September 30, 2025 • 35 mins
We reopen old wounds as Jodi and Edd dig deeper into the past. And they're forced to confront those closest to Brett as the full story begins to take shape - but at what cost?
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Wisecrack is released weekly and brought to you absolutely free,
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check out the show notes enjoy the episode.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely
those of the podcast author or individuals participating in the podcast,
and do not represent those of iHeartRadio, Tenderfoot TV, or
their employees. This podcast also contains subject matter which may
not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
Previously on Wiscrack, I at Hedges somehow became the center
of a true crime podcast, which frankly was not on
my five year plan. Jody came to my village. I
tried to act call she made my family. Oh no,
she didn't make my family. That was my grandparents. She
met my family. I panicked and made everyone tea that
(01:00):
no one asked for. Then I stood in the corner
like a lamp. My parents confirmed everything I'd said on stage,
so that was validating and also deeply, deeply awkward. I
didn't need therapy before. I think we're heading there now anyway.
JODI's still digging. Next up meeting Brett's dad. I tried
to warn her about him, using only my eyes and
a secret blinking language that I didn't teach her about
(01:22):
before we went. She didn't pick up on it. It's
her podcast, I guess onwards and upwards? Hi, how are you?
Speaker 4 (01:38):
How are you?
Speaker 5 (01:40):
I'm in the UK.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Did you have a chance to read the report? One
of the first documents I got my hands on was
the Domestic Homicide Report. There isn't an official equivalent in
the US, and it's only created in the UK when
there is a long history of violence or abuse when
society demands to know how did this happen? In Brett Rogers' report,
(02:04):
it examines his entire life and was conducted by investigating
all the government agencies that were supposed to support and
assess him, everything from the education system to the parole board.
Speaker 5 (02:15):
What did you think? Yes, I read it.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
I sent this report over to my friend Aaron, a
twenty year veteran of social work in Georgia. She focuses
on at risk young adults with mental health issues diagnosed
or not. Though our systems are different from the UK.
I was hoping she could see something I couldn't, especially
when it came to Brett's biggest advocate, his father, Pete Rogers.
Speaker 5 (02:44):
So it's just that's again a little bit of why
I'm nervous for you of being around his dad. I'm
not sure, like clearly none of that. I'm not sure
that was in the report about how dad or past behaviors.
I've just worked in the field for so long that, yes,
some of it is biological and the brain does different things,
(03:06):
and if he hasn't been diagnosed, that's one thing. But
there is also a learned behavior that comes along with
this where most people get it from where they live
and what they see the most.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
What do you think this is?
Speaker 3 (03:19):
So you're saying this isn't safe, I.
Speaker 5 (03:21):
Personally would not go there, or please bring someone with you.
Oh gosh, now I'm nervous. Can you please be careful?
Speaker 1 (03:31):
The thing was, I was already on my way. I'm
Jody Tovey and this is wisecrack to episode five Brett
(04:06):
you never knew me. On the drive to Pete's house,
I'm silent ed keeps looking over. He senses I'm nervous
and responds with wise cracks and one liners. But I
want to stay focused on the task at hand. The
(04:27):
truth is the thought of meeting the father of a
convicted murderer has me on edge. Out of respect for
the subject matter, I ask ed if he can wait
in the car while I interview Pete. Though it confuses him,
he agrees, and I take a deep breath and walk
up the front steps and knock on the door. Pete, Hi,
(04:52):
I'm Jody. Nice to meet you. How's it going. I'm good, good,
good good. Room in Marklas that is fine, keeps one
bedroom is the bottom floor of a converted townhouse in
the next village over. It looks a lot like the
Hedges Home, only split in half for those who don't
need room for a full family. All right, lovely, okay,
(05:17):
thank you so much. The apartment is simple and unassuming,
pared down to the needs of a retired electrician. He
greets me in shorts and a loud printed shirt like
an old surfer. I can tell he's nervous too, but
he calmly smiles as he shows me his place, which
includes his music collection and his new hobby, an acoustic guitar. Uh,
(05:39):
we have a musician in the house. What were we
listening to? There's so much I want to ask Pete
about that night, about what he thinks about his son,
about how he's continued to move on. But once we
sit down, I just want to work my way into
a conversation by starting simple. So I asked about his
(06:01):
other son, Aaron.
Speaker 4 (06:03):
He's a bit like me, actually, He's like, he's very
very soft, he's very clever actually, And I said, well,
I say it self, he's sort of like he's a
nice kid. Everyone says that, you know, everyone says that. Bear.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
You know what about Brett? Was he an easy kid
as well or a difficult kid?
Speaker 4 (06:23):
Well, it was always naughty Brett. He was always naughty. Yeah,
that was you know, that was his character, wasn't it.
You know he was full of life, full of life.
And he's like, yeah, he was always out there playing.
He would even play. The older kids would even follow him.
He was good at football, He was good at sports.
(06:43):
He was very popular, I would say, one of the
most popular in school.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
When did that friend group start to shrink?
Speaker 4 (06:52):
I believe when he stopped football, which is at mumby
of thirteen something like that. Yeah, he is about that then,
I think, you know.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Pete continued to walk me through Brett's childhood which includes
his divorce from Jillian and when Brett was a teenager.
He tells me about Brett's early run ins with the law,
eventually leading to one of the worst days of Pete's
life and perhaps the incident that sealed Brett's fate in
the years that followed, and he.
Speaker 4 (07:23):
Did get a job. He got a job as a milkman,
which was great. He was only good money. He was
only his own money. That lasted about a month until
we had a problem with me where he went out
to he was on his bike. He was always leaving
his wallet in his back pocket. Likely youngsters, do you know,
lost his wallet? Come home and I was sitting there actually,
(07:47):
and he went out there and make himself signing to eat,
and he started calling me names again, you know, one
of them they just flip. You see. I know this
sach funny going on, but I didn't know about it
then enough about it, and so I said, look, go
(08:08):
and take a walk, take a walk in the blog,
come back and calm down. So he decided to attack me.
So I slipped and he might eye on that on
the corner.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
Pete points to an area where furniture used to be.
It's worth noting that when Pete quote slipped, he hit
the furniture so hard he broke open his eye socket.
Speaker 4 (08:35):
Anyway, go long story short. The police come around. They
said to me, don't worry, it's a family thing. We
won't get much time in that, you know, but he's
going to get prosecuted, so we want your statement. So okay,
I gave him my statement. Then they tried to give
him seven years a family thing, So they tricked me.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
You know, tricked is a heartbreaking choice of words. I
can tell Pete is struggling with memories of Brett. He's
still grieving, still asking what if things could have been different.
As much as his reasoning is strained, I also understand it.
