Why One True Crime Writer Was Afraid For His Life

0:00Your social media feed delivers plenty of advice, but it doesn't know you. It doesn't ask questions. It doesn't give physical exams or order tests. Doctors do. At the American Medical Association, we believe the best care starts with a real conversation with someone who understands the science and your unique health. So stay curious, ask questions, but when it's time to make decisions, make them with a doctor. Learn more at AMAHealthVersesHype.org. That's AMAHealthVSHype.org. This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea. You spend your whole life moisturizing your face and then one day your neck just enters the chat. Nobody warns you about that part. Turns out, skin there is thinner with weightless support. So it shows the years first. Murad solved it. Murad's retinal, re-sculpt neck and decolate-lay lifting serum is clinically shown to visibly lift, firm and smooth the look of your neck and decolate-lay in as little as two weeks. Consider it, Murad's answer to the neck. Nobody warns you about. Go shop Murad on Murad.com

1:04or on Amazon. Hey, it's Ryan C. Crest for Albertsons, Vons and Pavilions. It's time to stock up and save now through October 27th. Get $10 off when you spend $25 or more on participating items. Just look for participating item tags to earn on eligible items from brands like Nestle, Quaker, Propel, Gatorade, Pepsi, Poppy and Uts. Clip once and save through October 27th every time you shop. Grab these hot deals before they're gone. Save on brands you trust. Restrictions apply. See website for full terms and conditions. This is Matt Rogers from Los Cultures. This is Matt Rogers in Bowen Yang. This is Bowen Yang from Los Cultures. This is Matt Rogers in Bowen Yang. You know when people try a new food and suddenly it's like, okay, hold on. I got a new favorite food. That's the reaction a lot of people are having when they first try Cupid Mayon. Yeah, it's the one with the red cap and the little baby on the bottle. You've probably seen it at the grocery store. And this mayo is different. Mm-hmm. Most mayonnaise uses whole eggs. Cupid only uses egg yolks, which gives it this rich

2:04umami flavor. It's smoother, deeper, almost buttery. Once people try it, they start putting it on everything. Eggs sandwiches, fries, burgers, chefs use it, restaurants use it, people who really care about flavor use it. Put it on just about anything. Then you'll understand. Cupid, the original Japanese mayonnaise. This is Steve Cuvino from Cuvino and Rich. Quick trivia, fellas. Every guy listening is contestant. Answer honestly to yourself. You got a belly in a little chest. Gassed by the afternoon, no drive left in the tank. You lack that confidence and mental edge. Those are classic signs that your testosterone's been sliding. And nothing drags it down faster than extra weight. So why not take matters into your own hands? Shrhip off the weight that tanks your testosterone with Bioma, GLP1 booster. Every serving is packed with science-packed ingredients that crank up your natural GLP1 production. Visit bioma.health slash GLP1 and use code CR Show for 15% off your first order. Imagine for a second that you are driving down a stretch of highway.

3:05Right. Just here every day routine. Exactly. It's a route you take all the time. Maybe you are commuting to work or maybe you are just running errands on a Tuesday afternoon. You know every bump in the road. You really do. The seed reap by heart, where the trees break, the exact spot where the radio signals start to get a little fuzzy. But then one day, you look up and there is this new billboard standing against the sky. Out of nowhere. Out of nowhere. And it is not advertising a local car dealership or a fast food joint at the next exit. It is a haunting display of human faces. Eight faces to be exact. Wow. Eight women and the text below them makes it undeniably clear. I mean, it just says it. These women were murdered and whoever did it is still out there just walking around, living their life. Just existing in the same space as you. Right. And you are driving past it at 60 miles an hour. You look at their eyes looking back at you. And in that split second,

4:09you really have a psychological choice to make as a commuter, which is such a heavy burden to put on someone just driving by. It is because do you keep your eyes in the road, grip the steering wheel a little tighter and just keep driving. Do you let those faces blend into the the background noise of everyday tragedies? Right. Or do you pull over, look closer and decide you absolutely have to figure out what happened? And see, that is the fundamental threshold of this entire narrative. I mean, most people purely for the sake of their own sanity, their own self-preservation will just keep driving. Yeah, you have to get to work. Exactly. We compartmentalize. The human brain is incredibly adept at seeing tragedy and categorizing it as, you know, not my problem, just so we can get through the day. Sure. But the investigative mind operates on a completely different frequency. The kind of mind that anchors the story we are examining today simply cannot ignore that visual plea. It becomes an obsession. It's a it's like a splinter in the brain that demands to be

5:11pulled out. That splinter is exactly what caught an investigative reporter named Ethan Brown. Right. He saw this billboard and he just could not let it go. So welcome to the deep dive. Glad to be here. Today we are taking you into the heart of a truly chilling narrative that comes to us from oxygen true crime, centered around a showtime docky series, and the relentless investigative work of Ethan Brown. And it is relentless. It really is. But our mission today is not just to play armchair detective. We are not going to sit here and simply dissect the forensic who done it of these eight murders. No, because that's missing the bigger picture. Exactly. We are looking at something much larger. And I would argue much more insidious. The murders themselves are horrifying, obviously, but the surrounding ecosystem is what makes this specific story so critical to understand. The environment. Yes. The most compelling true crime stories aren't solely about a single active violence. They are about the socio economic realities, the institutional blind spots,

