Transcript of Paradise Found | 1

Wndyri Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of We came to the Forest ad-free. Join WNDYRI Plus in the WNDYRI app or on Apple podcasts. Campside Media. On a chilly evening in January, an activist named Vienna Forest goes on a date with her partner in Atlanta. It has been a long, rough month for Vienna, and she spent much of it lying low, crashing on the floor at a friend's house. Her partner, who goes by Tortuguita, that's Little turtle in Spanish, has decided that it's time for her to get out of the house.

We went to get Vietnamese and Mexican food. Just got a whole buffet. Tortuguita was at their peak. They were just so happy. They quit cigarettes. They were just really doing good.

A couple hours later, Vienna and tort pack into a sedan, along with two other friends, and drive across town to a movie theater called the Starlight. The Starlight is pretty famous in Atlanta. It's one of the last real drive-ins in the country. Still has that old-school neon sign out front.

Me and Tort to save on tickets hid under a blanket. The person manning the gate caught us. They're like, Next time, tell your friends to to hide their legs better because Tori's legs were sticking out from under the blanket that they let us go through.

The couple stays there, curled up in the back seat, hands laced together in the dark, even as the movie gets underway.

They were always just like someone I felt comfortable with. They were, I'm feeling bad. I can lay my head on their chest and they'd comfort me.

The film that night at the Starlight is Megan, the horror flick about the killer doll.

The modern day Chucky, if you will. Took a while for me to remember what the movie was because I wasn't paying attention to the movie so much. But yeah.

As the movie winds down, Vienna turns to her partner, watching them.

They seemed like they didn't have a care in the world, or at least they didn't show it. They had this resolve about things. It seemed like they were just ready for whatever was to come.

Camera recording started.

About 36 hours later, in an event that will permanently, violently alter the trajectory of Vienna and Torts lives, a joint task force of law enforcement sweeps through a forest a few miles to the southeast of the drive-in. Their mission is to clear the woods of a group of activists who are camping there in an attempt to stop the construction of the largest police training facility in the country. The task force is divided into two teams, one of which approaches the camp from the north and the other from the south. Most of the members have their body cams rolling. That's the footage that you're hearing.

Clear that tent, clear That's it.

A lot of police.

Police, hey now, or you will be bit.

Walk around and you're going to find out. The officers are on high alert. They were warned in a briefing earlier that morning about the possibility weapons, booby traps, even improvised explosive devices. They wade further into the woods, hacking apart empty hammocks and tents with tactical knives. In one group, a task force member jokes about what he'll do if he finds a structure occupied. Quick question. Can you get the fuck out, please? There's some nervous laughter. Then, at 9: 01 AM, everything just shatters open.

Oh, shit. Is this target purpose?

The officers tense up, dropped their hands to their sidearm's.

Real soft fire.

And slowly, across the forest, they begin to move towards the sound of the gunfire.

Jaguar, Jaguar.

A very faint transmission comes over the radio. Man down. I went off for death.

I went hard sick already.

Fuck. This shit just took a step out. From WNDYRI, Campside Media, and Tenderfoot TV, I'm Matthew Sher. And this is We Came to the Forest. This is episode one, Paradise Found. Why don't you just go ahead and introduce yourself? I'll get a mic check here.

Hi, I'm Vienna. How do I introduce myself? I guess just from the charges, how people would know me, a partner in Tartequita, very much in the middle of this shitstorm.

It's a good introduction. In the late months of 2023, Vienna Forest sits on a sectional couch in an Airbnb in Atlanta, not far from where I live. She's got her dog, Ellie, in her lap. While she talks, she digs her fingers into the scraff behind Ellie's ears. Although it has been nearly a year since the shooting in the forest, Vienna is still wrestling with the aftermath of the incident, which remains unresolved in every sense of the word, obscured by rumor, conjecture, and layers of government secrecy. As for Vienna herself, she's attained a amount of infamy by her proximity to these events and the massive issues they've brought to the surface, race and gentrification, police militarization and repression, climate activism, and political polarization. The same issues, in other words, that are consuming all of the country. So, yeah, it's a lot. Tell us a little bit about your political life or your activist life. Were you politically interested interested when you were younger?

How I see my radicalization is just very much one of those lifelong processes of just doing the groundwork and everything. But then I didn't come to realization with a lot of it until in 2020 when there's the pandemic.

2020 had been a year Vienna spent partially in Nashville, where she'd hoped to make it in the music industry. But the going had been even before COVID. And so she heads home to suburban Omaha and moves back in with her parents, with whom she does not see eye to eye.

