This is

This is exactly right.

This story contains adult content and language.

Listener discretion is advised. I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a non-fiction author and

journalism professor in Austin, Texas. I'm also the host of the historical

True Crime Podcast,

Tenfold More Wicked on Exactly Right.

I've traveled around the world interviewing people for the show.

I've interviewed some people in person and some from my home studio over Zoom,

and they are all excellent writers.

They've had so many great true crime stories,

and now we want to tell you those stories with details that have never been published.

Wicked Words is about the choices that writers make good and bad.

It's a deep dive into the stories behind the stories.

My name is Pamela Koloff. I'm a staff writer at the New York Times magazine and a senior

reporter at ProPublica. Pam is one of the most wonderful people I know. And this story was really, really important to her.

She worked on it for years.

I had been covering criminal justice

for over 20 years when I found the Joe Bryan case and what led me there was I had been

looking into various causes of wrongful convictions and something that had caught my attention in I can't tell you how many

different cases I had looked at or trials I had sat through was something called blood-stained

pattern analysis,

...