January 5, 2026 • 20 mins
In early-’90s Seattle, a band was rising out of the rain-soaked clubs and basement stages — raw, fearless, and powered by a voice that could stop a room cold. That voice belonged to Mia Zapata, frontwoman of The Gits — a group on the brink of breaking through.
Part One of The Sign of the Crab traces Mia’s life, the band’s ascent, and the city that shaped them — before following a single summer night that ends in unimaginable violence. As the investigation stalls, suspicion turns inward, years pass without answers, and one chilling detail emerges: a song Mia recorded just weeks before her death — a dark warning that now feels eerily prophetic.
Based in part on investigative reporting featured on Forensic Files, Part One ends where hope nearly runs out… and where science quietly waits to catch up.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Written by Jonny Hartwell
Voiced by Jonny Hartwell
Music Credit: Reel World Audio.
A iHeart Radio Production
DISCLAIMER: This podcast contains discussions of sensitive topics...Listener discretion is strongly advised. While the stories you’ll hear are rooted in real events, not every detail is strictly historical—some moments are dramatized with creative license to bring the narrative to life. Please keep this in mind as you listen.
Jonny’s Dead Air Podcast
Written, hosted, and produced by Jonny Hartwell.
A production of iHeartRadio Pittsburgh.
Thanks for listening—and for keeping the light on.
Part One of The Sign of the Crab traces Mia’s life, the band’s ascent, and the city that shaped them — before following a single summer night that ends in unimaginable violence. As the investigation stalls, suspicion turns inward, years pass without answers, and one chilling detail emerges: a song Mia recorded just weeks before her death — a dark warning that now feels eerily prophetic.
Based in part on investigative reporting featured on Forensic Files, Part One ends where hope nearly runs out… and where science quietly waits to catch up.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Written by Jonny Hartwell
Voiced by Jonny Hartwell
Music Credit: Reel World Audio.
A iHeart Radio Production
DISCLAIMER: This podcast contains discussions of sensitive topics...Listener discretion is strongly advised. While the stories you’ll hear are rooted in real events, not every detail is strictly historical—some moments are dramatized with creative license to bring the narrative to life. Please keep this in mind as you listen.
Jonny’s Dead Air Podcast
Written, hosted, and produced by Jonny Hartwell.
A production of iHeartRadio Pittsburgh.
Thanks for listening—and for keeping the light on.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome in. I'm Johnny Hartwell and this is Johnny's Dead
Air Podcast, a production of iHeartRadio. Some stories don't start
in a bar or a back alley. They start in
the sky. If you look up on a clear night,
past the light pollution, past the planes and the satellites
pretending to be stars, there's a cluster shaped like a
(00:22):
sideways question mark. The ancients called it cancer the crab.
Astrologers say the crab rules over the soft places home,
the stomach, the heart, the parts of us that take
things in, and the parts that break when too much
hurt comes at once. Down below those stars, there's a city,
wet streets, neon halos around every sign, a kind of
(00:46):
permanent twilight broken only by club marquees and cigarettes. The
city Seattle in the early nineties. It isn't just a city,
it's a pressure cooker. Bands are forming in basements, record
labels are sniffing around like sharks. Grunge is the word
the outside world uses, but inside the bars it's something
more tangled. It's punk and blues metal mixed with desperation
(01:09):
and a little bit of hope. In that city, under
that sky, there's a band with a name that sounds
more like an inside joke. It's the Gits. And at
the center of that band is a voice, raw and
soul soaked, raised on Billie Holiday and Hank Williams, somehow
slammed into punk tempo. That voice belongs to Mia Catherine Zapata.
(01:31):
On stage. She's not a star, not yet, but she
is a gravitational field. In the last months of her life,
she writes and records a song, a dark, violence, strangely
playful piece about a killer, a stranger on the road,
a driver you shouldn't trust, the song's title, Sign of
the Crab. Weeks later, reality swallows fiction, a night out
(01:53):
becomes a crime scene, a rising band becomes a memorial,
And for more than a decade, the question hangs in
the air, who killed Mia Sapata? And what do you
do when a song you wrote about dying at a
stranger's hands suddenly sounds like prophecy? Well, tonight, We're not
just telling a story of murder. We're tracing a constellation.
(02:14):
How a life, a band, a city, and a song
all converged. This is Script number twenty three, The Sign
of the Crab, Act one, The Gits, Mia Seattle and
the rise. If you want to understand this story, you
can't start with a body. You start with a van,
Midwest highways, cheap coffee, cassette tapes, rattling in the doors.
