community. It made no sense. The police quickly found their suspect. There was only one problem: the man said he was nowhere near the scene of the crime. And he could prove it. In Examined: The Backfire Effect from Pushkin, journalist Josie Duffy Rice talks with eyewitnesses, investigators and local reporters to unravel a shocking story of judicial apathy and expedience — a story that leaves no one off the hook.Examined looks at overlooked cases that never got the real investigation they deserved. Each season features deeply reported stories about crime, punishment, and the criminal legal system. Find more episodes of Examined: The Backfire Effect wherever you get podcasts. Binge the full series now with a Pushkin+ subscription — sign up on the Examined Apple show page or at pushkin.fm/plus.

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Hey listeners, Josie Duffy Rice here. I'm dropping into your feed today to bring you a preview of my new podcast, examined the backfire effect. Nearly 40 years ago in the parking lot of a community college in Port Huron, Michigan, a student named Scott Macklam was shot dead in broad daylight. The police quickly found their suspect, and that guy has now been in prison for 40 years. a guy who says he's innocent

and who has 11 alibi witnesses that put him across the state at the time of the murder. This is a story of police corruption, prosecutorial misconduct, and a very, very complicated man. I promise you'll find this story as gripping as I did.

Find Examined the Backfire Effect wherever you listen to your podcasts. Pushkin Plus subscribers can hear each episode ad free. Sign up on the Examine show page on Apple or at pushkin.fm depending on how old you are, maybe you've never heard the sound of a car backfiring. That's what happens when a little bit of gasoline reaches the exhaust system and then suddenly ignites.

These days, cars don't backfire that much, but that used to happen all the time. You'd be in a parking lot somewhere, and the loud bang would startle you. That's why, on the morning of November 5, 1986, when a loud crack whipped through the cold air, People nearby didn't think much of it. You know, we didn't even discuss it. Oh, a car backfired. There was no discussion. I could have swore that I heard a back,

it sounded like a car backfiring as I told me to the parking lot. You know, I remember the noise. Which, by the way, wasn't unusual. Those voices are some of the people who were in the area that day. Max, Kathy, and Sherry. They, and a few others, were in the parking lot, The St. Clair County Community College in Port Huron, Michigan. Some are students, some are employees.

All were unaware that they were about to take on a new identity. Witness. This is where our story starts in the easternmost city in Michigan, spitting distance from Ontario, Canada. Port Huron lives near the intersection of Lake Huron in the St. Clair River. And a few blocks from the waterfront sits St. Clair County Community College. or SC4, as the locals call it. The St. Clair County Community College

is spread over an attractive 26-acre campus in central Port Huron. That was a clip from a very 1980s promotional video. Downtown Port Huron is pretty, with the low-slung brick buildings and the Christmas lights at night. But on the morning of November 5th, 1986, it was gray and chilly and dreary,

a layer of clouds coating the sky. The parking lot of SC4 was full. Most students were already in class, but there were a handful of struggling kids. They were adults technically, sure, but really just kids, falling in lockstep with their friends, a bunch of 18, 19, 20-year-olds,

who heard, not a car, but a gunshot. You don't expect to hear a shotgun blast in downtown Port Huron. on when you're walking through the college parking lot, you just don't expect that. The gunshot that no one realized was a gunshot was the first thing people did not, could not recognize.

But there were other things, too, like the scream. I'll tell you what I vividly remember. I heard the gunshot, and it was so close. And then I heard the death-curdling scream of that, young man. And I froze.

Sharon was on her way to work at SC4 that day. In my head, I'm thinking, I don't know what I was thinking. Like, it couldn't be real. I proceeded. I went on into the college. There was another student, do not know who he was. And I just made a comment about, oh my God, I hope Someone was just screwing around out there, but that sounded so real. All he said was, yeah, dead.

This whole series of events probably has taken me longer to describe than it occurred in the moment. A couple of minutes, max. But that one moment would still haunt these witnesses, and many others in Port Huron. Almost 40 years later. I'm Josie Duffy Rice, and this is the backfire effect. Episode 1, The Good Cop. I'm not from Michigan. I'm from Georgia.

I'm a journalist, and I used to be a lawyer. And in both careers, I focused almost exclusively on the criminal legal system. The story I'm going to tell you, the one that has been rattling around in my brain for a couple of years now, that has taken up thousands of hours of my mental real estate. The story that I've honestly wanted to shake, just to loosen its grip on me a little bit, is not the kind of story I usually tell.

