Mandy Matney is tired. It is late November, and she is finishing up the 69th episode of her podcast Murdaugh Murders, a true-crime investigation she began in 2019 and has evolved into a complex puzzle of unsolved deaths, insurance fraud, drugs, power and murder. The previous day, a jury in Charleston, South Carolina, delivered the first guilty verdict related to the case, and Matney was there to cover it. "It was super exciting, and really felt like a huge sigh of relief," she says.
Hedley Thomas knows this feeling well. He experienced a similar vindication when his 2018 podcast series The Teacher's Pet led to the conviction last year of former high school PE teacher Chris Dawson for the murder of his wife, Lynette, who disappeared from the couple's Sydney home 40 years ago.
Matney and Thomas are part of a wave of true-crime podcasters who have moved the genre into a vital new form of investigative journalism, shedding light on cold cases, wrongful convictions and broader injustices.
Their successes have joined those of Serial, which helped overturn the conviction of Adnan Syed, a Baltimore man who spent 23 years in prison for the murder of his ex-girlfriend, and in the Dark, which helped free Curtis Flowers, a Mississippi man who was tried six times for the same crime, and also spent 23 years in jail.
These podcasts offer glimmers of hope that legions of unsolved crimes could be solved given similar attention. But why has it fallen to podcasters to take up the work of police investigators? And how might this new era of sleuthing affect the legal process? Matney and Thomas discuss the highs and lows of their podcasting experiences.
You both have years of investigative journalism under your belts - Mandy, at publications such as FITSNews and the Island Packet, Hedley at the Australian and the Courier-Mail.
What made you move into podcasting?
This story is from the January 06, 2023 edition of The Guardian Weekly.
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This story is from the January 06, 2023 edition of The Guardian Weekly.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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