(02:37):
In the late nineteen eighties, a handful of Antioch college
kids in Yellow Springs, Ohio, decide that regular life is overrated.
They form a band, noisy, tuneful, angry in that very
specific way you get when you care too much. They
call themselves the Gits. This singer, Miya, grew up on
jazz and country, teaching herself to sing along with old
(03:00):
records until her voice could do two things at once,
break your heart and shove you in the mosh pit.
By nineteen eighty nine, the band looks west and see
something brewing in Seattle, so they pack their lives into
one van and follow the storm. Seattle greets them in
a way that it greets almost everybody. With rain, cheap rent,
(03:20):
and a tiny club stage, the town of Capitol Hill
is a world of cluttered apartments, dogs on sidewalks, and
flyers stapled over flyers, stapled over flyers. The big bands Nirvana, Soundgarden,
mud Honey are starting to break through, but underneath them
is a stable of local bands keeping the lights on
in clubs. The Gits slip into that level of groups
(03:41):
waiting on their chance to get noticed. They're not grunge
in the radio sense. They're more rough edged punk with
a deep blue streak and a lead singer who sounds
like she's been living for one hundred years and twenty
three All at once people notice. Fans pull out words
like ferocious and soulful. Fellow musicians call her rivals, which
is the best kind of compliment a musician can give.
(04:04):
They scrape together enough money and time to record an album,
Frenching the Bully, a record that sounds like a basement show,
pressed into vinyl. It hits in nineteen ninety two on
local label CZ and for the people in the know,
it might as well be a meteor. Now they're not
just a band, they're one of the bands. Just imagine
you're standing in a club that smells like spilled beer
(04:26):
and wet jackets. The stage is barely a foot tall.
Duct tape holds the monitors together. The gets walk out
without ceremony, no big intro, just tuning and a nod.
The drummer snaps the sticks, counts off four and the
first song hits like a punch, guitarist skidding, bass rumbling,
and then her Mia, her voice like ragged velvet, both
(04:48):
soft and edgy at the same time. You don't know
the lyrics yet, so you sing the vowels. By the
second chorus, You're not just watching a band, You're part
of something. And if there's any just this, this band won't
fit into this room much longer. Back in the daylight,
Justice looks like work. They were hearse in cramp spaces.
They live like every other band, broke, exhausted, always one
(05:11):
gigaway from having to sell something you love. But there's momentum.
In nineteen ninety three, the Gits are on the verge
of a major deal, whispers of Atlantic records, whisper louder,
of tours that don't involve sleeping on floors. In the studio,
they start carving out their second album, Enter the Conquering Chicken. Yeah,
(05:31):
sure the name is loose, but the sound. The sound
is tighter, meaner, more confident. The song sound like they
know where they're going. One track sits at the end
of the record, dark as a back alley sign of
the crab, a song Mia writes from inside the head
of someone facing a murderous stranger. It's fiction, it's a character.
(05:52):
It's a story about being taken down a road you
don't want to come back from. At least that's what
everybody thinks. For now, the band's story is still written.
In crowded rooms and late night beers. The worst things
they worry about are bad sound and bounce checks. But
July is coming, and with it a night that will
break this city in half. Act two breaking news, next,
(06:22):
Act two, breaking news. There are two clocks running in
this story. One is on the town of Capitol Hill,
ticking past last call. The other is on a police radio,
counting down to a call no one can unhear. You're there.
It's the last night. It's July sixth, nineteen ninety three,
bleeding into the early minutes of July seventh. Seattle is
(06:42):
warm in that sticky, rare way it gets in the summer.
Inside the Comet Tavern, the air is thicker than the smoke.
Punk kids, musicians, regulars all hanging out at the bar,
swapping stories, making loose plans for quote unquote tomorrow. You're there.
Maybe you're nursing a cheap drink maybe leaning against the
cigarette machine. At some point in the night, your eyes
(07:03):
keeps sliding back to a familiar figure. Dark hair, thrift's door, close,
easy laugh. Her name Mia. She's not holding court exactly.
She's one of those people who pulls the room towards
her man's talk shop. Friends talk nonsense, the jukebox coughs
up something aloud, and it's just a normal night. Around
two am, Mia leaves the bar. She's staying in a
(07:26):
basement studio a block away under a friend's apartment. She
stops upstairs briefly and says good night. It's the last
time anyone who loved her will see her alive. What
happens after that is a matter of inference and terror.
