Hey, Alphabet boys, listeners, this is Trevor Aronson. I'm here to tell you about a new series from me and Western Sound, Into the Madness. It's a very different kind of series from me and well, a different kind of series altogether, something very unique. Into the Madness is a seven part investigation of the twenty twenty two mass shooting in Highland Park, Illinois, a devastating attack during a Fourth of July parade in the Chicago suburbs. Prosecutors charged Bobby
Cremo with the mass shooting. Creamo was a SoundCloud artist who went by the stage name Awake the Rapper, but the mass shooting near Chicago was part of something insidious. Cremo had created an elaborate game, complete with cryptic videos, a book of numbers, and an eerie online presence designed
to see a conspiracy theory about the massacre. Into the Madness is a deep dive into the events leading up to the mass shooting and the story of a woman who became a confidant to Cremo and the final player in his twisted game. Drawing from dozens of interviews in more than forty eight hours of recorded calls with Cremo, I tell a story that will challenge everything you think you know about mass shootings, conspiracy theories, and the fragile
boundary between reality and illusion. Into the Madness explores the rise of nihilistic extremism, the role of technology and fostering extremism, and America's collective dissent into conspiracy thinking. You're about to hear the first chapter of this series. To listen to the full series, search for Into the Madness in the Audible app or follow me Trevor Aronson on the Audible app. You can start listening today when you sign up for
a free thirty day trial. Here's chapter one. A warning, this series contains graphic language and descriptions of violence and death. It also contains recordings of a man accused of committing mass murder. We advise listener discretion among researchers. A violent extremist A theory about a new type of threat is emerging. Doomers extremely online young men who have embraced a bleak, nihilistic outlook. They don't kill for a cause. The theory
suggests they don't kill to advance an ideology. They kill because they believe and nothing at all. This idea is reflected in an online video created by a suburban Chicago man named Robert Krema the Third, or Bobby as he's known.
Where am I going?
I don't know. I don't care. There is no past or future, just the now. I need to leave now. I need to just do it. It is my destiny. Everything has led up to this. Nothing can stop me, not even myself. Is there such thing as free will? Or has this been planned out like a cosmic recipe?
After posting this video, Bobby was arrested for committing a mass shooting during a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois, which left seven people dead and forty eight others injured. Police found surveillance footage showing Bobby dressed as a woman earbuds in walking to and from the rooftop where the shots were fired, and on the sidewalk they found a weapon. It discarded AR fifteen style rifle registered to Bobby. After his arrest, prosecutors announced that Bobby had confessed.
He was questioned in the Highland Park Police department. He was read his miranda, warnings, offered attorneys, etc. He went into details about what he had done. He admitted to what he had done.
The video Bobby posted before the shooting seemed to suggest that he had been signaling about his plans all along. I need to just do it, Bobby said. Nothing can stop me, not even myself. But the video is more than a cryptic prelude to the shooting. It acts as a trailer, an introduction to something bigger. Bobby posted a series of videos online, each one part of a dark, twisted game, a puzzle he created for anyone willing to play along. Bobby didn't carry out the Highland Park mass
shooting for political reasons. He wasn't driven by ideology. His motive was simpler. He did it as part of a game. Bobby Kremo appears to be proof of the Doomer theory. But here's the most unsettling part the game Bobby created. It didn't end with the shooting.
Okay, in yougording none?
No, this is real.
This holy was a false slight, void by the people who hide behind the FBI.
The witnesses are actors. The interview, even from his jail cell as he waits trial, He's still pulling the strings, still playing the role of game master with a player on the outside.
The suspect in the Highland Park parade. Massacre has kept his phone privileges despite some concerning behavior. The Chicago Sun Times is reporting that a woman recorded a phone call with the suspect, and Robert Kremo claimed that the shooting was quote false flag and that the FBI orchestrated it. He also names two alleged FBI agents.
And Bobby's reality warping game isn't over.
It's not so much just like a bunch of puzzle pieces thrown together. There's meaning behind it.
This is the story of a new kind of threat, a new kind of killer, not one driven by any sort of traditional ideology, but by a performative need for an audience, like an Internet troll brought to life as a mass shooter. I'm Trevor Aronson from Western Sound. This is Into the Madness an audible original Chapter one. The journalist and the murderer's friend.
So okay, So none of my friends were really into like the LOFI or the SoundCloud rap at that time, but I was. And I was the huge dork for being into SoundCloud rap. They all made fun of me for it, So I was really surprised to find out that they were going to have a SoundCloud rapper come through. I was really excited. Though.