6:12the bureaucratic machinery, basically the actual mechanics of the why and the how that allows a tragedy of this magnitude to unfold, to escalate, and to remain completely unsolved for years on end. We are looking at the intersection of investigative journalism, rural poverty, and the massive sometimes incredibly dangerous friction that happens when an out of town reporter starts knocking on doors. And local enforcement decides they don't like it. They decide to push back hard. We are talking about a scenario where a journalist who is looking into unsolved murders, suddenly finds himself terrified that the local police might actually want him dead, which completely shifts the paradigm of an investigation. How so? We'll think about it. When you are in danger, your first instinct is to call the authorities, but what happens when the people you are supposed to call for help are the very people you are hiding from. Oh, man. The entire architecture of safety just completely collapses. It's terrifying. Okay, let's unpack this. Let's

7:17travel down to Jefferson Davis, Parish, Louisiana. Deep in the bayou. Deep in the bayou. And the geography here is going to play a massive role in everything we discussed today. It's basically a character in the story. Absolutely. So the timeline we are looking at is a very tight, deeply terrifying four-year window, stretching from 2005 to 2009. Four years is, I mean, it's just a blink of an eye in the history of any municipality. Right. But when you have a localized serial event occurring within that compressed timeframe, it fundamentally alters the psychological fabric of the community. People get paranoid. Highly paranoid. They start looking at their neighbors differently. They start looking at the police differently. The ambient anxiety of the town skyrockets because the statistical probability of violence has suddenly spiked right in their immediate vicinity. And within those four years, eight women are murdered. They become known collectively as the Jeff Davis eight, or sometimes you hear the Jennings eight named after the specific town of Jennings

8:18within the parish. Right. The way these victims were treated, way they were discarded, it tells a very specific, very dark story. The source material notes that their bodies were discovered floating in drainage canals. We're simply abandoned on these desolate, rural backroads. Yeah. And we need to talk about the mechanics of that. Why canals? Why backroads? What's fascinating here is that the physical reality of that disposal represents something both literal and metaphorical. Okay, break that down for me. Think about the architectural purpose of a drainage canal. It is literally designed to take the unwanted runoff, the excess water, the mud, the waste, and just flush it away from society. So the town doesn't flood. Right. We wash these things out of sight. Exactly. By discarding these victims in these specific locations, whoever is responsible is utilizing the geography of the bayou to literally wash away physical evidence. Because water just destroys everything. Water is a forensic nightmare. It degrades DNA, it washes away trace evidence like fibers or hairs. It accelerates decomposition in a way that

9:22makes determining the time or cause of death incredibly difficult. Wow. But beyond the forensic utility, they are also metaphorically washing away the identities of these women. The source article explicitly points out that this method of disposal left, quote, little trace of who the women had once been. When you think about leaving little trace of who they had once been, it goes far beyond just, you know, losing fingerprints or DNA. It is the ultimate act of a razor. It really is. You are taking a human being person with a family, a history, a personality, and you are placing them in an environment specifically designed to degrade and dissolve. You are literally treating them like runoff. It is a profound dehumanization. It sends a very clear, very cruel message to the community that these lives were disposable, which is just awful to think about. And when you have eight women disposed of in this manner over a four-year period in a small rural setting, the fear becomes atmospheric. Every time a resident drives past one of those canals, every time they take a

10:23shortcut down a dirt road, they are visually reminded of the threat. The landscape itself becomes threatening. Precisely. They know there is a predator or maybe multiple predators operating with a parent impunity in their own backyard, which brings us right back to the billboard we talked about at the very beginning. I look at that billboard as like a modern-day ghost story. That's a good way to put it. It is this massive towering plea for help that thousands of commuters drove past every single day. Right. The killer, more killers, tried to hide these women in the lowest points of the parish. The muddy canals, the hidden roads. They tried to completely erase them from view. So the community had to fight back? Yes. The community, or the families who cared about them, had to physically elevate their faces onto a highway billboard just to force the world to acknowledge that they existed. They literally had to put the ghosts up in the sky because the bodies were buried in the mud. The billboard is a desperate countermeasure against that erasure. The environment was used to make them disappear, so the community used the environment, the visual space of the highway,

11:27to force them back into the public consciousness. It's a visual screen. A visual screen in a very quiet, very isolated part of the country. And you know, in a rural area, a billboard is impossible to ignore. It is not like a crowded city street where there is constant visual competition. Right. There aren't neon signs everywhere. Exactly. It dominates the horizon. And that visual screen worked. It caught Ethan Brown's attention. He's driving. He sees it. And he decides he has to tell their stories. He couldn't just keep driving. He couldn't. Your social media feed delivers plenty of advice, but it doesn't know you. It doesn't ask questions. It doesn't give physical exams or order tests. Doctors do. At the American Medical Association, we believe the best care starts with a real conversation with someone who understands the science and your unique health. So stay curious, ask questions. But when it's time to make decisions, make them with a doctor. Learn more at AMAHealthVsHype.org. That's AMAHealthVSHype.org. This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea. Can we talk about turning 50 for a second?

