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Transcript of Why Did He Do It?

Ghost of a Chance
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Transcription of Why Did He Do It? from Ghost of a Chance Podcast
00:00:02

Lemonada.

00:00:06

Previously on Ghost of a Chance.

00:00:09

The Robinsons were part of this network of people who were all making a beachhead, making a life, making a Black community in Minneapolis.

00:00:18

Eric found that during the 1920s, three more Black families moved into Southwest Minneapolis, and Clementine was back in the appeal newspaper.

00:00:26

Mr. Harry Robinson has opened the Little Dixie Sandwich Shop.

00:00:29

Mr. Robinson is a raceman and has given freely of his work to the race.

00:00:34

So I'm looking around. I mean, Little Dixie, Little Dixie Chicken Shack, all these different searches, and this leads me to a clip. Man shot and seriously wounded in restaurant. Negro cook under arrest. Harold Robinson, a Negro, said by police to have been employed as a cook in the restaurant, was held at the Fifth Precinct Police Station without charge.

00:00:55

There's a faulty police report that was used to write two faulty articles. So it's at this point that Eric decided he needed to do his own investigation.

00:01:05

Why would someone shoot Roy Mattis, who seems to have everything to lose by shooting Roy Mattis? Well, maybe Roy Mattis did something to him.

00:01:16

You're listening to Ghost of a Chance from the Minnesota Star Tribune.

00:01:22

This is the story of my search to find out what happened to Harry and Clementine Robinson. I'm Eric Broper.

00:01:28

I'm Melissa Townsend.

00:01:29

This is episode 4.

00:01:32

It's no small thing that two local newspapers reported that Harry Robinson, a Black man, shot Roy Mattis, a White man, for no good reason. It puts Harry and Clementine's entire future at risk. It could ruin their standing in the community. It could destroy them financially. So it was important to Eric to find out what happened in the Little Dixie Chicken Shack the night of February 15, 1926, and how did it impact Harry and Clementine's lives? Eric assumed that the case against Harry probably went to court, so The first thing he did in his investigation was try and get his hands on the court records.

00:02:20

I filed a request with the Haneman County Courts for any official court records, and I was hoping that maybe this would illuminate the rest of the story, but they didn't have any information about the shooting.

00:02:31

Without those court records, Eric had to go a different route.

00:02:34

If you think about a guy like Harry Robinson as running a night business in 1926, you're going to mean a lot of interesting, potentially scary characters, maybe drunk characters in the middle of the night.

00:02:46

Eric started digging for any reason there might be trouble at a chicken shack in Minneapolis. He came up with a few ideas about what might have led up to the shooting that My first instinct is to start looking in the newspaper records to get a sense of, well, why are chicken shacks in the news?

00:03:10

I start to find a lot of clips about chicken shacks being robbed and banned and hold-ups and things like this. One story I found, and the headline is, Armd Bandit Holds Up Cafe: Chicken Shack Rated by Lone Man Who gets $75. Then there's another one, Two Arrested, Believed to Have Robbed Propriety. Her of Chicken Shack. And then this one, trick foils, bandit pair. One is slain, chicken shack proprietors carry out rehearsed strategy. That clip is actually about these two chicken shack owners had this plan where one of them was going to throw a bottle across the room if there was a bandit so that the other one could go grab the gun and then shoot the bandit.

00:03:56

The vibe of these clips is that chicken shacks are being held up, and sometimes owners fight back. Eric wondered, could that have been what happened to Harry?

00:04:07

It's a cold night in Minneapolis, middle of February. Maybe there's snow on the ground. It's like the middle of the night, perhaps. Harry's alone, as he probably was accustomed to be pretty late at night at the chicken shack, and Roy Mattis walks in. Maybe Roy Mattis is there to rob the chicken shack. Then in the aftermath of this, it doesn't get reported all this detail about that Roy was holding up the business, and maybe the police don't believe Harry. This all just gets lost.

00:04:37

Maybe. But then Eric thought of another possibility.

00:04:41

You know, Roy Mattis lives in this area, and maybe he's one of these people that's annoyed that Harry still lives in this white neighborhood after all this time. There's a potential maybe where he comes in and just makes some remark or maybe even more than a remark, something that's pretty aggressive. We We know that there are reports of white people threatening and committing violence against Black people in this period. One article in particular in 1923 talks about these separate incidents of Black men being randomly attacked on the streets. The allegation in the Black newspaper about that is that this is a coordinated effort by members of the Klan.