This is Jamie, or, as she prefers, James, her nickname. You'll hear her refer to by both names, Jamie or James. She first meets Bobby Kremo in a club in Indiana in November twenty sixteen, when the hip hop subgenre known as SoundCloud rap is beginning to reshape American music. The music streaming platform SoundCloud disrupted the industry by allowing independent artists to cultivate their own followings, cutting out the record label middleman, and pushing the boundaries of what hip hop
can be. With its emo, grungesthetic SoundCloud rap stood apart from the brash, chest beating bravado of more commercial hip hop. Its lyrics often romanticize Xanax and suicide, set against down tempo beats that are purposely distorted and degraded, as if the songs are playing from an old, worn out cassette. Jamie was surprised to learn that a SoundCloud rapper from Chicago was coming to a club in her small Indiana town.
And Bobby came in and introduced himself to the owner, and I was standing up front talking to all of them, and he introduced himself to me, and he's got like this languid type of like it's almost like velvety, quiet voice all the time. So he introduced himself to me, and at that time, I remember I'm looking like a kid with like a backwards cap, and he was just like, hey, what's up. I'm Bobby, and I was.
Like, hey, just sixteen years old. Then, Bobby only had two tattoos, a small cross on his finger and the eye of Horace on his arm. Most of the famous SoundCloud rappers had tattoos on their faces, necks, and hands, a trademark look for SoundCloud rap, but Bobby at the time didn't have much ink. So when Bobby introduced himself to Jamie, she never imagined this was a SoundCloud rapper from Chicago. He just didn't look the part.
He didn't say Hi, I'm awake the rapper. He just said hey, what's up, I'm Bobby until it was time for him to go on, and then I was like, oh, so, okay, so this probably is gonna suck. This is going to be a horrible show because it's like this quiet little kid, like, what what SoundCloud rapping is? He going to do when he talks like this and he's so self spoke, canna apply. But he was really good. It was really good. I wish I had video of it to show you. I wish, but I don't.
So I stop for a second and think to myself, and so need you or anything else? I will mortal in these pages that discontinue. I'm an issue why he made in some swing patient and Brent away the sleepways so much or not enough at all.
They talked more after the show Drugs.
It's just he wasn't trying to like dominate the room. He wasn't interested in like chatting about a bunch of bullshit, which I'm not good at small talk. I don't care. He wasn't on his phone, he wasn't taking a bunch of selfies. I'm not interested in that either. Like he was very in the moment and watching everybody, and that's what I tend to do. So we were very content to be off to the side, just kind of having
a quiet conversation about like nothing. But I immediately felt very connected to him and like comfortable with him, Like I just I just genuinely liked him. I really liked him.
Something about Bobby drew Jamie in. She felt she understood him even from that one brief encounter. Back then, Jamie was a nursing school. She didn't have much time for friendships and relationships, but she and Bobby kept in touch off and on.
Was just Snapchat and Instagram that I followed him on, but he tends to disappear from the Internet from time to time completely. He would just rip everything down and delete everything, and I tend to do the same.
Thing over the next few years. Through their sporadic exchanges amid Bobby's repeated houdiniacs on social media, Jamie catches fleeting glimpses of Bobby. As he changes, Bobby gets more and more tauch hues, he begins to resemble the other SoundCloud artists, the number forty seven etched into his right temple, a tally mark beneath his right eye, and the word awake scripts it elegantly above the other coiled around his neck, a thorny rose stem across his knuckles, and black ink
f U c K l O VE fuck love. Other than meeting at that club, the relationship between Bobby and Jamie exists entirely online. It's been months since they'd communicated, and then comes July fourth, twenty twenty two, the annual parade in downtown Highland Park, Illinois. Hundreds of people line the streets, some sitting in folding chairs. A marching band plays, and floats promote local businesses and politicians. What you're about
to hear from that morning is disturbing. At ten fourteen am, the gunshots begin in first most assume it's fireworks, that what happened harmless. Then the crowd erupts in panic. On July fourth, twenty twenty two, Gamie's at home nursing a bird with a broken wing and looking through videos on YouTube.
I was trying to find soothing bird music for an angry bird. But then I saw that there was this live on because there was this active shooting in you know, Highland Park, Chicago, which I have other friends that live in that area and not just Bobby. So I was like, oh my god. So I turned it on and just started kind of following it throughout the day, from pretty much the time that they went live on the news until he was arrested. So I had no idea it
was Bobby. I was just following it because I was home well the ten search for the gunman lasted for hours, of course, until we finally heard police caught the suspect in Lake Forest near Wesley and US Highway forty one. Here's a map theory. It wasn't until they showed the picture of him sitting in the back of the cop car, because like they showed the live of him being arrested.