Speaker 4 (09:17):
But they give him five years in the end, then
he came out into about two and a half something
like that. I thought he needed to be prosecuted. I
thought he needed to but to give him five years
was like ridiculous. Really, But they're saying the law works,
you know, Yeah, they tricked me. I think don't want
(09:38):
to have a little tick on their box, the police.
You know, I'm not saying it all like that. I'm
just saying that that's the why it worked. At that point.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
M h, and so is that what it was like
when he was staying here with you? It was just
a switch that would flip seemingly.
Speaker 4 (09:53):
That's the first time it happened. Yeah, because I would
try to understand him.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
You see, I can imagine being a dad and watching
your son change behaviors so dramatically.
Speaker 4 (10:05):
It's not nice, not well, I didn't understand what was happening.
I dedn'ty I'm just schizophra any you.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
Know, this is the first time I've heard this word
allowed to describe Brett, and I'm a little stunned, but cautious.
Pete's casual use of the term makes me wonder if
he's using the clinical definition of the disease. Schizophrenia is
one of the most complex mental illnesses, affecting how a
person thinks, feels, and behaves. It can cause someone to
(10:34):
hear or see things that aren't there, believe things that
aren't true, or feel confused about what's real and what's not.
It's also one of the hardest to diagnose, because no
test exists. In men, symptoms tend not to appear until
their early twenties, and then, once recognized, a constellation of
traits must be diagnosed, but that requires a consistent schedule
(10:56):
with medical professionals to uncover. Simply put, it takes time
to see the pattern. To be clear, Brett was never
diagnosed with schizophrenia, but in hindsight Pete believes he suffered
from it. And remember, in prison, Brett was prescribed antipsychotics
intended to treat schizophrenia.
Speaker 4 (11:16):
And then he became eighteen or seven, not sixteen. When
you stop, you stop having any power over him, you know,
then you're lost because you can't do anything. The doctor
won't talk to you. That's sort of thing.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
Due to British age of consent laws, Pete wasn't allowed
to talk to the doctors about his son's mental health
after he turned sixteen. It's a frustrating law, paradoxical because
those late teenage years are exactly when symptoms start to show.
After Brett was released from prison, it said the family
felt like things were better and that the fact that
(11:54):
these murders had occurred it seemed out of the blue.
And I'm just curious when he that out of prison,
can you describe his behavior, like did it feel out
of the blue?
Speaker 4 (12:05):
Is that acting you come out of prison, you know,
her to stay he had to go and see his
probation officer. That the probation office was on holiday, bless her,
so he couldn't see her. So there's a big thing
going on there, like, oh what do I see? Then
where do I go? There's no way they could give
him anywhere to stay, so he's out on the street.
(12:26):
He's not allowed to stay with me, even though I
wrote him a really good letter saying, how I understand
better what's going on, and I think things would be
fine and all the rest of it, you know. So
we put him up in one of these.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
Like like a hotel or a hotel or something.
Speaker 4 (12:48):
Yeah, that's for about a week or so. And I
thought we can't keep doing this. So her sister tool like,
you know, she said, well, he can't stay here, you know,
blah blah blah.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
Once the parole board had forbidden Brett to live under
his father's roof and Gillian had agreed to take in
her son, Pete had some unsolicited advice for his ex wife,
and it was absolutely horrifying to hear him say it.
Speaker 4 (13:12):
I decide to her, get your knives or what does
sharp knives and put them away put him somewhere else.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
You had warned Jillian to take away those knives. Was
that because you knew that he was dangerous or because
he had threatened before to like use weapons because.
Speaker 4 (13:42):
I know there was a risk. It's as simple as that.
I know there was something not right. There was not
something not right. You know, sat in his room when
we put him in a hotel and he said, I
want you to go now. So he's getting ally, you know, wrong,
didn't they? You know? You just get to know that.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
The moment is both bone chilling and bittersweet. Brett, self aware,
is telling his father to leave the room and get
to safety before another psychotic episode takes hold of him.
So you weren't surprised, No.
Speaker 4 (14:21):
No, I wasn't surprised the whole thing happening, you know,
But merely and truly it didn't surprise me.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
This confession is staggering. Pete Rogers is telling me, pure
and simple that he knew Brett was capable of something
like this. With that weight hanging between us, now's the
time to ask how did he react when he heard
his son murdered his former wife?
Speaker 4 (14:51):
Well, Averon found me and a found He said, people
are saying sorry about this and sorry about that, and
I didn't know what he was talking about. And then
I started getting messages and I went around there basically
to see what was going on. I sort of knew something,
something really bad had happened, you know so, And I
don't know. They never told me. No, they keep storm,
(15:12):
don't they. They just said, like, you know, the incident.
It's an incident. Basically, it's a weird feeling because like
you're in shock, and life goes on and even a
little bit of shock, and you don't really know what
to do.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
Pete. Having now met you, I think you're you seem
like such a well adjusted kind person. How were you
able to get through this? How have you been able to?
Speaker 4 (15:42):
Well?
Speaker 1 (15:43):
If you're in stand and hold a house and a
job and play guitar.
Speaker 4 (15:48):
Well you do. This comes in as years go by,
don't it. I took a you onion analyst who's a local,
and I sat with her for probably once a week,
you know, more or less, for about five or six years,
and eventually got to where I want to be. I
(16:10):
guess sometimes you're all jumbled up in your head, aren't you,
And you just go ahead and do things anyway, you know.
But it gives you that space to sort of like
sort of segregate things a little bit and make the
right decisions basically. And me, for me, I am in
the winter. I generally take antidepressants for any a small amount,
(16:36):
a small amount, but recently I've taken a bit more.
I've taken them in the summer. And basically I realized
that I've needed them for years. I've needed them for
because I've noticed that if depression comes upon you, you don't
really know it unless you've been there, and you think
this is life. And when you get something that lifts
(16:58):
you that little bit, you think, well, this is how
it's supposed to be, you know, And so you can
manage your life like that if you have them problems,
you know. Yeah, And that's the way I'll get through it.
And I'd also like to like to laugh and have
a joke, you know.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
My head went back to my friend Aaron's analysis. Of course,
she's never met Pete Rogers. She'd only reviewed the domestic
homicide report. But Aaron had nothing to worry about. In
front of me sat a docile, polite man who openly
discussed the worst night of his life. With a complete stranger.
As we start to wrap up questions about Brett, Pete
(17:43):
fairly asks for some clarity on the direction of the podcast.
Speaker 4 (17:48):
You've told me that you're here to do a podcast
on Edward because he's an up and coming comedian, and
he's also done a gig on that something involves that
it may involve my one of my sons, and you
(18:08):
seem very interested in my son, and so it does
seem a bit over the top for you to come
all away over here to do a podcast on a comedian.