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13:34today. Hey, it's Ryan C. Crest for Albertsons, Vaughn's and Pavilion. It's time to stock up and save now through October 27th. Get $10 off when you spend $25 or more on participating items. Just look for participating item tags to earn on eligible items from brands like Nutella, Ferrero Rocher, Alchine, Hagen Doss, Swanson, Vitamin Water, Starbucks, Quaker and Angel Soft, Clip Once and Save through October 27th every time you shop. Grab these hot deals before they're gone. Restrictions apply. See website for full terms and conditions. Organic Valley Protein Plus Sultarpiltered Milk is pasture-aised from cows that might take more steps than most people. That's a plus. And it has 50% more protein and 50% less sugar than regular milk. That's a big plus. And the fact that it didn't make a pun about moving? Also a plus. Organic Valley Protein Plus Sultarpiltered Milk. Protein Plus pasture-aised. Learn more

14:34at organicvalley.com. This is Steve Cavino from Cavino and Rich. All right, quick round of trivia before we get back into the show. But we're doing it differently this time. Every guy listening right now, you're contestant. No buzzers, no calling in. Just answer honestly to yourself. Here we go. You got a belly and a little chest that won't go away no matter what you try. Gasped by the middle of the afternoon. No drive left in the tank. And lastly, you lack that confidence in mental edge. Fellowes, here's the thing. Those are classic signs that your testosterone has been sliding. And nothing drags it down faster than extra weight. The good news? Emerging research suggests that getting rid of it may actually be more effective than TRT. So why not take matters into your own hands? Strip off the weight that tanks your testosterone with Bioma GLP1 booster. Every serving is packed with science-backed and third-party tested ingredients that crank up your natural GLP1 production. So you can enjoy a leaner physique, surging energy and increased drive. Visit Bioma.Health slash GLP1 and use Code CR Show to get 15% off your

15:40first order. That's bioma.Health slash GLP1. Code CR Show for 15% off. He travels to Jennings, Louisiana. And he doesn't just do a quick phone interview for a puff piece. He starts spending countless hours there. Boots on the ground. Exactly. He starts fostering real relationships, sitting on porches, going to diners, trying to get people to actually talk to him. And what he finds when he starts peeling back the layers takes us far away from just the physical landscape of the Bayou and plunges us deep into the socioeconomic underbelly of the region. This is the critical juncture where the narrative shifts from a traditional who done it murder mystery to a profound systemic tragedy. As Brown investigates the mechanics of how these women lived and died become clearer, he realizes that these victims were made vulnerable by a very specific deeply entrenched set of circumstances. The investigation revealed a world that was absolutely steeped in poverty, drugs, and prostitution. Those three words, poverty, drugs,

16:41prostitution. Whenever society at large hears those words grouped together, there is an immediate, almost reflexive tendency to write the victims off. It's a defense mechanism. It really is. People say things like, well, they lived high-risk lifestyles or they put themselves in danger. It is this terrible built-in defense mechanism we use to distance ourselves from the horror. Right, because if it's their fault, it can't happen to us. Exactly. We blame the victim so we don't have to confront this systemic failures that put him there. But Ethan Brown doesn't do that. He refuses to look away. He looks closer to the mechanics of that poverty. And when he does, these terrifying anomalies start popping up in the official narrative. He finds the kind of anomalies that suggest the justice system itself is failing, or perhaps even actively working against the truth. And we are not just talking about a lack of resources, right? No, no. We are not just talking about slow response times. We are talking about witnesses,

17:42people who had actual tangible knowledge of elements of these crimes who suddenly turn up dead. Which is insane. We are talking about physical evidence that was gathered by law enforcement, but allegedly never properly investigated or tested. And looming over all of these anomalies is the very dark, very heavy shadow of alleged police corruption. Let's dig into the mechanics of that because a witness just turning up dead is wild to me. Yeah. If a witness in a high-profile murder case dies, shouldn't that trigger alarms at the highest levels of the state government? How does the community experience multiple witness deaths and just keep moving? Well, it depends entirely on how the death is categorized by the local authorities. And this is where the socio-economic reality of the victims becomes a weapon against them. Okay. How so? If a witness is known to struggle with substance abuse and they are found dead of an overdose, a police department that is either incompetent or corrupt can very easily file that away as an accidental death. Oh, wow. So they don't even look into it. Right. They don't run a full

18:44homicide protocol. They don't look for signs of forced injection or foul play. They just look at the victim's history, say, well, it was only a matter of time and close the file. The poverty and the addiction provide the perfect cover for violence to go completely uninvestigated. And the missing orignored evidence works the same way, doesn't it? Absolutely. If you have a box of evidence sitting in a locker, it doesn't matter what is in that box. If no one ever signs it out to send it alive. Exactly. The bureaucracy of a police department can be used to hide the truth. Simply through inaction, you don't have to literally burn the evidence. You just have to ignore it long enough for the trail to go cold. That is chilling. As Ethan Brown is looking at all of this, the dead witnesses, the ignored evidence, he has this profound realization about America as a whole. He sees that this isn't just a story about a killer on the loose in the bayou. It is a story about a socio economic trap. If we connect this to the bigger picture, Brown makes an incredibly insightful observation that anchors the sociological weight of his entire investigation.