I watched all of that unfold. But then I saw the picture of him in the back of the cop car, and it was the eyes, like he his eyes are very unforgettable. He's got they're almost they're sad. Even when he's happy, he's just they're like puppy dog eyes all the time kind of they're very unforgettable, very memorable. So there's a picture of him that was posted and he's sitting in the back of a cop car and he's
looking up at an officer. And that was when it kind of hit me that, like, Okay, I know him, I do know him, and he did not, like he didn't look right in the face to me, And I was like, this has to be like some kind of a psychotic break or something like, there's no way that this person that I met and talked to has done these things that they're saying.
Fourth of July is great, love it, but it gets old sitting like trying to get your seat because people go out like a day before and put their chair down in all of this.
This is Rachel Walstein, a longtime resident of Highland Park, Illinois. She's talking about the city's popular Fourth of July parade. She, her mom, and one of her kids decided to skip the crowd at the parade instead get breakfast nearby in downtown Highland Park.
As soon as we got out of the car, I heard fireworks, like really loud, and we saw everybody just running and strollers turned over and absolute chaos. And then we went to a coffee shop in Highwood, which is the next town over, and I mean we understood then when had happened, and they just tried to wrap our
minds around it. I mean, it was like it was crazy because Highland Park, first of all, I've always felt incredibly safe here and just that you know, something like that could happen in our town and on the Fourth of July, and it just it didn't make any sense until people started calling me and texting.
Me saying it's the Where's Waldo guy?
The Where's Waldo guy? That's Bobby Cremo. After the twenty twenty election, Rachel had been active in protest in the Highland Park area against Donald Trump's Stopped the Steal movement, which promoted to lie that Trump had been cheated out of the presidential line. This is a video Rachel recorder during one of the counter protests. Across the street. In the middle of the crowd waving Trump flags stands Bobby Cremo.
He's dressed in black jeans, black converts, round glasses, and a red striped shirt with a stocking cap, looking like where is Waldo? But instead of participating in the protest, he's just standing there looking blankly holding a can of red bull.
So I started diving into his background because I knew what I knew about these Stopped the Steel rallies and Hyland Park is a third Jewish We have more juice per capita than New York. And I had started to see some things being posted online, and then also people were sending me things saying that you know, he had this discord channel. I'll calleds and take a look at these posts we grabbed.
After the shooting Bobby Krimo left behind a massive digital footprint, dozens of videos, multiple Twitter accounts, messages on discord servers and online forums, and a whole discography of his music. As Awake the Rapper, Rachel starts sifting through Bobby's materials, which leads her to believe that Bobby is a far
right Trump supporter and an anti Semite. He posted offensive statements about Blacks, Asians, and Jews on an obscure website, and his videos appear to reference Christian nationalism and right wing political movements. Among the videos Rachel finds is one of Bobby wearing black jeans, a black hoodie, and red and white high tops, painting the words God's Not Dead
on the side of his house. It's a reference to the low budget Christian propaganda film starring Kevin Sorbo, the actor best known for his role as Hercules in the nineties TV series. The photos and videos of Bobby at Stop This Deal, and another picture of him draped in a Trump flag lead Rachel and much of the news media to assume that Bobby had been radicalized by Trump's rhetoric, that this is an act of far right political violence. Bobby had named a discord Channel SS, and he also
had those two letters tattooed on his hand. Rachel assumed that Bobby's SS is a Nazi reference, but much of Bobby's online in real world presence is tailored to create these kinds of illusions. At first glance, it seems to confirm whatever narrative you expected, but on closer inspection it raises more questions. The SS on Bobby's hand could have
been for Nazi stormtroopers. Rachel's conclusion isn't outlandish under the circumstances, but it isn't accurate for Bobby SS stands for Sleepy squad rap Collective yet formed he attended Stop the steal rallies, so he must have been a Trump supporter, but he was dressed as Where's Waldo? Was he really a Trump supporter or was it all some form of performance an
elaborate troll. The reason it's easy to assume Bobby Cremo is ideological is that he had borrowed images and symbols from various sources religious texts, political movements, video games, movies, altering them slightly to create a branded, but ultimately superficial identity for himself. The videos Bobby left behind on the Internet, borrowed heavily from other hip hop artists and online culture more broadly, filled with references to memes, video games, internet jokes,
that sort of thing. Some of the videos are just music videos for a wake the rapper, like this Onegad Bobby, his hair dyed red and pulled in the pigtails, is wearing welding goggles and what appears to be a cheap, oversized astronaut Halloween costume. He's dancing and walking through a deli in Convenienced or his father once owned in Highland Park, Illinois.
