May 31, 2023 • 26 mins
In this episode, the producers reflect on the impact of their investigation and the real-world implications of their podcast. They discuss the fallout from their reporting and the effects it has had on the individuals and organizations involved.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From the studio who brought you the number one podcast,
the piked in Massacre. This is Death Island.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Just a few miles off the Thailand coast. The island
of Kotoo looks like a postcard.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
I mean, it's almost like if you were going to
imagine a paradise island, they'll draw a picture of one.
That's what Kotao looks like.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Young tourists from all over the world visit the pristine
beaches and crystal clear water.
Speaker 4 (00:26):
Right underneath the surface lies something sinister.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
A dark cloud has come over the island and cast
its shadow death, history and danger.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
In the last twenty years, dozens of tourists have died
mysteriously on the island.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
One thing is certain in this beautiful place, no coast
is clear. This is Death Island, Episode elevee. This conversation
between Courtney Armstrong Andrew are Now, Stephanie Lyiduker and myself
(01:07):
was recorded on Friday, March twenty fourth. Our entire team
had just finished putting the final touches on our series,
and we thought a roundtable conversation with our editorial crew
talking about the ins and the outs of the series
might be interesting. Here's Andrew kicking it off.
Speaker 5 (01:22):
We just uploaded the trailer for Death Island two days ago,
and we've already started to get some reaction. Connor, do
you want to talk about that for a moment before
we kind of get into how we got into this project.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
I've already got my first and my second hate tweet
from the Kotal truthers, as I'm going to call them,
the people who think that it's all pure conspiracy theory
and craziness and tinfoil at people and anyone who talks
about cootal and any type of negative light are crazy people.
Speaker 4 (01:51):
So as soon as the trailer dropped, I already started.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
Getting people basically saying that we're conspiracy theorists and crazy people.
Speaker 4 (01:59):
So it starts.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
I think it's going to get a lot more crazy
once the first episode, and you know, all the way
through the other episodes, but it's it's gonna kick off here,
I think.
Speaker 5 (02:07):
I mean, you know, at least we were kind of
warned about this by a few of the people that
we've spoken to. They said, you know, as soon as
you guys put this out there, they're going to come
for you hard.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Exactly and exactly. I think that's The thing that's so
fascinating about this entire project is, on one hand, there
is crazy Internet speculation and conspiracy theories, right, and I'll
be the first to say some of them are just insane.
At the same time, there are some really valid, heartfelt
conclusions and views about the things that have gone on
(02:37):
on this island Kotel in the last twenty some years,
and they're valid, and they're truthful, and they deserve to
have these questions asked about that, which I think is
the point where you and I started from, which is,
let's ask some questions, let's see what's true, let's see
what's valid, and let's see what's crazy. Right.
Speaker 5 (02:54):
And speaking of where this started from, So December twenty
twenty one, Depie of KT Studios brought this to my attention.
Speaker 4 (03:02):
Jefanie Leidecker are our executive producer.
Speaker 5 (03:05):
And started looking into it, and I started doing some
research and you know, kind of getting ahead of it
before officially getting going on the project. And then you
and I connected in very interesting circumstances because I think
my first official day or week on the project, you
were in Kiev.
Speaker 4 (03:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
So I have been connected to this project for a
long time, which we'll explain later through KT Studios. And
have been following this island for a long time, having
lived overseas and just knowing a lot about Thailand, which
I want to state for the record, I think is
a beautiful, wonderful country.
Speaker 4 (03:38):
I visited it. I love it.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
I've always had a great time when I've been there.
But Kotao was always stuck out as a place that's
really problematic, and so it was always on It's been
on my radar, this this whole idea of Death Island
Kotao for years now. But right when we were beginning
to go into pre productions essentially like start our first meetings,
I got a phone call on a Friday afternoon from
a good friend of mine at CNN name Alex Marqua,
(04:01):
and he's a reporter there, and he said, Hey, I'm
going to Kiev tomorrow.
Speaker 4 (04:05):
Do you want to go.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
I immediately call my wife and I said, Alex is
asking if I can go to Keev with him as
a producer.
Speaker 4 (04:11):
Are you cool with that?
Speaker 2 (04:12):
And She's like yeah, but what about pre production on
Death Island? I said, well, that's my next phone call.
I'm going to call Courtney and Stephanie and find out
if I can go. And I said, listen, I'm going
to go. You know, there's this possibility there's a war,
but it doesn't look like it. I'll go for two
weeks if it's not, if the war hasn't happened in
two weeks, I'll come back.
Speaker 4 (04:28):
And I said, I'll be in a nice hotel and
Kiev most of the.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Time, I'll have internet. I'll be able to do pre
production when there's some downtime. And basically, Courtney and Stephanie said,
go do it. We'll start pre production. We're going to
bring Andrew on board. We'll get him sort of up
to speed. And then I think the first time we
spoke was about probably my second or third day in Ukraine,
and the war hadn't started yet, right, but I was
in a hotel room and we're all meeting, and it
(04:52):
was sort of like, Okay, where do we begin on
Koto as a story?
Speaker 5 (04:58):
It was a tough one, right, because when you start
digging into it, where do you really start? You can
start chronologically at the beginning of when everything happened, or
There's so many things that really stood out to me.
I remember one in particular, Dmitri pops, and you know
this was I did not come from a true crime background,
and I think my first day on the job, I
(05:20):
saw a lot of crime scene photos. This Dimitri case
stuck with me still to this day. I think about
it a lot.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
Yeah, I know exactly the photos you're talking about. They're
out there on the internet. Probably you might even see
them at some point if you're following the story. But
I know exactly the photos you're talking about, and yeah,
those stick with you. There's a lot of photos from Kotel,
from the death scenes that really stick with you.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
Dmitri Povs is one that stuck out to all of us.
