Investigation: Homicide

Some of the people who change our lives never know they did it.
Capt. Barbara Folsom-McNeal was eleven years old when a police officer walked into the worst night of her childhood and carried her out. She'd been whipped with an extension cord, and to a terrified kid, he was a promise that someone would come through when it mattered most.  She didn't learn his name that night, but because of him, she grew up to wear the badge herself in order to continue to fulfill that promise to others. 
A few months ago, Barbara sat down with us and told that story, and said that as she neared the end of her career, she'd made up her mind to find the officer who set her on this path. So we went looking. And we found his family.
Tonight, Therese Apel and Amanda Johansson welcome Barbara back, and this time she isn't alone. Chris Dill joins us to talk about his father, Mike Dill, the officer who once lifted a little girl out of harm's way and, by every account, went to his grave with no idea he'd shaped the whole course of her life.
This is the episode where the dots connect. It's about the long reach of a single heroic act, the echo it leaves behind, and how the memory of the same good man has shaped two entirely different lives.
 
Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.

Jackson has held the highest homicide rate per capita in the nation for five years running. Behind every one of those numbers is a name, a family, and a death someone has to answer for. In Hinds County, that responsibility runs through Jeramiah Howard.
 
As County Coroner, Howard oversees an office that investigates them all: every scene, every call in the middle of the night, every hardest conversation of someone's life. This week, Therese Apel and Sara Perkins Ricks sit down with the man who carries the weight of a city's losses to ask the questions most people never think to: What is that life actually like? 
 
What do you learn about a place from the way its people die? And how do you keep doing this work, year after year, in the deadliest city in America?
 
It's a raw conversation about death, duty, and the human cost behind the statistics from the man who knows them better than anyone.
Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.

From Olivia Benson to Dana Scully to Ziva David, we’ve all got a TV idea of what it looks like to be a female cop. Spoiler alert: you can’t actually run in those heels, and the cases don’t wrap up in 42 minutes.
Tonight, Therese and Amanda sit down with Warren County Sheriff’s Office Lieutenant Stacy Rollison, and her story is the real thing. She started as a part-time jailer while raising three kids as a single mom, and she didn’t stop until she became Warren County’s first female patrol deputy, then investigator, then Chief Investigator. AND she’s currently in her third year as Secretary/Treasurer of the Mississippi Deputy Sheriffs’ Association, because apparently she sleeps at some point but we’re not sure when.
Stacy talks about what it actually takes to build a career in law enforcement as a woman, the moments that tested her, and why she believes in a department that reflects its community and treats every single person who walks through the door with dignity no matter what they’ve done or where they’ve come from.
This is the episode for every woman who ever wondered if there was a place for her in this field, and for everyone who wants to know what real service looks like.
Investigation: Homicide — tonight.
 
Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.

George David Herrin spent a decade as a fixture at the Canton Estates Apartments. The 85-year-old security guard mowed lawns, helped residents with small tasks, and was a grandfather figure to the kids in the neighborhood.
 
Then, one Sunday night just after 11:20 p.m., deputies responded to gunshots and found him shot multiple times as he sat in his vehicle outside the complex. The Madison County Coroner called it a homicide. Authorities called it execution-style. He died in the hospital the next morning.
 
Sara Perkins Ricks and Therese Apel are joined tonight by Madison County Sheriff Randy Tucker to dig into a case that still hasn't been solved. They talk through what investigators know, the surveillance footage and witness interviews, the possible suspect named in early reports, and why a man everyone described as kind and generous ended up targeted this way. 
 
The community is still shaken. The people who loved David Herrin are still waiting for answers. Tonight, we reach out to find out if you know something that might help close this case. A $5,000 reward is on the table.
 
Madison County Sheriff's Department:601-859-2345
Crime Stoppers: 601-355-TIPS (8477)
 
Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.

In October 2004, Janell Hatton, a 63-year-old real estate agent from the Bunker Hill community in Marion County, was shot during a robbery at her home. Her body was found buried in a barn near Kokomo. Before it was over, five people would be arrested, and the brutality of the crime would make it one of the most talked-about murders in recent Mississippi history.
This week, Sara Perkins-Ricks and Therese Apel sit down with Lt. Col. Jimmy Herzog of the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation to walk through how the case came together, from the search for a missing woman to the arrests that followed and the guilty pleas that sent Steven Kirkley and Keith Magee to prison for life without parole. Herzog takes us inside the investigation with the perspective of someone who has spent a career working Mississippi's hardest cases.
It's a conversation about what it takes to bring a killer to justice, and what a case like this leaves behind long after the sentence is handed down.
 
Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.