19:48He notes that as a society, we pay way too little attention to the forces that, in his words, both make us who we are and that keep us who we are. Keep us who we are. Yes. He is pointing directly at the reality of modern America, specifically rural America, where there is very little actual social mobility left. The phrase forces that keep us who we are is so heavy. It implies that being stuck in poverty isn't just about a lack of opportunity. It is an active downward pressure. It's a weight holding you down. Yeah. It is a system designed to hold certain people in place. What does that actually look like on the ground in a place like Jefferson Davis Parish? It looks like structural stagnation. In rural communities, when a primary industry leaves or when poverty becomes multi-generational, the traditional escape routes simply vanish. Like getting a good factory job or something? Exactly. The concept of social mobility, the deeply ingrained American idea that you can just work hard,

20:51get a good job and move up the socio-economic ladder becomes a complete myth. If there are no jobs, no public transportation to get to jobs in other towns and schools are underfunded, the population becomes economically trapped. And so they turn to other ways to survive? Right. To survive, people often turn to whatever underground economies are available, which inevitably introduces drugs and sex work into the ecosystem. This creates a deeply vulnerable population. Because they can't go to the police. They are easily exploited by predators because they are forced to operate outside the margins of polite society entirely in the shadows. Simultaneously, they are easily ignored by the justice system because their lives are not deemed valuable by the political power structures in place. I want to stop and look at the progression of this, though, because I mean, a community can understand that they are poor. They can even understand that the police might be biased against sex workers or drug addicts. Sure. Systemic bias is common. That is awful, but it falls under the umbrella of systemic bias. But the leap from the police don't care about us to the police are

21:55actively covering up a serial killer is a massive jump. It's a huge leap. At what point is a community or a journalist cross that line? How does Ethan Brown look at the ignored evidence and the dead witnesses and decide this isn't just laziness. This is an actual cover-up. The tipping point is the consistency and the direction of the errors. I mean, incompetence is usually random. It leaves a scattered trail of mistakes. Like losing paperwork for a traffic ticket. Right. Sometimes paperwork is lost, sometimes a patrol car is late, but a cover-up leaves a highly specific trail of silence. When multiple witnesses to the same string of crimes happen to die, and when specific pieces of evidence related to certain suspects are continually ignored, the pattern is no longer random. It's focused. It is directed. When a journalist connects those dots, they realize that the errors are protecting someone. And that is an incredibly dangerous realization because you are no longer just looking for a killer in the shadows. You are investigating the people holding the flashlights. You are investigating the investigators. And Ethan Brown makes the

22:59decision to pull on those threats. In 2014, he publishes an incredibly detailed, in-depth article for Medium. He lays out the groundwork of his investigation for the whole world to see. He put it out there. He really did. He details the poverty, the drug trade, the dead witnesses, the ignored evidence, and he puts the rumors of law enforcement corruption right out in the open. Now, when you take a national spotlight and shine it directly into the dark, bureaucratic corners of a small town power structure, that system is going to react. It has to. It's Newton's third law, right? Exactly. Every action has a reaction. Exactly. And reacted did. It reacted in a way that was highly visible and deeply strategic. This wasn't a private phone call or a quiet legal threat from a lawyer. It was a public broadcast, which brings us to a major escalation in the narrative. We are talking about the blog posts heard round the value. Yeah, this was huge. And real quick, I want to clarify for you listening, we are going to look exactly at what happened here.

24:02Purely looking in the mechanics of the conflict between a journalist and a local authority figure. We are strictly analyzing how a local sheriff utilizes his platform to strike back against damning claims and the intense friction that generates. We are not taking sides on whether the corruption was real or not. We are just looking at the communication. Right. It's about the rhetorical battle. Exactly. So Jefferson Davis, Paris Sheriff Ivy Woods, who was still holding the position at the time, the Austrian True Crime article was published, decides he has to address this growing media attention. He doesn't hold a press conference. He posts a message directly to the department's official website, which is an interesting choice of medium. It is. And the language he uses is targeted squarely at Ethan Brown. From a crisis communication standpoint, the rhetorical strategy sheriff Woods employs is really fascinating. He writes, it is unfortunate out of town journalists are taking information and twisting it to support a fictional conspiracy theory to gain followers

25:02and sell a story. Every single phrase in that sentence is a calculated maneuver. Absolutely. He doesn't just call him a journalist. He calls him an out of town journalist. He doesn't say brown is mistaken. He accuses him of twisting facts for a fictional conspiracy theory. Right. And then he attacks the motive implying it is purely financial or ego driven to gain followers and sell a story. So what does this all mean? How effective is this kind of language in a rural setting? Oh, it is incredibly effective because it taps into deep-seated regional psychology. By repeatedly emphasizing the out of town label, sheriff Woods is invoking the classic outsider versus insider narrative. The us versus them mentality. Exactly. He is sending a very clear signal to his constituents. This person does not know us. This person does not understand our way of life. He is an arrogant invader profiting off our local tragedy. It is a mechanism designed to rally the local citizenry around their local institution, basically creating a defensive perimeter

26:05against the national media. That's a powerful tactic. It is. Notice that the statement attempts to invalidate the reporting not by presenting contradictory forensic evidence, but by discrediting the origin and the character of the messenger. It is the ultimate us versus them mentality, them playbook. But the blog post doesn't just attack brown. Sheriff Woods also has to address the actual allegations of corruption that Brown laid out. This is where the institutional logic gets incredibly complicated. Very complicated. According to the Oxygen article, Woods states that Brown is dredging up investigations and incidents from as long as 30 years ago to insinuate current corruption. Woods actually writes this incredible line. I don't dispute the sheriff's office has had problems, but the past is the past. The past is the past. I mean, to hear a chief law enforcement official use that phrase regarding systemic corruption is just staggering. It's wild. He acknowledges a 30 year history of problems, but attempts to sever his current administration

27:09from that entire legacy. He draws a hard line in the sand at the year 2011, which is when he was elected. Right. He states that upon his election, he promised to bring professionalism and quote integrity that is beyond reproach to the department. He claims his team has worked hard at this and they resent the broad brush painting the entire parish as corrupt. But wait, let's talk about how institutional culture actually functions. The sheriff is essentially arguing that because he won an election in 2011, three decades of departmental history are just wiped clean magically gone. Yeah. Is it possible for a new sheriff to just walk in, flip a switch and say, okay, the culture of corruption is over now sociologically and procedurally that is virtually impossible. That is the fundamental flaw in his public defense. You cannot instantly erase 30 years of institutional culture with a single election certificate because it's baked into the walls. Exactly. A police department is not just a building. It is a living, breathing culture.

