March 27, 2023 • 51 mins
In this special episode of Deep Cover, recorded live at Littlefield in Brooklyn, host Jake Halpern and his friend and fellow journalist Emily Bazelon (of New York Times Magazine and Political Gabfest) talk all things crime reporting. They talk about the ways female offenders have been portrayed in the media, the complicated ethics of telling these stories, and Jake gives the inside scoop on season three: “Never Seen Again.”
For more about Emily’s reporting on Noura Jackson’s case, check out her New York Times Magazine article and her book Charged.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Hey, it's Jake. Thanks for listening to deep Cover.
I'm starting to work now on season four, and I
want to remind you that when you sign up for
Pushkin Plus, you'll get access to binge drops of future
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true crime hits like Death of an Artist, which just
(00:36):
rapped its first season, as well as Lost Hills, which
is returning with their third season this June. And of course,
don't miss early access to Revisionist History and The Happiness Lab,
which are both publishing year round for the first time
in twenty twenty three. Check out Pushkin dot fm or
the Apple Show page for more information. Earlier this month,
(01:00):
I sat down for a live recorded conversation with my
friend Emily Basilon. She's a staff writer at The New
York Times magazine and a co host of Slate's Political Gabfest.
Emily someone I go to when I'm thinking through a story. Actually,
this often happens during runs that we take through East
Rock Park in New Haven, where we both live. We
(01:23):
kind of nerd out on these runs. We talk about
the process of recording and the ethical challenges that we
both face when telling our stories. So we took that
conversation rum the streets of New Haven to Brooklyn to
a place called Littlefield, and just so you can picture it,
it's a really great scene. It's a bar on the
stage with these two orange leather chairs, microphones, this cool
(01:45):
lighting display behind us. It was a fun night and
I'm excited to share that conversation with you here to
talk about season three, my favorite season. When Jake told
me about the idea for this season on a run,
I was immediately sold. I'm going to say this. I
hope it's true. I think I said this is going
(02:06):
to be the best season you did, but I didn't
know whether you're adjut you know, trying to up my confidence. Yeah,
I was certain because it's just such a good story.
So why don't we start, because I love these stories
from you, with your telling us how you found this
terrific story. Yeah, I mean, and also just say that
(02:28):
I years ago, an NPR producer said to me that
a good MPR segment should always feel like one person
talking to one other person. So in some ways, like
this run we had, or when I'll pitch the ideas,
that's how it starts. And so I live in New Haven.
We both went to Yale, and I've always been kind
of interested in people that faked their way into universities,
(02:50):
and there was a guy who faked his way into
Yale when I had been a student there, and I
started poking around about maybe there's a story about someone
who lived some kind of elaborate deception. And it turns
out I found a piece in the Harvard Crimson about
a woman named Esther Reid. I mean, this was just
kind of the tip of the iceberg, and so started
going down that path of like where else did she
(03:12):
go and who else was she? And yeah, that kind
of opened the rabbit's hole, and because of those years ago,
you had this kind of tantalizing lead. But then there
was this whole question of like, who is this person
now and would she talk to you? And why would
she ever talk to you. I wrote this kind of
generic letter saying who I was, and then I got
(03:32):
a callback from Esther And this is a bit of
a spoiler if you haven't gotten through episode six, but
she told me that yes, I'm now I go by
Esther Matthews, and I'm a professor of criminology at Gonzaga University.
I was like what, And then I just was kind
(03:54):
of really hooked on all right, this is really unusual woman.
What is her story? So I flew out to spoken
where she lives. I rented an airbnb. We set up
like a little studio in the living room of the airbnb,
and I just said, okay, like let's start talking. Tell
me your story. And this is kind of how it began.
This is a story about a young woman who ran
(04:16):
away from home. At least that's how it all started.
I think people think that I had this master plan
and I went out and did it, and like, you know,
like it's not fun, right, You're constantly scared, you have
no support, you have no one to talk to, which
is part of the reason it got so carried away.
Like if I had just talked to somebody, they would
(04:38):
have been like this is crazy. Along the way, there
were plenty of moments where she could have stopped running,
but she didn't. Sort of like I got on a
train track. There was clearly the wrong train track, and like,
my train is running away, and at some point you're
not thinking crap, how do we get off this train track?
(04:59):
You're just thinking crap, how do I stop this train
from like going off the rails. You know, I just
kept making horrible decision after horrible decision after horrible decision,
just trying to keep the train from crashing and killing
me at that point. So there's a lot of reflection
in Esther's voice, and you can tell that she's still
(05:22):
wrestling with the emotions she has, and the memories are
mixed in with how difficult and experience she had in
this past that you're excavating with her. Why did she
decide to talk to you? I think so at that point,
and as I say in the podcast, she was Professor
Esther Matthews. Almost no one at her university or in
(05:44):
this town knew that she was also this kind of
notorious figure from the tabloids, Esther Reid. But she lived
under this kind of specter of fear that someone was
going to eventually put the dots together, and that she felt,
if that was going to happen, why not do it
on my own terms and just kind of be out
in front of it, especially because she had had such
(06:05):
poor treatment in the media before. So I think there
was kind of a timing thing where she said, I've
been thinking about doing this. She knew that she knew
that that John Campbell had visited her LinkedIn page. She
knew that people would sometimes kind of poke around, and
so I think she just said, let's do this. We
(06:27):
had one of these discussions and Emily, you know, we
talked about this all the time on our runs, where
someone says they'll talk and then they say, oh this
is off limits and that's off limits and you can't
call them, and and I was waiting for that, and
she said, kind of got out in front of it,
and she said, look, I know you're going to want
to talk to other people. I'm not going to try
to control who you talk to. Look, you got to
(06:49):
do what you have to do. And that gave me
some confidence that I was going to be dealing with
someone who understood the process of what would be involved.
And so I think it's a short answer is timing.
So you mentioned John Campbell, who's the detective in this story,
and we made I think, kind of an unusual decision
to really start the podcast with him. I mean, Esther's
(07:09):
voice shows up early, but then you really moved to
his perspective, and he's not originally investigating Esther's disappearance. He's
investigating the disappearance of another young woman. Right. Yeah, he's
investigating the disappearance of a woman named Brooke Henson who
disappeared from the small town of Traveler's Rest, and he
wants to get to the bottom of this. But she
(07:31):
is vanished, and he hasn't given up on the case,
but he is the light is dim that he's going
to get to the answer and then whatever it is.
Six or seven years later, he gets a call from
New York saying, I think I found your woman, Brooke Henson.
She's a student at Columbia University. And of course it's
not really Brooke, it's Esther. But this leads him on
(07:52):
this quest to pursue Esther. And I'll just say I
wanted to talk to John. I called him up. He said,
coming down and chat. And I really wasn't sure what
to expect when I retire. I can't wait to put
this in a drawer. I mean, this is a that's
the thing I banged my elbow on all the time.
So it's not about carry a gun. I carry gun
(08:15):
because we have to. I'd rather be like Andy Griffith
and just be sharing for that a gun. And he's
he's just charming in a way that I was. He's disarming,
he laughs at himself, he's kind of goofy, and he's
a good detective, and so I immediately sensed, oh wow,
this guy is going to be an important kind of
character in the podcast. Why did he care so much
(08:36):
about this case? I mean, he really gets preoccupied with it.
I kind of want to use the word obsessed, although
it's not super respectful, but he's just really intensely driven
to work on this case. Is there not very much
interesting crime to solve and Traveler's Rest, well, funny you
should say that John. I asked John this question. He said, Look,
(08:57):
Traveler's Rest is like we call it the circle of Wagons.
It's a few miles across, and our job as constables
is to push the crime out of the city. And
that the kind of lawless mountains or what was once
the lawless Mountains beat a lawless mountains here. This roar
of a truck would come in and people would pile out,
(09:17):
and they'd say, we're looking for the law, you know,
and mountain justice had failed and they had to come
to into town to find find some law enforcement. And
so John was basically like within the circle of wagons
within this town. He felt like that he was a custodianigan,
someone who was really dependent upon to keep the peace,
and not a lot did happen, and then this young
(09:39):
woman vanishes, and I think he feels personally responsible in
some ways for getting to the bottom of this. And
you could say it becomes obsessed, but I relate to
that in a way. It's like you start to get
a little bit of a mystery and you're not going
to arrest until you get to it. And so he
just takes it a lot further than most would, right,
(10:00):
And so he is trying to solve the mystery of
Brooke Henson's disappearance and esther appears in his story in
the end almost by accident, because there are different aliases
that she's grabbing hold of and Brooke is one of them. Right. Yeah,
So this the thing that's kind of remarkable about the
story is he gets the call the Brooke Henson is
(10:22):
actually up in Columbia, right, and he doesn't really it
doesn't really make sense that she would vanish for seven
years and then show up at this school, and he
sends a police officer. The police officer talks to her
and he presents her with a series of questions that
only Brooke would know, and she answers most of them successfully,
and at that point, you know, you would think he
(10:45):
just lets it go. But this is where his doggedness
comes in. He says, no, I want DNA, which I
think I say in the podcast was ballsy, and somehow
the New York City cop agrees to it, and then
she runs. So here's what I find fascinating about John. Like,
on the one hand, it was kind of crazy of
him to push for DNA. On the other hand, his
(11:07):
hunch was right that it's possible that this person was
so adept at being an impostor that she knew these
kind of unknowable answers. And so that's the weird thing
about being an obsessive investigator is that if occasionally your unreasonable,
obsessive hunch is spot on, then you're going to follow
(11:29):
it at least the next time or maybe the time
after that, because you have positive confirmation that you are
right to be obsessed. And so to me, that was
a part of John that I could relate to and
that I understood. I think it's just he was on
his own train, you know. Esther says, she's on her train,
he's on his train, and it's not so easy to
get off of that. Yeah. So there are lots of podcasts,
(11:52):
especially movies, books in the genre of true crime. Right
it's sort of a national pastime right now to follow
some of these cases. There are different choices. You get
kind of hooked on a narrative. I find that podcasts
are an especially like engrossing way to enter stories and
become absorbed in them. Are there any ethical issues that
(12:13):
arise in this area of reporting? I mean, you're really
digging into people's lives. These are things that happened a
long time ago to real people. How do you think
about that with the story like this? Yeah, I mean
I think that you have to ask yourself at some
level what justifies doing this? Is it? Because if the
(12:35):
answer is strictly entertainment, then I don't think you can
do it. And so there were a few things that
I grappled with. One was I talked to this guy,
ben Ford, who is the chief of police, the current
chief of police down and Traveler's Rest, who is doing,
as far as I can tell, a very hard and
(12:56):
earnest job of still trying to find out what happened
to Brooke And this is a weird thing. This is
the only time that's ever happened to me. I interviewed
John Campbell and or I was about I hadn't even
interviewed I hadn't even gone to Traveler's Rest yet. And
I got a message, Jake, this is Ben Ford of
the Traveler's Rest Police Department. I would like to talk
to you. And that was because he knew you were
(13:17):
trying to get in touch with John Gimpbell. He got
word that I might be doing a story related to
Brooke Henson say. So I was like, this is weird.