Dmitri was found on New Year's Day twenty fifteen.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
Dmitri was a French citizen who had been living on
Kotel for some period of time, and he was out
celebrating New Year's twenty fifteen like everyone else, and he
was out at a bar until five am, and he
and his friends moved the after party to another spot
at some point that finally wrapped up really really late
in the morning, and at some point his friends all
went back to their rooms and Dimitri was essentially alone.
(06:18):
It's not clear when Dimitri who was twenty nine at
the time, was alone completely and when he went home
or where exactly we went. But later in the afternoon
on that day his friends found him hanging from a
ceiling fan in his villa.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
It was a particularly horrifying scene. His hands were tied
behind his back, and that's a pretty suspicious way to
kill yourself if you're going to That said, it's entirely
possible that he could have slipped his second hand in,
but it does seem like there wasn't much investigation done
at his place. There were no obvious signs of a
(06:55):
struggle or of a fight, and TI police pretty quickly
ruled his death as suicide and the official cause of
death was exphyxiation.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
There was also supposedly a suicide note in which he
essentially said that Iris, I love you. His friends said
that there was no woman named Iris in his life,
and they're not exactly sure who that note would have
been addressed to. It's possible it was somebody that his
friends on the island didn't know. That's always a possibility.
But the combination of the suicide note, in which it
(07:27):
references somebody who his friends didn't know, and the fact
that his hands were tied behind his back. Are really
two of the troubling parts of this suicide, and it's
possible it was a suicide, but given everything we know
about the island and the way that the police handle
the investigations, and the fact that we know that there
are people on the island who have threatened and possibly
(07:48):
even potentially killed others because of fights or disagreements, his
death is really suspicious and we've just had a lot
of lingering questions about his death for a long period
of time. But it's one of those deaths that there's
just not a lot of information other than the most
basic of information to really dig into.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
And Dimitri's case was one of the actual first ones
that we had read up on going back years ago,
you know, to twenty eighteen.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
We've struggled to track anyone down who knew them. But
it's also one of those stories where there just isn't
a lot of family and friends posting about him, and
a lot of these other deaths, you have family advocates
who have been basically out there saying, you know, we
don't believe that this death was in fact a suicide
or an accident. We really struggled to find anyone who
was still posting or had posted in the past about him.
(08:35):
We struggled to find anyone who seemed to be connected
to him. And whoever these friends are that are in
the newspapers, none of them are identified. And it's that
combination of this as a global story where there are
people all over the world who've gone to Thailand and
gone to Kotl and the combination of a French national
who maybe his friends didn't speak English and so weren't
(08:57):
posting in English. But we've looked everywhere to try to
find people who are connected to Dmitri, and it's just
been nearly impossible.
Speaker 4 (09:04):
This period of time.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
You've got the murders of Hannah and David, You've got
Chrissy's death, You've got Dmitri's suicide. When people talk about
Kotao as Death Island, it really comes from this period
of time. We know, as you've listened to this series
that the deaths, many of these deaths also predate this
period of time, Mister Band's death and Tony Lotus's later
as well. There's just this period of time where Kotao
(09:29):
really goes from this island paradise to being known as
death Island, and this is the period of time that
it really gets its reputation.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
And it's this period of time that you're referring to
where we'd found a lot of the cases that we
then went on to try and investigate and reach out
to people and see if we could find out any
kind of clarity whatsoever.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
The first thing we sort of said was, are we
just got to make a list of who do we
know that's died on Kotel, whether they were murdered, whether
they had a suspicious death, whether they had just a
tragic death that you know, as an accident or just natural.
And I remember that was sort of your first task, right,
which is like just compiling names, dates, locations, photos, contact information.
(10:14):
Just that was where we started from. And that list,
over the course of several weeks, just kept getting bigger
and bigger and bigger.
Speaker 5 (10:20):
Yeah. What I thought wasn't going to be you know,
two dents of a list ended up being a really
cumbersome project. You know, from mapping out on the island
where the deaths occurred or the bodies were found, and
you know, really being able to hone in and look
at these cases and say, you know, these ones really
(10:41):
really look like accidents or diving whatever, and these are
the ones that we really don't have enough information, and
these are the ones that are suspicious. So we kind
of took a long time to go through everything, and
once we compiled all of that, you and I started
just shooting out emails, Facebook messages, whets, you know, whatever
(11:01):
we could do to try and contact some people who
you know, who had lost loved ones on the island.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
You know, there's been I want to say a lot
written about Kotel because there actually hasn't been. But the
things that have been written about Kotel are often not
very in depth. You know, it's sort of the same
phrases and language written over and over again. For the articles,
they always highlight a couple of cases and a couple
of deaths as they mentioned the new death.
Speaker 4 (11:25):
But as we started to dig I.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
Think the thing we wanted to do was like, let's
try to find some new people who've never spoken on
the record before. Let's try to find some new voices
that have never been contacted, or if they've been contacted,
they've only been contacted. And you know for a podcast,
you know, years ago in you know, a brief conversation,
but people who haven't had sort of a full opportunity
to tell their stories, to have their own information, their
(11:48):
own stories sort of critically looked at as I think
like we tried to do. And you know, I think
as we were building this list and compiling this list
when it got bigger. And two, I think throughout this
process we uncovered some people whose voice had never been
heard before.
Speaker 5 (12:02):
Right. And you know, in going back a little bit,
you know you're talking about there's so much disinformation out there,
what's real, what's not? And so the biggest part of
the outreach and the research was, you know, what is
true and what is not? How do we figure that out?