But it grabbed a hold of me. There's a man in prison right now who maybe shouldn't be there. And he's a complicated man, a brilliant man, a strange man, a man unlike anyone I've ever met before. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

On November 5, 1986, there was the backfire, there was the scream. But as it turns out, the scream didn't really set off alarm bells either. Kathy later told authorities that it did not sound like a yell that a person would make if they were in trouble. Wanda and Jean both saw something weird after they heard it. Wanda, quote, saw a man bend over and grab himself, then he ran between two cars.

She thought he was joking, so she headed to horticulture class. Jean heard someone cry, help me, heard him say, oh God, I'm hurt. She apparently said that she saw a man, quote, walking by his vehicle and a crouched over position, but felt in her mind that this was just one of the college students putting on some sort of act. So she, too, just went inside. A number of witnesses would later tell investigators about another strange thing. A person wearing a red nylon ski jacket lying next to a car. Most of them just assumed it was someone working on their vehicle.

but not an 18-year-old student named Max. His story would be different. I was never late, and I was late that day, so I was in a rush. I was surprised that there was a parking spot that close to the main buildings. You know what I mean? Like that being late, usually, that never happens.

The parking spot that Max found was right next to a Plymouth-Turismo. I pulled in, grabbed my books, as I walked past, and kind of fast walk toward class. I remember seeing legs hanging out from under the car. And I thought that was kind of strange. And so I stopped, just kind of backed up and said, you know, hey, you know, you need any help.

You didn't respond. And so I kind of edged up along the side of the car and said, you know, hey, you're okay. And then I heard kind of a moan. And so then I kind of came up to the front of the car there and he was lying on the ground there. Max would later learn the man on the ground was a student named Scott Macklam. And as Max tried to help him,

he realized that Scott had been shot. Another student sees Max trying to turn Scott's body over. I just remember looking at him and I remember saying go across the street to the fire department and get help. And this was before cell phones. and all of that and everything. So he actually had to run across the street.

Max tried to do what he could to keep the victim alive, using his clothes to pack the wound. But it was a losing battle. I remember taking off my jacket and stuffing it in the side, trying to keep the blood from, and I looked back down and I thought, what good was I going to do?

Within minutes, the fire department and the paramedics arrived. By the time police officers got there, the EMTs had already loaded Scott's body onto the stretcher. They pronounced him dead about half an hour later, but Max suspects he was the last person to see anything like life in Scott Macklam. I was giving him CPR, and I remember he kind of, just kind of, almost like in the movies, you know, when somebody passes away, he kind of like, it just kind of like the body just kind of went limp. You know what I mean?

And his head kind of tilted back. It just might be, I think he was already dead by the time the police got there. In my field of work, if you're lucky, or maybe unlucky, depending, you feel drawn to a story. And I was drawn to this one, this series of events that started with Scott Macklems' tragic death 40 years ago. Like I said, it's not the kind of story I normally tell. I've reported on juvenile asylums in Alabama, corrupt cops in Kansas, battered women, serving time in Louisiana. I tend to focus most of my work in the South, where I live, and as a black journalist, my stories are often about black people. In other words, usually when I do a story, I identify more with the subjects.

It's not that I see myself reflected in them exactly, but that they're familiar to me in a way. At times it's been kind of strange to be so focused on this story about these white people in a small town in Michigan. One reason that this story, of the craziest ones I've heard in my career, has captivated me, is because I think it says a lot about the system, but maybe even more about us, about you, about me. I've come to an uncomfortable conclusion over the past few years that I, and I would guess you, are capable of more than I would like to believe. Macklam was 20 years old in 1986, and a couple of pictures I've seen of him, old snapshots from basketball games and high school yearbooks. He's tall with a nice smile and angular features, an athlete,

one of two boys, the prize son of Gary and Patricia Maclum. At Croswell Lexington High School, where Scott graduated in 1984, he was captain of the golf and basketball teams and was voted best dressed and most popular. Here's a former classmate of Scott's. He was like maybe the homecoming king or in the parade. And he was very good looking, very attractive. Scott was from a small town about half an hour outside of Port Huron called Croswell, Michigan, where his father was mayor.

The teacher liked him. I think it was that he was from a well-known family maybe in Croswell. And you could kind of tell the kids who came from Croswell good families and the kids who didn't. And I remember him being treated as though he were, you know, like a Croswell good family. After he graduated high school, Scott had started at SC4, where he was planning on getting his associate's degree in business. He worked part-time at a men's clothing store where he made close to minimum wage. He liked bird hunting. people said he had great manners and a kind heart.