It does to me.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
So ed talks about in his story is how he
was home the night that on July twenty second when
everything happened, and he said that he came home he
was doing a stand up set here in town or
at Ugly Village Hall, and it was John and Carroll,
his parents, both in the house, and they woke up
(18:45):
to banging, and they think that Brett was trying to
get into the house. That's what they believe. Did you
ever hear that before.
Speaker 4 (18:54):
I've never heard that before, apart from yourself saying that
I don't know. The first I knew about anything was
in the morning.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
Do you believe that happened that Brett went and tried
to break into their house that night, and this is
presumably after he had killed Jill and Dave.
Speaker 4 (19:13):
Well, I wouldn't like to say it didn't happen, because
I mean, it could have happened, couldn't it? Because the
boy didn't know what he was doing? Really did he?
Speaker 1 (19:23):
If it happened, why do you think he would go
to the Hedges house?
Speaker 4 (19:28):
It wouldn't I don't think. No, it won't be the
hobbyist thing that I would think he would do. But
who knows? Because someone with their mind scrambled like that.
You can't blame someone who's got mental health issues like
that anyway, and they're not to blame. Really, it's just circumstances. Really,
(19:50):
you know, that's all it is. You get nowhere from
blame like that anyway?
Speaker 6 (19:55):
Do you.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
Recognizing this as a chance for Ed to shar his perspective?
On that night, I shoot him a text asking if
he wants to come in, how you been?
Speaker 7 (20:11):
Was it all right? You're everything?
Speaker 6 (20:14):
Fine?
Speaker 4 (20:16):
Cool? Lovely?
Speaker 3 (20:18):
How much is I don't obviously I don't know what
I've come what I'm coming into. How much has been
explained to you?
Speaker 4 (20:24):
Because six week podcast six podcasts approximately sounds rough? It okay? Cool?
Speaker 3 (20:33):
So all right, do you know what happened that night
with the house? We might have been for guns? Do
you want me to tell you what happened from our side?
Just to kill you in So, I became a comedian,
did gigs all over the place. But then when I
left stance did I didn't come back like ever because mates,
(20:57):
I didn't really want So when I came back, I
do you know ugly village?
Speaker 4 (21:01):
All yeah, they had me.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
Do I pack up my stuff and watch this reunion,
a decade in the making, unfold out of the corner
of my eye. It takes me back to the years
when your friend's parents were just shapes and faces. You
never thought about their lives, their worries, their fears. You
were just a kid, But they watched you play together
in the yard, ride bikes on the sidewalk, sheer meals
(21:25):
at each other's tables. In this instance, neither family imagined
how it would end. One of those kids would become
a celebrated comedian. The other would become the subject of
every whispered conversation in town.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
When you hear I'm a comedian and when you hear
I was talking about this, you first thought it was like,
why the fuck are you making jokes about that?
Speaker 4 (21:47):
Whether there's a line there, haven't there, but I don't know.
I've never heard it show or no.
Speaker 3 (21:53):
So the way the way I did it was, if
you think of the show, the story that I told
in like one hundred percent, eighty percent of it was
the village, me growing up, going to school, stupid people
in the village. The last bit was about Brett because
obviously me and Brett had some runnings and yeah, I
didn't know it. And the whole show was about me saying,
there's this bullshit thing that I think all men do
(22:15):
when we hit thirty, where your father or husband and
you've got to be like flawless. You've got to get
your money, you got to protect your a lot. You
can't show any weakness at all, and that pressure fucks people.
It just rocks people away because if you can't if
you can't show any weakness at all, if a guy
(22:35):
can't turn around to his mates and be like, really
not happy with my job, really not happy with what's
going on, I'm not in a good place. I'm struggling
at the moment, and I feel like if we didn't
have that, and if Brett was in the situation he
was in, he could have turned around and been like,
I'm not good right now. If there was no shame
around it, he could have got help. Because my stance
(22:56):
on it is it ain't Brett's fault.
Speaker 4 (23:00):
Good time, so that the ones that keeping.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
Their memories definitely I taken everything. He just told Pete
Rogers something that felt like a long winded confession. Or
maybe it was just his nerves kicking in saying what
he knew Pete would want to hear a way to
justify his comedy. Either way, it was the first time
I'd heard any of it.
Speaker 3 (23:21):
Pete, thank you so much, thanks your tom speech to
say us.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
And as we say goodbye to Pete, I wondered how
much Ed believed what he actually said, and it got
me thinking there was one person in the story that
I hadn't interviewed yet asked the hard questions one on one,
Ed Hedges himself. How much of the truth did he
not know? Had he not faced had he taken any
(23:50):
liberties with the story that he still had not shared
with me? In the car, I check into my flight
back to Atlanta. I decided to follow up on a
few final loose ends before I left Stanstead, and Ed
was cool to drive me around the village, but the
(24:11):
quaint friendliness of this place was quickly wearing off. I
went to Ed's cricket club to interview his old coach,
Keith Ayres, the one so proud he'd given Ed an award.
Speaker 3 (24:28):
I didn't say anything you no, I don't think you're
gonna get anything from me.
Speaker 1 (24:33):
But we were met with nothing but icy glares and
folded arms. At a local bar where all the kids
who never left the village gather after work, we might
as well have been invisible. I wanted to hear some
good memories of Brett from his old friends, but.
Speaker 4 (24:50):
Instant, what do you say?
Speaker 7 (24:52):
Oh, and Argie membership?
Speaker 1 (24:54):
You went, You're not members. A family friend of the
who had agreed to an interview suddenly ghosted. The former
classmate of Brett's ran the local flower shop, but inexplicably,
her store was now closed for the foreseeable future.
Speaker 3 (25:12):
And see what I mean by you?
Speaker 7 (25:13):
Yeah, totally sorry about that, guys.
Speaker 1 (25:18):
It felt like whispers were swirling around this town about
our podcast and the questions we were asking about Brett.
In an instant, an entire village stopped speaking to us.
The cold shoulders put a chill on Ed's mood too.
By sunset, he wouldn't even look at me. My mind
rushed back to Sophie's accusations, through Ed's parents and the
(25:41):
police reports. I confirmed most everything that happened, But was
there something Ed wasn't telling me. I needed to confront
ed here and now. So I sat him down and
I asked him point blank, I'll just be very direct.
(26:02):
I spoke to Sophie Hagen, who directed your original show. Yeah,
I mean she says that you made a lot of
this stuff up. What is what's true and what's not.
