I Could Never Be A Criminal, Could I?

Joanne Freeman:
True crime has been a popular podcast genre since the mid 2010s. That was when Serial, a show about the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee became the most listened to podcast in America after it’s October 2014 debut.

Ed Ayers:
In fact, 2014 was a big year for true crime podcasts. Criminal, a show produced at WUNC released its first episode earlier that year.

Phoebe Judge:
… In North Carolina. He didn’t know it at the time, but he may have just had a brush with death. I’m Phoebe Judge and this is Criminal. Lauren Spohrer, my co-creator and I, had both been working for a national public radio show called The Story with Dick Gordon and I was the guest host and she was producing a lot of the segments and directing the show and we were sitting around one night and thought to ourselves, “People who listen to public radio also watch Law and Order. They may not want to admit it but they do.”

Ed Ayers:
Right.

Phoebe Judge:
“What if we start a crime show?” Lauren said. I thought, well that was the smartest thing I’d ever heard because I realized we would never run out of stories.

Ed Ayers:
Criminal is not only an original in its genre but a standout. It’s appeal is in the details but not in a salacious or violent way. Criminal carefully recounts each crime story with a deep curiosity and empathy for the people involved.

Phoebe Judge:
We very early on decided that we would try to make a show that was an answer to some of the crime reporting that we were seeing out there, some of the sensationalistic and violent, overdramatized, lack of empathy or concern for the victims that were being spoken about, all of that. We wanted to try and do it in a different way and to take a very broad look at what that word, “Crime,” means.

Ed Ayers:
What preconceived ideas do you think people have about crime or criminals? What do they bring to the show?

Phoebe Judge:
Well I think that people can oftentimes believe that they could never be a criminal.

Ed Ayers:
Ah yeah, mm-hmm (affirmative).

Phoebe Judge:
“That’s not me,” you know? Well I know people that would never be me. I’m so interested in the stories where the same person has thought that exact same thing and then something happens and they’ve become that other, that criminal. Those are so intriguing to me. I think that we like to believe that all those who do bad things, wrong things, are on one side of a line and we firmly are on the other as good people and we don’t come close to that line. I would say after doing this show for 140 episodes or more that I think we’re all much closer to that line than we may assume that we are and it just takes a circumstance, a series of events that can push us over. Now I’m not talking about terrible, violent, sadistic, serial crimes. I’m talking about those crimes that maybe we get pulled into that we never thought that we would and maybe we would never do again.

Phoebe Judge:
I’m thinking about an episode we did with a woman who helped a man escape from prison. I promise you that woman had never considered herself to be a criminal and probably still today is wondering how anyone could call her a criminal because she can’t understand it herself. But those are the stories that I think are really interesting to explore.

Ed Ayers:
Was that the episode Off Leash?

Phoebe Judge:
Off Leash.

Ed Ayers:
Yeah, because I was just listening to that and she said, “I always counted to three at stops signs. It never occurred to me to violate any kind of law.” I thought that was a particularly powerful demonstration of your theme there, really. Would it be giving away too much to ask kind of what happens to her?

Phoebe Judge:
She helps a man escape in a dog crate out of prison. I think she believes that he’s in love with her and maybe he is, I mean, who am I to say? They end up getting caught and she now is remarried and out of prison, she spent some time in prison, and living her life. When she tells the story, the way she talks about it, it’s almost as if she’s talking about another person because she’s still so amazed that she got wrapped up in this whole thing.

Ed Ayers:
Right, right. You say you’ve done well over 100 episodes, how do you pick stories for Criminal?

Phoebe Judge:
Well there really is no criteria except again our kind of own curiosity but I will say that we try to choose stories where we know that we will have some person speaking about this topic whose had some direct experience. We wanted to create a show that had a lot of first person narrative in it so that sometimes will help drive our stories. We also want to pick stories that haven’t been covered so well in the media in the past and if we do choose a story that has been covered well. I think that we oftentimes try to find a new angle on that but really the only criteria is our own curiosity and by this point as many episodes as we are in I think one of us will bring a story idea to the other and we’ll kind of immediately know, “Oh, that sounds like a Criminal story.” Criminal being this show. That sounds like something that fits the bill for the type of stories that we want to tell.

Ed Ayers:
Are there particular episodes or interviews that stand out over these years?

Phoebe Judge:
A lot. There’s a lot of episodes that stand out and interviews that I’ve done. One of my favorite episodes is an episode that’s called 695BGK about an unarmed black man who was shot by a white police officer because of a mistake of a letter on a license plate. That was I think an important episode to tell and it was also going on three or four years ago when we were seeing a rise in the number of black men that were being shot by white police officers and we were trying to figure out how we could comment. Not comment on that but participate in that conversation but by doing something that maybe hadn’t been done before. What we chose to do was to pick a story many of the men who had been shot by these white police officers had died and so we couldn’t hear from them.

Ed Ayers:
Right.

Phoebe Judge:
We chose a story where a man survived and so we could hear from him and hear his perspective on exactly what happened.

Ed Ayers:
Well somehow you managed to have other podcasts even while you do this remarkable one. You have Phoebe Reads a Mystery which sounds as if you might be reading mystery novels or books. Tell me about that. How does that work?

Phoebe Judge:
Well that was just a funny idea. When this whole virus started and staying at home and quarantine we had heard before that maybe sometimes people write and say, “Phoebe, would you read something?” Probably just to put them to sleep, I’m sure, but we thought that it would be a thing we could do. That I could read a chapter a day from a classic mystery novel and maybe it would just be a distraction for people and so we started with The Mysterious Affair at Styles, the Agatha Christie book and we really just hoped to do that but for some reason, I don’t know, people seem to like the show and so we kept it going and now are on our third book. We’re reading The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins and we’ll probably go back to an Agatha Christie next but I think it’s just a way for people to escape maybe what’s going on all around us right now and very simply just, and quietly, go to another time. That’s surprising to me that it’s continued but I’m very happy to be doing it.

Ed Ayers:
It’s nice to have the script written beforehand for a change.

Phoebe Judge:
That’s exactly right.

Ed Ayers:
You have another podcast called This Is Love. Love and crime, do you see a connection between these two topics?

Phoebe Judge:
Well certainly those are one of the two most covered topics in the world but I think what we wanted to do in the same way that we had done this with the word, “Crime,” is push the boundaries of this word, “Love.” The two shows, while seemingly very different, one about love and one about crime, are actually very similar. They’re both another show about the human experience and finding stories that challenge that notion of the word, “Love,” and what it means. We have very few episodes in this show that are actually about romantic love. We’re in the middle of our fourth season, it’s a whole season about animals and the season before was a whole season about Italy. I think that it’s fun for us to be able to every episode think, “Okay, how can we surprise our listeners? What can we do? How can we get them scratching their head saying, ‘how are they calling this a love story?'” And I hope by the end maybe people see why but I think that taking on these stories has made the crime show better. It’s just another attempt to understand why people do the things they do, what drives people. The idea of it’s all going to be okay I think is an overwhelming message in the love show of just even when you don’t think it is, it will be okay. One way or another it will be okay.

Ed Ayers:
Phoebe Judge is the host of Criminal, a Radiotopia podcast produced at WUNC and distributed by PRX. You can find episodes of Criminal at Thisiscriminal.com or wherever you get your podcasts.