One old friend called him a goodie two shoes. After he died, there was quote after quote from his high school teachers and a local barber. All-American boy, they said, fantastic young man, a great kid, happy-go-lucky, the kind you want your daughter to bring home. Speaking of which, Scott had just gotten engaged the month before he was killed,

his fiancé's name was Crystal Merrill. Crystal and Scott had grown up in the same area. They'd been friends for years, gone to the same schools growing up. They'd known each other since kindergarten. She'd spent her childhood on a farm, three or four hundred acres where they raised dairy cattle and beef cattle. People describe Crystal as quiet, hardworking, family-oriented, kind of like the girl next door.

They'd started dating nearly. end of high school and continued on and off through the beginning of college. They'd broken up in early 1986, but they'd reconciled a few months later. At the time of the murder, Crystal was pregnant, still in her first trimester. They were planning to get married that coming January. I suspect you won't hear much in this podcast from Scott's family or crystals. I've reached out and we'll keep trying because I'm interested in hearing more about who Scott was. But his family has been reticent to talk, which I get to have your child killed like that, as you're preparing for him to become a father himself, to go from planning a wedding, to lowering him into a grave,

and then to be asked to rehash it all these years later. I get why they don't want to relive all this. Let's return to the parking lot and the witnesses at SC4 in Court Huron. After Scott is shot and Max tries to save him, and the EMTs' try CPR, before they realize the heart-sinking clarity that such a job requires that it was a lost cause, that the boy, and he was really just a boy, was dead. After they put Scott's body on a stretcher and raced to the hospital, the witnesses are left shell-shocked, overwhelmed, confused. And, it turns out, the witnesses had witnessed very little. No one had seen Scott drop

drive up. But he'd just pulled in. He'd missed his first class that morning. No one knew where he'd just been. No one knew where he was headed. As he was trying to get in his car, had he just gotten out? But there was this one thing. Even before they realized that someone had been shot, a few witnesses said they noticed a car drive out of the parking lot quite fast. And then I do remember hearing a car racing away. Just a car going, because of the parking lot, quite fast. And then I do remember hearing a car racing away. just a car going, because in parking lots, cars usually don't go very fast. And I heard a car going kind of going fast. I remember seeing, I think you could see a car racing out of the parking lot. I remember seeing a guy leave in the parking lot, leave the car, drive fast too quickly for parking lot, and exit the parking lot. That morning, at least three witnesses described this car in generally the same way.

They described the color as pinkish tan, or reddish brown or light brown. Imprecise, yes, but at least in the same color family. And they described the car in the same way. A small, compact, a hatchback. Imagine a Prius, but smaller and more boxy. So, a small pinkish-brownish-reddish hatchback, and maybe a man driving it,

no one got a great look at the guy, but they say he was a white male, estimates anywhere from 18 to 25, with dark hair. Some say he's wearing a ski mask and a green army fatigue jacket. Some mention facial scruff, others don't. Two people say he's wearing a knit cap, another person says he's not. He's in the car so they can't tell how tall he is. The man is described as trying to conceal his face, or glancing in his rearview mirror to see what was going on with the victim,

or, alternatively, laughing and grinning. It's worth noting, too, that there isn't total agreement here, even on the basic descriptions. One witness later recalled a blue car. Another one said he thought he saw a woman driving, not a man. And more than one person mentions a woman, possibly blonde, possibly wearing a red-knit sweater, standing near Scott Macklam after he was shot. So now, you have the beginnings of a strange, story. There's so much more that's weird about this murder and everything that comes after.

So many lives that will be upended. And not just those of Scott's family and friends. On Carter Roy, host of Murder True Crime Stories. If you listen to True Crime because you want more than just what happened, this show is for you. On Murder True Crime Stories, we take deep dives into history's most notorious murders. But we don't stop at the crime scene. Each episode explores the darkest corners of true crime while keeping the focus where it belongs on the human cost. New episodes drop every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Follow murder, true crime stories on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon music, or wherever you listen.

