Deep Cover Live with Emily Bazelon

is returning with their third season this June. And of course, don't miss early access to Revisionist History and The Happiness Lab, which are both publishing year round for the first time in twenty twenty three. Check out Pushkin dot fm or the Apple Show page for more information. Earlier this month, I sat down for a live recorded conversation with my friend Emily Basilon. She's a staff writer at The New York Times magazine and a co host of Slate's Political Gabfest.

Emily someone I go to when I'm thinking through a story. Actually, this often happens during runs that we take through East Rock Park in New Haven, where we both live. We kind of nerd out on these runs. We talk about the process of recording and the ethical challenges that we both face when telling our stories. So we took that conversation rum the streets of New Haven to Brooklyn to a place called Littlefield, and just so you can picture it,

it's a really great scene. It's a bar on the stage with these two orange leather chairs, microphones, this cool lighting display behind us. It was a fun night and I'm excited to share that conversation with you here to talk about season three, my favorite season. When Jake told me about the idea for this season on a run, I was immediately sold. I'm going to say this. I hope it's true. I think I said this is going to be the best season you did, but I didn't

know whether you're adjut you know, trying to up my confidence. Yeah, I was certain because it's just such a good story. So why don't we start, because I love these stories from you, with your telling us how you found this terrific story. Yeah, I mean, and also just say that I years ago, an NPR producer said to me that a good MPR segment should always feel like one person talking to one other person. So in some ways, like this run we had, or when I'll pitch the ideas,

that's how it starts. And so I live in New Haven. We both went to Yale, and I've always been kind of interested in people that faked their way into universities, and there was a guy who faked his way into Yale when I had been a student there, and I started poking around about maybe there's a story about someone who lived some kind of elaborate deception. And it turns out I found a piece in the Harvard Crimson about

a woman named Esther Reid. I mean, this was just kind of the tip of the iceberg, and so started going down that path of like where else did she go and who else was she? And yeah, that kind of opened the rabbit's hole, and because of those years ago, you had this kind of tantalizing lead. But then there was this whole question of like, who is this person now and would she talk to you? And why would

she ever talk to you. I wrote this kind of generic letter saying who I was, and then I got a callback from Esther And this is a bit of a spoiler if you haven't gotten through episode six, but she told me that yes, I'm now I go by Esther Matthews, and I'm a professor of criminology at Gonzaga University. I was like what, And then I just was kind of really hooked on all right, this is really unusual woman. What is her story? So I flew out to spoken

where she lives. I rented an airbnb. We set up like a little studio in the living room of the airbnb, and I just said, okay, like let's start talking. Tell me your story. And this is kind of how it began. This is a story about a young woman who ran away from home. At least that's how it all started.

I think people think that I had this master plan and I went out and did it, and like, you know, like it's not fun, right, You're constantly scared, you have no support, you have no one to talk to, which is part of the reason it got so carried away. Like if I had just talked to somebody, they would have been like this is crazy. Along the way, there were plenty of moments where she could have stopped running, but she didn't. Sort of like I got on a

train track. There was clearly the wrong train track, and like, my train is running away, and at some point you're not thinking crap, how do we get off this train track? You're just thinking crap, how do I stop this train from like going off the rails. You know, I just kept making horrible decision after horrible decision after horrible decision, just trying to keep the train from crashing and killing

me at that point. So there's a lot of reflection in Esther's voice, and you can tell that she's still wrestling with the emotions she has, and the memories are mixed in with how difficult and experience she had in this past that you're excavating with her. Why did she decide to talk to you? I think so at that point, and as I say in the podcast, she was Professor Esther Matthews. Almost no one at her university or in this town knew that she was also this kind of

notorious figure from the tabloids, Esther Reid. But she lived under this kind of specter of fear that someone was going to eventually put the dots together, and that she felt, if that was going to happen, why not do it on my own terms and just kind of be out in front of it, especially because she had had such poor treatment in the media before. So I think there was kind of a timing thing where she said, I've been thinking about doing this. She knew that she knew

that that John Campbell had visited her LinkedIn page. She knew that people would sometimes kind of poke around, and

