HBM094: The Fatigue of Violence
Here Be Monsters
Here Be Monsters Podcast
4.6 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 14 March 2018
⏱️ 22 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the nearly 20 years that Susan Randall’s been working as a private investigator, she’s seen Vermont’s most disadvantaged people struggling to have life’s most basic amenities. Sometimes her job is to interview people addicted to crack, to help determine whether they’re suitable parents. Sometimes her job is to examine blood spatter at gruesome crime scenes. She recently helped defend a client who murdered a DCF worker in broad daylight.
Content Note:
Descriptions of violent crimes
Susan has seen how humanity’s worst instincts become possible where cyclical poverty, incarceration, and drug addiction wreak havoc on communities.
There’s a necessary split screen in Susan’s mind. One screen shows a home life: dropping her kids off at lacrosse, helping them with school projects. And another screen shows a work life: prison visitation rooms, run-down trailer parks, the color-shifted skin of a corpse.
Producer Erica Heilman interviewed Susan over the course of three years. Erica is a private investigator herself, and Susan was her mentor. The two talk about the mechanics of the legal system, poverty and how to survive a job that takes such an emotional toll.
Producer: Erica Heilman of Rumble Strip
Editor: Jeff Emtman
Music: The Black Spot
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From KCRW, this is Here Be Monsters. |
| 0:05.0 | This episode is a compilation of conversations between two private investigators in the state of Vermont. |
| 0:12.0 | As they drive together, they talk about their experiences with the criminal justice system. |
| 0:17.0 | And some of those discussions include frank descriptions of violence, crime scenes, and dead bodies. |
| 0:22.0 | So just keep that in mind. violence, crime scenes, and dead bodies. |
| 0:23.0 | So just keep that in mind. |
| 0:25.5 | All right, enjoy the show. |
| 0:27.7 | We're sitting where she killed the caseworker. |
| 0:38.7 | It's on this street. |
| 0:39.2 | And it's amazing to me. |
| 0:41.1 | It was. |
| 0:41.8 | I mean, it's kind of insane, but I'll drive you around the back. I'll drive you around the back. So this is where she was and this building right here. |
| 1:05.3 | So she freaked out, drove over to her family's house |
| 1:10.3 | that had made all these phone calls about her and then in a completely psychotic state |
| 1:18.0 | drove over here, pulled into this parking lot, parked right here, and waited. She parked right here. |
| 1:29.6 | She parked right here. And here's a rehab gym and DCF is up in here and she just waited. She just waited right here for the worker to come out and then turn the car off and ran across the parking lot with |
| 1:50.4 | a gun and just took her out right there and this is the case worker that was |
| 1:56.6 | in charge of her case with her daughter yeah and part of it was a child was |
| 2:02.1 | being returned to go be brought up by the father who had been super abusive to her |
| 2:08.1 | And nobody had actually looked into him but was just instead kind of giving this eight-year-old back to this guy. |
| 2:14.4 | So part of her trauma was like, this is what happened to me as a child. |
| 2:18.7 | So she completely lost it. |
... |
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