Sword and scale contains adult themes and violence.

It is not intended for all audiences.

Listen or discretion is advised.

John says he believed the children were possessed and then he did proceed to

kill them by stabbing and decapitating the children. Welcome to Season 3, episode 74 of Sword and Scale, a show that reveals that the worst monsters

are real. Oh, you know. In this is the story of three year old Julisa family but an entire community.

This is the story of three-year-old Julissa Kissada, 14-month-old John Estefan Rubio, and two-month-old Mary Jane Rubio,

and a dilapidated building in one of the poorest towns in the United States,

as told by Laura Tillman, author of the book The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts, Murder and Memory

in an American city.

Stay with us. You're a journalist by trade, but this story seems to have really affected you.

Definitely. I think that was one of the things that made me realize that I needed to put myself in the book to some extent

was this question of subjectivity and reporting and the way that when you truly become engaged as part of a community

that you're no longer a bystander in the face of something like this that you have

a stake in it, an emotional stake, and a stake in terms of the way that you want to interact with your community and act toward prevention of violent crimes.

So I think that, yeah, it definitely

was not your average story for me.

I never have really done that before since in my reporting.

How did you first come across this story?

I was a reporter at a newspaper called The Brownsville Herald on the US-Mexico border,

and it was my first job after college and about six

months into my time there I was assigned to write about this local debate over

...