Episode #67: Bootjack and Red

Episode #67: Bootjack and Red

Some stories don't start in a courtroom or a case file. They start at a kitchen table, in a grandmother's voice, in a story carried quietly across generations because the truth was too heavy and too dangerous to say out loud.   In 1937, Roosevelt "Red" Townes and Robert "Bootjack" McDaniels were lynched in Duck Hill, Mississippi. It became one of the most photographed lynchings in American history. For decades, the weight of that story lived in the memory of one family, including a little girl named Jimmie Lee, who would one day pass it on to her granddaughter.   That granddaughter is filmmaker Talamieka Brice, and what began as a whispered family story has grown into a documentary, a public memory initiative, and a community movement asking one of the hardest questions we can ask: how do we tell the truth about the past while still making room for healing? Tonight Therese Apel and Sara Perkins sit down with Talamieka to talk about the case that has lived inside her since childhood, the grandmother who first handed her this story, and the work she's now doing to bring transparency, remembrance, and justice to the memories of Bootjack and Red.   This is Investigation: Homicide.   Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.

Episode #66: Look In Their Phones

This week on Investigation: Homicide:   An 18-year-old from West Memphis tells his mom he’s heading to the movies. Three days later he’s found in the Holly Springs National Forest. He’s 80 miles from home, shot multiple times, just yards off a remote county road.   Fredarrious Wilson was months from graduating. He wanted to be an architect. Instead he was lured across a state line into the woods by people who knew exactly where to take him so no one would hear.   His father begged other parents: “Be nosy. Look in their phones.” What he didn’t know was that a phone is exactly what set all of this in motion.   Therese Apel and Amanda Johansson sit down with MBI Special Agent Gary Stanton, one of the investigators who worked the case, to trace how a missing-persons call in Arkansas became a multi-agency murder hunt in Mississippi, and what the evidence finally revealed about why Fredarrious never made it home. Produced be Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.

Episode #65: One Hell of a Story.

Tonight on Investigation: Homicide, Therese Apel and Sara Perkins sit down with author Charlie Spillers — a man whose life reads like the books he writes. Before he was a bestselling author, Spillers was an ex-Marine, an undercover agent, and a federal prosecutor, and he’s spent his career on both sides of the most dangerous corners of the law.   We’ll talk about Confessions of an Undercover Agent, his memoir of a decade spent infiltrating criminal operations across the South, and Echoes of War, which reaches back to where it all started. It’s a conversation about courage, cost, and what it takes to walk into rooms most people spend their lives avoiding.   You won’t want to miss this one. Tune in.   Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.

Episode #64 — Redeeming the Warrior: Faith for Those Who’ve Seen Too Much

First responders already know what it means to be strangers in a strange land — set apart by what they’ve seen, rewired by what they’ve carried. For those who also hold a faith life, there’s a second kind of strangeness layered on top of the first. In this episode, hosts Therese Apel and Amanda Johansson sit down with Clint Hatch, author of Keeping the Peace Within, to talk about what happens when those two worlds collide — and whether faith is actually robust enough to meet a warrior in the dark, or whether it’s been too sanitized to reach the people who need it most.   The conversation goes deep into what Clint and the hosts call the “sterile American faith problem” — the way so much of modern Christianity has learned to speak softly about obedience and ritual while going completely silent about violence, tragedy, and the kind of damage that doesn’t resolve in a one-hour sermon. For first responders sitting in pews carrying weight no one around them can see, that silence isn’t just frustrating. It’s isolating in a way that compounds everything they’re already carrying from the job.   But Scripture, it turns out, has never been silent about any of this. From David’s unfiltered trauma journals in the Psalms, to Elijah collapsing under a juniper tree and asking God to let him die, to Job demanding answers no one around him could give — the Bible is full of warriors God met in their brokenness without first asking them to clean up. The message isn’t “put down the old self and become someone softer.” It’s that the warrior identity was never the problem to be solved. It’s the thing God means to sanctify and use.   Whether you wear a badge, work a fire line, or run calls in the middle of the night — or whether you love someone who does — this episode is for you. The damage you carry isn’t proof you’re too far gone. It may be exactly the raw material God works with.   Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.

Episode #63 — Trying to find beauty in the ashes.

They run toward the worst moments of our lives and then they go home and carry it alone. On the next Investigation: Homicide, Therese Apel and Sara Perkins sit down with Kristy Daniels, who knows that weight personally.   After losing her husband to suicide, Kristy didn't just grieve, she built something that would start to address the devastating and fatal metal health crises that first responders deal with. 1828 is her answer to a crisis that too many first responders face in silence. It’s a nonprofit dedicated to making sure the men and women of Madison County who wear the badge have the resources, the support, and the community to not just survive the job, but thrive.    This is her story, and it's one you need to hear.     Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.