Like usually on any kind of active investigation with law enforcement,
as you know, it's like they generally very leery of
the press. And so I called him and he said, look,
I'm running an active investigation. If you can get the
(13:37):
word out about the facts about what we know when
don't know, I'd be very appreciative. I will share with
you whatever I've got. So that was encouraging to me
because I felt like, oh, maybe there's a public service here.
And then I got in touch with a woman that
looked for missing people, and then she put me in
touch with Brook's cousins, and I just asked them straight up.
(13:57):
I was like, is this something you're comfortable with? And
they basically said, look, we still want to find her remains,
we're hopeful that maybe this will help, and we're also
just that she's not forgotten. And we had that conversation
and we revisited that in the fact checking part. I
ran back overall with every aspect of it with them.
(14:20):
So yeah, I was thinking a lot about that and
the second part and we'll get to this is Esther's
treatment in the medium and revisiting that, and I felt
like there's a place where we can do a good,
hard look at the way this was played out, and
by taking a second look at it, there may be
some good that served from this. So it was as
(14:41):
I was grappling with this kind of looking at those
other things, that said, you know what, I think there
is value here in kind of telling the story well.
And some of this comes down again to timing, right,
we were talking about that earlier. But when you have
a cold case like this and a family that is
still wants to know answers, interest from reporters, podcasters can
(15:04):
be welcome in a way that it might well not
have been in the moment, right, this isn't a new story,
worry anymore. It was a big news story. Yeah, so
you're coming in at a different time. Yeah, the dust
is settled a bit. I mean, Esther is able to
talk about this. I mean there's good and bad from that.
The hard part is it time has passed, so sometimes
(15:25):
it's hard to get people to remember what they were
thinking and feeling at the time. Another hard part is
if they were burned by the media, they don't want
to talk to you, and you have to spend a
lot of time explaining this is not going to be
a tabloid treatment of this. But yeah, it's nice to
be like talking about the Secret Service. I mean, I've
tried to do with the Secret Service before. The Secret
Service never talks in my experience, and I got don
(15:47):
long and basically as at she was like, it's like
years ago, I'll talk to you, you know, And so yeah,
there were some definite benefits as well. How did the
media cover Ester's disappearance once they knew she was missing? Well,
you know, it's funny because when I first saw the
media coverage that this story got back in the day,
I mean, you know, how this is you kind of
think like this or story has been poured it out
(16:10):
like I'm late to the party, right, And so but
then I started taking a look a closer look at
the way it was reported out, and it was basically
like you know, fem fatale, It was, you know, very
much not what you're hearing her say in the opening,
that she kind of embarked on this path in which
she kind of was making incrementally bad decisions and was
(16:32):
we learned in the podcast was dealing with mental health
and all this that you know, she's portrayed as like
almost like a Bond villain, you know, as someone who's
seducing People's a kind of female version of Catch me
if you can. In fact, that was the play on
the forty eight Hours version of this. And so the
thinking is, Okay, is there a way to re examine
(16:52):
It doesn't mean you let her off the hook. It
doesn't mean you give her a pass for the laws
that she broke, But can you look at this and
see maybe there's a more nuanced portrayal of a real
human being here and not just the kind of cardboard cutout.
We're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back,
(17:24):
Welcome back. After we grab some drinks and mingled with
the crowd, I turned the tables on Emily asked her
some questions because we do similar work. She often reports
on criminal justice for the New York Times magazine and
finds her way into all kinds of interesting and convoluted
true crime stories. And there's one in particular that I
(17:45):
wanted to talk to her about, a story that Emily
spent years reporting on. It involves a young woman named
Nora Jackson. Nora was convicted as a teenager of killing
her own mother. She spent several years in prison, and
then one day her conviction was overturned. Emily became interested
in how someone like this happens and the role of
(18:07):
the prosecutor, a woman named Amy Wyrick. Emily wrote about
Norah's case for the New York Times magazine. Her story
also appeared in Emily's book Charged. You should check them out.
We've included links to both in our show notes. Okay,
back to our conversation, and I'm wondering whether Emily, you
(18:28):
can just kind of turn back the clock and help
remind me and us how did you get drawn to
this story? What did you know initially, and what made
you think that this was a story you wanted to write.
So you are a story person who starts with like
a good sizzly concept of people who faked their ideas
(18:48):
to go to college. I often, to my detriment, are
more of an ideas person. And I was interested several
years ago in prosecutors who had a pattern of breaking
the rules in a way that harmed the people who
they were charged with. Prosecuting prosecutors obviously prosecute cases, but
(19:10):
they're also supposed to be a kind of arbiter of
justice in their own way. They represent the people. They
also have responsibilities to uphold all the laws and rules
in the justice system. And I was interested in the
prosecutors who cut corners. So there was a prosecutor I
did a little research. I was like looking around the
country for a kind of rose gallery of prosecutors. Frankly,
(19:31):
and at the time, the district attorney in Memphis, which
is Shelby County, her name was Amy Wyrick, and she
had a real pattern of failing to disclose evidence in
cases in which she'd gotten, you know, big convictions, and
Nora Jackson's case. Once I was like in that world
jumped out at me, you know, for some similar reasons
(19:54):
to why you were interested in esther. So, when Nora
was eighteen, her mother was brutally stabbed death in her home.
And her mother was a forty year old white stockbroker,
so it was like an unusual murder and the kind
of murder that is destab realizing to you know, white
middle class residence. There was no obvious suspect, and about
(20:15):
three months after the murder, Amy Wireck charged Nora, the
eighteen year old daughter, with her mother's killing. Nora didn't
have a criminal history, but she was known as a
kind of wild child, and the charges were brought and
there was a lot of publicity, and then a few
(20:36):
months later the DNA results came back from the crime scene.
You know, her mother's blood was everywhere, so there was
a lot of evidence to test, and in fact, Nora
was excluded as someone who was part of that crime
scene in any way, and there were other DNA profiles. However,
Wyreck prosecuted her anyway, and for a variety of reasons,
(20:57):
including what was later deemed misconduct on Wyreck's part, Nora
was convicted and then later the Tennessee Supreme Court actually
overturned her conviction, and I think we have a little
clip of Nora talking about finding out about that ruling.
Three years ago, in a woman's prison outside Memphis, Tennessee,
(21:19):
Nora Jackson was sitting in her cell watching television en mute.
You know, they'd have three one three two and three
three and three dash two is just like a repeat
of the news in the weather. Her roommate was in
the cafeteria and Nora wanted to get some privacy. And
I just was sitting there going to the bathroom and
just like watching it, and I saw my name come
across the bottom of the screen and then I was like,
(21:42):
oh shit. So she turns on the volume. The Tennessee
Supreme Court has granted Norah Jackson a new trial, and
she just, honestly, for a few minutes, couldn't believe it.
Nora Jackson is now awaiting a new trial. And even
though Nora had just won her appeal, something that rarely
happens in the state of Tennessee. This is after she
(22:02):
has spent nine years in prison. Emily Basilon has been
covering the case and like nobody was there because everybody
that dinner so I'm like screaming to get out because
I'm like wanting to get to the phone and nobody's
there missing. Is something going to eat them? Right? And
why was Norah in prison in the first place. Nora
(22:23):
was in prison because she was convicted of murdering her
mother Jennifer Jackson. Wow, that's an episode of The Daily
and that was I think Mike Barbarrow somehow like sounds
different now to me anyway, So go ahead, I want
to ask you a question as you're telling the stories.
So she charges Amy Rick, charges Norah with the murder
(22:48):
of her mother, and then you said, some period of
time later it comes out that the DNA was excluded.
So what is the sequence of events? Does she have
that DNA evidence when she makes the charge. No, Wyrick
didn't have the DNA results from the crime lab. You
might wonder why she didn't wait for them to come back. Yes,
I am wondering, Yes she didn't, but they were available,
(23:11):
They were part of the record. They were part of
the evidence that the jury heard, and the jury convicted
Nora anyway, And I think there are a few explanations
for that. One was the kind of failed strategy of
her defense lawyer and that didn't go very well. And
also the judge in the case admitted people saying all
kinds of stuff about Nora, like, for example, that you know,
(23:36):
her boyfriend had crawled in the window just you know,
one night to have sex with her a couple months
after her mother was killed. Just all of this irrelevant
but kind of scurrilous character assassination evidence, and perhaps that
had an effect on the jury. As you're talking about
the chargers being placed before the DNA evidence comes back,
(23:57):
it almost makes me think of a version of the
media getting out in front of the story that you
have an idea that this is who this person is,
they've done this, and then what happens when you find
evidence that might or ought to give you pause about
the theories that you've postulated prior to having that evidence. Yeah,
I mean, you know, one way to think about this
is tunnel vision for prosecutors that once they've chosen someone,
(24:20):
there's a lot of impetus, confirmation bias, professional reasons to
kind of stick with that person as the suspect. And
that is in fact what happened to Nora. So after
the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned her conviction. She had a
kind of second round of like a prolonged kind of
face off with Amy Wyrick because Wireck was threatening to
(24:41):
prosecute her again and in order to get a plea bargain,
and Norah ended up accepting a plea bargain to manslaughter
because she thought she was going to get out of prison.