Speaker 6 (26:19):
She's correct, She's definitely correct. She's definitely correct.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
And that's something I think I'm pretty upfront with in
the past, even in reviews. You can look up and
up front with it. She's you know, I'm not going
to say she's incorrect with that. So in terms of
in terms of what's correct and what's not, what's true
and what's not, the story is true.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
Ed was caught off guard. His calm replaced with attension
that crept into his voice. I could see him tense up,
but I let him breathe let him process, and then
I let him tell me his side uninterrupted.
Speaker 3 (27:08):
Anything to do with Brett is true, and anything to
do with Brett coming to the house is true. Sophie
was really keen on this being a one hundred percent
true show, and it was really tough. It was really
really tough for me to do a one hundred percent
true show with no embellishments or lives. And I'm a comedian.
(27:29):
That's my currency. I need people to laugh. If I'm
telling you this really bad story, you gotta laugh. And
I did a preview and a friend came up to
me and he was like, well, it's a crazy story.
And I was like, what do you really think about it?
And he said, edits the Edinburgh Comedy Festival, not the
Edinburgh Story Festival, and like a couple of my mates laughed,
(27:52):
and I was like, shit, I'm a comedian, this needs
to be funny. So I made the decision to start
changing the punchlines. When I went back into my childhood,
I would embellish stories. I was really nervous to tell
Sophie that, because she was so adamant that everything had
to be true, but I couldn't keep dying. And when
you're dying on your ass on stage, it's just you
(28:13):
and no one knows that you're being well, it was
all true, that it's bollocks. I sucked for four or
five months telling this story, and I decided that when
I went back into my childhood, I had to earn
the laughs. So I would give them some true, real story.
And then I would tell a story that I'd embellished,
or that I'd made up an ending, or I'd made
(28:34):
up a conversation in my childhood.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
But the stuff that happened in the house with you
being there with Brett, those.
Speaker 3 (28:41):
I never messed with that. I never messed with that
because I knew that if someone found out I was
lying about a murder in my village, I would get crucified.
Everything that I said, you kind of had to be
able to google it, You kind of had to be
able to search for it. And that's what upset me.
When Sophy searched for the things and she said, look,
(29:02):
I don't think this happened in your childhood. I was like,
damn right, it didn't happen. But that's not the reason
they're coming to see the show. I'm glad I made
the decision that I made. If you're going to bring
the audience down, you have to bring them back up.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
I can understand that, and I'm not trying to where
I struggle, like, I can confirm those things, but where
I struggle is that I can't. I cannot confirm that
you and your parents were in your house that night, right.
I can't prove that there was banging at the door
because it's not in a police report and it's not
(29:40):
a yeah, that's and that's where i'm that's my struggle.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
Yeah, Brett was found next to my house, like and
you've seen the house. He was found ten foot away
from my house. That's where they found him. Brett spent
a lot of time at my house as a child.
My house was the only house in the village that
Brett could have gone to because we were the only
house that he would come to to hang out as
(30:08):
a kid.
Speaker 1 (30:10):
He was repeating the same facts, clinging to them, but
not because he was sticking to a made up story,
because there simply wasn't any new or different truths to
offer me. I could see the wheels in his head turning,
his frustration heating.
Speaker 3 (30:24):
Up with me. You've spoken to the three eyewitnesses, me,
my mom, and my dad.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
I guess to be very direct, Do you have any
proof though that you were?
Speaker 3 (30:35):
But Jody, what proof do you want? What proof can
I give you? It is a first hand account of
something that happened. If you can think of a way
that I can prove this in a time that happened
before video, doorbells and CCTV. If you can think of
something I can bring to you, tell me and I
(30:55):
will bring it. If you can think of something that
will definitively prove it did or it didn't happen, tell
me and I will bring it. You've spoken to all
of us, and we've told you. Is there anything else
I can offer you? Because if not, this is one
of those things where you take my word or you don't.
Speaker 1 (31:12):
I'm trying to stay objective to form an educated opinion,
knowing that there may never be hard proof that Brett
was at the Hedges door that night. For me to
believe that Ed is making it all up, I'd also
have to believe that he's convinced his parents to join
in on the lie, and after meeting them, I just
don't buy it. The truth is I believe Ed. I do.
(31:39):
ED repeats a behavioral pattern I've seen in my work, frantic,
anxious energy the Ed you see on stage, followed by
long periods of social withdrawal reflection. Those are the months
I couldn't even get a text back from him. It's
taken me this entire investigation to understand that this is
(31:59):
Ed's healing.
Speaker 3 (31:59):
P I have done this show for so long, I've
told this story for so long, and the fact that
I lived through the.
Speaker 1 (32:12):
Night, I could see the burden of proof weighing on
Ed's shoulders, and I wanted to stop the conversation and
tell him I trust him. But with what he said next,
I wasn't even sure i'd ever hear from him again.
Speaker 3 (32:29):
The fact that I lived through the night. I don't
mean to sound like blase, but if I can be
one hundred percent honest with you, and this might not
be what you want to hear, I really don't give
a fuck if you believe me or not.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
Next time on wisecrack, I'm just gonna show you something
for context.
Speaker 7 (33:05):
This is his rap sheet And that was only twelve
years of his life. So in twenty twelve, Joe calls
the police again and explicitly says her son is trying
to kill her. Wisecrack is a production of Tenderfoot TV
(33:29):
and iHeart Podcasts in association with Starwiit Productions. I'm Your
Host Jody Tovey. The show is written by Charles Forbes.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
Stand up comedy written and performed by Ed Hedges, with
additional writing contributions by Charles Forbes. Executive producers for Tenderfoot
TV are Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay. Executive producers for
Starwiit Productions are Jody Tovey and Charles Forbes. Lead producer
is Alex Vespestad, with additional production by Stephen Perez, Joe Grizzle,
(34:01):
ja Ja Muhammad, Jamie Albright, and Jordan Foxworthy. Lead editor
is Stephen Perez, with additional editing by Dylan Harrington and
Liam Luxon. Coordinating producers are John Street and Tracy Kaplan.
Research by Jim Nlly and Misty Showalter. Original music by
Jay Ragsdale with additional music by Makeup and Vanity Set
(34:24):
mix by Cooper Skinner. Artwork by Byron McCoy. Special thanks
to Orrin Rosenbaum and the team at Uta Nate Ranson,
Alexander Kaplan and the Synergy Clubhouse and the Nord Group.
For more podcasts like Wisecrack, search Tenderfoot Tv on your
favorite podcast app, or visit us at tenderfoot dot tv.
(34:45):
Thanks for listening. Episode six will release next week, but
you can binge the rest of the season right now,
completely add free by subscribing to Tenderfoot Plus on Apple
Podcasts or at time underfoot plus dot com.