And how do we use our platform to help these people.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
I think the other thing is is I wanted to
and I think you wanted to, and I think the
entire team at KAT Studios wanted to make sure that
we never lost track of the victims, the people who died,
their families and their loved ones, and to make sure
we're humanizing people as much as possible, that they're just
not a stat somebody who was you know, murdered, or
somebody who had an accident, or somebody who died under
(12:44):
unknown circumstances, right Like, we didn't want it just to
be a line that, oh, and then here's the gruesome
details or mysterious details. But we wanted to really try
to talk to people who you know, knew these people,
knew them as friendsnew them as family members, knew them,
was loved ones. And I think that is that that
was a really big part of what we were trying
to do throughout this entire process.
Speaker 5 (13:03):
And it didn't take too many conversations before we realize
we've really got something here. I mean, there's there's a
lot of smoke, and in my opinion, you know, and
I'm sure you'd agree with this, there's definitely a fire.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
Let's stop here for a break. We'll be back in
a moment.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
I think this is a conversation that deserves to be had,
and particularly for the people who thinks it's all looney
to and conspiracy theories. You know, is there a serial
killer who's behind all of these things? Is it a cult?
Is it a random tragic accident. I mean, there's a
whole gamut of conversations about what happens on Koto, And
you know, I think we tried to look at that
pretty critically about what we're honest conversations, and which was
(13:55):
disinformation and which was sort of truthful, and which was
just pure speculation, and not to any one person was
right or anyone person was wrong, but to try to
build up a conversation around these deaths because they're all separate,
but they're all equal in the sense that they all
are tied to this one tiny little island in Kotel.
Speaker 5 (14:13):
And not just one tiny island. I mean for several
of them, it's one beach on one tiny island. And
you know, that's something that we spent a lot of
time digging into.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
Yeah, I you know, as people listen to this story
about Kotel, so much of the questions are really centered
around a couple parts of the island. You know, there's
several parts of the island that just aren't inhabitable or
that they there are people that live there, they're locals.
The Western tourists, Facing party, scuba diving facing part is
a pretty small part of the island, but it's the
(14:46):
center of the island. It's the part where everything happens,
both good and bad, and that's the area where so
many of these suspicious deaths you know, happen.
Speaker 5 (14:55):
Yeah, And I'm really excited for people to to hear
these stories and kind of side for themselves what they
think about this, because I don't know. I mean, my
heart is very invested in this at this point in time.
It's been well over a year since we started, and
you know, as we spoke recently, things are still happening. Now.
(15:15):
You know, we think we've got everything covered, we're ready
to finish post on our shows, and then all of
the sudden, somebody else. So there's I don't know, there's
a lot out there for people to hear, and I
really I look forward to hearing their thoughts on it.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
Well, I mean, don't you feel like we're not actually
really done? Like I feel like even though we have
episodes in the can and they're edited and they've been
voiced and you know, they're finished, even though we think
we know how this all ends, the season wraps up,
I feel like there's things that are going to come out.
I think there's always the possibilities somebody else dies, Like
this is not over, even though we have finished essentially
(15:50):
the first season, or are finished with most of the
first season, you know, as it is, and That's kind
of the thing is this process has been going on
for a year for us, but I don't feel it's
wrapped up by any means.
Speaker 5 (16:01):
Not even close, not even close. I think there's more
people we want to talk to, and you know, as
we learn more, there's more questions that we have, which
is somewhat frustrating because usually the more information you have,
the less questions you have. And so this has been
a really fascinating, extremely sad, but fascinating process as we've
(16:23):
gone through this, and I have no idea where it's going.
Speaker 4 (16:27):
Yeah, me neither.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
I mean, I think I have a better sense of
what people who do investigations feel like, because you know,
you might get a piece of information and then you
try to verify it and you try to check it out,
and then you try to see where that fits in
with the other information you have and what else that
might open in terms of information and contacts with people.
And I can only imagine in a lot of murder cases,
(16:49):
crime cases, you know, political intrigue, like the more you
peel things back, the more doors you open, it often
leads to not more answers, but more questions, and over time,
some of those questions begin to become answers. But you know,
I can see why investigations that are complicated take years
to unravel, because the one thing I've come away from
(17:10):
this process.
Speaker 4 (17:10):
Is just like every question leads to an answer that
also leads to other questions.
Speaker 5 (17:16):
Yeah, and this has really been a crash course of
investigative journalism for me, having had no real experience in
the journalistic world. You know, you've kind of helped guide
me along the way and how we dig out these
little nuggets of info.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
Yeah, I think for me, one of the things that's
been really interesting is just the efforts that social media
allows you to go and reach and find people.
Speaker 5 (17:38):
Right.
Speaker 2 (17:38):
We also employed people in Germany and Argentina to help
track down people, so we had, you know, we hired
people in other countries to look for people where social
media was a dead end. You know, people looking through
film books and calling and reaching out to people. You know,
there's a lot of information on social media who people
are friends with, who people connect with, what pictures they like,
(18:01):
what links they provide, and stuff like that, and that
provides a trail. But it's also an incomplete trail, but
it is one that gives you, you know, some a
roadmap to some extent of where to start, not always
where to finish, but at least where to start when
you're trying to find out information on people, and again
as you try to find out who these people were
and why they went to Kotow, what motivated them to
go there, to live there, to visit, sometimes you have
(18:22):
to step way far away from Kotao and Thailand in
general to get a better picture of who these people are.
Speaker 5 (18:28):
I'm curious what about Kotao drew you in initially when
you started looking into this in meeting with Stephanie and Courtney.
Speaker 4 (18:36):
You know, years ago, I've.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
Lived and traveled all over the world. I can't and
I'm a scuba diver, and I've been to some small
little islands and scuba dived, and you know, lots of
beach paradises and things like that, and I can't think
of another place that I visited that has this type
of reputation, whether it's earned or unfair, or if it's
you know, something that they shouldn't have this label of
Death Island. The fact matter is they do have this label.