But then it turned out that her lawyers had made
a mistake in calculating her time and that she actually
had to remain in prison for fourteen months. So that
(25:04):
was completely horrible because first of all, she had she'd
already been in prison I think at that point for
nine years, and also it was socially for her, really horrible.
Her world were people in prison who saw her as
kind of heroic for standing up to Amy Wyrick. You know,
all these women in prison, so rare to have, especially
(25:26):
in Tennessee, to have your sentence, your conviction overturned. But
then she had taken this plea, she'd kind of given
in in their eyes, and she was back among them,
so she hadn't even gotten what she thought she was
going to get. So that happened to be the point
when I kind of stumbled on this story and I
wrote Nora a letter in prison. I wrote her a
(25:47):
bunch of letters, and she wrote back to me a
couple of times, but I wasn't really sure whether she
wanted to talk to me, and it actually took me
ten months to persuade her to meet with me. How
did you do that? I called her on the phone
and talked to her a couple of times. It was
very in and out, like she was responsive, then she wasn't,
(26:10):
And she had all kinds of reasons to mistrust the
media because by then she'd been the subject of I
think a twenty twenty special or maybe forty eight hours,
I think both, and neither of them had been helpful
to her at all, and in both cases she had
kind of been led along, or she said she felt
like she'd been misled, and then it turned into a
(26:30):
kind of tabloid you know, very who done it and
kind of implicating her. I mean, in these situations, there's always,
I always feel like an unspoken kind of agreement that's made,
Like you have your interest, which is writing the story,
and she has her own set of interests. Why she
ultimately decided she wants to speak with you, she's hoping
(26:52):
that your story will do something for her. What do
you think that she hoped your story would do and
did you feel that your story would in fact do that? Well?
When I first went to see her in prison, and
actually I went to Memphis, and then she almost decided
not to see me, but then she changed her mind
at the last minutely and we sat down in this
little classroom at um sh At that point, she was
(27:13):
at the jail, and what she really wanted to tell
me about were the black women she was imprisoned with,
and how much worse off they were, and how much
how strange she felt about the attention she was getting,
given that there were these people around her she thought
deserved attention. So it was that same feeling of like,
(27:35):
oh my god, there are all these cases, Why am
I focusing on this one particular person and not these
other people? And I was. She was very firm and
clear that other people were more deserving of being interviewed,
and that she felt that there was something wrong about that.
(27:57):
And so even though it only drew her to me,
drew me to her more, I didn't change course. There
was something sort of impressive about that, because she might
have wanted to keep the attention for herself, and for
a long time, I think she was very ambivalent. It
really wasn't until she had been released, until I had
(28:19):
really been pursuing her for a couple of years that
she started trusting me, which I totally understand. I think
that eventually the idea that it was the New York Times,
it was interested that I was going to be able
to tell her story in a way that really got
across the legal complexity and the wrongdoing on the part
(28:39):
of the prosecution. I think that she cared about that,
and Amy Wyrick was not interested in talking to me, was,
you know, obviously very clearly resistant to my doing the story.
And that also, I think kind of endeared me to
Norah because she could see it was sort of like
I was. It was like a different kind of press
(29:02):
was coming in, and she appreciated that. Eventually, you had
asked me why I thought that John Campbell was so
vehemently interested obsessed when it was this case and that
was driving this. So I'm going to flip the question
on you. Why did Amy Wyrick double down on this
case and give so much attention to it? What was
(29:23):
as best as you could tell, what was her motivation. Well,
Wyreck tried this case when she was a prosecutor working
for the elected district attorney in Shelby County, and it
made her famous. She was on TV news. She was
this young woman being this very strong in her eyes
advocate for justice, you know, standing in the place of
(29:46):
Norah's mother and convicting someone. And it was it's very,
very unusual for children to actually kill their parents, and
especially for daughters to kill their mothers. But for Wyreck
that was only kind of part of the way of
talking about the case that she was despite all of
those obstacles, that she was doing it anyway because this
(30:08):
was justice. She was really that was her line, and
she wound up being elected district Attorney in Shelby County
in twenty fourteen. And I think that Nora's case really
catapulted her into the kind of front of the community
in a way that was politically helpful to her. It
seems that the evidence against Nora was extremely circumstantial, But
(30:29):
I'm wondering, did you ever have any moments of doubt
about her innocence? Yeah, I decided that I didn't have
to know whether she was innocent or not, and I
kind of set that aside. I mean, Nora would hate
that if she were here, because it's so deeply important
to her to be believed, and I completely understand that.
(30:52):
But I just decided there was so much wrong with
this case legally speaking, that it was okay that I
was not standing there arguing for her innocence as her lawyer,
even as a journalist. I was just telling you the
story of what had happened to her. And my story
in the magazine is really about prosecutors hiding evidence, and
(31:13):
I think that really was sort of how the story
unfolded in my book as well. Tell us about where
Nora is now, I mean, give us the quick update.
So for a while Nora was living in Brooklyn. She
got out of prison twenty sixteen, and she was actually
in Brooklyn for a while. But now she is back
in Memphis. She's you know, it's hard. It's really hard
(31:35):
to get out of prison after you've been there for
a while. You kind of have to really restart your life.
Often people have a kind of prolonged form of PTSD
that they're figuring out just how to live in the
real world again. And Nora has no family, so in
addition to the death of her mother. Her parents were divorced,
but her father had actually been murdered a year and
(31:57):
a half before her mother was killed, which is like
another I know, really and perhaps that it was connected,
and maybe that's the kind of missing element of the
unsolved murders all along. But she really didn't have family,
and so that has been really hard for her to be.
You know, she got out of prison in her late twenties,
(32:19):
mid to late twenties, and she had kind of grown
up in prison, and in some ways that meant that
she didn't quite grow up. So now she's in Memphis
and she had a lawyer, or not the child Laura
I was talking about earlier, but a later lawyer who
is just a kind of incredibly caring person and so
right now she is actually working for him in Memphis
(32:43):
and you know, and getting on her feet, trying to
get her own place. She also has a dog named Liberty,
very deliberate name, who I'm very fond of. I actually
took care of Liberty for a little while long after
my book came out, just to be clear, and so
I just went to Memphis to see that I was
there to work on a different story. But of course
(33:05):
I wanted to see Nora, and my big question was
whether Libert was going to remember me, which she did,
which is great. One thing I will say to you,
Emily is that there are many journalists who interview people,
hear their story, and they never call them back or
hear from them again. And I don't know of another
journalist who's more committed to treating people as human beings,
(33:27):
not just for the week or day, but for years
often afterwards, and it's a rare thing. Thank you. Should
we take some listener questions? Absolutely? After the break, we
talked more about Deep Cover, Never Seen Again, and I
answer a few questions from the audience. We're back next up.
(33:59):
We took questions from listeners in the audience. We had
them write their questions out on paper and then put
them in a bucket. Yes, very old school, I know.
It was like seventh grade, everyone passing notes. Then someone
handed the bucket to Emily and she read them aloud.
Is there anything you wanted to include in the podcast
that didn't make the cut? Yeah, I mean there was
(34:21):
a lot. There was a lot probably there when I
went down to Traveler's Rest, I mean, when I went
down to Traveler's Rest. Before I connected with Brooks cousins,
I connected with this husband and wife team, Patrick and
Tammy Welch, and I didn't end up getting to put
them in the podcast, and I still feel badly about
(34:43):
that because what they do is they basically devote all
their spare time to try to look for people who
have gone missing, people that have kind of gone off
the radar of law enforcement, and actively kind of keep
the search alive. And the first thing they told me
straight up was like, look, it's great you're doing this
on brook but there's actually a ton of people that
(35:06):
are missing in this area. And they were they had
like a map in their house with all the pin
points of the people and where they went missing. And
it wasn't like they were all connected and this was
some conspiracy. It was just they were like the custodians
of these people's memory. And then they drove with me
up to the dark corner where Brooke may have gone missing,
(35:28):
and the whole thing was so intense for Tammy she
didn't want to go, but she reluctantly went with us
in the pickup truck. And it was it was one
of these scenes where it was kind of late at
night and were driving down some shadowy roads in the mountains,
and I just got a sense for like, this is
how these people spent their weekends. And it just made
you think about all the stories we can't tell. And
(35:51):
I kind of get to this at the end that
we often fixate on very particular types of stories that
kind of play into the fem fatale or that have
some sort of Hollywood appeal, But there's all these kind
of nameless cases of people that go missing. And there
was just something really poignant and powerful about this couple
and their pickup truck kind of winding their weight on
(36:11):
the darkened roods of this county, kind of going to
the last spots where these people were. And they're doing
great work, and I hope that they hear a shout
out for that in this bonus episode. Another listener question.
One of Estra's lies was that she was a professional
chess player. So did anyone ever ask Estra to play chess,
that ever threatened to blow her cover? I know, such
(36:34):
a crazy thing to make up that there, I get,
you know, she was apparently a pretty solid chess player,
because you know from the podcast what happens when she
says I'm a tennis player, and then she's like, oh shit,
I don't actually not to play tennis. I did talk
to one former boyfriend who didn't go on the record,
but he did play her in chess. He did ask
(36:54):
her she did beat him. You, Yeah, exactly. I mean
we're talking about this backstage a second ago. Like I
would be intimidated if I met if you just said
I'm a professional chess player, There's no way in hell
I wouldn't even played checkers with you. So I suspect
that's scared off enough people that she could pull it off. Yeah.
(37:18):
How do you think Esther's case would have been handled
differently today? Well, we kind of we kind of talked
about this a little bit the way that my mind
goes to the media, and I just think that I
would hope that I would hope that the ass that
we wouldn't just kind of immediately. Look, when you have
(37:41):
a story as a journalist, right, when someone brings you
a story and you're operating on impartial information, right, your
brain spins out. There's vast terra incognita, and we when
we go on our runs. Oh, I think I talked
to some of Esther and she might have done that. Well,
you ask me a question. I don't know, but I
have an idea of where the story maybe. But that
story that I have that I'm projecting out into Terra
(38:03):
Incognita is actually probably based on books I've read and
crappy movies I've watched, and local news stories I've read,
and is prompting me to make assumptions about who that
person is and how the story is in fact going
to play out based on like probably templates, like the
fem fatal template. So what happens is you get like
part way into the reporting, and inevitably you start getting
(38:27):
facts that challenge the assumptions that you've made in the template.
