The Sunday Read: ‘Podcasters Took Up Her Sister’s Murder Investigation. Then They Turned on Her’

《星期日报》上写道:播客们开始调查她姐姐的谋杀案。然后他们把矛头指向了她

The Daily

2024-01-21

48 分钟
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Liz Flatt drove to Austin, Texas, mostly out of desperation. She had tried talking with the police. She had tried working with a former F.B.I. profiler who ran a nonprofit dedicated to solving unsolved murders. She had been interviewed by journalists and at least one podcaster. She had been featured on a Netflix documentary series about a man who falsely confessed to hundreds of killings. Although she didn’t know it at the time, Flatt 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, or Debbie, in 1975. It was now 2021. She had come to Austin for a conference, CrimeCon, which formed around the same time that Flatt began her quest, at a moment now seen as an inflection point in the long history of true crime, a genre as old as storytelling but one that adapts quickly to new technologies, from the printing press to social media. Flatt 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 for-profit American Military University. Their presentation was on another cold case, the murder of Rebekah Gould in 2004, whose killer they claimed to have helped find using a technique that has quickly become a signature of the changing landscape of true crime: crowdsourcing.
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  • True crime is as old as storytelling, the cultural obsession.

  • It's nothing new.

  • One thing that true crime kind of excels at, though, is it adapts to new technology and media formats really well, from the printing press to podcasts and Facebook.

  • And with this, we've seen the development of what some people call the true crime industrial complex.

  • It's a huge business, and it can also be an emotional minefield for victims families.

  • My name's Sarah Barine, and I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, and I used to live in Lubbock, Texas, where this week's Sunday read takes place.

  • It's a piece I wrote for the magazine about a woman named Liz Flatt, whose sister, Deborah Sue Williamson, or Debbie, was murdered almost 50 years ago when Debbie was 18 and Liz was just eight.

  • My story follows Liz's efforts to solve her sister's murder and how, in the process, she became a target of some of the very people who also wanted to see her sister's murder solved.

  • So the trouble for Liz begins in 2021.

  • Decades had passed since her sister's killing.

  • From Liz's perspective, the police weren't really making any progress on the case, and Liz had already tried a bunch of other avenues, appearing on podcasts, talking to journalists, working with a nonprofit that focused on cold cases.

  • She was even part of a true crime documentary on Netflix.

  • Increasingly desperate, she finds herself at Crimecon, which is the biggest true crime conference in the United States, possibly even in the world.

  • And there she meets these two independent investigator podcasters.

  • One is also a journalist and the other an adjunct professor at a university.