(19:01):
There's plenty of questions surrounding what's happened on this island,
and so it's such a small, tiny island in comparison
to Kosamui or Kopanyang or some of these other places
that are more famous and other countries that have diving
cultures or party cultures. You know, the things that have
happened on Kotel are both tragic and are also mysterious.
(19:23):
And when you have a small town murderer, right, essentially,
if you put in the sort of conversation of America,
it's a small town that a lot of people visit,
and there's just a lot of death, and it's almost
like murder, she wrote in that sense, right, like it's
a small little town and what was a cab at
Maine or whatever that you know, somebody was murdered every
Sunday night. That's not quite Koto. But that's the way
(19:45):
it feels like to me, and I think that's what
drew me into it as a story, which is it's
a small community.
Speaker 4 (19:49):
It's a very tight knit community.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
Everybody knows each other to some extent, and even if
they didn't know each other, they know somebody who knew somebody.
Because it is just a small little island, but it
has a lot of and it has a lot of
people passing through at various points in their lives. Right,
it's not the number of tragic deaths that we discovered,
it's the number of tragic deaths compared to the size
(20:11):
and the amount of people there. Yeah, And you know,
and there will be people who say, well, it's not
there aren't that many deaths and compared to other places,
and that's just it's not true. Like it's a small
island and has a lot of tourists, and you have
you have accidents, and you have deaths, and you have murders,
and you have natural cause deaths all over the world
in Thailand and any other place, and all that stuff happens.
But there's two things that you have on Kotao, which
(20:34):
is one they happen a lot, and two they happen
really strange ways that the police just discount any type
of explanation. They don't really make much of an effort
to investigate. So you're always left with these questions about
what happened. And you can take even what is seemingly
the most natural of causes, and there's still questions because
(20:56):
the police blame it on the victim or they don't
do any investigation, or if they do an investigation, the
paperwork looks doctored or sort of made up in fake
or it looks like somebody just sort of googled on
the internet and said, you know, what's the cause of death,
let's put that.
Speaker 4 (21:11):
Down on the police report.
Speaker 2 (21:12):
And you have that time and time again, and that
leads to all of these questions about Koto. And you know,
no police department is perfect. But if you can compare
the police department on Koto to what we've been told
about Kopayang or Kosumui, the larger islands in Thailand or
even Bangkok, everybody says the investigations on Koto are the worst.
(21:34):
And that's that's even comes from people who are not,
you know, sort of as open to believing that Kota
has as many problems as they do. You know, Koto's
police department and police force is really inadequate for the
issues it has.
Speaker 5 (21:47):
I mean, I can't recall a single person we spoke
to or read about that had anything complimentary to say
about the way they handled an investigation.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
Yeah, and maybe that's the people who who most likely
we're happy with it, are unwilling to talk because they
just don't want to be drawn into this, you know.
I think I think there are people connected to Hannah
and David's murders who are very happy with the outcome
of that investigation and simply don't want to engage in
any conversation about that investigation being flawed. But in all honesty,
(22:20):
even people who are skeptical of, you know, their friends'
deaths maybe just be natural. They would all come back
and say, or most of them will come back and say.
Speaker 4 (22:30):
They were their problems with this investigation.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
It doesn't feel right. Even if I don't think they
were murdered, I'm not sure the investigation is going to
be the thing that makes me believe that they weren't murdered.
Speaker 5 (22:40):
Right, And that's the last thing. You know, something terrible
happens while a family member or loved ones on vacation,
you want to know what happened. I mean, I feel
so horrible for these people who are left with way
more questions than answers.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
Let's stop here for another break.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
I think one of the interesting things is the backdrop
of Thailand in the last twenty years as well, which
you've had a series of coups. You've had an issue
with the monarchy about what you can and can't say,
can you criticize and not criticize. The Ties are very
they're very concerned about the way they are portrayed in
the world and particularly in the media, about whether it's
a safe and friendly place, or whether it's a kotau
(23:35):
or even the country in general is dangerous. And so
you have this backdrop of the way Thailand views itself
and the way Ties view themselves. That is part of
this story as well, and I think that only adds
to some of the paranoia, some to the conspiracy theories
and some of the questions about how people die on
this island.
Speaker 5 (23:54):
Absolutely.
Speaker 6 (23:55):
Initially when we started this project kind of together, really
the task to you guys, meeting Connor and Andrew was
there's so many stories and this is a worldwide search, right,
so it's time zones and language barriers, and that's a
complicated effort in and of itself. And even just aggregating
the information about the various cases, Connor, to your point,
(24:17):
to be able to at least categorize them was the
initial task. And then you all continue to take it
to such a deeper level, and I think the level
of outreach that the both of you have done is
really remarkable.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
It's dangerous stuff.
Speaker 6 (24:30):
We're talking right now, it's dangerous stuff, and the stakes
are very high. Families don't have answers. Andrew to your
point earlier, which gave me chills. It's one of those
stories that I think everybody would agree once you hear it,
you literally cannot unhear it. And Connor, we were all
pitching it way back in the day prior to COVID,
(24:51):
and it was one of those cases that nobody could
get out of their head. And at the bare minimum,
the hope for the podcast is to be actionable, right,
aggregate all this information, utilize really frankly the world because
the victims are from so many different countries, to be
able to find new information. We're really going to encourage
listeners to hopefully add to the amount of leads that
(25:14):
we've gotten so far.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
Next week we'll be back to continue this conversation and
wrap up season one of Death Island.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
If you have any information about any of the cases
discussed this season, please contact us at producers at KTIDH
studios dot com For more information and relevant photos. Follow
us on Instagram at kt Underscore Studios. Death Island is
produced by Stephanie Leidecker, Connor Powell Andrew Arnow, Jeff Shane,
(25:49):
Chris Cacaro, Gabriel Castillo, and me Courtney Armstrong. Editing and
sound design by Jeff Tooi music by Vanicor. Music. Island
is a production of iHeartRadio and KT Studios. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
From the studio who brought you the number one podcast,
the piked in Massacre. This is Death Island.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Just a few miles off the Thailand coast. The island
of Kotoo looks like a postcard.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
I mean, it's almost like if you were going to
imagine a paradise island, they'll draw a picture of one.