And our mutual friend Jack Hit always says, and I
think this is so wise. He says, as soon as
the story turns out not being what you thought it was,
that's when your story begins. But there's dissonance there because
you're like, oh shit, this isn't the story I thought.
I'd mean, I told my editor and my producer was
going to be this, and I promise that, And now
(38:47):
you have to go back and say it's not quite that.
And I think that sometimes it's easier when you get
to that point and just say, wow, it's basically right.
I mean, she did have three boyfriends in one year,
and they were at military institutes, so she did kind
of go through them, and you could see how if
you just keep pushing and sticking to the preconception have
(39:09):
you could just plow down that road. And I say
that with empathy because I feel like, as a journalist,
I've stared down that and probably done some version of that.
I would think in this moment now, where there's more
awareness of the way, you know, we depict among other
people women in the news and such, that someone would say, hey,
(39:32):
wait a minute, here is this story that we're progressing on.
Does it all check out? Are we making assumptions? Are
we playing into stereotypes and templates that may not be
one hundred percent justified. That's why I would hope we
would play out differently today. Yeah, I mean some of
this is it just really depends on Esther's honesty. I
(39:53):
mean I think that that was a really I'm going
to use the word lucky. Maybe that's not right, But
somewhere in the alchemy of your interviewing her and her
reflecting there's some like pretty gritty candor that comes across right,
I think. And I would also say that like in
fairness to people that were reporting her on back then,
(40:13):
Let's be honest, this was a person who had his
history of not being candid when she was younger. Now
is a different story, she's a professor, it's a different life.
But at the time, this is someone who had been
a serial identity thief, who had told people that she
was a chess champion when she was in fact not,
who had told lies to her boyfriends, etc. And so
I think that's the really tricky part about telling a
(40:36):
story with an unreliable narrator is that you must be skeptical,
you must be dubious. You can't let them off the hook.
But that doesn't give you that blank check to project
whatever you want upon them. And so, yeah, it's easy
for me to say that now twenty years later looking back,
But but you've learned a thing or two. Okay, speaking
of compulsive liars, what about who am I going to say,
(40:59):
George Santos? Do you have a better understanding of what
motivates people like him? I think George is his own
special creature. We can probably all agree on that. Yeah, no,
is there a short answer. I mean, I don't. I
don't presume to know what's going on with that guy.
I do I think that I think with Esther I did.
(41:27):
I did kind of understand it. Like I don't know
that Esther agreed with my assessment of it, But I
feel like, to some extent, we grew up in a
certain town with certain friends and family, and we go
away to college, we moved to a different place, and
we enjoy being someone different in small ways. And that
doesn't mean that we always lie about it, but I
(41:50):
think that sometimes it's born from this desire to remove
ourselves from a place where we were. And I think
that what happened in Esther's story in particular, is that
the law enforcement looked at is there must be some
sort of kind of deeper, more methodical, devious play here
of espionage or something. And to me, it like just
(42:11):
spoke to a more human impulse to just have space
and reinvent. And that is not again to excuse it
or to say that it's all right, but to try
to understand it as a kind of basic human desire
that just kind of, as she says, ran out of
control in her case. So yeah, in some ways the
(42:32):
answers yes, But with Santos, I don't know, it's in
his own category. What led to the media thinking Esther
was a potential spy when the story broke Yeah, so,
I mean it starts off. I was talking to a
listener in the audience during the intermission and we're kind
of on the same page. It started off with a
(42:54):
kind of John Campbell trying to come up with an
explot It didn't make sense, right, It doesn't make sense.
Why do you enroll at college is a different name,
and there's no obvious game to be made for it,
and so in the absence of that knowledge, start putting
together other possible theories. Oh, she's dated two guys from
West Point and the shipman. Maybe it's this. I mean,
(43:14):
in some ways, that's what detectives are supposed to do.
They're supposed to speculate. But what happened was, for those
of you that listen to know, is that when they
were trying to get the word out about the case,
the police chief in Traveler's Rest of the time told
John he should owe the detective, he should open the
file and feel free to talk to the press. And
that's when John started to air some of his theories
(43:35):
about espionage, and there was a local news station that
ran some of them, and then there was a kind
of middleman who job it was was to find interesting
local stories and selve them to the national media. And
he quickly wrote up a press release based on this
impartial information, and three days later later it was running nationally.
(43:56):
And so the story just kind of got a bit
ahead of itself. And that that's how I mean, that's
what we do an episode four, we kind of connect
the dots of this pipeline of how it comes from
kind of you know, speculation to kind of headlines. Yeah,
sou new question. Part of the story is themed around
tough mental health challenges and also running away. What advice
(44:19):
do you think Esther might give to someone in a
similar situation? You know? This is It's interesting because when
we first started talking to Esther, I'm not sure how
exactly I posed it, but sometimes I'll often say this
is a version of like when I was asking you
before about nor like what do you want out of
the story, because it's just you don't always get an
honest answer, but it's helpful sometimes you do. And she said, look,
(44:44):
I was suffering from real mental health issues. And I
think that I felt and I made some bad choices,
and if I had had someone to talk to, OH,
I could have been honest about what was going on,
and I had been gotten some help earlier, I might
have made some better some better choices. And so I
(45:07):
think that she looks at this as situation of what
happens to kind of anxiety and desperation, and she has
social anxiety when it's kind of unchecked and left left
to kind of spiral with no help. And so to me,
I think that was a large part of the motivation
of her, of her of her talking about the story,
(45:31):
and she's now currently it's interesting that this is her
big thing, is like advocating for mental health kind of
premptively before people go off the rails and end up
in incarcerated. You know. One thing that strikes me about
Esther and Nora is that they had really strange things
happened to them that they participated in, but that like
also are just hard to explain. And I think there
(45:53):
is something about having someone just lay out your story clearly.
Noura sometimes says that she just like feels like she
can just take the magazine and hand it to people
just as an explanation of what happened. Anyway, I wonder
if that's something that helpful to esther, and I mean,
probably it is, right, I think so. I mean, I
(46:15):
didn't you know, we did this very intense session with
her when before it came out, where we went back
over it. I read back what other people said about her,
and I read back what I said to her, and
it was it was hot and it was intense. She
was not happy with some parts of it. But I
think that that even that even that conversation was a
(46:37):
conversation that she hadn't had in any of the previous
media treatments of it, And so I think that there
was When we talked to her a few days later,
she's like, I appreciate that we had at least the
chance to do that, and she was, but it's awkward.
I could see why hot people don't want to do
it because it wasn't fun. It is not fun, you know.
Last question, Yeah, it's kind of related to what we're
(46:59):
talking about. How do you recognize your past experiences and
traumas while covering a story and work to keep them
from influencing your interpretation and telling of the story. Wow. Well,
I mean, I'll start by saying that I don't think
I've had anything as traumatic happened to me as esther
had with I mean the loss of her mother at
that age. And if you've listened to the podcast, you
(47:20):
know how parents, how her parents divorced and she was struggling.
You know, it's interesting. I did say to her at times, like, look,
I get it. I didn't say I get it. I
said I I am sympathetic because I have had anxiety before,
but I don't think i've had it like you. And
so I think that it's actually important not to assume
(47:44):
that you've had their experience, because that's the problem. Like,
you know, if I start to let myself think that, like, oh,
I've had anxiety too, and I didn't make up X
number of identities, then I'm not on some level getting it.
So I think that it's I think that you have
to the starting point almost has to be that I'm
(48:06):
not seeing this the way you see it, but like,
try to help me see it, right. I mean, I
think you're talking about empathy and one and recognizing the
limits of empathy in terms of pretending to stand in
someone's shoes, right. I mean, empathy is a tool for
journalists like us, but I think we also have to
be really careful and how we handle it totally. I mean,
(48:27):
I think that's why it's important. You've got to talk
to the other family members. And there's many things that
weren't included in this podcast, things that like, in some
ways the most you could say, some of the most
significant things that that are part of a story, the
things that are actually not included because you've debated at
nauseum about whether or not to include them, and they
would be interesting, but you feel you can't include them.
(48:51):
So yeah, I feel like every twist in turn is
like some sort of dilemma in which you know and
you're getting back on Twitter, Oh you didn't do this,
you do that, and it's like, yeah, I had a
reason for it. Yeah, you're all right. You know, we're tried,
Like we told one version of the truth, the version
of the truth as best we could see it. And
that's where the team of people, the four of us,
(49:13):
sat down and went through this understanding, damn well, there's
no entirely objective way to tell a story, and you
want to tell it as compellingly as you possibly can,
so that we have the clicks that justify season four.
And yet at the same time, you know that you're
(49:35):
telling just one version of the truth, and you're going
to get it from one side to the other. And
as my wife says to me, it just has to
be a version of the truth that you can live
with even if no one else likes, which is really
hard to do, but that's the goal. I think. Yes,
I feel like I have heard that line from Kasha
a number of times from you, and it's like in
(49:56):
my head too, which I really appreciate because Kasha is
very wise. Jake, this has been so much fun. I
am really looking forward to season four. Thank you so much.
In congratulations, thanks for listening to this special live episode
of a deep Cover. I want to express my heartfelt
thanks to Emily for a great conversation. We'll have another
(50:18):
episode coming out next month. I'll be talking with Ben Ford,
the current chief of Police and Traveler's Rest, all about
Brooke Henson and the continued surge for closure in that case,
and I have a favor to ask. It'll only take
(50:39):
you about two minutes, I promise. If you like deep Cover,
please leave review on Apple Podcasts. It helps other people
find the show, it gets the word out, and it
helps us make the case that yes, there should be
a season four and beyond. Thank You. Deep Cover is
produced by Amy Gaines and Jacob Smith. This episode was
(51:01):
edited by Sophie Crane, mastering by Sarah Brugere. Our show
art was designed by Seancarney. Original scoring and our theme
was composed by Luis Gara. Special thanks to Nicole Morano,
Jason Gambrell, Mia Lobell, Greta Con, Jacob Weisberg, and Karen Shakerjee.