so I think she just said, let's do this. We had one of these discussions and Emily, you know, we talked about this all the time on our runs, where someone says they'll talk and then they say, oh this is off limits and that's off limits and you can't call them, and and I was waiting for that, and she said, kind of got out in front of it, and she said, look, I know you're going to want to talk to other people. I'm not going to try to control who you talk to. Look, you got to

do what you have to do. And that gave me some confidence that I was going to be dealing with someone who understood the process of what would be involved. And so I think it's a short answer is timing. So you mentioned John Campbell, who's the detective in this story, and we made I think, kind of an unusual decision to really start the podcast with him. I mean, Esther's voice shows up early, but then you really moved to

his perspective, and he's not originally investigating Esther's disappearance. He's investigating the disappearance of another young woman. Right. Yeah, he's investigating the disappearance of a woman named Brooke Henson who disappeared from the small town of Traveler's Rest, and he wants to get to the bottom of this. But she is vanished, and he hasn't given up on the case, but he is the light is dim that he's going to get to the answer and then whatever it is.

Six or seven years later, he gets a call from New York saying, I think I found your woman, Brooke Henson. She's a student at Columbia University. And of course it's not really Brooke, it's Esther. But this leads him on this quest to pursue Esther. And I'll just say I wanted to talk to John. I called him up. He said, coming down and chat. And I really wasn't sure what to expect when I retire. I can't wait to put

this in a drawer. I mean, this is a that's the thing I banged my elbow on all the time. So it's not about carry a gun. I carry gun because we have to. I'd rather be like Andy Griffith and just be sharing for that a gun. And he's he's just charming in a way that I was. He's disarming, he laughs at himself, he's kind of goofy, and he's a good detective, and so I immediately sensed, oh wow, this guy is going to be an important kind of character in the podcast. Why did he care so much

about this case? I mean, he really gets preoccupied with it. I kind of want to use the word obsessed, although it's not super respectful, but he's just really intensely driven to work on this case. Is there not very much interesting crime to solve and Traveler's Rest, well, funny you should say that John. I asked John this question. He said, Look, Traveler's Rest is like we call it the circle of Wagons. It's a few miles across, and our job as constables

is to push the crime out of the city. And that the kind of lawless mountains or what was once the lawless Mountains beat a lawless mountains here. This roar of a truck would come in and people would pile out, and they'd say, we're looking for the law, you know, and mountain justice had failed and they had to come to into town to find find some law enforcement. And so John was basically like within the circle of wagons

within this town. He felt like that he was a custodianigan, someone who was really dependent upon to keep the peace, and not a lot did happen, and then this young woman vanishes, and I think he feels personally responsible in some ways for getting to the bottom of this. And you could say it becomes obsessed, but I relate to that in a way. It's like you start to get a little bit of a mystery and you're not going

to arrest until you get to it. And so he just takes it a lot further than most would, right, And so he is trying to solve the mystery of Brooke Henson's disappearance and esther appears in his story in the end almost by accident, because there are different aliases

that she's grabbing hold of and Brooke is one of them. Right. Yeah, So this the thing that's kind of remarkable about the story is he gets the call the Brooke Henson is actually up in Columbia, right, and he doesn't really it doesn't really make sense that she would vanish for seven years and then show up at this school, and he

sends a police officer. The police officer talks to her and he presents her with a series of questions that only Brooke would know, and she answers most of them successfully, and at that point, you know, you would think he just lets it go. But this is where his doggedness comes in. He says, no, I want DNA, which I think I say in the podcast was ballsy, and somehow the New York City cop agrees to it, and then

she runs. So here's what I find fascinating about John. Like, on the one hand, it was kind of crazy of him to push for DNA. On the other hand, his hunch was right that it's possible that this person was so adept at being an impostor that she knew these

kind of unknowable answers. And so that's the weird thing about being an obsessive investigator is that if occasionally your unreasonable, obsessive hunch is spot on, then you're going to follow it at least the next time or maybe the time after that, because you have positive confirmation that you are right to be obsessed. And so to me, that was a part of John that I could relate to and that I understood. I think it's just he was on