That's what Kotao looks like.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Young tourists from all over the world visit the pristine
beaches and crystal clear water.
Speaker 4 (00:26):
Right underneath the surface lies something sinister.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
A dark cloud has come over the island and cast
its shadow death, history and danger.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
In the last twenty years, dozens of tourists have died
mysteriously on the island.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
One thing is certain in this beautiful place, no coast
is clear. This is Death Island, Episode elevee. This conversation
between Courtney Armstrong Andrew are Now, Stephanie Lyiduker and myself
(01:07):
was recorded on Friday, March twenty fourth. Our entire team
had just finished putting the final touches on our series,
and we thought a roundtable conversation with our editorial crew
talking about the ins and the outs of the series
might be interesting. Here's Andrew kicking it off.
Speaker 5 (01:22):
We just uploaded the trailer for Death Island two days ago,
and we've already started to get some reaction. Connor, do
you want to talk about that for a moment before
we kind of get into how we got into this project.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
I've already got my first and my second hate tweet
from the Kotal truthers, as I'm going to call them,
the people who think that it's all pure conspiracy theory
and craziness and tinfoil at people and anyone who talks
about cootal and any type of negative light are crazy people.
Speaker 4 (01:51):
So as soon as the trailer dropped, I already started.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
Getting people basically saying that we're conspiracy theorists and crazy people.
Speaker 4 (01:59):
So it starts.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
I think it's going to get a lot more crazy
once the first episode, and you know, all the way
through the other episodes, but it's it's gonna kick off here,
I think.
Speaker 5 (02:07):
I mean, you know, at least we were kind of
warned about this by a few of the people that
we've spoken to. They said, you know, as soon as
you guys put this out there, they're going to come
for you hard.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Exactly and exactly. I think that's The thing that's so
fascinating about this entire project is, on one hand, there
is crazy Internet speculation and conspiracy theories, right, and I'll
be the first to say some of them are just insane.
At the same time, there are some really valid, heartfelt
conclusions and views about the things that have gone on
(02:37):
on this island Kotel in the last twenty some years,
and they're valid, and they're truthful, and they deserve to
have these questions asked about that, which I think is
the point where you and I started from, which is,
let's ask some questions, let's see what's true, let's see
what's valid, and let's see what's crazy. Right.
Speaker 5 (02:54):
And speaking of where this started from, So December twenty
twenty one, Depie of KT Studios brought this to my attention.
Speaker 4 (03:02):
Jefanie Leidecker are our executive producer.
Speaker 5 (03:05):
And started looking into it, and I started doing some
research and you know, kind of getting ahead of it
before officially getting going on the project. And then you
and I connected in very interesting circumstances because I think
my first official day or week on the project, you
were in Kiev.
Speaker 4 (03:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
So I have been connected to this project for a
long time, which we'll explain later through KT Studios. And
have been following this island for a long time, having
lived overseas and just knowing a lot about Thailand, which
I want to state for the record, I think is
a beautiful, wonderful country.
Speaker 4 (03:38):
I visited it. I love it.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
I've always had a great time when I've been there.
But Kotao was always stuck out as a place that's
really problematic, and so it was always on It's been
on my radar, this this whole idea of Death Island
Kotao for years now. But right when we were beginning
to go into pre productions essentially like start our first meetings,
I got a phone call on a Friday afternoon from
a good friend of mine at CNN name Alex Marqua,
(04:01):
and he's a reporter there, and he said, Hey, I'm
going to Kiev tomorrow.
Speaker 4 (04:05):
Do you want to go.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
I immediately call my wife and I said, Alex is
asking if I can go to Keev with him as
a producer.
Speaker 4 (04:11):
Are you cool with that?
Speaker 2 (04:12):
And She's like yeah, but what about pre production on
Death Island? I said, well, that's my next phone call.
I'm going to call Courtney and Stephanie and find out
if I can go. And I said, listen, I'm going
to go. You know, there's this possibility there's a war,
but it doesn't look like it. I'll go for two
weeks if it's not, if the war hasn't happened in
two weeks, I'll come back.
Speaker 4 (04:28):
And I said, I'll be in a nice hotel and
Kiev most of the.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Time, I'll have internet. I'll be able to do pre
production when there's some downtime. And basically, Courtney and Stephanie said,
go do it. We'll start pre production. We're going to
bring Andrew on board. We'll get him sort of up
to speed. And then I think the first time we
spoke was about probably my second or third day in Ukraine,
and the war hadn't started yet, right, but I was
in a hotel room and we're all meeting, and it
(04:52):
was sort of like, Okay, where do we begin on
Koto as a story?
Speaker 5 (04:58):
It was a tough one, right, because when you start
digging into it, where do you really start? You can
start chronologically at the beginning of when everything happened, or
There's so many things that really stood out to me.
I remember one in particular, Dmitri pops, and you know
this was I did not come from a true crime background,
and I think my first day on the job, I
(05:20):
saw a lot of crime scene photos. This Dimitri case
stuck with me still to this day. I think about
it a lot.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
Yeah, I know exactly the photos you're talking about. They're
out there on the internet. Probably you might even see
them at some point if you're following the story. But
I know exactly the photos you're talking about, and yeah,
those stick with you. There's a lot of photos from Kotel,
from the death scenes that really stick with you.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
Dmitri Povs is one that stuck out to all of us.