I'm Jake Albern. I want to remind you that when
(51:23):
you sign up for Pushkin Plus, you'll get access to
binge drops of future seasons of deep Cover and exclusive
content from other Pushkin true crime hits. Check out Pushkin
dot fm or the Apple Show page for more information.
Pushkin. Hey, it's Jake. Thanks for listening to deep Cover.
I'm starting to work now on season four, and I
want to remind you that when you sign up for
Pushkin Plus, you'll get access to binge drops of future
seasons of Deep Cover and exclusive content from other Pushkin
true crime hits like Death of an Artist, which just
(00:36):
rapped its first season, as well as Lost Hills, which
is returning with their third season this June. And of course,
don't miss early access to Revisionist History and The Happiness Lab,
which are both publishing year round for the first time
in twenty twenty three. Check out Pushkin dot fm or
the Apple Show page for more information. Earlier this month,
(01:00):
I sat down for a live recorded conversation with my
friend Emily Basilon. She's a staff writer at The New
York Times magazine and a co host of Slate's Political Gabfest.
Emily someone I go to when I'm thinking through a story. Actually,
this often happens during runs that we take through East
Rock Park in New Haven, where we both live. We
(01:23):
kind of nerd out on these runs. We talk about
the process of recording and the ethical challenges that we
both face when telling our stories. So we took that
conversation rum the streets of New Haven to Brooklyn to
a place called Littlefield, and just so you can picture it,
it's a really great scene. It's a bar on the
stage with these two orange leather chairs, microphones, this cool
(01:45):
lighting display behind us. It was a fun night and
I'm excited to share that conversation with you here to
talk about season three, my favorite season. When Jake told
me about the idea for this season on a run,
I was immediately sold. I'm going to say this. I
hope it's true. I think I said this is going
(02:06):
to be the best season you did, but I didn't
know whether you're adjut you know, trying to up my confidence. Yeah,
I was certain because it's just such a good story.
So why don't we start, because I love these stories
from you, with your telling us how you found this
terrific story. Yeah, I mean, and also just say that
(02:28):
I years ago, an NPR producer said to me that
a good MPR segment should always feel like one person
talking to one other person. So in some ways, like
this run we had, or when I'll pitch the ideas,
that's how it starts. And so I live in New Haven.
We both went to Yale, and I've always been kind
of interested in people that faked their way into universities,
(02:50):
and there was a guy who faked his way into
Yale when I had been a student there, and I
started poking around about maybe there's a story about someone
who lived some kind of elaborate deception. And it turns
out I found a piece in the Harvard Crimson about
a woman named Esther Reid. I mean, this was just
kind of the tip of the iceberg, and so started
going down that path of like where else did she
(03:12):
go and who else was she? And yeah, that kind
of opened the rabbit's hole, and because of those years ago,
you had this kind of tantalizing lead. But then there
was this whole question of like, who is this person
now and would she talk to you? And why would
she ever talk to you. I wrote this kind of
generic letter saying who I was, and then I got
(03:32):
a callback from Esther And this is a bit of
a spoiler if you haven't gotten through episode six, but
she told me that yes, I'm now I go by
Esther Matthews, and I'm a professor of criminology at Gonzaga University.
I was like what, And then I just was kind
(03:54):
of really hooked on all right, this is really unusual woman.
What is her story? So I flew out to spoken
where she lives. I rented an airbnb. We set up
like a little studio in the living room of the airbnb,
and I just said, okay, like let's start talking. Tell
me your story. And this is kind of how it began.
This is a story about a young woman who ran
(04:16):
away from home. At least that's how it all started.
I think people think that I had this master plan
and I went out and did it, and like, you know,
like it's not fun, right, You're constantly scared, you have
no support, you have no one to talk to, which
is part of the reason it got so carried away.
Like if I had just talked to somebody, they would
(04:38):
have been like this is crazy. Along the way, there
were plenty of moments where she could have stopped running,
but she didn't. Sort of like I got on a
train track. There was clearly the wrong train track, and like,
my train is running away, and at some point you're
not thinking crap, how do we get off this train track?
(04:59):
You're just thinking crap, how do I stop this train
from like going off the rails. You know, I just
kept making horrible decision after horrible decision after horrible decision,
just trying to keep the train from crashing and killing
me at that point. So there's a lot of reflection
in Esther's voice, and you can tell that she's still
(05:22):
wrestling with the emotions she has, and the memories are
mixed in with how difficult and experience she had in
this past that you're excavating with her. Why did she
decide to talk to you? I think so at that point,
and as I say in the podcast, she was Professor
Esther Matthews. Almost no one at her university or in
(05:44):
this town knew that she was also this kind of
notorious figure from the tabloids, Esther Reid. But she lived
under this kind of specter of fear that someone was
going to eventually put the dots together, and that she felt,
if that was going to happen, why not do it
on my own terms and just kind of be out
in front of it, especially because she had had such
(06:05):
poor treatment in the media before. So I think there
was kind of a timing thing where she said, I've
been thinking about doing this. She knew that she knew
that that John Campbell had visited her LinkedIn page. She
knew that people would sometimes kind of poke around, and
so I think she just said, let's do this. We
(06:27):
had one of these discussions and Emily, you know, we
talked about this all the time on our runs, where
someone says they'll talk and then they say, oh this
is off limits and that's off limits and you can't
call them, and and I was waiting for that, and
she said, kind of got out in front of it,
and she said, look, I know you're going to want
to talk to other people. I'm not going to try
to control who you talk to. Look, you got to
(06:49):
do what you have to do. And that gave me
some confidence that I was going to be dealing with
someone who understood the process of what would be involved.
And so I think it's a short answer is timing.
So you mentioned John Campbell, who's the detective in this story,
and we made I think, kind of an unusual decision
to really start the podcast with him. I mean, Esther's
(07:09):
voice shows up early, but then you really moved to
his perspective, and he's not originally investigating Esther's disappearance. He's
investigating the disappearance of another young woman. Right. Yeah, he's
investigating the disappearance of a woman named Brooke Henson who
disappeared from the small town of Traveler's Rest, and he
wants to get to the bottom of this. But she
(07:31):
is vanished, and he hasn't given up on the case,
but he is the light is dim that he's going
to get to the answer and then whatever it is.
Six or seven years later, he gets a call from
New York saying, I think I found your woman, Brooke Henson.
She's a student at Columbia University. And of course it's
not really Brooke, it's Esther. But this leads him on
(07:52):
this quest to pursue Esther. And I'll just say I
wanted to talk to John. I called him up. He said,
coming down and chat. And I really wasn't sure what
to expect when I retire. I can't wait to put
this in a drawer. I mean, this is a that's
the thing I banged my elbow on all the time.
So it's not about carry a gun. I carry gun
(08:15):
because we have to. I'd rather be like Andy Griffith
and just be sharing for that a gun. And he's
he's just charming in a way that I was. He's disarming,
he laughs at himself, he's kind of goofy, and he's
a good detective, and so I immediately sensed, oh wow,
this guy is going to be an important kind of
character in the podcast. Why did he care so much
(08:36):
about this case? I mean, he really gets preoccupied with it.
I kind of want to use the word obsessed, although
it's not super respectful, but he's just really intensely driven
to work on this case. Is there not very much
interesting crime to solve and Traveler's Rest, well, funny you
should say that John. I asked John this question. He said, Look,
(08:57):
Traveler's Rest is like we call it the circle of Wagons.
It's a few miles across, and our job as constables
is to push the crime out of the city. And
that the kind of lawless mountains or what was once
the lawless Mountains beat a lawless mountains here. This roar
of a truck would come in and people would pile out,
(09:17):
and they'd say, we're looking for the law, you know,
and mountain justice had failed and they had to come
to into town to find find some law enforcement. And
so John was basically like within the circle of wagons
within this town. He felt like that he was a custodianigan,
someone who was really dependent upon to keep the peace,
and not a lot did happen, and then this young
(09:39):
woman vanishes, and I think he feels personally responsible in
some ways for getting to the bottom of this. And
you could say it becomes obsessed, but I relate to
that in a way. It's like you start to get
a little bit of a mystery and you're not going
to arrest until you get to it. And so he
just takes it a lot further than most would, right,
(10:00):
And so he is trying to solve the mystery of
Brooke Henson's disappearance and esther appears in his story in
the end almost by accident, because there are different aliases
that she's grabbing hold of and Brooke is one of them. Right. Yeah,
So this the thing that's kind of remarkable about the
story is he gets the call the Brooke Henson is
(10:22):
actually up in Columbia, right, and he doesn't really it
doesn't really make sense that she would vanish for seven
years and then show up at this school, and he
sends a police officer. The police officer talks to her
and he presents her with a series of questions that
only Brooke would know, and she answers most of them successfully,
and at that point, you know, you would think he
(10:45):
just lets it go. But this is where his doggedness
comes in. He says, no, I want DNA, which I
think I say in the podcast was ballsy, and somehow
the New York City cop agrees to it, and then
she runs. So here's what I find fascinating about John. Like,
on the one hand, it was kind of crazy of
him to push for DNA. On the other hand, his
(11:07):
hunch was right that it's possible that this person was
so adept at being an impostor that she knew these
kind of unknowable answers. And so that's the weird thing
about being an obsessive investigator is that if occasionally your unreasonable,
obsessive hunch is spot on, then you're going to follow
(11:29):
it at least the next time or maybe the time
after that, because you have positive confirmation that you are
right to be obsessed. And so to me, that was
a part of John that I could relate to and
that I understood. I think it's just he was on
his own train, you know. Esther says, she's on her train,
he's on his train, and it's not so easy to
get off of that. Yeah. So there are lots of podcasts,
(11:52):
especially movies, books in the genre of true crime. Right
it's sort of a national pastime right now to follow
some of these cases. There are different choices. You get
kind of hooked on a narrative. I find that podcasts
are an especially like engrossing way to enter stories and
become absorbed in them. Are there any ethical issues that
(12:13):
arise in this area of reporting? I mean, you're really
digging into people's lives. These are things that happened a
long time ago to real people. How do you think
about that with the story like this? Yeah, I mean
I think that you have to ask yourself at some
level what justifies doing this? Is it? Because if the
(12:35):
answer is strictly entertainment, then I don't think you can
do it. And so there were a few things that
I grappled with. One was I talked to this guy,
ben Ford, who is the chief of police, the current
chief of police down and Traveler's Rest, who is doing,
as far as I can tell, a very hard and
(12:56):
earnest job of still trying to find out what happened
to Brooke And this is a weird thing. This is
the only time that's ever happened to me. I interviewed
John Campbell and or I was about I hadn't even
interviewed I hadn't even gone to Traveler's Rest yet. And
I got a message, Jake, this is Ben Ford of
the Traveler's Rest Police Department. I would like to talk
to you. And that was because he knew you were
(13:17):
trying to get in touch with John Gimpbell. He got
word that I might be doing a story related to
Brooke Henson say. So I was like, this is weird.