28:11How evidence is handled, how informants are treated on the street, the unspoken codes of silence, the political favors. Those things are deeply entrenched. They are passed down generationally from veteran officers to rookies. Right. A new rookie gets in the squad car with a 30-year veteran and they learn how the department really works regardless of what the new manual says. While a new sheriff can absolutely implement new policies or fire bad actors, claiming that a 30-year history of problems is magically irrelevant because the past is the past, completely ignores the reality of house systemic issues faster, adapt, and endure over time. It is like buying a house with a crumbling foundation and 30 years of termite damage, putting a new coat of paint on the front door until everyone the house is brand new. That's a perfect analogy. He is hitting the ultimate administrative reset button. He is trying to sever himself from the history of the badge he wears. But the intended effect of this blog post, which was clearly to reassure the public and calm the waters,

29:11it completely backfired when it came to Ethan Brown. Oh, completely. It didn't call anything. For the journalist on the receiving end, it escalated the tension to a terrifying degree. The intention may have been public relations, but the reception was pure existential terror. Your social media feed delivers plenty of advice, but it doesn't know you. It doesn't ask questions. It doesn't give physical exams or order tests. Doctors do. At the American Medical Association, we believe the best care starts with a real conversation with someone who understands the science and your unique health. So stay curious, as questions, but when it's time to make decisions, make them with a doctor. Learn more at AMAHealthVsHeipe.org. That's AMAHealthVsHeipe.org. This is Chelsea Hanna from Dear Chelsea. You spend your whole life moisturizing your face and then one day your neck just enters the chat. Nobody warns you about that part. Turns out skin there is thinner with weightless support. So it shows the years first.

30:11Murad solved it. Murad's retinal, re-sculpt neck and decolate lifting serum is clinically shown to visibly lift, firm, and smooth the look of your neck and decolate in as little as two weeks. Consider it Murad's answer to the neck. Nobody warned you about. Go shop Murad on Murad.com or on Amazon. Hey, it's Ryan and Seacrest for Albertsons, Vaughns, and Pavilion. It's time to stock up and save now through October 27th. Get $10 off when you spend $25 or more on participating items. Just look for participating item tags to earn on eligible items from brands like Nestle, Quaker, Propel, Gatorade, Pepsi, Poppy, and Uts. Clip once and save through October 27th every time you shop. Grab these hot teals before they're gone. Save on brands you trust. Restrictions apply. See website for full terms and conditions. Organic Valley Protein Plus Sultard filtered milk is pasture-aced from cows that might take more steps than most people. That's a plus. And it has 50% more protein and 50% less sugar than

31:17regular milk. That's a big plus. And the fact that it didn't make a pun about moving? Also a plus. Organic Valley Protein Plus Sultard filtered milk. Protein Plus pasture-aced. Learn more at organicvalley.com.

32:23Science Backed and Third-Party Tested Ingredients that Crank Up Your Natural GLP1 Production. So you can enjoy a leaner physique, surging energy, and increased drive. Visit bioma.health slash GLP1 and use Code CR Show to get 15% off your first order. That's bioma.health slash GLP1. Code CR Show for 15% off. Ethan Brown reads this official statement from the sheriff of the parish he's investigating and his blood just runs cold. The source material states that Brown felt the tone of the message was akin to a most wanted poster. A most wanted poster on a police website. Exactly. He wasn't just worried about like a defamation lawsuit or getting yelled at. He was terrified. He actually believed he was being targeted by cops or deputies. He feared he was going to be harassed, assaulted, or outright killed. We really need to pause and analyze the gravity of that reaction. This is not a reporter dealing with standard political pushback. This is a civilian who believes the armed state-sanctioned

33:27wing of the local government might physically eliminate him for asking questions about eight dead women. Think about the mechanics of that fear. If you are in a major city like New York or Los Angeles and you think it's specific police precinct is after you, you have options. You can go to the FBI, internal affairs. Exactly. You can go to the mayor's office. You can go to a different precinct. But if you are in a rural parish down in the bayou, the sheriff has offered the ultimate unquestioned law of the land. They run the county. They do. If you think the sheriff's deputies are going to break down your motel room door in the middle of the night, you literally cannot dial 911. The dispatch will route your call directly to the people you are terrified of. It is the absolute pinnacle of psychological isolation. The entity that society tells you is your emergency contact has become the primary threat. It places the journalist in a deeply disorienting, incredibly vulnerable space. There is no safety net. You are operating in a jurisdiction where

34:28the people with the badges and the guns are explicitly angry with you. And Brown wasn't just spiraling in his own head either. He showed this blog post to his literary agent at a second opinion. Right. A reality check. And both of them came to a very specific, very heavy, historical conclusion about the tenor of the sheriff's message. They compared the rhetoric to bull Connor in the early 60s. They saw it as a coded message warning outside agitators to stay out of town or face the consequences. This raises an important question. To invoke bull Connor is to place an immense historical weight on a situation. For context, Eugene Bull Connor was the commissioner of public safety in Birmingham, Alabama during the height of the American civil rights movement in the 1960s. Very dark. Very dark. He is globally infamous for directing the use of high pressure fire hoses and attack dogs against peaceful civil rights protesters. But crucially, his entire political philosophy and his justification for that violence was built on maintaining the systemic