This smell of you.
Running out in Time's.
Other videos are intentionally cryptic. In this video, Bobby stands just inches from the camera. All you can see is his face from the nose up, framed by his tattoos. He's staring intently at something off camera, the glow of a screen reflecting in his eyes. In the background, you can hear a track from Mike Wallace's nineteen fifty eight
interview with Brave New World author Aldus Huxley. Right off the bat, let me ask you this as you see it, Who and what are the enemies of freedom here in the United states in another video, which the news media play up to dramatic effect, Fallow in the shooting, Ladies and gentlemen, welcome you. Bobby stands in what seems to be a classroom cladden, a long sleeved black T shirt emblazoned with a large, bright yellow smiley.
Face, your eyes on my mind and cutey with the fast I wanna makeumon. I'm running at its arm shotty his good class, smoke and show.
Then about halfway through the video, Bobby, seated at school desk, reaches into his backpack. The screen goes black and the music turns ominous. Bobby reappears, his head encased in a black helmet fitted with a GoPro camera. He wears a tactical vest, holding an Ammo cartridge for an AR fifteen style rifle. He lets bullets tumble from his hand onto the classroom floor. Although no gun is ever seen, the
intent is unmistakable. A grim visual commentary on school shootings, but in the aftermath of the Highland Park Parade shooting, this portrayal took on an ominous and unsettling sognificance, as if he were role playing his future crime. Viewed in the aftermath of the Highland Parks shooting. Bobby's videos and images seem to suggest he's planning the attack and hinting at it for months, but it's hard to say if that's truly what they communicate. Seen in isolation, the messages
aren't so clear. After mass shootings and other tragedies. There's a tendency to search for meaning to make sense of what happened, but in that search it's easy to confuse noise for signal. A few years after Bobby meets Jamie in Indiana, he starts to cultivate a life in the darker corners of the Internet, where racist and fascist commentary often flourishes, including forums where users share extremely violent videos and then make fun of other suffering. However, Bobby's writings
in these forums aren't truly ideological. He's ironic and nihilistic, not serious. That's the culture of these forums. Everything's a joke or fodder patrolling, even a gruesome death captured on video. Extremism researchers believe this kind of radical nihilism, a philosophy that no information can be trusted and nothing is what it seems, has the potential to transform into violence just as Islamus extremists in the West became radicalized by watching
propaganda for al Qaeda or the Islamic State. The theory goes the so called dumers may become radicalized by the modern Internet, which left algorithms can become a personal fire hose of conspiracy theories and misinformation. The Dumer idea suggests a total lack of belief can be just as radicalizing as a dogmatic belief. After the Fourth of July mass shooting, the assailant drops the rifle on a sidewalk in Highland Park before fleeing the area. The rifle traces back to
Bobby Cremo. Several hours later, police pull over Bobby while he's driving his mother's silver Honda Fit on a road just outside Highland Park. Here's what reportedly happens during those several hours. Bobby, dressed as a woman, drives to his dad's house. He changes it to men's clothing. From there, he heads to Northbrook, another Chicago suburb, where he apparently stops for a drink of water. Bobby continues on to Wisconsin, where, just outside Madison, he buries his phone in the parking
lot of an auto body shop. Then Bobby returns to the Chicago area, where he's arrested. Police say Bobby considered but abandoned a plan to attack a second parade in Wisconsin. He h had another rifle in the car. Bobby's action suggests some sort of panic, a plan that didn't work out, or maybe there wasn't much of a plan at all. Back in Indiana, Jamie's watching the man hunh play out live. She's shocked to learn that her distant friend might have committed the mass shooting.
At first, I thought, Okay, it's got to be like a mental health thing. It's got to be some kind of undetected, undiagnosed, untreated, ignored mental health kind of crisis thing. That has to be what's happening here? That was my first thought.