Like usually on any kind of active investigation with law enforcement,
as you know, it's like they generally very leery of
the press. And so I called him and he said, look,
I'm running an active investigation. If you can get the
(13:37):
word out about the facts about what we know when
don't know, I'd be very appreciative. I will share with
you whatever I've got. So that was encouraging to me
because I felt like, oh, maybe there's a public service here.
And then I got in touch with a woman that
looked for missing people, and then she put me in
touch with Brook's cousins, and I just asked them straight up.
(13:57):
I was like, is this something you're comfortable with? And
they basically said, look, we still want to find her remains,
we're hopeful that maybe this will help, and we're also
just that she's not forgotten. And we had that conversation
and we revisited that in the fact checking part. I
ran back overall with every aspect of it with them.
(14:20):
So yeah, I was thinking a lot about that and
the second part and we'll get to this is Esther's
treatment in the medium and revisiting that, and I felt
like there's a place where we can do a good,
hard look at the way this was played out, and
by taking a second look at it, there may be
some good that served from this. So it was as
(14:41):
I was grappling with this kind of looking at those
other things, that said, you know what, I think there
is value here in kind of telling the story well.
And some of this comes down again to timing, right,
we were talking about that earlier. But when you have
a cold case like this and a family that is
still wants to know answers, interest from reporters, podcasters can
(15:04):
be welcome in a way that it might well not
have been in the moment, right, this isn't a new story,
worry anymore. It was a big news story. Yeah, so
you're coming in at a different time. Yeah, the dust
is settled a bit. I mean, Esther is able to
talk about this. I mean there's good and bad from that.
The hard part is it time has passed, so sometimes
(15:25):
it's hard to get people to remember what they were
thinking and feeling at the time. Another hard part is
if they were burned by the media, they don't want
to talk to you, and you have to spend a
lot of time explaining this is not going to be
a tabloid treatment of this. But yeah, it's nice to
be like talking about the Secret Service. I mean, I've
tried to do with the Secret Service before. The Secret
Service never talks in my experience, and I got don
(15:47):
long and basically as at she was like, it's like
years ago, I'll talk to you, you know, And so yeah,
there were some definite benefits as well. How did the
media cover Ester's disappearance once they knew she was missing? Well,
you know, it's funny because when I first saw the
media coverage that this story got back in the day,
I mean, you know, how this is you kind of
think like this or story has been poured it out
(16:10):
like I'm late to the party, right, And so but
then I started taking a look a closer look at
the way it was reported out, and it was basically
like you know, fem fatale, It was, you know, very
much not what you're hearing her say in the opening,
that she kind of embarked on this path in which
she kind of was making incrementally bad decisions and was
(16:32):
we learned in the podcast was dealing with mental health
and all this that you know, she's portrayed as like
almost like a Bond villain, you know, as someone who's
seducing People's a kind of female version of Catch me
if you can. In fact, that was the play on
the forty eight Hours version of this. And so the
thinking is, Okay, is there a way to re examine
(16:52):
It doesn't mean you let her off the hook. It
doesn't mean you give her a pass for the laws
that she broke, But can you look at this and
see maybe there's a more nuanced portrayal of a real
human being here and not just the kind of cardboard cutout.
We're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back,
(17:24):
Welcome back. After we grab some drinks and mingled with
the crowd, I turned the tables on Emily asked her
some questions because we do similar work. She often reports
on criminal justice for the New York Times magazine and
finds her way into all kinds of interesting and convoluted
true crime stories. And there's one in particular that I
(17:45):
wanted to talk to her about, a story that Emily
spent years reporting on. It involves a young woman named
Nora Jackson. Nora was convicted as a teenager of killing
her own mother. She spent several years in prison, and
then one day her conviction was overturned. Emily became interested
in how someone like this happens and the role of
(18:07):
the prosecutor, a woman named Amy Wyrick. Emily wrote about
Norah's case for the New York Times magazine. Her story
also appeared in Emily's book Charged. You should check them out.
We've included links to both in our show notes. Okay,
back to our conversation, and I'm wondering whether Emily, you
(18:28):
can just kind of turn back the clock and help
remind me and us how did you get drawn to
this story? What did you know initially, and what made
you think that this was a story you wanted to write.
So you are a story person who starts with like
a good sizzly concept of people who faked their ideas
(18:48):
to go to college. I often, to my detriment, are
more of an ideas person. And I was interested several
years ago in prosecutors who had a pattern of breaking
the rules in a way that harmed the people who
they were charged with. Prosecuting prosecutors obviously prosecute cases, but
(19:10):
they're also supposed to be a kind of arbiter of
justice in their own way. They represent the people. They
also have responsibilities to uphold all the laws and rules
in the justice system. And I was interested in the
prosecutors who cut corners. So there was a prosecutor I
did a little research. I was like looking around the
country for a kind of rose gallery of prosecutors. Frankly,
(19:31):
and at the time, the district attorney in Memphis, which
is Shelby County, her name was Amy Wyrick, and she
had a real pattern of failing to disclose evidence in
cases in which she'd gotten, you know, big convictions, and
Nora Jackson's case. Once I was like in that world
jumped out at me, you know, for some similar reasons
(19:54):
to why you were interested in esther. So, when Nora
was eighteen, her mother was brutally stabbed death in her home.
And her mother was a forty year old white stockbroker,
so it was like an unusual murder and the kind
of murder that is destab realizing to you know, white
middle class residence. There was no obvious suspect, and about
(20:15):
three months after the murder, Amy Wireck charged Nora, the
eighteen year old daughter, with her mother's killing. Nora didn't
have a criminal history, but she was known as a
kind of wild child, and the charges were brought and
there was a lot of publicity, and then a few
(20:36):
months later the DNA results came back from the crime scene.
You know, her mother's blood was everywhere, so there was
a lot of evidence to test, and in fact, Nora
was excluded as someone who was part of that crime
scene in any way, and there were other DNA profiles. However,
Wyreck prosecuted her anyway, and for a variety of reasons,
(20:57):
including what was later deemed misconduct on Wyreck's part, Nora
was convicted and then later the Tennessee Supreme Court actually
overturned her conviction, and I think we have a little
clip of Nora talking about finding out about that ruling.
Three years ago, in a woman's prison outside Memphis, Tennessee,
(21:19):
Nora Jackson was sitting in her cell watching television en mute.
You know, they'd have three one three two and three
three and three dash two is just like a repeat
of the news in the weather. Her roommate was in
the cafeteria and Nora wanted to get some privacy. And
I just was sitting there going to the bathroom and
just like watching it, and I saw my name come
across the bottom of the screen and then I was like,
(21:42):
oh shit. So she turns on the volume. The Tennessee
Supreme Court has granted Norah Jackson a new trial, and
she just, honestly, for a few minutes, couldn't believe it.
Nora Jackson is now awaiting a new trial. And even
though Nora had just won her appeal, something that rarely
happens in the state of Tennessee. This is after she
(22:02):
has spent nine years in prison. Emily Basilon has been
covering the case and like nobody was there because everybody
that dinner so I'm like screaming to get out because
I'm like wanting to get to the phone and nobody's
there missing. Is something going to eat them? Right? And
why was Norah in prison in the first place. Nora
(22:23):
was in prison because she was convicted of murdering her
mother Jennifer Jackson. Wow, that's an episode of The Daily
and that was I think Mike Barbarrow somehow like sounds
different now to me anyway, So go ahead, I want
to ask you a question as you're telling the stories.
So she charges Amy Rick, charges Norah with the murder
(22:48):
of her mother, and then you said, some period of
time later it comes out that the DNA was excluded.
So what is the sequence of events? Does she have
that DNA evidence when she makes the charge. No, Wyrick
didn't have the DNA results from the crime lab. You
might wonder why she didn't wait for them to come back. Yes,
I am wondering, Yes she didn't, but they were available,
(23:11):
They were part of the record. They were part of
the evidence that the jury heard, and the jury convicted
Nora anyway, And I think there are a few explanations
for that. One was the kind of failed strategy of
her defense lawyer and that didn't go very well. And
also the judge in the case admitted people saying all
kinds of stuff about Nora, like, for example, that you know,
(23:36):
her boyfriend had crawled in the window just you know,
one night to have sex with her a couple months
after her mother was killed. Just all of this irrelevant
but kind of scurrilous character assassination evidence, and perhaps that
had an effect on the jury. As you're talking about
the chargers being placed before the DNA evidence comes back,
(23:57):
it almost makes me think of a version of the
media getting out in front of the story that you
have an idea that this is who this person is,
they've done this, and then what happens when you find
evidence that might or ought to give you pause about
the theories that you've postulated prior to having that evidence. Yeah,
I mean, you know, one way to think about this
is tunnel vision for prosecutors that once they've chosen someone,
(24:20):
there's a lot of impetus, confirmation bias, professional reasons to
kind of stick with that person as the suspect. And
that is in fact what happened to Nora. So after
the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned her conviction. She had a
kind of second round of like a prolonged kind of
face off with Amy Wyrick because Wireck was threatening to
(24:41):
prosecute her again and in order to get a plea bargain,
and Norah ended up accepting a plea bargain to manslaughter
because she thought she was going to get out of prison.
But then it turned out that her lawyers had made
a mistake in calculating her time and that she actually
had to remain in prison for fourteen months. So that
(25:04):
was completely horrible because first of all, she had she'd
already been in prison I think at that point for
nine years, and also it was socially for her, really horrible.