They have come to the realization that basically everything I'm against is everything they stand for because they work in finance and they're evangelical Christians.

What do you think they wanted for you if they had had their way and they'd been like, This is what we want for Vienna?

They'd want me to follow in my dad's footsteps, work in finance, have a good paying job, wife, kids, and white picket fence. Typical American dream.

Eventually, Vienna lands a job driving a delivery route for FedEx. The gig suits her, not only because of the money, which allows her to move out of her folks' place and into a house owned by a friend named Gavin.

I just had a lot of time to just listen to podcasts and just really expand my mind a little bit more.

One afternoon, Vienna sitting in the driver's seat of the van, watching the planes race past, listening to a podcast that's become something like gospel to young progressive activists. It's called It Could here.

I think it was probably their first episode about the forest movement. In early 2021, it was revealed to the public that the city of Atlanta and the Atlanta Police Foundation plans are to turn the sections of the South Atlanta forest into the largest police police training facility in the country.

The focus of the episode is a massive $109 million complex nicknamed Cop City, which is slated to be built on the wooded, overgrown site of an abandoned prison farm, adjacent, notably, to a historically Black neighborhood in a city where the relationship between Black residents and police is often very strained. To its critics, what makes matters worse is that Cop City is being paid for, in part, by a collection of powerful corporate donors. It's like someone went into the lab and engineered a thing that would piss off as many progressives as possible. And yet, as the podcast episode makes clear, the supporters of Copp City have not gone unopposed. Multiple efforts are underway to stave off construction. Some activists are mobilizing politically, lobbying officials to take a stand against the complex. Other Others are using a more direct route, physically blocking the clear-cutting with their bodies and occasionally sabotaging construction equipment.

In the last year, activists, ghost-like saboteurs, and open-source researchers have vultrized together into an anonymous and diverse movement that's brought the plans to destroy the forest out of the shadows of secretive backdoor corporate deals and into the public spotlight.

Forest defenders, these activists call themselves. Instinctively, Vienna turns up the volume. It's as if someone is reaching out of the speakers and grabbing her by the collar. Pay attention to this.

I think a lot of people in this country can relate with the feeling of just being stuck in a rut and just working home, working home vibe and just feeling like they want to do more. As crazy as it is to live in the woods and protest this thing. There's some beauty to just, even though there are risks and everything, at least you are taking control of your own life.

Although she has no connection to Atlanta, the cause is what counts to Vienna. Back at home, Vienna keeps tabs on the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement on social media. One day, she spots news of a gathering in the Atlanta woods in late July of 2022, an event for anyone interested in learning more more about Stopping Cop City. There'll be rallies, marches, and lessons from movement elders. A week of action, it's called. Hey, Vienna thinks, I could do that.

I was very much burnt out at this time because I was working a 9: 00 to 5: 00 job five days a week. In some ways, I saw the Week of Action as a vacation, but I'm also doing activism.

Soon after, Vienna wearing a black leather jacket, with a pack of American spirits tucked into the front pocket, piles into a car with her friend and her dog Ellie, and races across the plains of the Midwest in the direction of Atlanta in a parcel of woodland that's quickly becoming a battleground.

In October In 2008, the residents of the Valleyview Apartment Complex in Redman, Washington, held a Halloween party. Dozens of people in costumes mingled, drank, and danced. But before the night was over, one of them was murdered. The police had a suspect. His story kept changing. His DNA was at the crime scene. But when he finally came in for questioning, the detectives felt like they were a breath away from confession, but it didn't happen. And so the police focused their attention on another man, a man with a criminal record whose DNA was also found at the crime scene and who happened to be the only the Black man at the party. Suspect is a new true crime mini-series about cutting-edge forensic science and mislaid justice, about race and policing, and ultimately, about the weighty decisions that cops and prosecutors make every day. Decisions that once made, change, forever and are almost impossible to reverse. Follow Suspect on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, where you can binge all nine episodes ad-free right now by subscribing to Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app.

Approaching Atlanta from the Southwest on the still boiling asphalt to '75, Anna watches the city draw into view, the vast green canopy and the jagged skyscrapers that loom over it. South again, past Centennial Park, through the late afternoon traffic until she reaches the South River Forest, one of the largest urban woodlands in the country, thousands of acres in total, just a few short miles from the city proper.

It was already after dark because we were driving all day. We pulled in past the concrete barricades that have been pushed across the side, and the parking lot was just absolutely overfilled with people and cars. Bare found a parking spot. Me and my packed up all our stuff and packed into the woods.