Just like Rachel Walkstein, Jamie starts examining as much of Bobby's digital footprint as she can, But Jamie comes to a much different conclusion than Rachel and the media do. She finds the videos strange. She starts to wonder is Bobby trying to send a message. Inconsistent and contradictory news reports from the crime scene, which are not uncommon following violent chaotic events, only fuel Jamie's suspicions. It's not that Jamie thinks Bobby wasn't there at the crime scene. He
clearly was. The surveillance video of Bobby dressed as a woman and his rifle left on the sidewalk are indisputable pieces of evidence. But Jamie thinks the real story might be more more complicated than the one told in the news media and in court filings. Why else, Jamie's thinking goes,
would there be so much conflicting information. For example, on the day of the shooting, a man at the parade tells the news media he saw the gunman on the street, even though the shellcasings were found on a rooftop.
I had a good look at this guy who was not on a rooftop. He was on the street. He was right behind the street post that had a stop sign on it, and he was shooting from behind. That this information about being on a rooftop. Just because there was an access to the rooftop doesn't mean he was there.
And there are other odd or conflicting reports. The shooter fired more than seventy rounds, but fifteen of those bullets were fired not into the crowd, but instead into a knee wall on the roof, and the Highland Park Police tell the news media that they believed Bobby had planned the attack for weeks, but the FBI leader says he had planned it for years.
That math does not math for me. There's a whole lot of math doesn't math, but that especially does not.
So Jamie sets out to investigate. She requests to be added to Bobby Krima's contact list in jail. There, he has access to a tablet that, depending on the restrictions, let some text and call people on the outside.
And I waited and I waited and I waited for him to message me back, and it took a while, but he did answer me.
Hello, this is a prepaid debit call from It's Bobby Cremo. This call is from a correctionion facility, and it's subject to monitoring and recording. Thank you for your thing.
Like, hey, how are you? It took about god about a month, but once he was given the tablet, he started texting and calling NonStop and it was like nothing ever happened, like we had just met at the venue yesterday. Wait to done.
I'm doing nothing. What are you doing?
You're doing something?
I'm always doing nothing in time. As Jamie gets Bobby to open up, she starts recording her conversations with him, making more than forty eight hours of tape. Been all. She wants to know more about the shooting, and the recordings give her a record.
What are you doing?
He never addressed anything for a very long time, and I didn't ask.
How's the weather?
Every single day he asks the same three questions, What's for dinner, how's the weather? What am I wearing every day?
What's for dinner?
Dinner? Like I'm thinking about dinner like Bobby, it is okay, it's you're an hour behind. Well, I just ate a huge fucking breakfast burrito. Actually, I was very careful not to ask him any questions other than you know, do you need anything? Are you okay?
I'm being yellman and doing him in pain.
I don't know what human things.
Walking and talking and cooping, sure, researching.
I don't think I started pressing him for answers until this past summer. But initially, no, I didn't ask him anything because I knew he wasn't going to say anything.
Most of the calls are just hours of meaningless banter. Bobby sounds lonely, like he's just using Jamie as someone to talk to. It's also clear that Bobby is keenly aware he's being recorded not by Jamie but by jail officials. When he talks about the shooting or conspiracies about the shooting, he speaks obliquely.
See I've been here. I've been around many mountains, I've been over many hells. I've gotten over every single one of them. Here, I said, blacked out, and it's big. You know, I'm living in my very own episode in the Twilight Zone, where everybody thinks of cartoon character and they're living in their own little cartoon world.
I don't take you're a cartoon character.
None of it is real. That's Bobby insisting that we're all witnessing a staged reality, with him cast unwillingly as the villain the mass shooter. Jamie responds with sympathy. I don't think you're a cartoon character, she says, echoing his words. But how much of that sympathy is genuine and how much is part of her own cartoon character to coax Bobby into talking more about the shooting and what led up to it, that's unclear in these early conversations I.
Don't think you're a cartoon character, Bobby.
Of course, all I ever want is for the truth that he knows.
But that's what I'm trying to do.
But if you then I don't put my hope in it, because I know that God is my witness and no matter what, it will always be all right. You know. They can beat me, torture me, start me, all the things that they've done, but all He've ever done walk the truth, you know, that's all that they're But even the content, I don't care what they say.
I don't care what they do.
It has nothing to do with me.
I'm just in the middle.
Of it, you know.
At times, Bobby weaves Christian themes into his monologues. He claims to be on the right side, walking in the light of God, but he also alludes to a vast government conspiracy.
I'm just simply a pawn.
You're pond, We're all pause, We're not we're not the most rich in powerful. We're just you know, humans for them to suck every out of the life and money out.
At other times, he's just plain cryptic. No one's telling the truth, he says.
People nowadays all around have become sick, whatever it is, they no longer desire to create a healthy relationship or or hell, you.