35:30status quo against what he specifically termed outside agitators. There's that phrase again. Exactly. He framed civil rights workers coming from the north as invaders trying to disrupt the southern way of life. Here's where it gets really interesting. This is where the narrative shifts from a true crime investigation into something much broader. By using the bull Connor analogy, Brown and his agent are saying that this conflict isn't just a squabble over a municipal history or case files. No, it's bigger. It feels like a civil rights battle. It is a fundamental battle over who has the right to ask questions in a small town. It is about an entrenched power structure utilizing its authority to repel an outsider who is threatened to expose their darkest secrets. The sheriff's post was functioning as a digital wall. It is a fascinating juxtaposition of communication methods. You have the literal physical billboard on the highway erected by the community, begging people to stop, to look, to ask questions about these murdered women. Right. And then you have this digital billboard

36:32erected by the authorities effectively warning the journalists to leave to stop asking questions, to go back where he came from. One billboard cries out for attention, the other demands silence. And the terror that digital billboard instilled was highly effective. The sources tell us that Brown actually fled the town for a while. The fear of physical harm outweighed the investigation. He packed up and left. The intimidation, whether intentional or just a byproduct of aggressive PR, worked. Which is a devastating reality for investigative journalism. When the threat of violence successfully suppresses inquiry, the systems that allowed the original tragedy to occur remain entirely unchecked. You have to imagine Ethan Brown driving out of Jefferson Davis Parish, constantly checking his rearview mirror, wondering if a cruiser is going to pull up behind him on a lonely stretch of highway. That anxiety must have been unbearable. You have to mention the guilt too, of leaving that story behind. But eventually he realizes he cannot just abandon it. He cannot leave the memories of those eight women or the community that loved them in the dark.

37:37He has to finish what he started. He knows he has to go back. But he also knows he can't go back as a lone print reporter with a notepad. It is too dangerous. He needs a broader platform. He needs a shield. And in this case, the shield he chooses is a documentary film crew. The transition from print journalism to documentary filmmaking completely alters the power dynamic in the small town. Because they're safety in numbers. Safety in numbers and safety and visibility. A lone rider in a motel room is vulnerable. They are easy to intimidate, easy to pull over, easy to isolate. But a professional film crew backed by the legal and financial resources of a major premium network like Showtime brings a level of visibility that is much, much harder for local authorities to mess with. They can't hide it. A camera crew provides a protective glaring spotlight. You cannot quietly intimidate a director, a producer, a sound engineer, and a camera operator who are constantly rolling footage. It is a brilliant tactical move.

38:39Brown initiates the creation of what becomes the five part Showtime Docu series Murder in the Value. He steps into the role of executive producer, which allows him to guide the story. He brings in Josh Levine as a producer and Matthew Galkin as the director. And they go back into Jennings. Back into the fray. But they don't just act like detectives hunting for a killer. They do something that is quite revolutionary for the true crime genre. They turn the microphones and the cameras over to the community itself. They let the people who have been living in this terror, the people living in this multi-generational poverty tell their own stories in their own words. And the response they got from the community was just unprecedented. Matthew Galkin, the director, provided a quote that really underscores the emotional reality of the town. He said that in his 20 plus years of making documentaries traveling all over, he had never experienced a community of people who were so open, so forthcoming, so emotionally raw, and such incredible storytellers about their own lives and their own trauma. Just think about the psychology behind

39:43that openness. You have a community that for years has been ignored. Completely pushed aside. They have been marginalized by the broader society. They have been told by the local systems that their sisters, their daughters, their mothers were just junkies or prostitutes, that their lives didn't warrant a full investigation. Their loved ones were literally treated like trash, discarded in drainage canals. And then suddenly a national film crew shows up. They set up lights, they pin a microphone to their shirt, and they say, tell me everything. The camera offers them profound absolute validation. It says your pain is real, your story matters, the world is finally going to listen. The cathartic power of the documentary medium in the specific context cannot be overstated. For a marginalized community, forced silence is a form of ongoing oppression. Right. When the local economy fails you, when the government fails you, and when law enforcement fails you, you become invisible. You internalize the idea that you do not matter.

40:46The physical presence of a documentary crew serves as a massive, undeniably visible amplifier for a voiceless population. It is a reclamation of their own narrative. For the first time they are allowed to define themselves in their loved ones rather than being defined by cold police reports or community gossip. It is incredibly powerful to watch a community take their voice back. But it also brings up a really complex tension that we have to talk about. I mean does a national true crime documentary beautifully shot scored with moody music and packaged into five episodes for showtime. Does it actually help heal a broken town? That's the big question. Or does it just broadcast their raw unfiltered trauma for our evening entertainment? We sit on our couches and consume their pain. Are we participating in their validation? Or are we just watching the spectacle? That is the central, inescapable ethical tension of the entire true crime genre. There is no simple answer. On one side of the coin, bringing a massive national audience to unsolved murders and alleged

41:50systemic corruption is a vital public service. It applies intense external pressure that can force dormant investigations to reopen or spark federal oversight or at the very least ensure the victims are not forgotten. It can be an instrument of justice. True. But on the flip side, the genre absolutely commodifies human trauma. It turns the worst days of these people's lives into episodic content designed to keep subscribers engaged. It's a fine line. A very fine line. The ethical burden lies almost entirely on the filmmakers, how they interact with the subjects, whether they center the victim's humanity, or if they just focus on the macabre, grisly details of the violence. Based on Galcon's reflection of the community's willingness to participate, it strongly suggests the town felt respected by the filmmaking process. But the danger of exploitation is always hovering right at the edge of the frame. It is a massive tightrope walk for the director. And to make this series truly comprehensive, to ensure it wasn't just a one-sided presentation of grievances, the documentary team knew they had to do something that