Her world were people in prison who saw her as
kind of heroic for standing up to Amy Wyrick. You know,
all these women in prison, so rare to have, especially
(25:26):
in Tennessee, to have your sentence, your conviction overturned. But
then she had taken this plea, she'd kind of given
in in their eyes, and she was back among them,
so she hadn't even gotten what she thought she was
going to get. So that happened to be the point
when I kind of stumbled on this story and I
wrote Nora a letter in prison. I wrote her a
(25:47):
bunch of letters, and she wrote back to me a
couple of times, but I wasn't really sure whether she
wanted to talk to me, and it actually took me
ten months to persuade her to meet with me. How
did you do that? I called her on the phone
and talked to her a couple of times. It was
very in and out, like she was responsive, then she wasn't,
(26:10):
And she had all kinds of reasons to mistrust the
media because by then she'd been the subject of I
think a twenty twenty special or maybe forty eight hours,
I think both, and neither of them had been helpful
to her at all, and in both cases she had
kind of been led along, or she said she felt
like she'd been misled, and then it turned into a
(26:30):
kind of tabloid you know, very who done it and
kind of implicating her. I mean, in these situations, there's always,
I always feel like an unspoken kind of agreement that's made,
Like you have your interest, which is writing the story,
and she has her own set of interests. Why she
ultimately decided she wants to speak with you, she's hoping
(26:52):
that your story will do something for her. What do
you think that she hoped your story would do and
did you feel that your story would in fact do that? Well?
When I first went to see her in prison, and
actually I went to Memphis, and then she almost decided
not to see me, but then she changed her mind
at the last minutely and we sat down in this
little classroom at um sh At that point, she was
(27:13):
at the jail, and what she really wanted to tell
me about were the black women she was imprisoned with,
and how much worse off they were, and how much
how strange she felt about the attention she was getting,
given that there were these people around her she thought
deserved attention. So it was that same feeling of like,
(27:35):
oh my god, there are all these cases, Why am
I focusing on this one particular person and not these
other people? And I was. She was very firm and
clear that other people were more deserving of being interviewed,
and that she felt that there was something wrong about that.
(27:57):
And so even though it only drew her to me,
drew me to her more, I didn't change course. There
was something sort of impressive about that, because she might
have wanted to keep the attention for herself, and for
a long time, I think she was very ambivalent. It
really wasn't until she had been released, until I had
(28:19):
really been pursuing her for a couple of years that
she started trusting me, which I totally understand. I think
that eventually the idea that it was the New York Times,
it was interested that I was going to be able
to tell her story in a way that really got
across the legal complexity and the wrongdoing on the part
(28:39):
of the prosecution. I think that she cared about that,
and Amy Wyrick was not interested in talking to me, was,
you know, obviously very clearly resistant to my doing the story.
And that also, I think kind of endeared me to
Norah because she could see it was sort of like
I was. It was like a different kind of press
(29:02):
was coming in, and she appreciated that. Eventually, you had
asked me why I thought that John Campbell was so
vehemently interested obsessed when it was this case and that
was driving this. So I'm going to flip the question
on you. Why did Amy Wyrick double down on this
case and give so much attention to it? What was
(29:23):
as best as you could tell, what was her motivation. Well,
Wyreck tried this case when she was a prosecutor working
for the elected district attorney in Shelby County, and it
made her famous. She was on TV news. She was
this young woman being this very strong in her eyes
advocate for justice, you know, standing in the place of
(29:46):
Norah's mother and convicting someone. And it was it's very,
very unusual for children to actually kill their parents, and
especially for daughters to kill their mothers. But for Wyreck
that was only kind of part of the way of
talking about the case that she was despite all of
those obstacles, that she was doing it anyway because this
(30:08):
was justice. She was really that was her line, and
she wound up being elected district Attorney in Shelby County
in twenty fourteen. And I think that Nora's case really
catapulted her into the kind of front of the community
in a way that was politically helpful to her. It
seems that the evidence against Nora was extremely circumstantial, But
(30:29):
I'm wondering, did you ever have any moments of doubt
about her innocence? Yeah, I decided that I didn't have
to know whether she was innocent or not, and I
kind of set that aside. I mean, Nora would hate
that if she were here, because it's so deeply important
to her to be believed, and I completely understand that.
(30:52):
But I just decided there was so much wrong with
this case legally speaking, that it was okay that I
was not standing there arguing for her innocence as her lawyer,
even as a journalist. I was just telling you the
story of what had happened to her. And my story
in the magazine is really about prosecutors hiding evidence, and
(31:13):
I think that really was sort of how the story
unfolded in my book as well. Tell us about where
Nora is now, I mean, give us the quick update.
So for a while Nora was living in Brooklyn. She
got out of prison twenty sixteen, and she was actually
in Brooklyn for a while. But now she is back
in Memphis. She's you know, it's hard. It's really hard
(31:35):
to get out of prison after you've been there for
a while. You kind of have to really restart your life.
Often people have a kind of prolonged form of PTSD
that they're figuring out just how to live in the
real world again. And Nora has no family, so in
addition to the death of her mother. Her parents were divorced,
but her father had actually been murdered a year and
(31:57):
a half before her mother was killed, which is like
another I know, really and perhaps that it was connected,
and maybe that's the kind of missing element of the
unsolved murders all along. But she really didn't have family,
and so that has been really hard for her to be.
You know, she got out of prison in her late twenties,
(32:19):
mid to late twenties, and she had kind of grown
up in prison, and in some ways that meant that
she didn't quite grow up. So now she's in Memphis
and she had a lawyer, or not the child Laura
I was talking about earlier, but a later lawyer who
is just a kind of incredibly caring person and so
right now she is actually working for him in Memphis
(32:43):
and you know, and getting on her feet, trying to
get her own place. She also has a dog named Liberty,
very deliberate name, who I'm very fond of. I actually
took care of Liberty for a little while long after
my book came out, just to be clear, and so
I just went to Memphis to see that I was
there to work on a different story. But of course
(33:05):
I wanted to see Nora, and my big question was
whether Libert was going to remember me, which she did,
which is great. One thing I will say to you,
Emily is that there are many journalists who interview people,
hear their story, and they never call them back or
hear from them again. And I don't know of another
journalist who's more committed to treating people as human beings,
(33:27):
not just for the week or day, but for years
often afterwards, and it's a rare thing. Thank you. Should
we take some listener questions? Absolutely? After the break, we
talked more about Deep Cover, Never Seen Again, and I
answer a few questions from the audience. We're back next up.
(33:59):
We took questions from listeners in the audience. We had
them write their questions out on paper and then put
them in a bucket. Yes, very old school, I know.
It was like seventh grade, everyone passing notes. Then someone
handed the bucket to Emily and she read them aloud.
Is there anything you wanted to include in the podcast
that didn't make the cut? Yeah, I mean there was
(34:21):
a lot. There was a lot probably there when I
went down to Traveler's Rest, I mean, when I went
down to Traveler's Rest. Before I connected with Brooks cousins,
I connected with this husband and wife team, Patrick and
Tammy Welch, and I didn't end up getting to put
them in the podcast, and I still feel badly about
(34:43):
that because what they do is they basically devote all
their spare time to try to look for people who
have gone missing, people that have kind of gone off
the radar of law enforcement, and actively kind of keep
the search alive. And the first thing they told me
straight up was like, look, it's great you're doing this
on brook but there's actually a ton of people that
(35:06):
are missing in this area. And they were they had
like a map in their house with all the pin
points of the people and where they went missing. And
it wasn't like they were all connected and this was
some conspiracy. It was just they were like the custodians
of these people's memory. And then they drove with me
up to the dark corner where Brooke may have gone missing,
(35:28):
and the whole thing was so intense for Tammy she
didn't want to go, but she reluctantly went with us
in the pickup truck. And it was it was one
of these scenes where it was kind of late at
night and were driving down some shadowy roads in the mountains,
and I just got a sense for like, this is
how these people spent their weekends. And it just made
you think about all the stories we can't tell. And
(35:51):
I kind of get to this at the end that
we often fixate on very particular types of stories that
kind of play into the fem fatale or that have
some sort of Hollywood appeal, But there's all these kind
of nameless cases of people that go missing. And there
was just something really poignant and powerful about this couple
and their pickup truck kind of winding their weight on
(36:11):
the darkened roods of this county, kind of going to
the last spots where these people were. And they're doing
great work, and I hope that they hear a shout
out for that in this bonus episode. Another listener question.
One of Estra's lies was that she was a professional
chess player. So did anyone ever ask Estra to play chess,
that ever threatened to blow her cover? I know, such
(36:34):
a crazy thing to make up that there, I get,
you know, she was apparently a pretty solid chess player,
because you know from the podcast what happens when she
says I'm a tennis player, and then she's like, oh shit,
I don't actually not to play tennis. I did talk
to one former boyfriend who didn't go on the record,
but he did play her in chess. He did ask
(36:54):
her she did beat him. You, Yeah, exactly. I mean
we're talking about this backstage a second ago. Like I
would be intimidated if I met if you just said
I'm a professional chess player, There's no way in hell
I wouldn't even played checkers with you. So I suspect
that's scared off enough people that she could pull it off. Yeah.
(37:18):
How do you think Esther's case would have been handled
differently today? Well, we kind of we kind of talked
about this a little bit the way that my mind
goes to the media, and I just think that I
would hope that I would hope that the ass that
we wouldn't just kind of immediately. Look, when you have
(37:41):
a story as a journalist, right, when someone brings you
a story and you're operating on impartial information, right, your
brain spins out. There's vast terra incognita, and we when
we go on our runs. Oh, I think I talked
to some of Esther and she might have done that. Well,
you ask me a question. I don't know, but I
have an idea of where the story maybe. But that
story that I have that I'm projecting out into Terra
(38:03):
Incognita is actually probably based on books I've read and
crappy movies I've watched, and local news stories I've read,
and is prompting me to make assumptions about who that
person is and how the story is in fact going
to play out based on like probably templates, like the
fem fatal template. So what happens is you get like
part way into the reporting, and inevitably you start getting
(38:27):
facts that challenge the assumptions that you've made in the template.