A placard catches her eye, a homemade, hand-scrawled greeting.

It was a little old park sign that wore away forever ago and then throwing a graffiti on it.

You are now leaving the USA, it reads. Smiling, Vienna and her friend pushed deeper into the forest, following the sound of voices through the darkness.

We came up behind the little circle of people that were there. There was string lights lighting up the forest floor and speakers and stuff.

Vienna is told that the South River forest really has two sides. There's the technically off-limits part, the foundations of an old prison farm, and the cop city construction site. Then there's the public park where most of the forest defenders live, in an area known as space camp.

That's where the kitchen was, all the food. There was a little campfire, which people would gather around and just be in community with each other.

In the heart of Space Camp is a clearing where the tall trees have grown together overhead, stitching themselves into a weather resistant canopy.

A living room area, we call it. It's a little pine Grove, so it was a nice spot to lay.

It's here that the forest defenders, many of whom have adopted forest names to protect their through identities, sit in community with one another.

People would bring instruments and play folk songs, sing together, just talk about dumb stuff, or even get into some of the heavier stuff in the theory and our political thoughts. And just really enrich each other's lives.

But tonight, being at first in the woods, things are pretty quiet. A lot of folks are already in their sleeping bags.

It wasn't until the next morning that I really got the full experience.

This place is a astonishing, she thinks. Everything is so cleverly engineered, from a water delivery network to piles of food donated by supporters or procured more creatively.

We'd go to pantries, we'd go in a dumpstering. We're very resourceful.

There's a gazebo that's been repurposed as a gathering place, complete with an upright piano. There are dining tables for group suppers. There are even improvised toilets.

We love call them shitters. You'd sit there and into the trench, and then you'd cover it with ash and dirt. It kept out the smell. There's something truly liberating about taking a shit in the middle of the woods. Just bringing you back to your animalistic nature.

As the morning haze burns off, Vianna watches dozens more people begin to pour into the park.

That's a big influx of people. There's not probably hundreds of people.

Members of environmental organizations and pro labor groups, members of the clergy, anarchists and drifters, veterans of past refinement actions around the country.

It's hard to describe how big of a popular movement this was.

A local activist nicknamed Earthworm is on hand that day. As a resident of Atlanta, Earthworm knows how committed movement folks tend to be in her city. Still, she's rarely seen anything as powerful or varied as this.

There would be picnics and barbecues and speaking events, symposia, Muscogee elders who'd been forced off of this land or coming from Oklahoma and taught about their traditional dance. I remember thinking at the time and remarking, Wow, who would have thought that opposition to cop city would manifest this way. It's just such a diverse movement.

To other attendees, like two protesters who go by Lavender and Mermade, respectively, the Week of Action is proof of something that they long suspected. That it is possible to build a community on one's own terms with one's own guiding principles.

The forest occupation or things like that present a vision of a society where we can have what we need and support each other without being at each other's throats or being subservient to each other.

I don't know.

You go to this magical forest and you find people that are really kind and really care about protecting it. In a way, it's really just romantic, especially being around people that shared similar identities, politically had the same things that they were striving for. I I found people that I loved and a space that I loved, and I found a struggle worth fighting for.

On top of its most basic aim to ward off the construction of a facility that represents everything the activists fear and dislike, the movement is a haven for people who have felt for their whole lives like they don't fully belong.

I think a lot of what sparks it is a lot of trans and gender nonconforming and queer folks are already out and casted by a society. So that pushes them more into more radical spaces, more questioning the norms that have been put upon us. And that makes us more prone to be politically active and be challenging things in ways that most people don't. A lot of queer people are unhoused because they've been disowned or whatever. So they are more free to live in a forest for a Then there's a queer community there, and then that attracts more queers, and so on and so forth. Many people went in binary and came out less binary. It starts as the And you start she/her, and then you're she/they, and then you're they/she, and now you're they/them. Oupsies. The real pipeline no one talks about.

At camp, the residents pass around a book called Joyful Militancy, which Vienna devours. The It's written by a pair of activist scholars. The basic idea is that the world is broken, increasingly so, by capitalism, by war, by the destruction of the environment. To fix it will require direct action, direct resistance, and also friendship, camaraderie, mutual reliance. Righteous fights, the idea goes, make for beautiful communities, and those beautiful communities can be an antidote to a culture that often feels alienating. It's basically Basically, Vianna comes to realize what was meant by that, you are now leaving the USA sign. Every day of the Week of Action, she is seeing firsthand how quickly the typical grind of real life can be replaced by something superior, something elevated and almost spiritual in nature.