42:52must have been incredibly tense. Oh, absolutely. They had to sit down and interview the very law enforcement apparatus that had absolutely terrified Ethan Brown just a few years earlier. Your social media feed delivers plenty of advice, but it doesn't know you. It doesn't ask questions. It doesn't give physical exams or order tests. Doctors do. At the American Medical Association, we believe the best care starts with a real conversation with someone who understands the science and your unique health. So stay curious as questions, but when it's time to make decisions, make them with a doctor. Learn more at AMAHealthVSHype.org. That's AMAHealthVSHype.org.

43:54Lifts, firms, and tightens, crapy skin, and smooths the appearance of cellulite and stretch marks. It sold out five times over backed by over 35 years of Murad's clinical expertise. Go shop Murad on Murad.com or on Amazon. Hey, it's Ryan C. Crest for Albertsons, Vaughns, and Pavilion. It's time to stock up and save now through October 27th. Get $10 off when you spend $25 or more on participating items. Just look for participating item tags that are on eligible items from brands like Nestle, Quaker, Propel, Gatorade, Pepsi, Poppy, and UTS. Clip once and save through October 27th every time you shop. Grab these hot deals before they're gone. Save on brands you trust. Restrictions apply. See website for full terms and conditions. Organic Valley Protein Plus Sultard Filter Milk is pasture-aced from cows that might take more steps than most people. That's a plus. And it has 50% more protein and 50% less sugar than regular

44:55milk. That's a big plus. And the fact that it didn't make a pun about moving? Also a plus. Organic Valley Protein Plus Sultard Filter Milk. Protein Plus pasture-aced. Learn more at organicvalley.com. This is Steve Covino from Covino and Rich. All right, quick round of trivia before we get back into the show. But we're doing it differently this time. Every guy listening right now, you're contestant. No buzzers, no calling in. Just answer honestly to yourself. Here we go. You got a belly and a little chest that won't go away no matter what you try. Gasped by the middle of the afternoon, no drive left in the tank. And lastly, you lacked that confidence and mental edge. Fellows, here's the thing. Those are classic signs that your testosterone has been sliding. And nothing drags it down faster than extra weight. The good news? Emerging research suggests that getting rid of it may actually be more effective than TRT. So why not take matters into your own hands? Strip off the weight that tanks your testosterone with Bioma GLP-1 booster. Every serving

46:00is packed with science-backed and third-party tested ingredients that crank up your natural GLP-1 production. So you can enjoy a leaner physique, surging energy, and increased drive. Visit bioma.health slash GLP-1 and use code CR Show to get 15% off your first order. That's bioma.health slash GLP-1 code CR Show for 15% off. They had to take the cameras into the belly of the beast. If you are going to dissect a systemic failure, you cannot just interview the people who are failed. You have to interview the system itself. You have to put the authorities on the record. The Showtime series includes on-camera interviews with officers from the Jefferson Davis Parish Sheriff's Office and the Jennings Police Department. Director Matthew Galkan explicitly stated that he felt it was paramount to offer the Sheriff's Department and the police their opportunity to, in his words, at least own their part of the story. But how do you get an entity that has been publicly accused of massive corruption, an entity that previously warned the

47:02executive producer to back off to agree to sit under hot studio lights and answer questions? It requires an incredibly delicate, highly strategic negotiation. The filmmakers have to convince the police that participating is better for their public image than refusing to comment. Basically, if you don't talk, you look guilty. Exactly. They have to present the interview not as an ambush, but as an opportunity for the department to clear the air and show transparency. The Oxygen article describes the negotiation as a slow-burning process. It took time, but they eventually built a working relationship with an investigators commander named Rambi Kormier. Galkan noted a mutual understanding, saying, he has a job to do, and I have a job to do. They reached this uneasy, professional truce. I choose of convenience. But this is the absolute kicker. This is the detail that reframes everything we just talked about regarding institutional accountability. Galkan notes that law enforcement was very cooperative, but largely because of one highly specific reason. He says, I think it helps that 99% of what we're

48:07talking about in this series deals with the former administration of the Sheriff's Office. And there is the loophole. That single sentence is a masterclass in bureaucratic self-preservation. The current law enforcement administration gets to have their cake and eat it too. They get to appear in a high profile, national documentary. They get to sit on camera looking transparent, cooperative, and highly professional. They get to claim they are owning their part of the story. But the reality is, they are doing so primarily by pointing the finger at the ghosts of their predecessors. It perfectly, almost poetically mirrors the blog post, Sheriff Woods wrote years earlier. The past is the past. Exactly. They are only willing to sit down and talk about the botched investigations, the ignored evidence and the rumors of corruption because they have drawn that artificial line in the sand at the year 2011. They are essentially saying to the cameras, yes, those terrible things happened. Yes, the evidence was mishandled. Yes, the families were failed. But that was the old guys. We are the new guys. And we are graciously helping you make a movie