his own train, you know. Esther says, she's on her train, he's on his train, and it's not so easy to get off of that. Yeah. So there are lots of podcasts, especially movies, books in the genre of true crime. Right it's sort of a national pastime right now to follow some of these cases. There are different choices. You get kind of hooked on a narrative. I find that podcasts are an especially like engrossing way to enter stories and become absorbed in them. Are there any ethical issues that

arise in this area of reporting? I mean, you're really digging into people's lives. These are things that happened a long time ago to real people. How do you think about that with the story like this? Yeah, I mean I think that you have to ask yourself at some level what justifies doing this? Is it? Because if the answer is strictly entertainment, then I don't think you can do it. And so there were a few things that

I grappled with. One was I talked to this guy, ben Ford, who is the chief of police, the current chief of police down and Traveler's Rest, who is doing, as far as I can tell, a very hard and earnest job of still trying to find out what happened to Brooke And this is a weird thing. This is the only time that's ever happened to me. I interviewed John Campbell and or I was about I hadn't even interviewed I hadn't even gone to Traveler's Rest yet. And I got a message, Jake, this is Ben Ford of

the Traveler's Rest Police Department. I would like to talk to you. And that was because he knew you were trying to get in touch with John Gimpbell. He got word that I might be doing a story related to Brooke Henson say. So I was like, this is weird. Like usually on any kind of active investigation with law enforcement, as you know, it's like they generally very leery of the press. And so I called him and he said, look,

I'm running an active investigation. If you can get the word out about the facts about what we know when don't know, I'd be very appreciative. I will share with you whatever I've got. So that was encouraging to me because I felt like, oh, maybe there's a public service here. And then I got in touch with a woman that looked for missing people, and then she put me in touch with Brook's cousins, and I just asked them straight up.

I was like, is this something you're comfortable with? And they basically said, look, we still want to find her remains, we're hopeful that maybe this will help, and we're also just that she's not forgotten. And we had that conversation and we revisited that in the fact checking part. I ran back overall with every aspect of it with them.

So yeah, I was thinking a lot about that and the second part and we'll get to this is Esther's treatment in the medium and revisiting that, and I felt like there's a place where we can do a good, hard look at the way this was played out, and by taking a second look at it, there may be some good that served from this. So it was as I was grappling with this kind of looking at those other things, that said, you know what, I think there is value here in kind of telling the story well.

And some of this comes down again to timing, right, we were talking about that earlier. But when you have a cold case like this and a family that is still wants to know answers, interest from reporters, podcasters can be welcome in a way that it might well not have been in the moment, right, this isn't a new story, worry anymore. It was a big news story. Yeah, so you're coming in at a different time. Yeah, the dust is settled a bit. I mean, Esther is able to

talk about this. I mean there's good and bad from that. The hard part is it time has passed, so sometimes it's hard to get people to remember what they were thinking and feeling at the time. Another hard part is if they were burned by the media, they don't want to talk to you, and you have to spend a lot of time explaining this is not going to be a tabloid treatment of this. But yeah, it's nice to be like talking about the Secret Service. I mean, I've

tried to do with the Secret Service before. The Secret Service never talks in my experience, and I got don long and basically as at she was like, it's like years ago, I'll talk to you, you know, And so yeah, there were some definite benefits as well. How did the

media cover Ester's disappearance once they knew she was missing? Well, you know, it's funny because when I first saw the media coverage that this story got back in the day, I mean, you know, how this is you kind of think like this or story has been poured it out like I'm late to the party, right, And so but then I started taking a look a closer look at the way it was reported out, and it was basically like you know, fem fatale, It was, you know, very

much not what you're hearing her say in the opening, that she kind of embarked on this path in which she kind of was making incrementally bad decisions and was we learned in the podcast was dealing with mental health and all this that you know, she's portrayed as like almost like a Bond villain, you know, as someone who's seducing People's a kind of female version of Catch me if you can. In fact, that was the play on

the forty eight Hours version of this. And so the thinking is, Okay, is there a way to re examine It doesn't mean you let her off the hook. It doesn't mean you give her a pass for the laws that she broke, But can you look at this and see maybe there's a more nuanced portrayal of a real human being here and not just the kind of cardboard cutout. We're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back,