Have one minute, Bobby.
The amount of people who why nowadays is both people and that's fundamentals.
Are you gonna call me back?
Oh?
You put me back?
Please?
Why?
I'm not finished?
I have thank you for you being global girling Jesus Christ.
This fucking guy, this fucking guy.
Sometimes Jamie's frustration seeps through Bobby's cryptic, meandering responses testing her patients. Each direct question she poses is met with vague evasions, as if he's playing a game only he understands. And there's another concept in the conversations the birds. Jamie often records their calls outside under the canopy of trees near Indiana Yard, where bird feeders dangle lazily. The bird song, a gentle, almost hypnotic chorus, becomes a quiet, persistent ampanion to their exchanges.
Dude, it's a pre paid get it call from Bobby.
During their conversations, Jamie and Bobby build a playlist, which becomes a way for Jamie to keep Bobby engaged when he refuses to answer her questions or is too cryptic.
So the duration of these calls, most of the time is spent with him wanting me to play him music because he no longer has the ability to strain music on his own. So most of the calls can you play me a song? Can you play me a song? Can you play me a song? Like yeah, I can. Can you answer a fucking question for me, because I'd love to know what the fuck it is you're doing. But after that there wasn't really much conversation because all he wanted he just wanted to hear music.
One of the songs they add to the playlist no psycho Killer. By talking heads, you're.
Saying, well, but you're not saying anyone.
Yeah, this is like a big, perfect song. So totally apropro of you.
That Jamie is playing the song psycho Killer to an alleged psycho killer is not lost on her.
You're adding, you have a psychokiller, Bobby, we can't say. You can't say hey, hey, hey, we can't say the name of that.
On the phone, Jamie keeps playing songs for Bobby, trying to build this trust, and when the moment seems right, she has questions about the case. Slowly she starts asking him about the year leading up to the shooting. She wants to know about a website he frequented that hosted extremely violent videos, and about a mysterious Skype call that
was always running and never disconnected. Both the website with the violent videos and the skype call also became primary interest for the FBI during its investigation of the Highland Park shooting.
How do I find this Skype group?
Wh then you know, girls talk about like walking on the bed here.
Or I'm so happy to talk to you about those things after you answered this one question for me and then I'm done.
Jamie has become intrigued with the series of videos Bobby uploaded to the Internet before the shooting. The videos are filled with numbers, symbols, and cryptic references that seem to connect to each other, leading to what appears to be a cipher, a twenty seven page book of numbers. It appears that Bobby created a puzzle. Jamie asked Bobby how to solve it, but he never gives her clues, only pushes her to keep playing the game, and the calls
between them aren't one sided. Sometimes Bobby asked Jamie to take on specific tasks.
Okay, so I would like you to figure out the yeah, the the green captures green recoring and been on top of that, yeah yeah yeah, So on top of that and the event had that found you create that ghetto ass thing that he tried to do, or he set up another phone on top of it looking poying at it.
So Jamie gives me copies of these phone recordings because she wants my help to investigate what led up to the Highland Park shooting. If we could dig into Bobby's life during the year before the attack, maybe we could solve the riddle he created and uncovered the message hidden in those twenty seven pages of numbers. That's Jamie's goal. Jamie also tells me that she started to toy with a provocative theory. Buried in Bobby's massive digital footprint are
multiple references to the FBI. In some of his photos, he's wearing a black hat with FBI written across the front in white letters. In one video, he refers to an FBI agent. Jamie believes Bobby is trying to send a message.
That was a smoke signal and nobody picked.
Up on it.
That's why she came to me in the first place. I've spent much of my career investigating the FBI, so she asked me for my help, and I agree, but I don't tell Jamie that I see a very different story. Jamie wants me to investigate what led up to the Highland Park shooting. Maybe she thinks Bobby had been coerced, maybe the FBI was behind it. But from the start
I know that won't be the case. The story I want to tell, the story I will tell, is about how Jamie becomes the final player in a violent domer's twisted game. But even I couldn't have anticipated where this story would lead. Into the Madness explores the rise of nihilistic violence, the role of technology and fostering extremism, and America's collect to dissent into conspiracy thinking. All seven chapters
are now available on audible. Search for Into the Madness on the Audible app, or follow me Trevor Aronson on the Audible app. You can start listening today when you sign up for a free thirty day trial. For more on Into the Madness or my other reporting projects, subscribe to my newsletter at Trevor Aaronson dot com. Subscribers receive news and updates, as well as promo codes to access new releases,