Sometimes the best conversations are the unplanned ones. Our guest for tonight was under the weather this week, so hosts Therese Apel and Amanda Johansson are flipping the script and opening the floor. Episode 68, "You're the guest," is exactly what it sounds like. No case file, no set agenda, just the two of us talking with you about the stories that pull us in and keep us coming back.
We are pulling back the curtain on how Investigation: Homicide actually comes together, what draws us to a particular case or guest, and why we keep telling the stories of Mississippi's law enforcement, first responders, and the crimes and issues that shape their world. We will trade our favorite episodes, the ones that stuck with us long after we stopped recording, and talk about the moments that reminded us why this work matters.
But the whole point tonight is you. Bring us the cases you want investigated, the guests you want to hear from, the questions you have always wanted to ask, and the issues you think deserve more attention. Drop them in the comments and get in on the conversation live. This one runs on your curiosity, so pull up a chair. Tonight, you're the guest.
Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.

Some stories don't start in a courtroom or a case file. They start at a kitchen table, in a grandmother's voice, in a story carried quietly across generations because the truth was too heavy and too dangerous to say out loud.
 
In 1937, Roosevelt "Red" Townes and Robert "Bootjack" McDaniels were lynched in Duck Hill, Mississippi. It became one of the most photographed lynchings in American history. For decades, the weight of that story lived in the memory of one family, including a little girl named Jimmie Lee, who would one day pass it on to her granddaughter.
 
That granddaughter is filmmaker Talamieka Brice, and what began as a whispered family story has grown into a documentary, a public memory initiative, and a community movement asking one of the hardest questions we can ask: how do we tell the truth about the past while still making room for healing?
Tonight Therese Apel and Sara Perkins sit down with Talamieka to talk about the case that has lived inside her since childhood, the grandmother who first handed her this story, and the work she's now doing to bring transparency, remembrance, and justice to the memories of Bootjack and Red.
 
This is Investigation: Homicide.
 
Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions. 

This week on Investigation: Homicide:
 
An 18-year-old from West Memphis tells his mom he’s heading to the movies. Three days later he’s found in the Holly Springs National Forest. He’s 80 miles from home, shot multiple times, just yards off a remote county road.
 
Fredarrious Wilson was months from graduating. He wanted to be an architect. Instead he was lured across a state line into the woods by people who knew exactly where to take him so no one would hear.
 
His father begged other parents: “Be nosy. Look in their phones.” What he didn’t know was that a phone is exactly what set all of this in motion.
 
Therese Apel and Amanda Johansson sit down with MBI Special Agent Gary Stanton, one of the investigators who worked the case, to trace how a missing-persons call in Arkansas became a multi-agency murder hunt in Mississippi, and what the evidence finally revealed about why Fredarrious never made it home.
Produced be Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.

Tonight on Investigation: Homicide, Therese Apel and Sara Perkins Ricks sit down with author Charlie Spillers — a man whose life reads like the books he writes. Before he was a bestselling author, Spillers was an ex-Marine, an undercover agent, and a federal prosecutor, and he’s spent his career on both sides of the most dangerous corners of the law.
 
We’ll talk about Confessions of an Undercover Agent, his memoir of a decade spent infiltrating criminal operations across the South, and Echoes of War, which reaches back to where it all started. It’s a conversation about courage, cost, and what it takes to walk into rooms most people spend their lives avoiding.
 
You won’t want to miss this one. Tune in.
 
Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.

First responders already know what it means to be strangers in a strange land — set apart by what they’ve seen, rewired by what they’ve carried. For those who also hold a faith life, there’s a second kind of strangeness layered on top of the first. In this episode, hosts Therese Apel and Amanda Johansson sit down with Clint Hatch, author of Keeping the Peace Within, to talk about what happens when those two worlds collide — and whether faith is actually robust enough to meet a warrior in the dark, or whether it’s been too sanitized to reach the people who need it most.
 
The conversation goes deep into what Clint and the hosts call the “sterile American faith problem” — the way so much of modern Christianity has learned to speak softly about obedience and ritual while going completely silent about violence, tragedy, and the kind of damage that doesn’t resolve in a one-hour sermon. For first responders sitting in pews carrying weight no one around them can see, that silence isn’t just frustrating. It’s isolating in a way that compounds everything they’re already carrying from the job.
 
But Scripture, it turns out, has never been silent about any of this. From David’s unfiltered trauma journals in the Psalms, to Elijah collapsing under a juniper tree and asking God to let him die, to Job demanding answers no one around him could give — the Bible is full of warriors God met in their brokenness without first asking them to clean up. The message isn’t “put down the old self and become someone softer.” It’s that the warrior identity was never the problem to be solved. It’s the thing God means to sanctify and use.
 
Whether you wear a badge, work a fire line, or run calls in the middle of the night — or whether you love someone who does — this episode is for you. The damage you carry isn’t proof you’re too far gone. It may be exactly the raw material God works with.
 
Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.