It was very much a living for today vibe. We were just living out our ideals in a lot of ways. We had basically our own society out there where we are taking care of each other, living very communally, very self-directed.

That sounds like you were happy.

I was. It was probably the happiest of everybody in my life. Wednesday, August third, in approximately 12: 25 PM.

Around the same time, Vienna is in the woods for the Week of Action, an interesting exchange is taking place between an agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and an activist who has recently been detained in the South River Forest. Unbeknownst to any of the forest defenders, for several months, this investigator has been tracking the Defend the Forest movement, which has been connected by law enforcement to a string of troubling vandalism and arson incidents. Construction equipment, for example, has been burned and sabotaged. Atlanta police just released body camera footage of one of the explosions created by protesters outside a future Atlanta police and fire trading facility. Companies associated with the project have had their windows smashed and walls tagged with anti-cop city messages. All of a sudden, you hear this big loud boom, and the back windows shattering. My partner looked and she's like, Are they breaking our windows? I was like, Yeah. Owners and employees of engineering firms and contractors have awoken to protesters outside their homes. It became very, very loud. There were drums, there was loudspeakers. There were people at my doors and windows pounding on them. Police have managed to arrest a few dozen activists and charge them with minor crimes.

But to date, none of those arrested have wanted to talk about the nature of the movement or its aims or its internal structure. This guy is different. He seems to want to talk. Talk. And so the GBI agent seizes his opportunity. Do you know how the activism against cop city got started? If there was any central group or anything that brought it to light?

I've asked that same question myself, and there's no answers. It's basically just, I don't know, just magic in a way. It just seems like the wind blew a seed and then it started sprouting. There's no organization, really. There are people who have been there longer than others, but there's really no administration.

Not that I know of. It's all very seclusive because then someone like me could get detained and know exactly who to tell, or even text messages and sharing names and things like that.

The information just can always be got. If the information isn't even there, to begin with, it's called safety culture.

Okay. Basically, I guess to have an analogy, if there is no leader, there's no leader that can be got.

Exactly.

As the interview progresses, the GBI investigator pushes his subject. What about some of these tactics? Pretty destructive, right? Well, the activist answers, we are working with what we have, with what resources are available to us.

They have guns. We have to have some... We can't stand up to tanks, we can't stand up to guns, but we can make a It's very difficult for you guys to do what you guys want to do. There's a few people in there that are just out there because they just want to cause problems. Chaos is chaos. Yes.

But there are consequences to that, the young activist admits. Consequences to leaderlessness and chaos as everyone in the forest is about to find out. At the end of the week of action, Vienna reluctantly returns to Nebraska, reluctantly being the keyword. She'd prefer to stay in the paradise of the woods. She has a job, and she has a roommate, Gavin, who had steadfastly supported her during her transition.

Unfortunately, they were not as kind towards themselves. And They were very heavy into the alcohol, and eventually it took its toll on their kidneys and liver, and they lost their job, and they were just drinking all the time.

While Vienna has been in Georgia But Gavin has gotten markedly worse. Now they're the one that needs support.

Their body was literally falling apart.

They can barely greet Vienna. They're jaundiced, their breathing is ragged and shallow.

They died less than 48 hours later. Total organ failure. That's when my life fell apart. I feel a lot of guilt in regret about their death just because I spent so much time outside the house and I didn't give them the support I felt like I needed to give them.

But the guilt and the grief is only part of it. As she prepares a memorial service for Gavin, Viena discovers that her roommate has left behind unpaid bills. The bank is moving to repossess the house. Viena decides she won't wait to be evicted.

I quit my job, and then I went to the first place that I felt safe.

Which is the forest, a place that feels no less hot than it was in July. Climbing out of her van in the parking lot at the South River Forest, Fianna spots the burnout husk of a pickup truck, covered in graffiti. She does a double take.

I was like, That's new.

She shoulders her bag and follows the path out of the parking lot. Past the you are now leaving the USA sign, and she realizes, in contrast to her arrival for the week of action, that it's really quiet here. She'll later learn that construction crews are picking up the pace at the cop city site, and law enforcement is on alert. There are rumors have added surveillance of potential raids.

Everyone was off hiding, so just walk in to camp and there's just nobody around, and it's just really eerie ghost town vibes.

