The Sunday Read: ‘Podcasters Took Up Her Sister’s Murder Investigation. Then They Turned on Her’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 21 January 2024

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Liz Flatt drove to Austin, Texas, mostly out of desperation. She had tried talking with the police. She had tried working with a former F.B.I. profiler who ran a nonprofit dedicated to solving unsolved murders. She had been interviewed by journalists and at least one podcaster. She had been featured on a Netflix documentary series about a man who falsely confessed to hundreds of killings. Although she didn’t know it at the time, Flatt was at a crossroads in what she had taken to calling her journey, a path embarked on after a prayer-born decision five years earlier to try to find who killed her sister, Deborah Sue Williamson, or Debbie, in 1975. It was now 2021. She had come to Austin for a conference, CrimeCon, which formed around the same time that Flatt began her quest, at a moment now seen as an inflection point in the long history of true crime, a genre as old as storytelling but one that adapts quickly to new technologies, from the printing press to social media. Flatt met a woman who would later put her in touch with two investigators who presented at the conference that year: George Jared and Jennifer Bucholtz. They were podcasters, but Jared was also a journalist and Bucholtz an adjunct professor of forensics and criminal justice at the for-profit American Military University. Their presentation was on another cold case, the murder of Rebekah Gould in 2004, whose killer they claimed to have helped find using a technique that has quickly become a signature of the changing landscape of true crime: crowdsourcing.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	True crime is as old as storytelling. The cultural obsession, it's nothing new.
0:13.0	One thing that true crime kind of excels at though
0:16.0	is it adapts to new technology and media formats really well.
0:21.0	From the printing press to podcasts and Facebook.
0:25.8	And with this, we've seen the development of what some people call the true crime industrial
0:31.0	complex. It's a huge business and it can also be an emotional
0:36.4	minefield for victims families. My name's Sarah Breen and I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times magazine
0:45.0	and I used to live in Lubbock, Texas where this week's Sunday Reed takes place.
0:50.0	It's a piece I wrote for the magazine about a woman named Liz Flat, whose sister
0:55.6	Deborah Sue Williamson or Debbie was murdered almost 50 years ago, when Debbie was
1:01.4	18 and Liz was just 8. My story follows Liz's efforts to solve her
1:07.6	sister's murderer and how in the process she became a target of some of the very people who also wanted to see her
1:15.0	sister's murder solved. So the trouble for Liz begins in 2021. Decades had
1:22.3	passed since her sister's killing.
1:25.0	From Liz's perspective, the police weren't really making any progress on the case,
1:30.0	and Liz had already tried a bunch of other avenues, appearing on podcasts, talking to
1:35.0	journalists, working with a nonprofit that focused on cold cases. She was
1:40.6	even part of a true crime documentary on Netflix.
1:44.0	Increasingly desperate, she finds herself at CrimeCon, which is the biggest true crime conference in the United States,
1:51.0	possibly even in the world.
1:53.4	And there she meets these two independent investigator slash podcasters.
1:58.6	One is also a journalist and the other an adjunct professor at a university.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The New York Times, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The New York Times and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.