Wisecrack is released weekly and brought to you absolutely free,
but if you want to hear the whole season right now,
it's available ad free on Tenderfoot Plus. For more information,
check out the show notes enjoy the episode.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely
those of the podcast author or individuals participating in the podcast,
and do not represent those of iHeartRadio, Tenderfoot TV, or
their employees. This podcast also contains subject matter which may
not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
Previously on Wiscrack, I at Hedges somehow became the center
of a true crime podcast, which frankly was not on
my five year plan. Jody came to my village. I
tried to act call she made my family. Oh no,
she didn't make my family. That was my grandparents. She
met my family. I panicked and made everyone tea that
(01:00):
no one asked for. Then I stood in the corner
like a lamp. My parents confirmed everything I'd said on stage,
so that was validating and also deeply, deeply awkward. I
didn't need therapy before. I think we're heading there now anyway.
JODI's still digging. Next up meeting Brett's dad. I tried
to warn her about him, using only my eyes and
a secret blinking language that I didn't teach her about
(01:22):
before we went. She didn't pick up on it. It's
her podcast, I guess onwards and upwards? Hi, how are you?
Speaker 4 (01:38):
How are you?
Speaker 5 (01:40):
I'm in the UK.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Did you have a chance to read the report? One
of the first documents I got my hands on was
the Domestic Homicide Report. There isn't an official equivalent in
the US, and it's only created in the UK when
there is a long history of violence or abuse when
society demands to know how did this happen? In Brett Rogers' report,
(02:04):
it examines his entire life and was conducted by investigating
all the government agencies that were supposed to support and
assess him, everything from the education system to the parole board.
Speaker 5 (02:15):
What did you think? Yes, I read it.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
I sent this report over to my friend Aaron, a
twenty year veteran of social work in Georgia. She focuses
on at risk young adults with mental health issues diagnosed
or not. Though our systems are different from the UK.
I was hoping she could see something I couldn't, especially
when it came to Brett's biggest advocate, his father, Pete Rogers.
Speaker 5 (02:44):
So it's just that's again a little bit of why
I'm nervous for you of being around his dad. I'm
not sure, like clearly none of that. I'm not sure
that was in the report about how dad or past behaviors.
I've just worked in the field for so long that, yes,
some of it is biological and the brain does different things,
(03:06):
and if he hasn't been diagnosed, that's one thing. But
there is also a learned behavior that comes along with
this where most people get it from where they live
and what they see the most.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
What do you think this is?
Speaker 3 (03:19):
So you're saying this isn't safe, I.
Speaker 5 (03:21):
Personally would not go there, or please bring someone with you.
Oh gosh, now I'm nervous. Can you please be careful?
Speaker 1 (03:31):
The thing was, I was already on my way. I'm
Jody Tovey and this is wisecrack to episode five Brett
(04:06):
you never knew me. On the drive to Pete's house,
I'm silent ed keeps looking over. He senses I'm nervous
and responds with wise cracks and one liners. But I
want to stay focused on the task at hand. The
(04:27):
truth is the thought of meeting the father of a
convicted murderer has me on edge. Out of respect for
the subject matter, I ask ed if he can wait
in the car while I interview Pete. Though it confuses him,
he agrees, and I take a deep breath and walk
up the front steps and knock on the door. Pete, Hi,
(04:52):
I'm Jody. Nice to meet you. How's it going. I'm good, good,
good good. Room in Marklas that is fine, keeps one
bedroom is the bottom floor of a converted townhouse in
the next village over. It looks a lot like the
Hedges Home, only split in half for those who don't
need room for a full family. All right, lovely, okay,
(05:17):
thank you so much. The apartment is simple and unassuming,
pared down to the needs of a retired electrician. He
greets me in shorts and a loud printed shirt like
an old surfer. I can tell he's nervous too, but
he calmly smiles as he shows me his place, which
includes his music collection and his new hobby, an acoustic guitar. Uh,
(05:39):
we have a musician in the house. What were we
listening to? There's so much I want to ask Pete
about that night, about what he thinks about his son,
about how he's continued to move on. But once we
sit down, I just want to work my way into
a conversation by starting simple. So I asked about his
(06:01):
other son, Aaron.
Speaker 4 (06:03):
He's a bit like me, actually, He's like, he's very
very soft, he's very clever actually, And I said, well,
I say it self, he's sort of like he's a
nice kid. Everyone says that, you know, everyone says that. Bear.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
You know what about Brett? Was he an easy kid
as well or a difficult kid?
Speaker 4 (06:23):
Well, it was always naughty Brett. He was always naughty. Yeah,
that was you know, that was his character, wasn't it.
You know he was full of life, full of life.
And he's like, yeah, he was always out there playing.
He would even play. The older kids would even follow him.
He was good at football, He was good at sports.
(06:43):
He was very popular, I would say, one of the
most popular in school.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
When did that friend group start to shrink?
Speaker 4 (06:52):
I believe when he stopped football, which is at mumby
of thirteen something like that. Yeah, he is about that then,
I think, you know.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Pete continued to walk me through Brett's childhood which includes
his divorce from Jillian and when Brett was a teenager.
He tells me about Brett's early run ins with the law,
eventually leading to one of the worst days of Pete's
life and perhaps the incident that sealed Brett's fate in
the years that followed, and he.
Speaker 4 (07:23):
Did get a job. He got a job as a milkman,
which was great. He was only good money. He was
only his own money. That lasted about a month until
we had a problem with me where he went out
to he was on his bike. He was always leaving
his wallet in his back pocket. Likely youngsters, do you know,
lost his wallet? Come home and I was sitting there actually,
(07:47):
and he went out there and make himself signing to eat,
and he started calling me names again, you know, one
of them they just flip. You see. I know this
sach funny going on, but I didn't know about it
then enough about it, and so I said, look, go
(08:08):
and take a walk, take a walk in the blog,
come back and calm down. So he decided to attack me.
So I slipped and he might eye on that on
the corner.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
Pete points to an area where furniture used to be.
It's worth noting that when Pete quote slipped, he hit
the furniture so hard he broke open his eye socket.
Speaker 4 (08:35):
Anyway, go long story short. The police come around. They
said to me, don't worry, it's a family thing. We
won't get much time in that, you know, but he's
going to get prosecuted, so we want your statement. So okay,
I gave him my statement. Then they tried to give
him seven years a family thing, So they tricked me.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
You know, tricked is a heartbreaking choice of words. I
can tell Pete is struggling with memories of Brett. He's
still grieving, still asking what if things could have been different.
As much as his reasoning is strained, I also understand it.