00:05:25

Eric hadn't heard much about the Ku Klux Klan in Minneapolis before, but historian Kirsten Deligard told us they were really active in the city in the first half of the 1920s.

00:05:35

You have clan members in the schools, you have clan members in City Hall, you have clan members in the Police Department, open Klan members. People in clan robes are riding in civic parades. It's completely open.

00:05:48

Eric even found allegations in the Black newspaper that an alderman representing Southwest Minneapolis was a member of the clan. And across the river in Saint Paul, there was a burning meant to intimidate a Black family living there. That happened just about a year before the shooting.

00:06:05

Just to be clear, we have absolutely no idea if Roy Mattis was a part of the clan. But at the time, we know that there are White people making threats and attacking Black men, clan or not. Maybe that's what Roy did, and then Harry shot him.

00:06:20

Maybe that's what happened. But there's one other scenario that Eric wondered about, bootlegging. Prohibition Prohibition had gone into effect about six years earlier. Could Harry or Roy have been involved in some bootlegging situation?

00:06:39

In the era of Prohibition, we know that there's still booze everywhere. It's being imported, it's being factored both in the city but also in the countryside, specifically in central Minnesota. There are farmers who have stills and things like that. There's also examples of chicken shacks that are front for bootlegging operations, which we know because there's a lot of articles about liquor raids on chicken shacks during this period.

00:07:03

Could Roy have been connected to the bootleggers in central Minnesota? Could Harry have been selling bootlegged liquor out of the chicken shack?

00:07:11

Maybe that explains why Roy Mattis walks in. Either he is protecting some territory that Harry has violated by selling booze, or maybe there's some deal that they have that's gone south. I mean, there's lots of scenarios you could go into there.

00:07:30

Yes, lots of scenarios, but these were all still speculation. Eric needed more information to make any firm conclusions about what happened with Roy and Harry in the chicken shack that night.

00:07:44

This is Eric Broper. It is May 16th, 2024. I'm going through workhouse records.

00:07:53

These are for the city workhouse- Eric went to a big warehouse where he could look at old files from the city of Minneapolis.

00:07:59

These What else tell you who was sent to the workhouse.

00:08:02

I'm currently looking in 1926 because this is a key year when the shooting happened.

00:08:09

Back in the 1920s, if you were convicted of a lower offense, something less than a felony, the city might send you to the workhouse. Eric wanted to see if Harry or Roy were ever sent to the workhouse to do time for the shooting.

00:08:23

There's these large books, and they're handwritten. Your eyes start to glaze over reading the names.

00:08:30

He was sitting in a folding table, paching through these giant ledgers, reading handwritten lists of people's names, their personal details, and their crimes.

00:08:39

The charges here, a lot of them, it just says drunk, and then there'll be a lot of ditto marks because so many of these are for public drunkenness.

00:08:47

So much for Prohibition.

00:08:48

Vagrancy, it's a common one on here. So far, I'm not finding anything.

00:08:55

By the end of the day, Eric had come up empty. In fact, after years of searching, he still can't find any record about the shooting or if anyone served time for it.

00:09:04

You would imagine that there would be some record of this somewhere, whether it's in the workhouse, whether it's in the county jail, whether it's at the MPD Index, whether it's in the Hennemann County Court System, all these places I've gone to. Now, I can't vouch for the completeness of any of these records, but I've found nothing.

00:09:25

Eric decided to go in a different direction. Instead of looking for records about the shooting, he would look for any criminal record. He had done quite a bit of research at this point into Harry Robinson, and he hadn't come up with anything. But what about Roy Mattis? Did Roy Mattis have a criminal record? Eric started digging, and he found some things. That's after the break.

00:09:51

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00:11:31

Eric had gone down a new rabbit hole, trying to figure out if Roy Mattis had a criminal record. Here's what he found out.

00:11:39

Roy Mattis was born in 1896. When he's 17, he has a kid with a woman named Hazel Morrell. They ended up getting married. At the time of the shooting, he's a clerk at this lithography company. His father is like a VP, an executive at this company.

00:11:57

At first, that's the of information Eric could find about Roy Mattis, details about his personal life. He couldn't find a criminal record, or at least that's what he thought.

00:12:09

I had found a clip in St. Cloud from 1934. St. Cloud is far north of the Twin Cities, and it was a guy named Louis Mattis, which is Roy's father's name, and he's getting arrested for selling illegal liquor. I'm like, Well, it doesn't seem like Roy. I put that aside for a very long time. Then I got more and more desperate to figure this it out, I was thinking like, well, Roy's middle name is Louis. Let's check it out. I went through all these Sterns County ledgers.

