THE CONFESSION KILLER

Podcasters took up the murder investigation of Liz Flatt's sister. Then they turned on her 

- Sara Viren

Liz Flatt drove to Austin mostly out of desperation. She had tried talking with the police. She had tried working with a former FBI profiler who ran a nonprofit dedicated to solving unsolved murders. She had been interviewed by journalists and at least one podcaster.

Although she didn’t know it at the time, Liz was at a crossroads in what she had taken to calling her journey, a path embarked on after a prayer-born decision five years earlier to try to find who killed her sister, Deborah Sue Williamson (“Debbie”), in 1975. It was now 2021.

She had gone to Austin, Texas, for a conference, CrimeCon, which formed around the same time that Liz began her quest, at a moment now seen as an inflection point in the long history of true crime. She ran into a podcaster who had covered Debbie’s story and, at another booth, Liz met a woman who would later put her in touch with two investigators who presented at the conference that year: George Jared and Jennifer Bucholtz. They were podcasters, but Jared was also a journalist and Bucholtz an adjunct professor of forensics and criminal justice at the American Military University. Their presentation was on the 2004 murder of Rebekah Gould, whose killer they claimed to have helped find using a technique that has quickly become a signature of the changing landscape of true crime: crowd sourcing.