Speaker 4 (09:17):
But they give him five years in the end, then
he came out into about two and a half something
like that. I thought he needed to be prosecuted. I
thought he needed to but to give him five years
was like ridiculous. Really, But they're saying the law works,
you know, Yeah, they tricked me. I think don't want
(09:38):
to have a little tick on their box, the police.
You know, I'm not saying it all like that. I'm
just saying that that's the why it worked. At that point.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
M h, and so is that what it was like
when he was staying here with you? It was just
a switch that would flip seemingly.
Speaker 4 (09:53):
That's the first time it happened. Yeah, because I would
try to understand him.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
You see, I can imagine being a dad and watching
your son change behaviors so dramatically.
Speaker 4 (10:05):
It's not nice, not well, I didn't understand what was happening.
I dedn'ty I'm just schizophra any you.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
Know, this is the first time I've heard this word
allowed to describe Brett, and I'm a little stunned, but cautious.
Pete's casual use of the term makes me wonder if
he's using the clinical definition of the disease. Schizophrenia is
one of the most complex mental illnesses, affecting how a
person thinks, feels, and behaves. It can cause someone to
(10:34):
hear or see things that aren't there, believe things that
aren't true, or feel confused about what's real and what's not.
It's also one of the hardest to diagnose, because no
test exists. In men, symptoms tend not to appear until
their early twenties, and then, once recognized, a constellation of
traits must be diagnosed, but that requires a consistent schedule
(10:56):
with medical professionals to uncover. Simply put, it takes time
to see the pattern. To be clear, Brett was never
diagnosed with schizophrenia, but in hindsight Pete believes he suffered
from it. And remember, in prison, Brett was prescribed antipsychotics
intended to treat schizophrenia.
Speaker 4 (11:16):
And then he became eighteen or seven, not sixteen. When
you stop, you stop having any power over him, you know,
then you're lost because you can't do anything. The doctor
won't talk to you. That's sort of thing.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
Due to British age of consent laws, Pete wasn't allowed
to talk to the doctors about his son's mental health
after he turned sixteen. It's a frustrating law, paradoxical because
those late teenage years are exactly when symptoms start to show.
After Brett was released from prison, it said the family
felt like things were better and that the fact that
(11:54):
these murders had occurred it seemed out of the blue.
And I'm just curious when he that out of prison,
can you describe his behavior, like did it feel out
of the blue?
Speaker 4 (12:05):
Is that acting you come out of prison, you know,
her to stay he had to go and see his
probation officer. That the probation office was on holiday, bless her,
so he couldn't see her. So there's a big thing
going on there, like, oh what do I see? Then
where do I go? There's no way they could give
him anywhere to stay, so he's out on the street.
(12:26):
He's not allowed to stay with me, even though I
wrote him a really good letter saying, how I understand
better what's going on, and I think things would be
fine and all the rest of it, you know. So
we put him up in one of these.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
Like like a hotel or a hotel or something.
Speaker 4 (12:48):
Yeah, that's for about a week or so. And I
thought we can't keep doing this. So her sister tool like,
you know, she said, well, he can't stay here, you know,
blah blah blah.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
Once the parole board had forbidden Brett to live under
his father's roof and Gillian had agreed to take in
her son, Pete had some unsolicited advice for his ex wife,
and it was absolutely horrifying to hear him say it.
Speaker 4 (13:12):
I decide to her, get your knives or what does
sharp knives and put them away put him somewhere else.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
You had warned Jillian to take away those knives. Was
that because you knew that he was dangerous or because
he had threatened before to like use weapons because.
Speaker 4 (13:42):
I know there was a risk. It's as simple as that.
I know there was something not right. There was not
something not right. You know, sat in his room when
we put him in a hotel and he said, I
want you to go now. So he's getting ally, you know, wrong,
didn't they? You know? You just get to know that.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
The moment is both bone chilling and bittersweet. Brett, self aware,
is telling his father to leave the room and get
to safety before another psychotic episode takes hold of him.
So you weren't surprised, No.
Speaker 4 (14:21):
No, I wasn't surprised the whole thing happening, you know,
But merely and truly it didn't surprise me.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
This confession is staggering. Pete Rogers is telling me, pure
and simple that he knew Brett was capable of something
like this. With that weight hanging between us, now's the
time to ask how did he react when he heard
his son murdered his former wife?
Speaker 4 (14:51):
Well, Averon found me and a found He said, people
are saying sorry about this and sorry about that, and
I didn't know what he was talking about. And then
I started getting messages and I went around there basically
to see what was going on. I sort of knew something,
something really bad had happened, you know so, And I
don't know. They never told me. No, they keep storm,
(15:12):
don't they. They just said, like, you know, the incident.
It's an incident. Basically, it's a weird feeling because like
you're in shock, and life goes on and even a
little bit of shock, and you don't really know what
to do.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
Pete. Having now met you, I think you're you seem
like such a well adjusted kind person. How were you
able to get through this? How have you been able to?
Speaker 4 (15:42):
Well?
Speaker 1 (15:43):
If you're in stand and hold a house and a
job and play guitar.
Speaker 4 (15:48):
Well you do. This comes in as years go by,
don't it. I took a you onion analyst who's a local,
and I sat with her for probably once a week,
you know, more or less, for about five or six years,
and eventually got to where I want to be. I
(16:10):
guess sometimes you're all jumbled up in your head, aren't you,
And you just go ahead and do things anyway, you know.
But it gives you that space to sort of like
sort of segregate things a little bit and make the
right decisions basically. And me, for me, I am in
the winter. I generally take antidepressants for any a small amount,
(16:36):
a small amount, but recently I've taken a bit more.
I've taken them in the summer. And basically I realized
that I've needed them for years. I've needed them for
because I've noticed that if depression comes upon you, you don't
really know it unless you've been there, and you think
this is life. And when you get something that lifts
(16:58):
you that little bit, you think, well, this is how
it's supposed to be, you know, And so you can
manage your life like that if you have them problems,
you know. Yeah, And that's the way I'll get through it.
And I'd also like to like to laugh and have
a joke, you know.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
My head went back to my friend Aaron's analysis. Of course,
she's never met Pete Rogers. She'd only reviewed the domestic
homicide report. But Aaron had nothing to worry about. In
front of me sat a docile, polite man who openly
discussed the worst night of his life. With a complete stranger.
As we start to wrap up questions about Brett, Pete
(17:43):
fairly asks for some clarity on the direction of the podcast.
Speaker 4 (17:48):
You've told me that you're here to do a podcast
on Edward because he's an up and coming comedian, and
he's also done a gig on that something involves that
it may involve my one of my sons, and you
(18:08):
seem very interested in my son, and so it does
seem a bit over the top for you to come
all away over here to do a podcast on a comedian.