00:12:39

Eric knew a lot of illegal distilleries were located out in Rural Sterns County, Minnesota at the time. So we went to look at the conviction records to see if Louis Mattis could actually have been Roy Mattis. And he was.

00:12:54

Here at the History Center, going through boxes and just discovered that Roy Mattis was a bootlegger. We have a record here of him getting convicted of selling MoonShine Whisky in 1934. Just a big discovery.

00:13:14

Eight years after the shooting in Harry's Chicken Shack, Roy Mattis was arrested for bootlegging. Could that mean that he was bootlegging during the time of the shooting? If it was just that one instance, it might not be that convincing. But it wasn't just that one instance.

00:13:31

While I was looking for that bootlegging arrest, I also found he was arrested a couple of months after that for just being drunk. Then if we fast forward to 1945, he's in downtown Minneapolis seemingly drunk because he's falling down and he's trying to get into parked cars downtown. Cops pick him up and they find he has all these war bonds in his pocket, and that's all in the papers. Based on what I know about Roy later in his life, he is a complicated character, to say the at least.

00:14:00

It's tough to speculate about what was happening for Roy Mattis nearly 100 years ago. We wouldn't want to do to him what was done to Harry. We wouldn't want to make false or incomplete accusations. That said, there's reasonable evidence to suggest that Harry did not, as the news article had stated, shoot Roy Mattis for no good reason. Based on all the information that Eric has collected, maybe Harry had a gun because other chicken shacks were being robbed or because of clan violence or because he was bootlegging. And Roy Mattis has a criminal record. He might have been involved in some illegal activity when he came into the chicken shack. But we can't find any evidence of that. And we can't find any evidence if either of them serve time for the shooting.

00:14:54

I feel like I've turned over basically every rock that I can find at this point, and this does haunt me on a day-to-day basis. I cannot tell you what happened that night at the chicken shack. I am still looking, though, so maybe one day we'll have more clarity.

00:15:13

That may be as far as Eric has been able to take the investigation into the shooting, but he knows a lot more about what happened to Harry after that was all said and done. He and Clementine began to have financial trouble.

00:15:28

They're really bobbing above water, but barely.

00:15:33

The shooting happened in February 1926. Eric found that the next month, Harry and Clémentine took out a loan for $500. That'd be $9,000 today.

00:15:50

Could there have been legal bills associated with- There could be legal bills.

00:15:53

Be overspending.

00:15:55

Eric went back to historians Penny Peterson and Kirsten Delagard. He asked them to make sense of what was happening with the Robinson's finances. Kirsten started wondering, How much does a lawyer's fee cost?

00:16:07

And how much does it cost to maybe pay off some people in the police Department? And then, of course, what happens to your business when there's a shooting in the business? You have to think that this was a difficult… He was like, Okay, we just need to get through this. People will forget about it or I'll get through. But then it coincides with the collapse of the economy in Minneapolis.

00:16:29

They all agreed this was terrible timing. The city was on the cusp of the Great Depression. Money was getting tight for nearly everyone. It looked like the Robinson's financial situation was becoming dire.

00:16:42

After that first loan for $500, they take out another loan for $300, then another loan for $1,500, then six months later, another loan for $500.

00:16:55

Harry and Clementine took out four loans in just three years. Today, those loans would add up to roughly $51,000. Historian Penny Peterson.

00:17:06

I mean, this bing, bing, bing, bing. There's times when their house is paid off, but then they have to borrow again, and then money is getting increasingly tight.

00:17:16

Meanwhile, we know that they're still working hard. It looks like Clementine has left St. Barnabas and Dr. Farr, and we can see from some of the newspaper reports that she is seemingly working on her own. There's one article from 1927 that describes her as one of the best known masseuses in the city and notes that she has, quote, built up a large clientele among the leading white citizens.

00:17:41

But it looks like that hard work wasn't enough.

00:17:46

I found an ad that Harry Robinson put in the Minneapolis Tribune, and it was dated March 1931, and he was selling the business. In fact, he put in five ads that month, and they said, Sandwich shop, first class, good business, reasonable, meaning he's going to offer some reasonable terms here.

00:18:07

We knew Harry was renting the space. Eric asked Penny Peterson, what was he selling?

00:18:13

He's selling your customer list, your recommendation, your recipes. That's what you're selling, and maybe some of the equipment as well.