St. Clair, Michigan is a tiny town, about four square miles, five, six thousand people, over 90% white. And on this November afternoon, the drive there is something close to beautiful. It's not as cold as I, a resident of Atlanta, expected it to be. You would not believe the winter clothes I bought for this trip. Fleece-line leggings, thick wool socks. Just a few blocks after we pull off the long stretch of highway, where fallen leaves have piled up along the edges,

we find ourselves in farm country. I think it's the next one. I think it might be the one with the red truck. For some reason, I feel like he has a red truck. I don't know. Yep, here's his barn. I'm with Joshua Sharp, another journalist from Georgia, who has spent plenty of his own time wrestling with this story.

I'm an investigative journalist. I am based in Detroit, Michigan, where I have lived for going on two years now. On this Tuesday afternoon, we are on our way to visit a retired police detective named Herb Wellzer. Herb's around 70 years old, and he has lived here in this buttery-yellow house, essentially his whole life. It was kind of a strange thing for me and Josh to meet Herb in person after all this time, after talking to him on the phone and reading over his research so much these past few years. I don't think I'd even seen a picture of Herb.

before we got there. But I knew him very well, and I've been reading his years of his work. Right. But, you know, Herb on the phone, I always just, he felt like this sort of gentle grandfatherly figure and then show up, and that is exactly who we found. Hello, chickens. I give them a treat every afternoon, so that's what they're waiting for. They see you here.

Now over here, I'll show you inside the barn. They actually built the barn before they built the house, my great-grandparents. Oh, wow. Priorities. In the episodes to come, you'll be hearing a fair amount about the port here on Police Department. It is not a large operation, not now and not back in 1986. Back then, it had around 50 officers, mostly men, in a town of around 35,000. and shrinking.

One of those officers was Herb Wellzer. I went here to St. Clair High School and graduated in 1973. And at that time, I still love sports. I'm really into sports. And I wanted to be a gym teacher. But I could see there really wasn't any openings, you know, in gym teaching. So I had three cousins that were police officers. And I thought, well, maybe I should try law enforcement.

Herb, like a lot of people in this story, graduated from SC4. And was hired as a cadet in 1974 at the Portearn Police Department. And then was hired as an officer in 1976. I was the youngest officer that Porteering Police Department had ever hired. Just after I was 21, I was hired. Port Huron was not exactly crime-ridden back then, except, of course, for the Canadians. We had a lot of persons from Canada that came over because at that time, the drinking age was 18 here in Michigan. And so a lot of Canadians would come over and get into fights in the bars and pour Iran.

So a lot of those calls. Herb worked nearly 30 years as a Port Huron police officer. On the wall in his office is a plaque with all his badges, a sign of the years of his life he gave to the department. So as a patrol officer, I was there for about seven years, and then I was a detective for about five years, uniform sergeant for a few years, uniform lieutenant for a few years, and then the last three years, detective lieutenant. I've spent my career scrutinizing law enforcement. Herb spent his in the throes of it, and he loved it. He says he believes strongly in the moral imperative of the job

that his role was to keep the community safe, to behave ethically at all times. And every so often, he'd hear whispers about the Scott Macklam case. He was never assigned to it, but he remembers when the call came into the station. I remember the radio call. that it came out as an injured person there in the parking lot. And then later on in the day, I heard that a murder had occurred.

So I was working that day. And it wasn't long before the murder was all over the news. The story kept growing bigger and bigger, and the rumors started. After Herb retired from the police force in 2005, he decided to get a private investigator's license. He started looking into the Scott Macklin case, hoping to find something that would vindicate law enforcement. The more I kept reading that stuff, I thought, man, there's more red flags that just kept coming up over and over. Herb began to realize that something had gone terribly wrong.

And even though he didn't cause the problem, he felt it was his responsibility to help fix it. So that's really why that I became involved in that. This is true, just to do the right thing. And I knew it would come at a cost. Herb was going to be investigating the work of his former colleagues, his friends. Some of the audio you'll hear during this series comes from interviews he's done. He showed us the boxes and boxes of documents that he's collected over the years, sitting in his basement. All of those files there on that rack, and then all of them to the level.

And this is my to-do list right there. Oh, my gosh. Wow. And Herb's prediction that this investigation would come at a cost was correct. And not just because he's been doing it on his own dime all by himself for years. He's done an insane amount of work. And once I realized that all of that's there, I'm thinking, okay, maybe actually, wait a second, Maybe, my God, maybe Herb's already figured it out, and nobody, including Herb, has put it all together because, I mean, I couldn't tell you how many interviews you still.