Dmitri was found on New Year's Day twenty fifteen.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
Dmitri was a French citizen who had been living on
Kotel for some period of time, and he was out
celebrating New Year's twenty fifteen like everyone else, and he
was out at a bar until five am, and he
and his friends moved the after party to another spot
at some point that finally wrapped up really really late
in the morning, and at some point his friends all
went back to their rooms and Dimitri was essentially alone.
(06:18):
It's not clear when Dimitri who was twenty nine at
the time, was alone completely and when he went home
or where exactly we went. But later in the afternoon
on that day his friends found him hanging from a
ceiling fan in his villa.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
It was a particularly horrifying scene. His hands were tied
behind his back, and that's a pretty suspicious way to
kill yourself if you're going to That said, it's entirely
possible that he could have slipped his second hand in,
but it does seem like there wasn't much investigation done
at his place. There were no obvious signs of a
(06:55):
struggle or of a fight, and TI police pretty quickly
ruled his death as suicide and the official cause of
death was exphyxiation.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
There was also supposedly a suicide note in which he
essentially said that Iris, I love you. His friends said
that there was no woman named Iris in his life,
and they're not exactly sure who that note would have
been addressed to. It's possible it was somebody that his
friends on the island didn't know. That's always a possibility.
But the combination of the suicide note, in which it
(07:27):
references somebody who his friends didn't know, and the fact
that his hands were tied behind his back. Are really
two of the troubling parts of this suicide, and it's
possible it was a suicide, but given everything we know
about the island and the way that the police handle
the investigations, and the fact that we know that there
are people on the island who have threatened and possibly
(07:48):
even potentially killed others because of fights or disagreements, his
death is really suspicious and we've just had a lot
of lingering questions about his death for a long period
of time. But it's one of those deaths that there's
just not a lot of information other than the most
basic of information to really dig into.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
And Dimitri's case was one of the actual first ones
that we had read up on going back years ago,
you know, to twenty eighteen.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
We've struggled to track anyone down who knew them. But
it's also one of those stories where there just isn't
a lot of family and friends posting about him, and
a lot of these other deaths, you have family advocates
who have been basically out there saying, you know, we
don't believe that this death was in fact a suicide
or an accident. We really struggled to find anyone who
was still posting or had posted in the past about him.
(08:35):
We struggled to find anyone who seemed to be connected
to him. And whoever these friends are that are in
the newspapers, none of them are identified. And it's that
combination of this as a global story where there are
people all over the world who've gone to Thailand and
gone to Kotl and the combination of a French national
who maybe his friends didn't speak English and so weren't
(08:57):
posting in English. But we've looked everywhere to try to
find people who are connected to Dmitri, and it's just
been nearly impossible.
Speaker 4 (09:04):
This period of time.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
You've got the murders of Hannah and David, You've got
Chrissy's death, You've got Dmitri's suicide. When people talk about
Kotao as Death Island, it really comes from this period
of time. We know, as you've listened to this series
that the deaths, many of these deaths also predate this
period of time, Mister Band's death and Tony Lotus's later
as well. There's just this period of time where Kotao
(09:29):
really goes from this island paradise to being known as
death Island, and this is the period of time that
it really gets its reputation.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
And it's this period of time that you're referring to
where we'd found a lot of the cases that we
then went on to try and investigate and reach out
to people and see if we could find out any
kind of clarity whatsoever.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
The first thing we sort of said was, are we
just got to make a list of who do we
know that's died on Kotel, whether they were murdered, whether
they had a suspicious death, whether they had just a
tragic death that you know, as an accident or just natural.
And I remember that was sort of your first task, right,
which is like just compiling names, dates, locations, photos, contact information.
(10:14):
Just that was where we started from. And that list,
over the course of several weeks, just kept getting bigger
and bigger and bigger.
Speaker 5 (10:20):
Yeah. What I thought wasn't going to be you know,
two dents of a list ended up being a really
cumbersome project. You know, from mapping out on the island
where the deaths occurred or the bodies were found, and
you know, really being able to hone in and look
at these cases and say, you know, these ones really
(10:41):
really look like accidents or diving whatever, and these are
the ones that we really don't have enough information, and
these are the ones that are suspicious. So we kind
of took a long time to go through everything, and
once we compiled all of that, you and I started
just shooting out emails, Facebook messages, whets, you know, whatever
(11:01):
we could do to try and contact some people who
you know, who had lost loved ones on the island.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
You know, there's been I want to say a lot
written about Kotel because there actually hasn't been. But the
things that have been written about Kotel are often not
very in depth. You know, it's sort of the same
phrases and language written over and over again. For the articles,
they always highlight a couple of cases and a couple
of deaths as they mentioned the new death.
Speaker 4 (11:25):
But as we started to dig I.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
Think the thing we wanted to do was like, let's
try to find some new people who've never spoken on
the record before. Let's try to find some new voices
that have never been contacted, or if they've been contacted,
they've only been contacted. And you know for a podcast,
you know, years ago in you know, a brief conversation,
but people who haven't had sort of a full opportunity
to tell their stories, to have their own information, their
(11:48):
own stories sort of critically looked at as I think
like we tried to do. And you know, I think
as we were building this list and compiling this list
when it got bigger. And two, I think throughout this
process we uncovered some people whose voice had never been
heard before.
Speaker 5 (12:02):
Right. And you know, in going back a little bit,
you know you're talking about there's so much disinformation out there,
what's real, what's not? And so the biggest part of
the outreach and the research was, you know, what is
true and what is not? How do we figure that out?
And how do we use our platform to help these people.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
I think the other thing is is I wanted to
and I think you wanted to, and I think the
entire team at KAT Studios wanted to make sure that
we never lost track of the victims, the people who died,
their families and their loved ones, and to make sure
we're humanizing people as much as possible, that they're just
not a stat somebody who was you know, murdered, or
somebody who had an accident, or somebody who died under
(12:44):
unknown circumstances, right Like, we didn't want it just to
be a line that, oh, and then here's the gruesome
details or mysterious details. But we wanted to really try
to talk to people who you know, knew these people,
knew them as friendsnew them as family members, knew them,
was loved ones. And I think that is that that
was a really big part of what we were trying
to do throughout this entire process.