We know this. Around three twenty am, a cyclist in
Seattle Central District sees something near the intersection of twenty
(07:47):
fourth Avenue South and South Washington Street. It's a shape
in the dark. He looks closer. It's a woman. She's
lying face up, almost in a cruciform pose, arms slightly,
legs extended. She's not moving. He calls nine to one one.
Paramedics arrive. Police floodlights transform this quiet corner into a
(08:10):
stage set nobody asked for. The woman has no idea
on her She's been beaten, raped, and strangled. There are
signs of a brutal struggle, blunt force trauma, internal injury
so severe that, according to the medical examiner, if the
strangulation hadn't killed her, the beatings would have. They bag
(08:31):
her belongings. They photograph the scene and they tape off
the block for the officers on the ground. It's another
horrific night in the city that's seen way too many.
The body is transported to the medical examiner's office. There
the story takes a strange, almost cinematic turn. The pathologist
on duty happens to be a fan of the local
rock scene, and he has seen the gifts shows. He
(08:54):
recognizes the face on the table, even under the bruises mia.
He thinks, or maybe he says it out loud. Imagine
you're waking up late, post gig hangover in some cramped apartment.
The phone rings back then it's a landline. It never
sounds good that early. You pick it up a voice
you know on the other end. Shock follows. They say
(09:17):
her name and killed in the same sentence. Meanwhile, the
rest of the city learns like this good evening. Our
top story. Seattle police are investigating the murder of a
young woman found in the Central District early this morning.
Authority say the victim was in her twenties and may
have been walking home after visiting at Capitol Hill Bar.
Here's Fox thirteen's Mark Thompson with more. Thanks Tim. Behind
(09:40):
me is the corner of twenty fourth in South Washington.
We're at around three twenty this morning. A bicyclist discovered
the body of a woman lying in the roadway. Police
say she had been sexually assaulted and strangled. They're asking
anyone who may have seen a woman walking in this
area between two and three am to contact our tip
line one eight hundred five five five night. They don't
(10:01):
say her name, not at first, they say local musician
or Seattle woman. But the scene is fast. Word outruns
the cameras within hours. The clubs, no bands, no the gets,
no Steve the drummer, Joe on bass and Andy on guitar.
Their phones are ringing off the hook. For them, it's
not a news event. It's the center of their universe.
(10:24):
Dropping away Act three. The usual suspects, Well, it's something
this violent happens to someone this beloved. The first reaction
is grief, The second is suspicion. You're there inside the precinct,
fluorescent lights, coffee, the taste like burnt rubber. You're sitting
(10:44):
in a plastic chair at a police station, staring at
your own hands. A detective, not unkind, just tired, presses
record on a little tape machine. Detective, state your name,
Please you do, Detective, how did you know? You tell them.
You talk about bands and shows and nights at the
(11:04):
comment rehearsals and sweaty basements. The detective nods and scribbles. Detective,
when was the last time you saw her? You rewind
the night in your head like bad footage, the bar
and the laughter, the moment she left. You replay everything,
every shrug, every joke, wondering if anything was a sign.
(11:25):
When the interview is over, they thank you. They might
even say they're sorry for your loss. You walk out
feeling like you've been accused of something you can't name.
For the Seattle Police Department. The first and most probable
theory is simple. Whoever did this knew her? Statistically, that's
how it goes. A friend, a boyfriend, or an next boyfriend,
(11:48):
somebody from her inner circle, jealous, obsessed, maybe angry. They
draw a circle around MIA's life and start working inward.
They talk to friends and bandmates and roommates and ex boyfriends,
people who might know, oh her first name, if they
were part of the scene. Let's call them what they were,
the people who were closest to Mia. Every one of
them feels the same double punch losing Mia than having
(12:11):
to prove they didn't take her life. The cops collect
what physical evidence they can. There's damaged clothing and fibers
and something else, something that will sit in a freezer
for nearly a decade before it finds its voice. On
her chest, the medical examiner finds a bite mark on
her breast saliva. They swab for DNA, but this is
(12:35):
nineteen ninety three. DNA testing exists, but it's still crude.
They can extract a profile of source, but it's not
enough to point a finger at anyone in the room.
No suspects leap out, no boyfriend with a history of violence,
no stalker with a paper trail. There are rumors, there
always are, that an x was questioned, that a jealous
(12:56):
friend had a temper, that someone saw her arguing with
a man outside of bar. None of it gels into
probable cause. Months pass leads fizzle. The press coverage cools
from headlines to occasional updates. Inside the station, detectives like
Richard Gagnon and Greg Mixel feel the pressure mount. This
is a high profile case and they're not getting anywhere.