It does to me.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
So ed talks about in his story is how he
was home the night that on July twenty second when
everything happened, and he said that he came home he
was doing a stand up set here in town or
at Ugly Village Hall, and it was John and Carroll,
his parents, both in the house, and they woke up
(18:45):
to banging, and they think that Brett was trying to
get into the house. That's what they believe. Did you
ever hear that before.
Speaker 4 (18:54):
I've never heard that before, apart from yourself saying that
I don't know. The first I knew about anything was
in the morning.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
Do you believe that happened that Brett went and tried
to break into their house that night, and this is
presumably after he had killed Jill and Dave.
Speaker 4 (19:13):
Well, I wouldn't like to say it didn't happen, because
I mean, it could have happened, couldn't it? Because the
boy didn't know what he was doing? Really did he?
Speaker 1 (19:23):
If it happened, why do you think he would go
to the Hedges house?
Speaker 4 (19:28):
It wouldn't I don't think. No, it won't be the
hobbyist thing that I would think he would do. But
who knows? Because someone with their mind scrambled like that.
You can't blame someone who's got mental health issues like
that anyway, and they're not to blame. Really, it's just circumstances. Really,
(19:50):
you know, that's all it is. You get nowhere from
blame like that anyway?
Speaker 6 (19:55):
Do you.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
Recognizing this as a chance for Ed to shar his perspective?
On that night, I shoot him a text asking if
he wants to come in, how you been?
Speaker 7 (20:11):
Was it all right? You're everything?
Speaker 6 (20:14):
Fine?
Speaker 4 (20:16):
Cool? Lovely?
Speaker 3 (20:18):
How much is I don't obviously I don't know what
I've come what I'm coming into. How much has been
explained to you?
Speaker 4 (20:24):
Because six week podcast six podcasts approximately sounds rough? It okay? Cool?
Speaker 3 (20:33):
So all right, do you know what happened that night
with the house? We might have been for guns? Do
you want me to tell you what happened from our side?
Just to kill you in So, I became a comedian,
did gigs all over the place. But then when I
left stance did I didn't come back like ever because mates,
(20:57):
I didn't really want So when I came back, I
do you know ugly village?
Speaker 4 (21:01):
All yeah, they had me.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
Do I pack up my stuff and watch this reunion,
a decade in the making, unfold out of the corner
of my eye. It takes me back to the years
when your friend's parents were just shapes and faces. You
never thought about their lives, their worries, their fears. You
were just a kid, But they watched you play together
in the yard, ride bikes on the sidewalk, sheer meals
(21:25):
at each other's tables. In this instance, neither family imagined
how it would end. One of those kids would become
a celebrated comedian. The other would become the subject of
every whispered conversation in town.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
When you hear I'm a comedian and when you hear
I was talking about this, you first thought it was like,
why the fuck are you making jokes about that?
Speaker 4 (21:47):
Whether there's a line there, haven't there, but I don't know.
I've never heard it show or no.
Speaker 3 (21:53):
So the way the way I did it was, if
you think of the show, the story that I told
in like one hundred percent, eighty percent of it was
the village, me growing up, going to school, stupid people
in the village. The last bit was about Brett because
obviously me and Brett had some runnings and yeah, I
didn't know it. And the whole show was about me saying,
there's this bullshit thing that I think all men do
(22:15):
when we hit thirty, where your father or husband and
you've got to be like flawless. You've got to get
your money, you got to protect your a lot. You
can't show any weakness at all, and that pressure fucks people.
It just rocks people away because if you can't if
you can't show any weakness at all, if a guy
(22:35):
can't turn around to his mates and be like, really
not happy with my job, really not happy with what's
going on, I'm not in a good place. I'm struggling
at the moment, and I feel like if we didn't
have that, and if Brett was in the situation he
was in, he could have turned around and been like,
I'm not good right now. If there was no shame
around it, he could have got help. Because my stance
(22:56):
on it is it ain't Brett's fault.
Speaker 4 (23:00):
Good time, so that the ones that keeping.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
Their memories definitely I taken everything. He just told Pete
Rogers something that felt like a long winded confession. Or
maybe it was just his nerves kicking in saying what
he knew Pete would want to hear a way to
justify his comedy. Either way, it was the first time
I'd heard any of it.
Speaker 3 (23:21):
Pete, thank you so much, thanks your tom speech to
say us.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
And as we say goodbye to Pete, I wondered how
much Ed believed what he actually said, and it got
me thinking there was one person in the story that
I hadn't interviewed yet asked the hard questions one on one,
Ed Hedges himself. How much of the truth did he
not know? Had he not faced had he taken any
(23:50):
liberties with the story that he still had not shared
with me? In the car, I check into my flight
back to Atlanta. I decided to follow up on a
few final loose ends before I left Stanstead, and Ed
was cool to drive me around the village, but the
(24:11):
quaint friendliness of this place was quickly wearing off. I
went to Ed's cricket club to interview his old coach,
Keith Ayres, the one so proud he'd given Ed an award.
Speaker 3 (24:28):
I didn't say anything you no, I don't think you're
gonna get anything from me.
Speaker 1 (24:33):
But we were met with nothing but icy glares and
folded arms. At a local bar where all the kids
who never left the village gather after work, we might
as well have been invisible. I wanted to hear some
good memories of Brett from his old friends, but.
Speaker 4 (24:50):
Instant, what do you say?
Speaker 7 (24:52):
Oh, and Argie membership?
Speaker 1 (24:54):
You went, You're not members. A family friend of the
who had agreed to an interview suddenly ghosted. The former
classmate of Brett's ran the local flower shop, but inexplicably,
her store was now closed for the foreseeable future.
Speaker 3 (25:12):
And see what I mean by you?
Speaker 7 (25:13):
Yeah, totally sorry about that, guys.
Speaker 1 (25:18):
It felt like whispers were swirling around this town about
our podcast and the questions we were asking about Brett.
In an instant, an entire village stopped speaking to us.
The cold shoulders put a chill on Ed's mood too.
By sunset, he wouldn't even look at me. My mind
rushed back to Sophie's accusations, through Ed's parents and the
(25:41):
police reports. I confirmed most everything that happened, But was
there something Ed wasn't telling me. I needed to confront
ed here and now. So I sat him down and
I asked him point blank, I'll just be very direct.
(26:02):
I spoke to Sophie Hagen, who directed your original show. Yeah,
I mean she says that you made a lot of
this stuff up. What is what's true and what's not.
