In the early morning hours of August 5, 1998 in the small town of Cookeville, Tennessee, a house suddenly erupts into flames, waking the nearby neighbors and alarming all the animals in the area. There are loud explosion sounds coming from the house, as though there are firecrackers being set off from the inside. A car engine is heard, and its tail lights are seen driving away from the driveway of the engulfed house. This car does not belong to anyone that lives in the house, however. The two cars belonging to the residents of the house remain parked, indicating the husband and wife are still inside. No more than three minutes later, fire fighters and police arrive at the scene, only to find the couple dead in their bedroom. Despite the fact that their house has been fully torched, the fire was not the cause of their death. Three bullet holes are found in both of the victims, and the fire was only the cover up of any evidence. The only questions that remain are: Who did this to the unsuspecting couple? How did the perpetrator get into the house? And, most importantly, why did this happen?
In this podcast series, wrongful convictions in the criminal justice system are analyzed and explored through the means of interviews and information released from the closed cases. Each case is examined and explored in the course of multiple episodes, and between each episode is an addendum episode in which the scientific and logistic aspects of the case are explained by experts in the fields and the experts that investigated the cases themselves.
The way in which the cases are told build the suspense and makes the convicted person’s innocence more compelling. The cases are narrated by multiple people, some female and some male. The lead narrator is female, utilizing different tones and inflections in the way she describes evidence and details of the crime to not only gain the interest of the listeners, but to have the listeners develop their own ideas and come to their own conclusions on who they believe was the actual criminal. The male and other female narrators go more in depth than the lead narrator, explaining any uncertain or unclear ideas that were brought about in the case. Throughout the duration of each podcast episode, the details explained by the lead narrator are subsidized by the use of interview clips. These audio clips are usually between the narrator and any of the witnesses, people related to both the victim/s and the convicted, and experts who worked the case. The scratchy audio recordings highlight and emphasize the criminal aspect of the podcast and make listeners feel as if they are the ones trying to solve the case by listening to those involved.
Between each main episode, there is an addendum episode in which the narrators change and the focus is shifted to the scientific and logistic explanations of the details of the crime. The addendums are not a narration, but rather a group of people discussing the details of the case in a casual manner. The group of people consists of a producer of the main episodes, authors, and experts in the fields of which the case pertains to and experts that worked on the case themselves. This addendum episode provides a relief to the listeners, as they get to hear how conclusions were drawn from evidence collected from the crime scene and those related to the victim/suspect involved.
In the first episodes about the couple executed and set ablaze in their home, we are introduced to the case, the details surrounding the case, and are told how the crime was committed. We learn that the couple was shot dead before the fire, and that each victim wound up with 3 bullets in their bodies. Neighbors do not recall seeing a person leave the house, but nearly all of the neighbors remember hearing and seeing a car pulling out of the couple’s driveway moments after the house had gone up in flames. The couple was found in the bedroom, with the wife lying in bed and the husband at the foot of the bed, still gripping the beams of the bedframe. This indicates the couple was murdered before the arson, which we are told by fire experts was accelerated by the use of gasoline. This allowed the house to be engulfed in 30-foot flames in mere minutes. The accuracy of the shots has detectives questioning how the perpetrator saw the victims so clearly in the dead of night, and why didn’t the couple’s dog awake and alarm the couple? Surely this had to have been done by someone close to the couple if they were able to break into the house unsuspected by even the dog, and get into the bedroom and kill the wife before she even knew it was coming. The husband was likely the second to be killed, as he was found at the foot of the bed, either confronting the assailant or trying to escape.
The first episodes rarely go into the depths of the backgrounds of the victims and the convicted murderer, but leave listeners wondering and wanting more information about the case; and whether or not the man convicted of this heinous crime was in fact the man that committed it.
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