Welcome back. After we grab some drinks and mingled with the crowd, I turned the tables on Emily asked her some questions because we do similar work. She often reports on criminal justice for the New York Times magazine and finds her way into all kinds of interesting and convoluted true crime stories. And there's one in particular that I wanted to talk to her about, a story that Emily spent years reporting on. It involves a young woman named

Nora Jackson. Nora was convicted as a teenager of killing her own mother. She spent several years in prison, and then one day her conviction was overturned. Emily became interested in how someone like this happens and the role of the prosecutor, a woman named Amy Wyrick. Emily wrote about Norah's case for the New York Times magazine. Her story also appeared in Emily's book Charged. You should check them out.

We've included links to both in our show notes. Okay, back to our conversation, and I'm wondering whether Emily, you can just kind of turn back the clock and help remind me and us how did you get drawn to this story? What did you know initially, and what made you think that this was a story you wanted to write. So you are a story person who starts with like a good sizzly concept of people who faked their ideas to go to college. I often, to my detriment, are

more of an ideas person. And I was interested several years ago in prosecutors who had a pattern of breaking the rules in a way that harmed the people who they were charged with. Prosecuting prosecutors obviously prosecute cases, but they're also supposed to be a kind of arbiter of justice in their own way. They represent the people. They also have responsibilities to uphold all the laws and rules in the justice system. And I was interested in the

prosecutors who cut corners. So there was a prosecutor I did a little research. I was like looking around the country for a kind of rose gallery of prosecutors. Frankly, and at the time, the district attorney in Memphis, which is Shelby County, her name was Amy Wyrick, and she had a real pattern of failing to disclose evidence in cases in which she'd gotten, you know, big convictions, and Nora Jackson's case. Once I was like in that world jumped out at me, you know, for some similar reasons

to why you were interested in esther. So, when Nora was eighteen, her mother was brutally stabbed death in her home. And her mother was a forty year old white stockbroker, so it was like an unusual murder and the kind of murder that is destab realizing to you know, white middle class residence. There was no obvious suspect, and about three months after the murder, Amy Wireck charged Nora, the

eighteen year old daughter, with her mother's killing. Nora didn't have a criminal history, but she was known as a kind of wild child, and the charges were brought and there was a lot of publicity, and then a few months later the DNA results came back from the crime scene. You know, her mother's blood was everywhere, so there was a lot of evidence to test, and in fact, Nora was excluded as someone who was part of that crime

scene in any way, and there were other DNA profiles. However, Wyreck prosecuted her anyway, and for a variety of reasons, including what was later deemed misconduct on Wyreck's part, Nora was convicted and then later the Tennessee Supreme Court actually overturned her conviction, and I think we have a little clip of Nora talking about finding out about that ruling. Three years ago, in a woman's prison outside Memphis, Tennessee, Nora Jackson was sitting in her cell watching television en mute.

You know, they'd have three one three two and three three and three dash two is just like a repeat of the news in the weather. Her roommate was in the cafeteria and Nora wanted to get some privacy. And I just was sitting there going to the bathroom and just like watching it, and I saw my name come across the bottom of the screen and then I was like,

oh shit. So she turns on the volume. The Tennessee Supreme Court has granted Norah Jackson a new trial, and she just, honestly, for a few minutes, couldn't believe it. Nora Jackson is now awaiting a new trial. And even though Nora had just won her appeal, something that rarely happens in the state of Tennessee. This is after she

has spent nine years in prison. Emily Basilon has been covering the case and like nobody was there because everybody that dinner so I'm like screaming to get out because I'm like wanting to get to the phone and nobody's there missing. Is something going to eat them? Right? And why was Norah in prison in the first place. Nora was in prison because she was convicted of murdering her

mother Jennifer Jackson. Wow, that's an episode of The Daily and that was I think Mike Barbarrow somehow like sounds different now to me anyway, So go ahead, I want to ask you a question as you're telling the stories. So she charges Amy Rick, charges Norah with the murder of her mother, and then you said, some period of time later it comes out that the DNA was excluded. So what is the sequence of events? Does she have that DNA evidence when she makes the charge. No, Wyrick