Speaker 6 (26:19):
She's correct, She's definitely correct. She's definitely correct.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
And that's something I think I'm pretty upfront with in
the past, even in reviews. You can look up and
up front with it. She's you know, I'm not going
to say she's incorrect with that. So in terms of
in terms of what's correct and what's not, what's true
and what's not, the story is true.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
Ed was caught off guard. His calm replaced with attension
that crept into his voice. I could see him tense up,
but I let him breathe let him process, and then
I let him tell me his side uninterrupted.
Speaker 3 (27:08):
Anything to do with Brett is true, and anything to
do with Brett coming to the house is true. Sophie
was really keen on this being a one hundred percent
true show, and it was really tough. It was really
really tough for me to do a one hundred percent
true show with no embellishments or lives. And I'm a comedian.
(27:29):
That's my currency. I need people to laugh. If I'm
telling you this really bad story, you gotta laugh. And
I did a preview and a friend came up to
me and he was like, well, it's a crazy story.
And I was like, what do you really think about it?
And he said, edits the Edinburgh Comedy Festival, not the
Edinburgh Story Festival, and like a couple of my mates laughed,
(27:52):
and I was like, shit, I'm a comedian, this needs
to be funny. So I made the decision to start
changing the punchlines. When I went back into my childhood,
I would embellish stories. I was really nervous to tell
Sophie that, because she was so adamant that everything had
to be true, but I couldn't keep dying. And when
you're dying on your ass on stage, it's just you
(28:13):
and no one knows that you're being well, it was
all true, that it's bollocks. I sucked for four or
five months telling this story, and I decided that when
I went back into my childhood, I had to earn
the laughs. So I would give them some true, real story.
And then I would tell a story that I'd embellished,
or that I'd made up an ending, or I'd made
(28:34):
up a conversation in my childhood.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
But the stuff that happened in the house with you
being there with Brett, those.
Speaker 3 (28:41):
I never messed with that. I never messed with that
because I knew that if someone found out I was
lying about a murder in my village, I would get crucified.
Everything that I said, you kind of had to be
able to google it, You kind of had to be
able to search for it. And that's what upset me.
When Sophy searched for the things and she said, look,
(29:02):
I don't think this happened in your childhood. I was like,
damn right, it didn't happen. But that's not the reason
they're coming to see the show. I'm glad I made
the decision that I made. If you're going to bring
the audience down, you have to bring them back up.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
I can understand that, and I'm not trying to where
I struggle, like, I can confirm those things, but where
I struggle is that I can't. I cannot confirm that
you and your parents were in your house that night, right.
I can't prove that there was banging at the door
because it's not in a police report and it's not
(29:40):
a yeah, that's and that's where i'm that's my struggle.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
Yeah, Brett was found next to my house, like and
you've seen the house. He was found ten foot away
from my house. That's where they found him. Brett spent
a lot of time at my house as a child.
My house was the only house in the village that
Brett could have gone to because we were the only
house that he would come to to hang out as
(30:08):
a kid.
Speaker 1 (30:10):
He was repeating the same facts, clinging to them, but
not because he was sticking to a made up story,
because there simply wasn't any new or different truths to
offer me. I could see the wheels in his head turning,
his frustration heating.
Speaker 3 (30:24):
Up with me. You've spoken to the three eyewitnesses, me,
my mom, and my dad.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
I guess to be very direct, Do you have any
proof though that you were?
Speaker 3 (30:35):
But Jody, what proof do you want? What proof can
I give you? It is a first hand account of
something that happened. If you can think of a way
that I can prove this in a time that happened
before video, doorbells and CCTV. If you can think of
something I can bring to you, tell me and I
(30:55):
will bring it. If you can think of something that
will definitively prove it did or it didn't happen, tell
me and I will bring it. You've spoken to all
of us, and we've told you. Is there anything else
I can offer you? Because if not, this is one
of those things where you take my word or you don't.
Speaker 1 (31:12):
I'm trying to stay objective to form an educated opinion,
knowing that there may never be hard proof that Brett
was at the Hedges door that night. For me to
believe that Ed is making it all up, I'd also
have to believe that he's convinced his parents to join
in on the lie, and after meeting them, I just
don't buy it. The truth is I believe Ed. I do.
(31:39):
ED repeats a behavioral pattern I've seen in my work, frantic,
anxious energy the Ed you see on stage, followed by
long periods of social withdrawal reflection. Those are the months
I couldn't even get a text back from him. It's
taken me this entire investigation to understand that this is
(31:59):
Ed's healing.
Speaker 3 (31:59):
P I have done this show for so long, I've
told this story for so long, and the fact that
I lived through the.
Speaker 1 (32:12):
Night, I could see the burden of proof weighing on
Ed's shoulders, and I wanted to stop the conversation and
tell him I trust him. But with what he said next,
I wasn't even sure i'd ever hear from him again.
Speaker 3 (32:29):
The fact that I lived through the night. I don't
mean to sound like blase, but if I can be
one hundred percent honest with you, and this might not
be what you want to hear, I really don't give
a fuck if you believe me or not.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
Next time on wisecrack, I'm just gonna show you something
for context.
Speaker 7 (33:05):
This is his rap sheet And that was only twelve
years of his life. So in twenty twelve, Joe calls
the police again and explicitly says her son is trying
to kill her. Wisecrack is a production of Tenderfoot TV
(33:29):
and iHeart Podcasts in association with Starwiit Productions. I'm Your
Host Jody Tovey. The show is written by Charles Forbes.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
Stand up comedy written and performed by Ed Hedges, with
additional writing contributions by Charles Forbes. Executive producers for Tenderfoot
TV are Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay. Executive producers for
Starwiit Productions are Jody Tovey and Charles Forbes. Lead producer
is Alex Vespestad, with additional production by Stephen Perez, Joe Grizzle,
(34:01):
ja Ja Muhammad, Jamie Albright, and Jordan Foxworthy. Lead editor
is Stephen Perez, with additional editing by Dylan Harrington and
Liam Luxon. Coordinating producers are John Street and Tracy Kaplan.
Research by Jim Nlly and Misty Showalter. Original music by
Jay Ragsdale with additional music by Makeup and Vanity Set
(34:24):
mix by Cooper Skinner. Artwork by Byron McCoy. Special thanks
to Orrin Rosenbaum and the team at Uta Nate Ranson,
Alexander Kaplan and the Synergy Clubhouse and the Nord Group.
For more podcasts like Wisecrack, search Tenderfoot Tv on your
favorite podcast app, or visit us at tenderfoot dot tv.
(34:45):
Thanks for listening. Episode six will release next week, but
you can binge the rest of the season right now,
completely add free by subscribing to Tenderfoot Plus on Apple
Podcasts or at time underfoot plus dot com.
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