Investigation: Homicide

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.

They run toward the worst moments of our lives and then they go home and carry it alone. On the next Investigation: Homicide, Therese Apel and Sara Perkins sit down with Kristy Daniels, who knows that weight personally.
 
After losing her husband to suicide, Kristy didn't just grieve, she built something that would start to address the devastating and fatal metal health crises that first responders deal with. 1828 is her answer to a crisis that too many first responders face in silence. It’s a nonprofit dedicated to making sure the men and women of Madison County who wear the badge have the resources, the support, and the community to not just survive the job, but thrive. 
 
This is her story, and it's one you need to hear.  
 
Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.

She was about eleven, washing dishes with fresh gashes up her arms and praying to die, when three officers answered a call for help. Two got pulled into an argument at the door. The third — a tall veteran officer whose name she never learned — knelt down and took her hands. That moment is the reason Jackson Police Department Capt. Barbara Folsom-McNeal wears a badge today.
 
Now, more than forty years later, she’s the veteran cop who answers the calls, and she wants to find him. To say thank you — or to tell his family what he did mattered.
 
If you served with Jackson PD back then, or know someone who did, we want to hear from you. Help us close the loop.
 
Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.

Every courtroom tells a story, but rarely do we hear it straight from the bench.
 
This week, Nicole Kral and Therese Apel sit down with Justice Court Judge Marsha Weems Stacey for a candid conversation about what it really looks like to dispense justice at the community level. Judge Stacey pulls back the curtain on cases that have moved through her courtroom: the ones that stay with you, the ones that challenge you, and the ones that reveal something true about the people we live alongside every day.
It’s a conversation about law, yes, but more than that, it’s about the relationship between a judge and the community she serves, and how each one quietly shapes the other in ways most of us never see.
 
This episode is produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.

 On April 24, 1996, an ordinary shift at Jackson Fire Department headquarters turned into one of the deadliest days in the department's history. Firefighter Kenneth Tornes walked the halls of the station he knew well, moving from office to office with deadly intent — targeting the men who wore the same uniform he did, the supervisors who had dedicated their lives to protecting others. When it was over, four members of the command staff were dead: Captain Merideth Moree, District Chief Dwight Craft, Captain Stan Adams, and District Chief Rick Robbins.
 
For retired Jackson Police Department Crime Scene Investigator Charlie Smith, this wasn't just another case. These were men he knew — colleagues he had worked alongside for years, responding to the same scenes, in the same city, all of them bound by the same mission to serve and protect. Processing a crime scene is already one of the most demanding things a first responder can be asked to do. Doing it where your friends fell is something else entirely.
On this episode of Investigation: Homicide, hosts Therese Apel and Amanda Johansson sit down with Charlie Smith to revisit a case that shook Jackson's first responder community to its core. Nearly three decades later, the weight of that day hasn't faded — and neither has Charlie's commitment to making sure the men who died that morning are not forgotten.
 
This episode is produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.