She passes a series of tree sits, tree forts, basically, that forest defenders use to monitor law enforcement movement and impede the progress of clear-cutting.

I hear, Who goes there?

The voice Fianna hears belongs to a short, sinewy activist with dark hair pulled back into a ponytail.

I tell them my name at that time, and they're like, Oh, hi there.

The activist goes by Torteguita, little turtle. Although they've been living in the woods for months, they'd kept their head low during the week of action, which is why Viana realizes she's only meeting them for the first time.

They preferred when there were smaller numbers where you could have more genuine connection with people and people who aren't just there to party and everything as fun as it is to have concerts and stuff in the woods.

Tort explains that they work as a informal spokesperson for the Forest Defenders, a liaison to journalists interested in the workings of the movement. It is something they Excel at. They're charismatic, funny, quick to laugh, quick on their feet.

I think it's incredibly important to continue having popular support because CUP City is incredibly unpopular already. We are very popular. I say this, we're really cool. We're winning every day that we're out here. Every party that we have is a success. Every time When somebody's needs are met, every time somebody has a nice warm, dry place to sleep out in the woods. Well, maybe not dry. Less wet.

Vienna and Tort spend the day together, walking and talking, sharing ideas. Later, Vienna tells Tort about her childhood in Nebraska, and Tort gives her a rundown on their backstory. They grew up in Venezuela, and when they were young, their mother had remarried an oil executive. Cognitive dissonance, Tort knows, considering where their politics ended up. Tort had traveled the world, Russia, Egypt, Europe. After high school, they'd briefly studied medicine with the goal of becoming a doctor. Later, they'd moved to Florida, to Tallahassee, where they found a life in activism. They built a mutual aid network, helped create a massive community garden, toured the country, participating in climate at protests. To make money, to make enough to survive, they'd worked on a lawn crew. Then they'd heard about the movement to build Cop City and come to the same decision as Vienna. This is where I'm meant to be. Torte adores life in the camp, as I'll later tell an Atlanta journalist named David Pizner.

I love living in the woods. Being a forest homo is pretty chill, especially when you have friends. I'm really good at making friends.

In Torte's diary, which they keep next to their sleeping bag in their tent, is a piece called A Poem Under a Tree, which seems to speak to their time in the forest. The beauty of a lover's touch should be free, and so should everything else one needs to live. The gentle reminder that everything dies and returns to cosmic dust makes me think about how precious each moment is. Each atom of eternity, the vastness of it all amazes me, comforts me, and leaves me grateful for the awesome greatness of our universe of Earth. Earth without art would be nothing of interest. For me, the little things make life worth living. Chop wood, water plants, rest and repeat. Chop wood, carry water. So it goes. Vienna is smitten by tort. There's no other way to put it. One evening, the pair retreat to tort's tent, and a stand of pines a couple of dozen yards from space camp.

We're flirting. We did massages, gave each other massages, and that's enough detail for this podcast.

It's worth noting that all of this, the romance, the courtship, comes at a pivotal time in the history of the camp. While Vienna was in Nebraska dealing with the aftermath of Gavin's death, forest defenders had been involved in a series of skirmishes with law enforcement. Later, a transformer, part of the local electrical road grid had also been damaged. Meanwhile, activists had sabotaged a truck belonging to Ryan Millsapp, a real estate mogul who was developing another section of the South River forest, which made him, in the eyes of the forest defenders, a target, too. Well, new tonight, Vandals destroyed a work truck near the controversial site of a planned training facility for Atlanta police and first responders. Millsap says Vandals ripped the doors off this Ram 5,500 pickup, then torched it. And he says they spray-painted threats on the sidewalk directly aimed at him. The threats on the truck were not ambiguous. Due crime. If this park isn't safe, Millsap isn't either. This was the same truck, the same graffiti city Vienna had passed on a return to the woods.

Cortequita talked about it being almost like a symbol of we're winning in a lot of ways because we built a little planter out of it. We did art and everything with it. It represented a lot of the movement in the sense of while there was destruction, we also were growing from that destruction, from the ashes of a very corrupt system.

Vienna carves out a role for herself in the camp. Lookout, medic, part-time cook, part of the glue that keeps the camp running.

Diversity of tactics was always something that was respected. You had people who were doing canvassing, and that's all they did. There were some people wouldn't cross the creek because they don't wanted to get arrested. I never took part in whatever perceived actions were taken over there.

This is deliberate. That work, Vienna decides, is not for her. It's too risky. Across the creek is private land. Just your presence there is an arrestable offense, and jail is the last place as a trans woman she wants to be. Outwardly, at least, In conversations with journalists, Tor takes a similar position.