Speaker 5 (13:03):
And it didn't take too many conversations before we realize
we've really got something here. I mean, there's there's a
lot of smoke, and in my opinion, you know, and
I'm sure you'd agree with this, there's definitely a fire.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
Let's stop here for a break. We'll be back in
a moment.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
I think this is a conversation that deserves to be had,
and particularly for the people who thinks it's all looney
to and conspiracy theories. You know, is there a serial
killer who's behind all of these things? Is it a cult?
Is it a random tragic accident. I mean, there's a
whole gamut of conversations about what happens on Koto, And
you know, I think we tried to look at that
pretty critically about what we're honest conversations, and which was
(13:55):
disinformation and which was sort of truthful, and which was
just pure speculation, and not to any one person was
right or anyone person was wrong, but to try to
build up a conversation around these deaths because they're all separate,
but they're all equal in the sense that they all
are tied to this one tiny little island in Kotel.
Speaker 5 (14:13):
And not just one tiny island. I mean for several
of them, it's one beach on one tiny island. And
you know, that's something that we spent a lot of
time digging into.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
Yeah, I you know, as people listen to this story
about Kotel, so much of the questions are really centered
around a couple parts of the island. You know, there's
several parts of the island that just aren't inhabitable or
that they there are people that live there, they're locals.
The Western tourists, Facing party, scuba diving facing part is
a pretty small part of the island, but it's the
(14:46):
center of the island. It's the part where everything happens,
both good and bad, and that's the area where so
many of these suspicious deaths you know, happen.
Speaker 5 (14:55):
Yeah, And I'm really excited for people to to hear
these stories and kind of side for themselves what they
think about this, because I don't know. I mean, my
heart is very invested in this at this point in time.
It's been well over a year since we started, and
you know, as we spoke recently, things are still happening. Now.
(15:15):
You know, we think we've got everything covered, we're ready
to finish post on our shows, and then all of
the sudden, somebody else. So there's I don't know, there's
a lot out there for people to hear, and I
really I look forward to hearing their thoughts on it.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
Well, I mean, don't you feel like we're not actually
really done? Like I feel like even though we have
episodes in the can and they're edited and they've been
voiced and you know, they're finished, even though we think
we know how this all ends, the season wraps up,
I feel like there's things that are going to come out.
I think there's always the possibilities somebody else dies, Like
this is not over, even though we have finished essentially
(15:50):
the first season, or are finished with most of the
first season, you know, as it is, and That's kind
of the thing is this process has been going on
for a year for us, but I don't feel it's
wrapped up by any means.
Speaker 5 (16:01):
Not even close, not even close. I think there's more
people we want to talk to, and you know, as
we learn more, there's more questions that we have, which
is somewhat frustrating because usually the more information you have,
the less questions you have. And so this has been
a really fascinating, extremely sad, but fascinating process as we've
(16:23):
gone through this, and I have no idea where it's going.
Speaker 4 (16:27):
Yeah, me neither.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
I mean, I think I have a better sense of
what people who do investigations feel like, because you know,
you might get a piece of information and then you
try to verify it and you try to check it out,
and then you try to see where that fits in
with the other information you have and what else that
might open in terms of information and contacts with people.
And I can only imagine in a lot of murder cases,
(16:49):
crime cases, you know, political intrigue, like the more you
peel things back, the more doors you open, it often
leads to not more answers, but more questions, and over time,
some of those questions begin to become answers. But you know,
I can see why investigations that are complicated take years
to unravel, because the one thing I've come away from
(17:10):
this process.
Speaker 4 (17:10):
Is just like every question leads to an answer that
also leads to other questions.
Speaker 5 (17:16):
Yeah, and this has really been a crash course of
investigative journalism for me, having had no real experience in
the journalistic world. You know, you've kind of helped guide
me along the way and how we dig out these
little nuggets of info.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
Yeah, I think for me, one of the things that's
been really interesting is just the efforts that social media
allows you to go and reach and find people.
Speaker 5 (17:38):
Right.
Speaker 2 (17:38):
We also employed people in Germany and Argentina to help
track down people, so we had, you know, we hired
people in other countries to look for people where social
media was a dead end. You know, people looking through
film books and calling and reaching out to people. You know,
there's a lot of information on social media who people
are friends with, who people connect with, what pictures they like,
(18:01):
what links they provide, and stuff like that, and that
provides a trail. But it's also an incomplete trail, but
it is one that gives you, you know, some a
roadmap to some extent of where to start, not always
where to finish, but at least where to start when
you're trying to find out information on people, and again
as you try to find out who these people were
and why they went to Kotow, what motivated them to
go there, to live there, to visit, sometimes you have
(18:22):
to step way far away from Kotao and Thailand in
general to get a better picture of who these people are.
Speaker 5 (18:28):
I'm curious what about Kotao drew you in initially when
you started looking into this in meeting with Stephanie and Courtney.
Speaker 4 (18:36):
You know, years ago, I've.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
Lived and traveled all over the world. I can't and
I'm a scuba diver, and I've been to some small
little islands and scuba dived, and you know, lots of
beach paradises and things like that, and I can't think
of another place that I visited that has this type
of reputation, whether it's earned or unfair, or if it's
you know, something that they shouldn't have this label of
Death Island. The fact matter is they do have this label.
(19:01):
There's plenty of questions surrounding what's happened on this island,
and so it's such a small, tiny island in comparison
to Kosamui or Kopanyang or some of these other places
that are more famous and other countries that have diving
cultures or party cultures. You know, the things that have
happened on Kotel are both tragic and are also mysterious.