And our mutual friend Jack Hit always says, and I
think this is so wise. He says, as soon as
the story turns out not being what you thought it was,
that's when your story begins. But there's dissonance there because
you're like, oh shit, this isn't the story I thought.
I'd mean, I told my editor and my producer was
going to be this, and I promise that, And now
(38:47):
you have to go back and say it's not quite that.
And I think that sometimes it's easier when you get
to that point and just say, wow, it's basically right.
I mean, she did have three boyfriends in one year,
and they were at military institutes, so she did kind
of go through them, and you could see how if
you just keep pushing and sticking to the preconception have
(39:09):
you could just plow down that road. And I say
that with empathy because I feel like, as a journalist,
I've stared down that and probably done some version of that.
I would think in this moment now, where there's more
awareness of the way, you know, we depict among other
people women in the news and such, that someone would say, hey,
(39:32):
wait a minute, here is this story that we're progressing on.
Does it all check out? Are we making assumptions? Are
we playing into stereotypes and templates that may not be
one hundred percent justified. That's why I would hope we
would play out differently today. Yeah, I mean some of
this is it just really depends on Esther's honesty. I
(39:53):
mean I think that that was a really I'm going
to use the word lucky. Maybe that's not right, But
somewhere in the alchemy of your interviewing her and her
reflecting there's some like pretty gritty candor that comes across right,
I think. And I would also say that like in
fairness to people that were reporting her on back then,
(40:13):
Let's be honest, this was a person who had his
history of not being candid when she was younger. Now
is a different story, she's a professor, it's a different life.
But at the time, this is someone who had been
a serial identity thief, who had told people that she
was a chess champion when she was in fact not,
who had told lies to her boyfriends, etc. And so
I think that's the really tricky part about telling a
(40:36):
story with an unreliable narrator is that you must be skeptical,
you must be dubious. You can't let them off the hook.
But that doesn't give you that blank check to project
whatever you want upon them. And so, yeah, it's easy
for me to say that now twenty years later looking back,
But but you've learned a thing or two. Okay, speaking
of compulsive liars, what about who am I going to say,
(40:59):
George Santos? Do you have a better understanding of what
motivates people like him? I think George is his own
special creature. We can probably all agree on that. Yeah, no,
is there a short answer. I mean, I don't. I
don't presume to know what's going on with that guy.
I do I think that I think with Esther I did.
(41:27):
I did kind of understand it. Like I don't know
that Esther agreed with my assessment of it, But I
feel like, to some extent, we grew up in a
certain town with certain friends and family, and we go
away to college, we moved to a different place, and
we enjoy being someone different in small ways. And that
doesn't mean that we always lie about it, but I
(41:50):
think that sometimes it's born from this desire to remove
ourselves from a place where we were. And I think
that what happened in Esther's story in particular, is that
the law enforcement looked at is there must be some
sort of kind of deeper, more methodical, devious play here
of espionage or something. And to me, it like just
(42:11):
spoke to a more human impulse to just have space
and reinvent. And that is not again to excuse it
or to say that it's all right, but to try
to understand it as a kind of basic human desire
that just kind of, as she says, ran out of
control in her case. So yeah, in some ways the
(42:32):
answers yes, But with Santos, I don't know, it's in
his own category. What led to the media thinking Esther
was a potential spy when the story broke Yeah, so,
I mean it starts off. I was talking to a
listener in the audience during the intermission and we're kind
of on the same page. It started off with a
(42:54):
kind of John Campbell trying to come up with an
explot It didn't make sense, right, It doesn't make sense.
Why do you enroll at college is a different name,
and there's no obvious game to be made for it,
and so in the absence of that knowledge, start putting
together other possible theories. Oh, she's dated two guys from
West Point and the shipman. Maybe it's this. I mean,
(43:14):
in some ways, that's what detectives are supposed to do.
They're supposed to speculate. But what happened was, for those
of you that listen to know, is that when they
were trying to get the word out about the case,
the police chief in Traveler's Rest of the time told
John he should owe the detective, he should open the
file and feel free to talk to the press. And
that's when John started to air some of his theories
(43:35):
about espionage, and there was a local news station that
ran some of them, and then there was a kind
of middleman who job it was was to find interesting
local stories and selve them to the national media. And
he quickly wrote up a press release based on this
impartial information, and three days later later it was running nationally.
(43:56):
And so the story just kind of got a bit
ahead of itself. And that that's how I mean, that's
what we do an episode four, we kind of connect
the dots of this pipeline of how it comes from
kind of you know, speculation to kind of headlines. Yeah,
sou new question. Part of the story is themed around
tough mental health challenges and also running away. What advice
(44:19):
do you think Esther might give to someone in a
similar situation? You know? This is It's interesting because when
we first started talking to Esther, I'm not sure how
exactly I posed it, but sometimes I'll often say this
is a version of like when I was asking you
before about nor like what do you want out of
the story, because it's just you don't always get an
honest answer, but it's helpful sometimes you do. And she said, look,
(44:44):
I was suffering from real mental health issues. And I
think that I felt and I made some bad choices,
and if I had had someone to talk to, OH,
I could have been honest about what was going on,
and I had been gotten some help earlier, I might
have made some better some better choices. And so I
(45:07):
think that she looks at this as situation of what
happens to kind of anxiety and desperation, and she has
social anxiety when it's kind of unchecked and left left
to kind of spiral with no help. And so to me,
I think that was a large part of the motivation
of her, of her of her talking about the story,
(45:31):
and she's now currently it's interesting that this is her
big thing, is like advocating for mental health kind of
premptively before people go off the rails and end up
in incarcerated. You know. One thing that strikes me about
Esther and Nora is that they had really strange things
happened to them that they participated in, but that like
also are just hard to explain. And I think there
(45:53):
is something about having someone just lay out your story clearly.
Noura sometimes says that she just like feels like she
can just take the magazine and hand it to people
just as an explanation of what happened. Anyway, I wonder
if that's something that helpful to esther, and I mean,
probably it is, right, I think so. I mean, I
(46:15):
didn't you know, we did this very intense session with
her when before it came out, where we went back
over it. I read back what other people said about her,
and I read back what I said to her, and
it was it was hot and it was intense. She
was not happy with some parts of it. But I
think that that even that even that conversation was a
(46:37):
conversation that she hadn't had in any of the previous
media treatments of it, And so I think that there
was When we talked to her a few days later,
she's like, I appreciate that we had at least the
chance to do that, and she was, but it's awkward.
I could see why hot people don't want to do
it because it wasn't fun. It is not fun, you know.
Last question, Yeah, it's kind of related to what we're
(46:59):
talking about. How do you recognize your past experiences and
traumas while covering a story and work to keep them
from influencing your interpretation and telling of the story. Wow. Well,
I mean, I'll start by saying that I don't think
I've had anything as traumatic happened to me as esther
had with I mean the loss of her mother at
that age. And if you've listened to the podcast, you
(47:20):
know how parents, how her parents divorced and she was struggling.
You know, it's interesting. I did say to her at times, like, look,
I get it. I didn't say I get it. I
said I I am sympathetic because I have had anxiety before,
but I don't think i've had it like you. And
so I think that it's actually important not to assume
(47:44):
that you've had their experience, because that's the problem. Like,
you know, if I start to let myself think that, like, oh,
I've had anxiety too, and I didn't make up X
number of identities, then I'm not on some level getting it.
So I think that it's I think that you have
to the starting point almost has to be that I'm
(48:06):
not seeing this the way you see it, but like,
try to help me see it, right. I mean, I
think you're talking about empathy and one and recognizing the
limits of empathy in terms of pretending to stand in
someone's shoes, right. I mean, empathy is a tool for
journalists like us, but I think we also have to
be really careful and how we handle it totally. I mean,
(48:27):
I think that's why it's important. You've got to talk
to the other family members. And there's many things that
weren't included in this podcast, things that like, in some
ways the most you could say, some of the most
significant things that that are part of a story, the
things that are actually not included because you've debated at
nauseum about whether or not to include them, and they
would be interesting, but you feel you can't include them.
(48:51):
So yeah, I feel like every twist in turn is
like some sort of dilemma in which you know and
you're getting back on Twitter, Oh you didn't do this,
you do that, and it's like, yeah, I had a
reason for it. Yeah, you're all right. You know, we're tried,
Like we told one version of the truth, the version
of the truth as best we could see it. And
that's where the team of people, the four of us,
(49:13):
sat down and went through this understanding, damn well, there's
no entirely objective way to tell a story, and you
want to tell it as compellingly as you possibly can,
so that we have the clicks that justify season four.
And yet at the same time, you know that you're
(49:35):
telling just one version of the truth, and you're going
to get it from one side to the other. And
as my wife says to me, it just has to
be a version of the truth that you can live
with even if no one else likes, which is really
hard to do, but that's the goal. I think. Yes,
I feel like I have heard that line from Kasha
a number of times from you, and it's like in
(49:56):
my head too, which I really appreciate because Kasha is
very wise. Jake, this has been so much fun. I
am really looking forward to season four. Thank you so much.
In congratulations, thanks for listening to this special live episode
of a deep Cover. I want to express my heartfelt
thanks to Emily for a great conversation. We'll have another
(50:18):
episode coming out next month. I'll be talking with Ben Ford,
the current chief of Police and Traveler's Rest, all about
Brooke Henson and the continued surge for closure in that case,
and I have a favor to ask. It'll only take
(50:39):
you about two minutes, I promise. If you like deep Cover,
please leave review on Apple Podcasts. It helps other people
find the show, it gets the word out, and it
helps us make the case that yes, there should be
a season four and beyond. Thank You. Deep Cover is
produced by Amy Gaines and Jacob Smith. This episode was
(51:01):
edited by Sophie Crane, mastering by Sarah Brugere. Our show
art was designed by Seancarney. Original scoring and our theme
was composed by Luis Gara. Special thanks to Nicole Morano,
Jason Gambrell, Mia Lobell, Greta Con, Jacob Weisberg, and Karen Shakerjee.
I'm Jake Albern. I want to remind you that when
(51:23):
you sign up for Pushkin Plus, you'll get access to
binge drops of future seasons of deep Cover and exclusive
content from other Pushkin true crime hits. Check out Pushkin
dot fm or the Apple Show page for more information.
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