I am not an adrenaline junkie. I'm out here because I like the forest a lot. I love the forest. I don't crave conflict. I'm sure some folks do, Some folks probably have flashpoint moments where it's like, Oh, yes, the truck being lit on fire, or whatever. But not me. No, I love it when we're all chill. Just love it when everything is calm.

And yet, tort has two speeds, two modes, really. They can be friendly, they can be easygoing, but they can also be reactive, quick to action, especially when they feel pushed, which they do when law enforcement starts making incursions into the forest, destroying tree sits and arresting a number of protesters for truspassing.

Whenever the cops destroy things, it just makes us angry. Then we just build more things. Because it's like, what better way to say, Fuck the police, than to build and thrive and be happy and peaceful and kind to each other. That's such good vengeance.

But the problem with a certain type of vengeance, even if it's good vengeance, is that it can perpetuate a cycle rather than halt it. It tends to bring more heat, more pressure. Sure enough, outside the forest, the city is planning its next step, a response that will forever shatter the paradise the couple have found. Coming up on this season of We Came to the Forest.

As long as I'm your governor, there will be no gray area or political double talk.

We will support our law enforcement officers in the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center needs to be built, period. We've heard that we're militarizing the police.

We will never be militarized. We are equipped to respond to whatever dangers may be for our city.

There were Armored SWAT police at every entrance to the house.

They had come prepared to attack and kill anybody that they encountered in the house.

What's on fire down there? What the fuck are they doing?

Now, I don't wish even on my worst enemy. Because do you know what it's like to be grieving for somebody and not know who you're even grieving for yet? But you know it's somebody you know?

Am I scared of the state? I mean, pretty silly not to be.

That was the first time I knew what they were charging me with. The weight really hit me.

If their explanation of the events of that morning are true, they would have every reason to be as transparent as possible. What do you think is actually happening? I don't know.

Sure seems like they're hiding something.

If you like We Came to the Forest, you can binge all episodes ad-free right now by joining WNDYRI Plus in the WNDRI app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery. Com/survey. If you have a tip about a story you think we should investigate, please write to us at wndri. Com/tips. We came to the Forest as a production of WNDYRI, Campside Media, and Tenderfoot TV. The series is hosted by me, Matthew Sher, and is written and reported by me and Tommy Andres. For Campside Media, our producers are Abicara Dawn and Henry Lvoy. Additional production assistance from Timothy Pratt, John Marouhsh, Alia Papes, Johnny Kaufman, and Jamie Albright. Sound design and mix by Garret Tiedemann. Our theme is by Mondo Boys. Original music by Makeup and Vanity Set and Garret Tiedemann. Our studio engineers are Jimmy Guthrie at Arcade 160 and Seth Cohen at Seth Co Sound. Fact-checking by Alia Papes. Tommy Andres is the executive producer. Special Special thanks to David Eisner. For WNDYRI, our senior producer is Lata Pandia. Coordinating producer is Cierra Franco. Development producer is Olivia Webber.

Consulting by Cassius Adair of Sylvia Consulting. Executive producers are Vanessa Gregoriades, Josh Dean, Adam Hoff, and me, Matthew Sher, for Campside Media. Executive producers are Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay for Tenderfoot TV. Tv. Executive producers are Najri Eton, George Lavender, Marshall Louis, and Jenn Sargent for Wondery.

Are you captivated by the dark and mysterious world of true crime? Wndyri Plus offers you the ultimate true crime experience with early access to new episodes, exclusive content, and a seamless ad-free listening journey. With WNDYRI Plus, you'll get access to hundreds of podcasts, including more than 50 true crime series like Dr. Death, the shocking true story of a trusted surgeon who brought unimaginable pain and suffering to his patients. This was not an operation that was performed. This was attempted murder and there's Morbit, the hit podcast that's a light-hearted nightmare. With WNDYRY Plus, you get access to exclusive bonus content, too, allowing you to dive deeper into the cases you love, like in Suspect, where an ordinary Halloween party turned into a terrifying murder mystery and left its mark on the community.

This case is one of those roller coaster rides where it's like, no, he did it for sure. No, for sure he did it.

Each story is crafted to keep you enthralled, revealing the complexities and motivations behind every crime. Subscribe to WNDRI+ on the WNDRI app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify today. Unlock the door to a world of true crime like never before. With WNDRI+, the best true crime stories are always at your fingertips.