didn't have the DNA results from the crime lab. You might wonder why she didn't wait for them to come back. Yes, I am wondering, Yes she didn't, but they were available, They were part of the record. They were part of the evidence that the jury heard, and the jury convicted Nora anyway, And I think there are a few explanations for that. One was the kind of failed strategy of

her defense lawyer and that didn't go very well. And also the judge in the case admitted people saying all kinds of stuff about Nora, like, for example, that you know, her boyfriend had crawled in the window just you know, one night to have sex with her a couple months after her mother was killed. Just all of this irrelevant but kind of scurrilous character assassination evidence, and perhaps that

had an effect on the jury. As you're talking about the chargers being placed before the DNA evidence comes back, it almost makes me think of a version of the media getting out in front of the story that you have an idea that this is who this person is, they've done this, and then what happens when you find evidence that might or ought to give you pause about

the theories that you've postulated prior to having that evidence. Yeah, I mean, you know, one way to think about this is tunnel vision for prosecutors that once they've chosen someone, there's a lot of impetus, confirmation bias, professional reasons to kind of stick with that person as the suspect. And that is in fact what happened to Nora. So after

the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned her conviction. She had a kind of second round of like a prolonged kind of face off with Amy Wyrick because Wireck was threatening to prosecute her again and in order to get a plea bargain, and Norah ended up accepting a plea bargain to manslaughter because she thought she was going to get out of prison. But then it turned out that her lawyers had made a mistake in calculating her time and that she actually

had to remain in prison for fourteen months. So that was completely horrible because first of all, she had she'd already been in prison I think at that point for nine years, and also it was socially for her, really horrible. Her world were people in prison who saw her as kind of heroic for standing up to Amy Wyrick. You know, all these women in prison, so rare to have, especially

in Tennessee, to have your sentence, your conviction overturned. But then she had taken this plea, she'd kind of given in in their eyes, and she was back among them, so she hadn't even gotten what she thought she was going to get. So that happened to be the point when I kind of stumbled on this story and I wrote Nora a letter in prison. I wrote her a bunch of letters, and she wrote back to me a couple of times, but I wasn't really sure whether she wanted to talk to me, and it actually took me

ten months to persuade her to meet with me. How did you do that? I called her on the phone

and talked to her a couple of times. It was very in and out, like she was responsive, then she wasn't, And she had all kinds of reasons to mistrust the media because by then she'd been the subject of I think a twenty twenty special or maybe forty eight hours, I think both, and neither of them had been helpful to her at all, and in both cases she had kind of been led along, or she said she felt like she'd been misled, and then it turned into a kind of tabloid you know, very who done it and

kind of implicating her. I mean, in these situations, there's always, I always feel like an unspoken kind of agreement that's made, Like you have your interest, which is writing the story, and she has her own set of interests. Why she ultimately decided she wants to speak with you, she's hoping that your story will do something for her. What do you think that she hoped your story would do and did you feel that your story would in fact do that? Well?

When I first went to see her in prison, and actually I went to Memphis, and then she almost decided not to see me, but then she changed her mind at the last minutely and we sat down in this little classroom at um sh At that point, she was at the jail, and what she really wanted to tell me about were the black women she was imprisoned with, and how much worse off they were, and how much how strange she felt about the attention she was getting,

given that there were these people around her she thought deserved attention. So it was that same feeling of like, oh my god, there are all these cases, Why am I focusing on this one particular person and not these other people? And I was. She was very firm and clear that other people were more deserving of being interviewed, and that she felt that there was something wrong about that. And so even though it only drew her to me,

drew me to her more, I didn't change course. There was something sort of impressive about that, because she might have wanted to keep the attention for herself, and for a long time, I think she was very ambivalent. It really wasn't until she had been released, until I had really been pursuing her for a couple of years that

she started trusting me, which I totally understand. I think that eventually the idea that it was the New York Times, it was interested that I was going to be able to tell her story in a way that really got across the legal complexity and the wrongdoing on the part of the prosecution. I think that she cared about that, and Amy Wyrick was not interested in talking to me, was, you know, obviously very clearly resistant to my doing the story.