00:18:26

If we think about the luncheon that had happened five years before and all these big names that come, and this was a celebration. Remember the flowers were out? This was a very beautiful affair. Now we've come to a place where that dream is starting to crumble for the Robinsons. But at least they still had Clementine's work and their house.

00:18:51

But Penny had looked at the Robinson's financial records, and she knew that their grip on the house was shaky.

00:18:59

I think the mortgage They're just probably paying the interest on it. It's interest on interest. It's like student loans today. Gee, I only borrowed $20,000, but now $50,000. How did that happen?

00:19:11

Penny said they couldn't pay off those last two loans. So in 1931, they lose the house to foreclosure, and they have to leave this neighborhood that they had fought to live in for 14 years.

00:19:25

This was when the Robinsons left their home in Southwest Minneapolis. Us.

00:19:32

This is what I've been trying to figure out this entire time, what happened to the Robinsons. Here it is. They had taken a number of risks to become homeowners and then business owners, but ultimately, a lot of things went wrong. There was the shooting, there was the media coverage, and then there's this Great Depression that's going to sweep over everything.

00:19:56

In 1930, there were 11 Black families who owned in Southwest Minneapolis. By 1940, there were only three. Eight Black families had left, and with them, the whole city took one more giant step toward racial segregation. Harry and Clementine would need to start over. But before we get to that, we need to share an unexpected discovery. That's after the break.

00:20:32

Just here in the microphone room of the Minnesota History Center, looking through the microphone index. The first index I pulled was- After Eric had basically pieced together this whole story of what happened to the Robinsons.

00:20:47

He decided to look in one more corner of the Minnesota Historical Society. It's where they keep the files from the Hennepin County Civil Court, not the criminal court where he had been before, the civil court.

00:21:00

Anybody who is suing anybody in Hennepin County, they're all indexed in here. This is pretty obscure record searching at this point. I mean, we're going into the deep end of trying to find anything we can out there, not expecting to find much.

00:21:15

But he did find something.

00:21:17

The first thing I pull up and I see the plaintiff is Clementine Robinson, and the defendant is Harry Robinson. This is November 23rd, 1915.

00:21:29

I'm just totally perplexed. I don't know.

00:21:31

Just blew my mind here.

00:21:35

When Eric was able to see the full file in person, he could see that Clementine was filing for divorce from Harry. But the file was dated 1915. That's before they bought the house and before they opened the chicken shack. We knew that Clementine and Harry were together that whole time. We both wondered, what happened? Let's start with what Eric in the file.

00:22:01

I remember having a fairly physical reaction to seeing it.

00:22:05

This is Clementine's account of domestic abuse at the hands of Harry. It's graphic. I'm going to read part of it, but if you want to skip this part, you just need to fast forward 60 seconds and you'll be in the clear. The defendant, that's Harry, has a violent and uncontrollable temper and has at all times since said marriage been a constant user of intoxicating liquors to excess and has on frequent occasions come to his said home under the influence of liquor, and there struck, beat, kicked, and otherwise abused and mistreated the plaintiff. That's Clementine. On said occasions, the defendant swore at the plaintiff and called her vile names and has threatened on several occasions during said married life to take plaintiff's life if she made any complaint about him, the defendant. She says he has spent all of his evenings away from home, drinking and gambling, at which he has spent and lost his money. But for her work and efforts, said parties would have had no home to live in, nor any money with which to pay rent, buy clothes, and provisions. According to Clementine's divorce filing, the most recent attack was the final straw.

00:23:28

She tells the court, Harry is working as a waiter, making $80 a month, and she wants a divorce and suitable alimony and attorney's fees.

00:23:44

This is incredibly personal information. It took me a while to really process this document, and I thought about it for a long time. If I was to take anything away from it that wasn't just how sad it is, is that this is a brave thing for Clementine to take this risk and to put this in writing.

00:24:08

It's unexpected and terrible and disappointing. When Eric first found out, he called me, and we were both stunned. Then we thought, maybe we shouldn't talk about this on the podcast.

00:24:22

I think one of the biggest reasons I was concerned about this document is that it feeds a really problematic stereotype about violent Black men.

00:24:32

We know that Black men like Harry are overrepresented in media stories about violence and underrepresented as people in positive roles. So let me say this. In an old recording, Marvell Cook talked about her father. You might remember her from a previous episode. She was a Black woman who grew up in Minneapolis in the early 1900s. Her father's name was Madison, and she talks about him like he was one of the most caring and tender men on the planet.