(13:19):
The gits in Seattle's music scene want to help. Bands
like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden others participate in benefit
shows to help raise money to hire a private investigator.
Lee Heron is hired. Lee knocks on doors, talks to bartenders,
revisits timelines, checks alibis, but she runs into the same
brick wall. The detectives do, no clear suspect and no
(13:41):
smoking gun. The fund dries up the official hour's end.
Lee keeps working on her own time for a while,
out of stubbornness and conscious even that has to slow.
In nineteen ninety six, the case reaches national television Unsolved Mysteries,
America's most Wanted forensic files and more. Recreation actor plays me.
(14:01):
A narrator asks was it a jealous lover, an obsessed fan,
or a stranger in the night? Tips pour in none
of them stick. By nineteen ninety eight, five years after
the murder, a detective emits to a reporter, we're no
closer to solving the case than we were right after
the murder. You're there the long quiet years. You're at
(14:22):
a house party in ninety seven. The music's too loud
as always. Someone puts on a gits track, maybe Seaweed
or maybe Precious Blood, and the mood in the room
is now different. People fall silent for a line or two.
Someone turns the volume down instead of up. Later in
the kitchen, someone says, have you heard anything about Mia anything?
(14:45):
And someone else shakes their head. You listen to the
same theories you've heard for four years. Ex. Boyfriend, random creep,
serial killer, copycat, stranger with a car. You realize the
details don't change, only the EDG wears off the voice
telling the story. But in a room, in a drawer
in a police lab, the DNA from that bite Mark
(15:09):
sits on ice, waiting for signs to catch up. At four,
The Night of the Crab. Next act four, The Night
of the Crab. Here's where the story tilts into something
that feels less like coincidence and more like a bad
(15:32):
joke from the universe. Remember that second album The Gets
were making, Enter the Conquering Chicken, the one that came
out after MIA's death. At the end of the record
is a song called Sign of the Crab. It was
recorded just weeks before she was killed. On paper, it's
a punk song with hardcore edges, fast and intense. But
(15:53):
listen closely and you hear what Mia is actually doing.
She's imagining herself faced face with a violent man. In
some versions you can hear the line about serial killing
ways a woman being taken down a road by someone
who doesn't mean her well. It's a story, a character,
a sort of thing artists do all the time, except
(16:15):
this time the story she wrote about dying at the
hands of a stranger would play out almost beat for
beat in her own life under the star Sign of
the Crab. You're there listening in reverse. It's years later.
You're not in Seattle anymore, maybe you never were. You
find The Gets through a friend or a playlist or documentary.
(16:38):
You press play on Enter the Conquering Chicken. It rocks
and it roars, and you get it immediately. Then you
hit the final track, Sign of the Crab. The guitar's jab,
the drums clatter, and there's Mia right there, spitting out
lines from the point of view of someone being drawn
into danger. She starts a song with these lines, you
(17:00):
take me off the roller coaster, you're serial killing Ways.
Then later, she says, never ceases to amaze me the
things you try to pull, anything to get me in
and then get me killed. Go ahead and slice me up,
spread me across this town because you know you're the
one that won't be found. Perhaps you really listen to
(17:21):
the phrase about someone's serial killing ways, and it lands
differently because you already know how she died. You check
the liner notes recorded June of ninety three, the day
she was murdered July seventh, ninety three. The hairs on
your arms stand up. You feel like you've listened to
a message sent backwards through time. Science catches up. While
(17:46):
fans and friends are trying to make sense of the
eerie overlap between song and fate, something else is happening
in labs and databases. In nineteen ninety three. DNA analysis
is a blunt instrument, but by the Earth only two thousands.
It's a scalpel. The sample from that bitemark on MIA's chest, preserved,
logged and nearly forgotten, is pulled back out of storage
(18:09):
by the Seattle Police Cold Case Unit and the Washington
State Patrol Crime Lab. Using newer str short tandem repeat technology,
they're able to develop a full DNA profile. They load
it into codis, the national DNA database, and wait to
see if anyone lights up. The results nothing for the
(18:32):
detectives and for MEA's family, and for her bandmates Steve,
Joe and Andy. For the fans who still wear that
T shirt until it's threadbare. The non result cuts like
a fresh wound. The science finally works, the database is ready,
and still it doesn't know who did this. It feels
like the universe is playing another cruel joke. The song
(18:55):
that predicted her death exists, the evidence that could catch
her killer exists, and still no match. More years go by,
detectives retire, clothing goes out of style, the city changes skyline.