(19:23):
And when you have a small town murderer, right, essentially,
if you put in the sort of conversation of America,
it's a small town that a lot of people visit,
and there's just a lot of death, and it's almost
like murder, she wrote in that sense, right, like it's
a small little town and what was a cab at
Maine or whatever that you know, somebody was murdered every
Sunday night. That's not quite Koto. But that's the way
(19:45):
it feels like to me, and I think that's what
drew me into it as a story, which is it's
a small community.
Speaker 4 (19:49):
It's a very tight knit community.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
Everybody knows each other to some extent, and even if
they didn't know each other, they know somebody who knew somebody.
Because it is just a small little island, but it
has a lot of and it has a lot of
people passing through at various points in their lives. Right,
it's not the number of tragic deaths that we discovered,
it's the number of tragic deaths compared to the size
(20:11):
and the amount of people there. Yeah, And you know,
and there will be people who say, well, it's not
there aren't that many deaths and compared to other places,
and that's just it's not true. Like it's a small
island and has a lot of tourists, and you have
you have accidents, and you have deaths, and you have murders,
and you have natural cause deaths all over the world
in Thailand and any other place, and all that stuff happens.
But there's two things that you have on Kotao, which
(20:34):
is one they happen a lot, and two they happen
really strange ways that the police just discount any type
of explanation. They don't really make much of an effort
to investigate. So you're always left with these questions about
what happened. And you can take even what is seemingly
the most natural of causes, and there's still questions because
(20:56):
the police blame it on the victim or they don't
do any investigation, or if they do an investigation, the
paperwork looks doctored or sort of made up in fake
or it looks like somebody just sort of googled on
the internet and said, you know, what's the cause of death,
let's put that.
Speaker 4 (21:11):
Down on the police report.
Speaker 2 (21:12):
And you have that time and time again, and that
leads to all of these questions about Koto. And you know,
no police department is perfect. But if you can compare
the police department on Koto to what we've been told
about Kopayang or Kosumui, the larger islands in Thailand or
even Bangkok, everybody says the investigations on Koto are the worst.
(21:34):
And that's that's even comes from people who are not,
you know, sort of as open to believing that Kota
has as many problems as they do. You know, Koto's
police department and police force is really inadequate for the
issues it has.
Speaker 5 (21:47):
I mean, I can't recall a single person we spoke
to or read about that had anything complimentary to say
about the way they handled an investigation.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
Yeah, and maybe that's the people who who most likely
we're happy with it, are unwilling to talk because they
just don't want to be drawn into this, you know.
I think I think there are people connected to Hannah
and David's murders who are very happy with the outcome
of that investigation and simply don't want to engage in
any conversation about that investigation being flawed. But in all honesty,
(22:20):
even people who are skeptical of, you know, their friends'
deaths maybe just be natural. They would all come back
and say, or most of them will come back and say.
Speaker 4 (22:30):
They were their problems with this investigation.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
It doesn't feel right. Even if I don't think they
were murdered, I'm not sure the investigation is going to
be the thing that makes me believe that they weren't murdered.
Speaker 5 (22:40):
Right, And that's the last thing. You know, something terrible
happens while a family member or loved ones on vacation,
you want to know what happened. I mean, I feel
so horrible for these people who are left with way
more questions than answers.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
Let's stop here for another break.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
I think one of the interesting things is the backdrop
of Thailand in the last twenty years as well, which
you've had a series of coups. You've had an issue
with the monarchy about what you can and can't say,
can you criticize and not criticize. The Ties are very
they're very concerned about the way they are portrayed in
the world and particularly in the media, about whether it's
a safe and friendly place, or whether it's a kotau
(23:35):
or even the country in general is dangerous. And so
you have this backdrop of the way Thailand views itself
and the way Ties view themselves. That is part of
this story as well, and I think that only adds
to some of the paranoia, some to the conspiracy theories
and some of the questions about how people die on
this island.
Speaker 5 (23:54):
Absolutely.
Speaker 6 (23:55):
Initially when we started this project kind of together, really
the task to you guys, meeting Connor and Andrew was
there's so many stories and this is a worldwide search, right,
so it's time zones and language barriers, and that's a
complicated effort in and of itself. And even just aggregating
the information about the various cases, Connor, to your point,
(24:17):
to be able to at least categorize them was the
initial task. And then you all continue to take it
to such a deeper level, and I think the level
of outreach that the both of you have done is
really remarkable.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
It's dangerous stuff.
Speaker 6 (24:30):
We're talking right now, it's dangerous stuff, and the stakes
are very high. Families don't have answers. Andrew to your
point earlier, which gave me chills. It's one of those
stories that I think everybody would agree once you hear it,
you literally cannot unhear it. And Connor, we were all
pitching it way back in the day prior to COVID,
(24:51):
and it was one of those cases that nobody could
get out of their head. And at the bare minimum,
the hope for the podcast is to be actionable, right,
aggregate all this information, utilize really frankly the world because
the victims are from so many different countries, to be
able to find new information. We're really going to encourage
listeners to hopefully add to the amount of leads that
(25:14):
we've gotten so far.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
Next week we'll be back to continue this conversation and
wrap up season one of Death Island.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
If you have any information about any of the cases
discussed this season, please contact us at producers at KTIDH
studios dot com For more information and relevant photos. Follow
us on Instagram at kt Underscore Studios. Death Island is
produced by Stephanie Leidecker, Connor Powell Andrew Arnow, Jeff Shane,
(25:49):
Chris Cacaro, Gabriel Castillo, and me Courtney Armstrong. Editing and
sound design by Jeff Tooi music by Vanicor. Music. Island
is a production of iHeartRadio and KT Studios. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hosts And Creators
Stephanie Lydecker
Courtney Armstrong
Jeff Shane
Conor Powell
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