In psychology, there's a term called the backfire effect. A concept coined 15 or so years ago, though the ideas that undergird it have existed for much longer. It says that correcting a false belief can sometimes strengthen it. It's kind of controversial in social psychology. actually. But the idea survives because it points at something real and much older than the term. Rational human behavior is not the same thing as predictable human behavior. If we were purely rational, our beliefs would shift slightly in accordance with new data. Calculators are rational. Humans are not. That's one of the most beautiful things about being human, our irrationality, our hopes, our perceptions,

our convictions are the prism through which we often function. We do not hold our deepest beliefs the way I calculate our process as numbers. We hold them the way we hold the people we love in the picture we have of ourselves, as things that would cost us something to give up. Another variation of the backfire effect, one that sounds prettier, more romantic, is called belief perseverance. Believe perseverance is woven throughout this case, you'll find out. This is a show about everyone, for whom the cost of being wrong had simply grown too high to pay.

Predictable incentives leading to monstrous outcomes. After Scott's death, everyone in Port Huron is left wondering who kills a kid like this. The people who knew him couldn't make sense of it. As a teacher at his high school put it, things like this don't happen to such nice people. And who kills someone this way? Who does it in the parking lot at 9 a.m? I've been to this parking lot. It's big.

It sits at a busy intersection surrounded by buildings and houses. To commit a crime here is so risky, so impulsive. It's frankly stupid. But it's possible that the one person who might have been feeling worried that day in the parking lot was Scott. Later, people would say that Scott had been acting nervous, preoccupied. concerned for a while. He'd been telling people he was being followed that someone was out to get him.

He allegedly told his manager at work that two men had come into the store a couple of times looking for him. One time, he said, he confronted them and they left. Another time, he hid. Scott told other people, too, a couple of his friends, one of his professors. Crystal, his fiancé, said two.

men had followed them home the night after Halloween. Plus, stuff had been stolen out of his car. Someone let the air out of his tires. But for some reason, as far as I can figure, Scott never pointed the finger at anyone. He knew them, he told people. But he didn't seem to tell anyone the name of who he thought was harassing him. There were other things going on with Scott.

School wasn't going great. His cumulative GPA was about a one-point-point-year. Already he was in his third year of a two-year business program and nowhere near to graduating. Part of the problem, it seemed, was that he rarely showed up. If he wasn't at school, he was at work, Crystal would later say. But he wasn't really at school. He'd missed 21 days of his accounting class, an 18 of algebra. Something was up.

The question is, was it connected to the way that he died? Scott's father, Gary Macklam, was not only mayor of their town, he also ran the insurance agency where Crystal worked. That's where she was when the police called around 10 a.m. on the morning of November 5th. Crystal said that she didn't think anything of it. At her job, sometimes cops would call and tell you about an accident or something. But then she heard Gary Maclum say,

is he hurt very bad and knew it was about Scott. He ran out, didn't tell her what happened. but soon after she got a call from a friend who told her that Scott had been killed in the parking lot of SC4 Scott's parents and Crystal went to the hospital to wait soon others came Crystal's little sister Scott's boss at the menswear store there they learned that the worst had happened

that Scott was dead in the waiting room in the midst of their collective shock they were joined by two officers from the port here on police department They were starting their homicide investigation, and they began to ask questions. That's when the trajectory of another life was changed forever, when they heard about a man who might be responsible. A drifter. An outsider.

A suspect. Coming up on the backfire effect. The policeman came out to me and said, why do you have blood all over you? As I'm walking down the driveway, I see there's like five cars. lined up. And then I'm really freaking out. The whole house was surrounded with guys in black and rifle. I'm like, who is this? What are you doing

in my home? Tell me who this is right now, I'm calling the police. He goes, well, I am the police. The Backfare Effect is hosted and reported by me, Josie Deffey Rice. Additional reporting by Joshua Sharp. It's produced by Lydia Jean Cott with additional production support from Trina Manino. Our editor

is Julia Barton. Our executive producers are Amy Gaines-McQuaid and Jacob Smith. Our music was composed by Daniel Walter, sound design and additional music by Jake Gorski. Our fact checker is Lauren Vespoli, and our show art was designed by Sean Carney. Special thanks to a few more people at Pushkin

who made the backfire effect possible. Greta Cohn, Christina Sullivan, Eric Sandler, Morgan Ratner, Kira Posey, Jordan McMillan, Jake Flanagan, Owen Miller, Sarah Brigher, and Karen Shakurgy. For more CBCBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.