The Home Alive collective, born in the aftermath of MIA's
murder to teach self defense in anti violence on a
(19:17):
sliding scale, fights its own battles to stay afloat its
classes and curriculum, rippling outward into new generations. Life unbelievably
goes on, and then, and then, one day in two
thousand and two, a different lab in a different state
processes DNA from a burglary and domestic violence case. The
(19:40):
profile from that man is uploaded into CODIS. At that moment,
the system quietly compares it against hundreds of unsolved crimes.
Somewhere on a screen in a secure room, a new
line blinks. Seattle, Washington, nineteen ninety three homicide potential match.
(20:03):
The Night of the Crab is about to give way
to something else, the naming of the man who murdered Mia.
He're listening to Script twenty three, The Sign of the Crab.
The MIA's a Pottas Story, Part one. I'm Johnny Hartwell.
Listen for part two next time on Johnny's Dead Air
podcast
Welcome in. I'm Johnny Hartwell and this is Johnny's Dead
Air Podcast, a production of iHeartRadio. Some stories don't start
in a bar or a back alley. They start in
the sky. If you look up on a clear night,
past the light pollution, past the planes and the satellites
pretending to be stars, there's a cluster shaped like a
(00:22):
sideways question mark. The ancients called it cancer the crab.
Astrologers say the crab rules over the soft places home,
the stomach, the heart, the parts of us that take
things in, and the parts that break when too much
hurt comes at once. Down below those stars, there's a city,
wet streets, neon halos around every sign, a kind of
(00:46):
permanent twilight broken only by club marquees and cigarettes. The
city Seattle in the early nineties. It isn't just a city,
it's a pressure cooker. Bands are forming in basements, record
labels are sniffing around like sharks. Grunge is the word
the outside world uses, but inside the bars it's something
more tangled. It's punk and blues metal mixed with desperation
(01:09):
and a little bit of hope. In that city, under
that sky, there's a band with a name that sounds
more like an inside joke. It's the Gits. And at
the center of that band is a voice, raw and
soul soaked, raised on Billie Holiday and Hank Williams, somehow
slammed into punk tempo. That voice belongs to Mia Catherine Zapata.
(01:31):
On stage. She's not a star, not yet, but she
is a gravitational field. In the last months of her life,
she writes and records a song, a dark, violence, strangely
playful piece about a killer, a stranger on the road,
a driver you shouldn't trust, the song's title, Sign of
the Crab. Weeks later, reality swallows fiction, a night out
(01:53):
becomes a crime scene, a rising band becomes a memorial,
And for more than a decade, the question hangs in
the air, who killed Mia Sapata? And what do you
do when a song you wrote about dying at a
stranger's hands suddenly sounds like prophecy? Well, tonight, We're not
just telling a story of murder. We're tracing a constellation.
(02:14):
How a life, a band, a city, and a song
all converged. This is Script number twenty three, The Sign
of the Crab, Act one, The Gits, Mia Seattle and
the rise. If you want to understand this story, you
can't start with a body. You start with a van,
Midwest highways, cheap coffee, cassette tapes, rattling in the doors.
(02:37):
In the late nineteen eighties, a handful of Antioch college
kids in Yellow Springs, Ohio, decide that regular life is overrated.
They form a band, noisy, tuneful, angry in that very
specific way you get when you care too much. They
call themselves the Gits. This singer, Miya, grew up on
jazz and country, teaching herself to sing along with old
(03:00):
records until her voice could do two things at once,
break your heart and shove you in the mosh pit.
By nineteen eighty nine, the band looks west and see
something brewing in Seattle, so they pack their lives into
one van and follow the storm. Seattle greets them in
a way that it greets almost everybody. With rain, cheap rent,
(03:20):
and a tiny club stage, the town of Capitol Hill
is a world of cluttered apartments, dogs on sidewalks, and
flyers stapled over flyers, stapled over flyers. The big bands Nirvana, Soundgarden,
mud Honey are starting to break through, but underneath them
is a stable of local bands keeping the lights on
in clubs. The Gits slip into that level of groups
(03:41):
waiting on their chance to get noticed. They're not grunge
in the radio sense. They're more rough edged punk with
a deep blue streak and a lead singer who sounds
like she's been living for one hundred years and twenty
three All at once people notice. Fans pull out words
like ferocious and soulful. Fellow musicians call her rivals, which
is the best kind of compliment a musician can give.