00:25:02

My father believed that children should be nurtured, and we'd take long walks together, and he would tell me things.

00:25:10

I learned all about the constellations and about love. In another old interview, Adina Gibbs sounded just the same when she talked about her father, JQ Adams. You might remember he was the publisher of the Appeal newspaper. How was your father as a family man when you were coming along? Wonderful. Some of the incidents. Just wonderful. Just wonderful. Yes. He spent his money on his family, and he was very fond of my mother. I have often thought about how loving he was when he spoke to her or of her. There are no excuses for domestic violence, but there are explanations. When it came to Harry and Clementine, we wanted to understand more about why he may have been violent. Can I say your name again? Introduce yourself. I called a therapist who might help.

00:26:08

Okay. Well, my name is Deon Trice. I am one of the marriage and family therapists over at the Family Development Center over in Saint Paul.

00:26:16

Is it okay if I record this for the podcast?

00:26:19

Go right ahead.

00:26:20

Deanne is a Black therapist who has particular expertise with domestic violence. One of the first things she told me was, You have to remember what it was like in the early 1900s.

00:26:31

We have to understand that you could beat and discipline a woman like you could a child.

00:26:36

Wow.

00:26:36

That was a common experience, common thought process, to be able to hear a woman thinking it was your right to do so.

00:26:44

But she said the level of violence described in the divorce filing was extreme. So I asked her if she could help me understand more about what leads to domestic violence. And she said there are some general observations. One, men who have been abused often end up abusing. Two, oftentimes, men who abuse have had experiences of traumatic abandonment and rejection. When she said this, I thought about Harry's childhood. So I told her about it. Harry, when he was eight, his dad dies of accidental rat poisoning. Then when Harry becomes a high school senior, he's valedictorium of his class, and he gets a scholarship to law school, and they take it away they find out he's Black. And so talk about abandonment and rejection. As I was saying all this, Deanne was nodding her head. Oh, yeah, this makes sense.

00:27:41

One of the ways that we would explain their cycle to the men is we would use a Jack in a box. Jack in a box, you get 15 cranks before it pops open, right? But when you have poverty, abandonment, social stressors, injustices, trauma that are unresolved and un dealt with, that's like taking a crank away every day. This is one of the things about mental health in African-Americans. I'm speaking specifically about African descendants of slaves here. The pressures to assimilate or to bear this pressure of being the middle class, the exception That stress that you're constantly under takes cranks away. So I don't get to wake up with 14 cranks. I only get to wake up with seven, eight. So then, of course, when I'm walking and I come home and I'm with my family, all the other daily things that get added makes it far easier for me to lose it.

00:28:53

Deon told me Harry's alcoholism was probably a response to the same thing.

00:28:58

Especially if I don't have an empathetic space in which I can be able to voice and say these things and be heard, be honored, respected, validated, and heard.

00:29:12

We don't know if Harry had a space where he could talk and be heard about the pressure that he felt. But I found this old recording of a man named Nelson Peary. He was a black man who spent his younger years in Minneapolis. And in this interview, he talked about what he learned from his father about sharing emotions.

00:29:29

One of the things that my old man drove into me that I think took hold of me, and that's he used to always tell me, A man don't cry. And from that on went on to where a man doesn't have any emotion. You know what? And you can't live like that. I have to, too. You can't live like that. I don't guess I got it out of me yet.

00:29:51

I don't think I ever will get it out of me yet.

00:29:57

Men were not supposed to share their emotions. Before I said goodbye to Deanne, I wanted to ask for her thoughts on Clementine. Why did she stay with Harry during the abuse?

00:30:11

Why do you- It It's heavy respectability in politics. Because, again, if I am in a predominantly white society, respectability is I can't show my flaws, I can't reach out for help. If I live up to social norms, then I can be highly penalized for that. Are we going to become the laughing stock? Is he going to lose all social credibility? Am I going to lose social credibility? I can't afford that.

00:30:45

You can imagine that's what Clementine was thinking for seven years as she endured this violence. But then in 1915, she filed for divorce. Eric did some digging, and he learned that a lot of women at the time were doing the same thing.

00:31:04

In 1915, the number of divorces was actually skyrocketing where they lived in Henneman County, Minnesota. Nearly 700 divorces were granted that year, and that's about 2. 5 times the number from a decade earlier, which far outpaced the growth of the population. According to some reports, in 1914, one out of every seven marriages ended in divorce.

00:31:29

But somewhere around 1916, Harry and Clementine got back together.

00:31:33

Harry and Clementine definitely separated, but it looks like they never got divorced.