49:12about how bad the old guys were. It is the ultimate deflection strategy. By agreeing to cooperate, but only on the condition that the scrutiny is placed squarely in the rear view mirror, the current administration completely avoids any accountability for the present day. Wow. It allows them to absorb all the public relations benefits of being part of a truth-seeking documentary without actually exposing themselves to any current institutional risk. They don't have to answer for how they are running the department today because the focus is strictly on the failures of yesterday. It is a pragmatic compromise for the filmmaker who desperately needs the interviews to make a balanced series. But it is a massive concession when it comes to holding current power structures accountable. I just constantly visualize the tension in that interview room. I want you to picture the unspoken dynamics happening off camera. Ethan Brown, the executive producer, standing in the shadows behind the lenses. This is the man who literally fled the parish because he thought that deputies of this department

50:14might kill him. Yeah, the history there is thick. And sitting in the chair, under the bright lights, getting his microphone checked is a commander from that exact same department. Both sides know the entire history. Both sides know about the media article, the blog post, the bull conner analogy, the fear, the dead witnesses, and yet they are both sitting there, playing their respective professional roles, maintaining this fragile, intensely polite truth because they both have a narrative goal to achieve. The psychological chess game happening in the silence of that room is just as intense as the details of the murders being discussed on camera. It is a perfect microcosm of how truth is actually negotiated in the real world. We like to think of truth as something clean and absolute that is simply uncovered. But in reality, uncovering the truth is usually a very messy, fraught compromise between competing interests, historical baggage, and deep-seated fears. It is unbelievable.

51:18The layers to this story just keep going. We have covered an incredible arc today. We started with a haunted billboard standing on the side of a Louisiana highway, forcing commuters to look at the faces of eight murdered women who have been thrown away in the mud. We followed an investigative journalist as he dug into the machinery of Jefferson Davis Parish, uncovering a terrifying web of multi-generational poverty, dead witnesses, and alleged cover-ups. We analyzed how a defensive local sheriff fired back, utilizing regional psychology to label the reporter an outside agitator, which led to a level of fear so profound it echoed the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. Very dark parallel. And finally we saw how a marginalized, emotionally raw community found a way to reclaim their voice on a national stage through a documentary, forcing an uneasy, highly conditional truce with the very authorities they feared. The complexity of this entire socio-economic ecosystem is exactly why we cannot just consume true

52:23crime as simple who done it. The story of the Jeff Davis 8 is not just a mystery about finding a killer, it is a vital examination of the municipal machinery that allowed a killer to operate undetected and allowed a community to be ignored for so long. And that brings me to why this matters to you listening right now. The next time you are listening to a true crime story on your commute or watching a documentary on your couch, challenge yourself to look deeper, look beyond the mystery of the crime scene. Pay attention to the background noise. Exactly. Pay attention to the socio-economic machinery running in the background of the story. Ask yourself, who is vulnerable in this town? Who is being ignored by the system? How did the local institutions react when their authority is finally questioned? Because the real monsters aren't always just the individuals hiding in the dark. Sometimes the most dangerous elements are the broken systems operating in broad daylight. Understanding those systems is the true value of critical media consumption. It moves us from being

53:26passive observers of tragedy to active understanders of how our society functions. Before we go, I want to leave you with one final provocative thought, something to really chew on as you go about the rest of your day. We learned that the current sheriff's office only agreed to cooperate with the documentary filmmakers because 99% of the series focused on the past administration. They were willing to be transparent only because the blame could be safely shifted backward in time. So here is the lingering unsettling question you have to ask yourself. If uncovering the truth relies on this kind of bureaucratic loophole where officials only agree to talk when they can point the finger at their predecessors, how many ongoing present day injustices in our own towns and our own cities remain completely untold simply because no one is safely in the past yet. Think about that. Until next time. This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea. Can we talk about turning 50 for a second? Everyone acts like it is the beginning of the end and I think it's more like the season where

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55:33now through October 27th. Get $10 off when you spend $25 or more on participating items. Just look for participating item tags that are on eligible items from brands like Nestle Quaker, Propel, Gatorade, Pepsi, Poppy and Uts. Flip once and save through October 27th every time you shop. Grab these hot deals before they're gone. Save on brands you trust. Restrictions apply. See website for full terms and conditions. You know when you try a new food and suddenly it's like, wait, how did I not know about this? Ryan C. Crest here. That's how people are reacting to Cupid Mayo. The one with the red cap you probably seen on TikTok. What makes it different? Egg Yokes. Cupid uses egg yolks only, giving it this rich umami flavor that elevates just about anything. Chefs use it, restaurants use it, food lovers use it. You never tried it. Find the red cap and see what everyone's talking about. Cupid, the original Japanese mayonnaise. This is Steve Cuvino from Cuvino and Rich. Quick trivia fellas. Every guy listening is contestant. Answer honestly to yourself.

56:36You got a belly in a little chest. Gassed by the afternoon, no drive left in the tank. You lack that confidence and mental edge. Those are classic signs that your testosterone has been sliding and nothing drags it down faster than extra weight. So why not take matters into your own hands? Shrip off the weight that tanks your testosterone with Bioma, GLP1 booster. Every serving is packed, with science-backed ingredients that crank up your natural GLP1 production. Visit bioma.health slash GLP1 and use code CR Show for 15% off your first order. Organic Valley protein plus sultry filter milk is pasture-aced from cows that might take more steps than most people. That's a plus. And it has 50% more protein and 50% less sugar than regular milk. That's a big plus. And the fact that it didn't make a pun about moving? Also a plus. Organic Valley protein plus sultry filter milk. Protein plus pasture-aced. Learn more at organicvalley.com.