(04:04):
They scrape together enough money and time to record an album,
Frenching the Bully, a record that sounds like a basement show,
pressed into vinyl. It hits in nineteen ninety two on
local label CZ and for the people in the know,
it might as well be a meteor. Now they're not
just a band, they're one of the bands. Just imagine
you're standing in a club that smells like spilled beer
(04:26):
and wet jackets. The stage is barely a foot tall.
Duct tape holds the monitors together. The gets walk out
without ceremony, no big intro, just tuning and a nod.
The drummer snaps the sticks, counts off four and the
first song hits like a punch, guitarist skidding, bass rumbling,
and then her Mia, her voice like ragged velvet, both
(04:48):
soft and edgy at the same time. You don't know
the lyrics yet, so you sing the vowels. By the
second chorus, You're not just watching a band, You're part
of something. And if there's any just this, this band won't
fit into this room much longer. Back in the daylight,
Justice looks like work. They were hearse in cramp spaces.
They live like every other band, broke, exhausted, always one
(05:11):
gigaway from having to sell something you love. But there's momentum.
In nineteen ninety three, the Gits are on the verge
of a major deal, whispers of Atlantic records, whisper louder,
of tours that don't involve sleeping on floors. In the studio,
they start carving out their second album, Enter the Conquering Chicken. Yeah,
(05:31):
sure the name is loose, but the sound. The sound
is tighter, meaner, more confident. The song sound like they
know where they're going. One track sits at the end
of the record, dark as a back alley sign of
the crab, a song Mia writes from inside the head
of someone facing a murderous stranger. It's fiction, it's a character.
(05:52):
It's a story about being taken down a road you
don't want to come back from. At least that's what
everybody thinks. For now, the band's story is still written.
In crowded rooms and late night beers. The worst things
they worry about are bad sound and bounce checks. But
July is coming, and with it a night that will
break this city in half. Act two breaking news, next,
(06:22):
Act two, breaking news. There are two clocks running in
this story. One is on the town of Capitol Hill,
ticking past last call. The other is on a police radio,
counting down to a call no one can unhear. You're there.
It's the last night. It's July sixth, nineteen ninety three,
bleeding into the early minutes of July seventh. Seattle is
(06:42):
warm in that sticky, rare way it gets in the summer.
Inside the Comet Tavern, the air is thicker than the smoke.
Punk kids, musicians, regulars all hanging out at the bar,
swapping stories, making loose plans for quote unquote tomorrow. You're there.
Maybe you're nursing a cheap drink maybe leaning against the
cigarette machine. At some point in the night, your eyes
(07:03):
keeps sliding back to a familiar figure. Dark hair, thrift's door, close,
easy laugh. Her name Mia. She's not holding court exactly.
She's one of those people who pulls the room towards
her man's talk shop. Friends talk nonsense, the jukebox coughs
up something aloud, and it's just a normal night. Around
two am, Mia leaves the bar. She's staying in a
(07:26):
basement studio a block away under a friend's apartment. She
stops upstairs briefly and says good night. It's the last
time anyone who loved her will see her alive. What
happens after that is a matter of inference and terror.
We know this. Around three twenty am, a cyclist in
Seattle Central District sees something near the intersection of twenty
(07:47):
fourth Avenue South and South Washington Street. It's a shape
in the dark. He looks closer. It's a woman. She's
lying face up, almost in a cruciform pose, arms slightly,
legs extended. She's not moving. He calls nine to one one.
Paramedics arrive. Police floodlights transform this quiet corner into a
(08:10):
stage set nobody asked for. The woman has no idea
on her She's been beaten, raped, and strangled. There are
signs of a brutal struggle, blunt force trauma, internal injury
so severe that, according to the medical examiner, if the
strangulation hadn't killed her, the beatings would have. They bag
(08:31):
her belongings. They photograph the scene and they tape off
the block for the officers on the ground. It's another
horrific night in the city that's seen way too many.
The body is transported to the medical examiner's office. There
the story takes a strange, almost cinematic turn. The pathologist
on duty happens to be a fan of the local
rock scene, and he has seen the gifts shows. He
(08:54):
recognizes the face on the table, even under the bruises mia.
He thinks, or maybe he says it out loud. Imagine
you're waking up late, post gig hangover in some cramped apartment.