00:31:38

In the divorce filing from 1915 that Eric saw, there was no response from Harry, and there was also no final divorce decree. All we know is that in 1917, they bought a house together, and in 1925, they opened a business. Maybe that was a sign that he dealt with his demons and cleaned up his act. But how? To find out, we called an expert.

00:32:02

It's so interesting.

00:32:05

Diane Stort is an historian and an author, and she specializes in Black love, marriage, and relationships.

00:32:12

I actually am wondering. I'm thinking about her family. She is definitely coming from a context where her family would be considered high Black society. Her sister is a nurse. Her brother is a doctor.

00:32:28

They all lived in Kansas City, Missouri.

00:32:30

I am wondering if there might have been family interventions. Is it possible that her brother intervened on her behalf and said, Look, we're going to take our sister back if you don't shape up? I just wondered, what would the family conversations have been?

00:32:50

Or she says, maybe Harry came to his senses on his own.

00:32:54

I'm wondering about that. Did he himself realize, Okay, what am I doing? This is ridiculous. I'll never get someone as good as this who literally becomes a foundation for my own status, no matter what. I wonder if he did shape up and maybe through the help of religion. I'm so intrigued. I just don't know.

00:33:19

Man, I really struggled with this. I think when you're researching someone, it's really easy to root for them and to come up with an idea of them in your head. I I think that I started to realize that Harry's clearly more complicated than I understood previously. But I really do think that by the time that Harry opened the restaurant, that he was in a different place in his life. And why do I think that? Well, first, let's just talk about who came to that luncheon in 1925, just months before the shooting. I mean, these are the Black leaders of Minneapolis, and I don't think they would have been there if Harry was the same violent and irresponsible person that Clementine had described a decade earlier. And besides that, his life had changed dramatically from 10 years earlier. I mean, he had a successful wife and a house and a business. And again, he was supported by some of the most respected local Black leaders.

00:34:25

That makes sense to me, too. But I wanted to ask Eric if this new information from the divorce filing changed his understanding of what might have happened at the chicken shack the night of the shooting. And he said he's as puzzled as ever about what happened that night in the chicken Shack. But he also said he knows one thing for sure.

00:34:50

I think that Harry was a man that cleaned himself up. I mean, he was finding a way for himself in this city after all these years. So when Roy Mattis walked into the chicken shack, at that point, I think he had everything to lose.

00:35:05

And he did lose nearly everything. By the end of 1931, Harry and Clémentine had closed their business and lost their house. I picture them packing up to leave for the very last time. Their dishes are in boxes, the floors are bare, the walls are bare. But the question is, where were they going? The city had only gotten more segregated, so where could they land on their feet? That's next time.

00:35:39

It's not fair, it's not just, it's not correct, but it is what it is.

00:35:45

We just got to keep moving forward.

00:36:00

This is Ghost of a Chance. Our website is startribune. Com/ghostofachance. There you can see pictures and documents from the podcast, and you can also sign up to receive news about discussion guides and events. Our email is ghostofachance@star-tribune. Com. Get in touch if you have a question or feedback or a tip related to the Robinson's story. We'd also love to know if this story motivated you to do something in your community, so let us know. You can help pay for this incredible story and others like it with a subscription to the Minnesota Star Tribune. Go to our website, startribune. Com. Ghost of a Chance is reported by Eric Roper and written and produced by me, Melissa Townsend. Our executive producer is Jenny Pinkley. Our editor is Mary Joe Webster. Fact-checking by Eric Roper and Mary Joe Webster. Sound design by Marcel Malakabu. Our contributing editors are Star Tribune Managing Editor Maria Reeve and Star Tribune Editor and Senior Vice President Sook Yee Dardarian. Legal review from Randy Lebedoff. The art for our show comes from Anna Boon and Brock Kaplin. Special thanks to Kendall Harkness, Zoe Jackson, Laura McCollum, James Schiffer, Nancy Yang, Casey Darnell, Laura Yuen, Taine Danger, and members of the local community who served as our advisors.

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Episode description

Episode 4 --There is sometimes a steep price to pay for being bold. Eric investigates a mysterious shooting involving Harry, and a damaging accusation that threatens his livelihood on the eve of a global catastrophe. He also makes a shocking discovery that pulls back the curtain on the Robinsons’ relationship. They are tested. For documents, photos and other source material related to this episode, go to: https://www.startribune.com/ghost-of-a-chance-podcast-episode-4-guide/601204958See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.