The phone rings back then it's a landline. It never
sounds good that early. You pick it up a voice
you know on the other end. Shock follows. They say
(09:17):
her name and killed in the same sentence. Meanwhile, the
rest of the city learns like this good evening. Our
top story. Seattle police are investigating the murder of a
young woman found in the Central District early this morning.
Authority say the victim was in her twenties and may
have been walking home after visiting at Capitol Hill Bar.
Here's Fox thirteen's Mark Thompson with more. Thanks Tim. Behind
(09:40):
me is the corner of twenty fourth in South Washington.
We're at around three twenty this morning. A bicyclist discovered
the body of a woman lying in the roadway. Police
say she had been sexually assaulted and strangled. They're asking
anyone who may have seen a woman walking in this
area between two and three am to contact our tip
line one eight hundred five five five night. They don't
(10:01):
say her name, not at first, they say local musician
or Seattle woman. But the scene is fast. Word outruns
the cameras within hours. The clubs, no bands, no the gets,
no Steve the drummer, Joe on bass and Andy on guitar.
Their phones are ringing off the hook. For them, it's
not a news event. It's the center of their universe.
(10:24):
Dropping away Act three. The usual suspects, Well, it's something
this violent happens to someone this beloved. The first reaction
is grief, The second is suspicion. You're there inside the precinct,
fluorescent lights, coffee, the taste like burnt rubber. You're sitting
(10:44):
in a plastic chair at a police station, staring at
your own hands. A detective, not unkind, just tired, presses
record on a little tape machine. Detective, state your name,
Please you do, Detective, how did you know? You tell them.
You talk about bands and shows and nights at the
(11:04):
comment rehearsals and sweaty basements. The detective nods and scribbles. Detective,
when was the last time you saw her? You rewind
the night in your head like bad footage, the bar
and the laughter, the moment she left. You replay everything,
every shrug, every joke, wondering if anything was a sign.
(11:25):
When the interview is over, they thank you. They might
even say they're sorry for your loss. You walk out
feeling like you've been accused of something you can't name.
For the Seattle Police Department. The first and most probable
theory is simple. Whoever did this knew her? Statistically, that's
how it goes. A friend, a boyfriend, or an next boyfriend,
(11:48):
somebody from her inner circle, jealous, obsessed, maybe angry. They
draw a circle around MIA's life and start working inward.
They talk to friends and bandmates and roommates and ex boyfriends,
people who might know, oh her first name, if they
were part of the scene. Let's call them what they were,
the people who were closest to Mia. Every one of
them feels the same double punch losing Mia than having
(12:11):
to prove they didn't take her life. The cops collect
what physical evidence they can. There's damaged clothing and fibers
and something else, something that will sit in a freezer
for nearly a decade before it finds its voice. On
her chest, the medical examiner finds a bite mark on
her breast saliva. They swab for DNA, but this is
(12:35):
nineteen ninety three. DNA testing exists, but it's still crude.
They can extract a profile of source, but it's not
enough to point a finger at anyone in the room.
No suspects leap out, no boyfriend with a history of violence,
no stalker with a paper trail. There are rumors, there
always are, that an x was questioned, that a jealous
(12:56):
friend had a temper, that someone saw her arguing with
a man outside of bar. None of it gels into
probable cause. Months pass leads fizzle. The press coverage cools
from headlines to occasional updates. Inside the station, detectives like
Richard Gagnon and Greg Mixel feel the pressure mount. This
is a high profile case and they're not getting anywhere.
(13:19):
The gits in Seattle's music scene want to help. Bands
like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden others participate in benefit
shows to help raise money to hire a private investigator.
Lee Heron is hired. Lee knocks on doors, talks to bartenders,
revisits timelines, checks alibis, but she runs into the same
brick wall. The detectives do, no clear suspect and no
(13:41):
smoking gun. The fund dries up the official hour's end.
Lee keeps working on her own time for a while,
out of stubbornness and conscious even that has to slow.
In nineteen ninety six, the case reaches national television Unsolved Mysteries,
America's most Wanted forensic files and more. Recreation actor plays me.
(14:01):
A narrator asks was it a jealous lover, an obsessed fan,
or a stranger in the night? Tips pour in none
of them stick. By nineteen ninety eight, five years after
the murder, a detective emits to a reporter, we're no
closer to solving the case than we were right after
the murder. You're there the long quiet years. You're at
(14:22):
a house party in ninety seven. The music's too loud
as always. Someone puts on a gits track, maybe Seaweed
or maybe Precious Blood, and the mood in the room
is now different. People fall silent for a line or two.
Someone turns the volume down instead of up. Later in
the kitchen, someone says, have you heard anything about Mia anything?
(14:45):
And someone else shakes their head. You listen to the
same theories you've heard for four years. Ex. Boyfriend, random creep,
serial killer, copycat, stranger with a car. You realize the
details don't change, only the EDG wears off the voice
telling the story. But in a room, in a drawer
in a police lab, the DNA from that bite Mark
(15:09):
sits on ice, waiting for signs to catch up. At four,
The Night of the Crab. Next act four, The Night
of the Crab. Here's where the story tilts into something
that feels less like coincidence and more like a bad
(15:32):
joke from the universe. Remember that second album The Gets
were making, Enter the Conquering Chicken, the one that came
out after MIA's death. At the end of the record
is a song called Sign of the Crab. It was
recorded just weeks before she was killed. On paper, it's
a punk song with hardcore edges, fast and intense. But
(15:53):
listen closely and you hear what Mia is actually doing.
She's imagining herself faced face with a violent man. In
some versions you can hear the line about serial killing
ways a woman being taken down a road by someone
who doesn't mean her well. It's a story, a character,
a sort of thing artists do all the time, except
(16:15):
this time the story she wrote about dying at the
hands of a stranger would play out almost beat for
beat in her own life under the star Sign of
the Crab. You're there listening in reverse. It's years later.
You're not in Seattle anymore, maybe you never were. You
find The Gets through a friend or a playlist or documentary.
(16:38):
You press play on Enter the Conquering Chicken. It rocks
and it roars, and you get it immediately. Then you
hit the final track, Sign of the Crab. The guitar's jab,
the drums clatter, and there's Mia right there, spitting out
lines from the point of view of someone being drawn
into danger. She starts a song with these lines, you
(17:00):
take me off the roller coaster, you're serial killing Ways.
Then later, she says, never ceases to amaze me the
things you try to pull, anything to get me in
and then get me killed. Go ahead and slice me up,
spread me across this town because you know you're the
one that won't be found. Perhaps you really listen to
(17:21):
the phrase about someone's serial killing ways, and it lands
differently because you already know how she died. You check
the liner notes recorded June of ninety three, the day
she was murdered July seventh, ninety three. The hairs on
your arms stand up. You feel like you've listened to
a message sent backwards through time. Science catches up. While
(17:46):
fans and friends are trying to make sense of the
eerie overlap between song and fate, something else is happening
in labs and databases. In nineteen ninety three. DNA analysis
is a blunt instrument, but by the Earth only two thousands.
It's a scalpel. The sample from that bitemark on MIA's chest, preserved,
logged and nearly forgotten, is pulled back out of storage
(18:09):
by the Seattle Police Cold Case Unit and the Washington
State Patrol Crime Lab. Using newer str short tandem repeat technology,
they're able to develop a full DNA profile. They load
it into codis, the national DNA database, and wait to
see if anyone lights up. The results nothing for the
(18:32):
detectives and for MEA's family, and for her bandmates Steve,
Joe and Andy. For the fans who still wear that
T shirt until it's threadbare. The non result cuts like
a fresh wound. The science finally works, the database is ready,
and still it doesn't know who did this. It feels
like the universe is playing another cruel joke. The song
(18:55):
that predicted her death exists, the evidence that could catch
her killer exists, and still no match. More years go by,
detectives retire, clothing goes out of style, the city changes skyline.
The Home Alive collective, born in the aftermath of MIA's
murder to teach self defense in anti violence on a
(19:17):
sliding scale, fights its own battles to stay afloat its
classes and curriculum, rippling outward into new generations. Life unbelievably
goes on, and then, and then, one day in two
thousand and two, a different lab in a different state
processes DNA from a burglary and domestic violence case. The
(19:40):
profile from that man is uploaded into CODIS. At that moment,
the system quietly compares it against hundreds of unsolved crimes.
Somewhere on a screen in a secure room, a new
line blinks. Seattle, Washington, nineteen ninety three homicide potential match.
(20:03):
The Night of the Crab is about to give way
to something else, the naming of the man who murdered Mia.
He're listening to Script twenty three, The Sign of the Crab.
The MIA's a Pottas Story, Part one. I'm Johnny Hartwell.
Listen for part two next time on Johnny's Dead Air
podcast
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