And that also, I think kind of endeared me to Norah because she could see it was sort of like I was. It was like a different kind of press was coming in, and she appreciated that. Eventually, you had asked me why I thought that John Campbell was so vehemently interested obsessed when it was this case and that was driving this. So I'm going to flip the question on you. Why did Amy Wyrick double down on this case and give so much attention to it? What was

as best as you could tell, what was her motivation. Well, Wyreck tried this case when she was a prosecutor working for the elected district attorney in Shelby County, and it made her famous. She was on TV news. She was this young woman being this very strong in her eyes advocate for justice, you know, standing in the place of Norah's mother and convicting someone. And it was it's very, very unusual for children to actually kill their parents, and

especially for daughters to kill their mothers. But for Wyreck that was only kind of part of the way of talking about the case that she was despite all of those obstacles, that she was doing it anyway because this was justice. She was really that was her line, and she wound up being elected district Attorney in Shelby County in twenty fourteen. And I think that Nora's case really catapulted her into the kind of front of the community

in a way that was politically helpful to her. It seems that the evidence against Nora was extremely circumstantial, But I'm wondering, did you ever have any moments of doubt about her innocence? Yeah, I decided that I didn't have to know whether she was innocent or not, and I kind of set that aside. I mean, Nora would hate that if she were here, because it's so deeply important to her to be believed, and I completely understand that.

But I just decided there was so much wrong with this case legally speaking, that it was okay that I was not standing there arguing for her innocence as her lawyer, even as a journalist. I was just telling you the story of what had happened to her. And my story in the magazine is really about prosecutors hiding evidence, and I think that really was sort of how the story unfolded in my book as well. Tell us about where Nora is now, I mean, give us the quick update.

So for a while Nora was living in Brooklyn. She got out of prison twenty sixteen, and she was actually in Brooklyn for a while. But now she is back in Memphis. She's you know, it's hard. It's really hard to get out of prison after you've been there for a while. You kind of have to really restart your life. Often people have a kind of prolonged form of PTSD that they're figuring out just how to live in the real world again. And Nora has no family, so in

addition to the death of her mother. Her parents were divorced, but her father had actually been murdered a year and a half before her mother was killed, which is like another I know, really and perhaps that it was connected, and maybe that's the kind of missing element of the unsolved murders all along. But she really didn't have family, and so that has been really hard for her to be.

You know, she got out of prison in her late twenties, mid to late twenties, and she had kind of grown up in prison, and in some ways that meant that she didn't quite grow up. So now she's in Memphis and she had a lawyer, or not the child Laura I was talking about earlier, but a later lawyer who is just a kind of incredibly caring person and so right now she is actually working for him in Memphis and you know, and getting on her feet, trying to get her own place. She also has a dog named Liberty,

very deliberate name, who I'm very fond of. I actually took care of Liberty for a little while long after my book came out, just to be clear, and so I just went to Memphis to see that I was there to work on a different story. But of course I wanted to see Nora, and my big question was whether Libert was going to remember me, which she did, which is great. One thing I will say to you, Emily is that there are many journalists who interview people, hear their story, and they never call them back or

hear from them again. And I don't know of another journalist who's more committed to treating people as human beings, not just for the week or day, but for years often afterwards, and it's a rare thing. Thank you. Should we take some listener questions? Absolutely? After the break, we talked more about Deep Cover, Never Seen Again, and I answer a few questions from the audience. We're back next up.

We took questions from listeners in the audience. We had them write their questions out on paper and then put them in a bucket. Yes, very old school, I know. It was like seventh grade, everyone passing notes. Then someone handed the bucket to Emily and she read them aloud. Is there anything you wanted to include in the podcast that didn't make the cut? Yeah, I mean there was a lot. There was a lot probably there when I went down to Traveler's Rest, I mean, when I went

down to Traveler's Rest. Before I connected with Brooks cousins, I connected with this husband and wife team, Patrick and Tammy Welch, and I didn't end up getting to put them in the podcast, and I still feel badly about that because what they do is they basically devote all their spare time to try to look for people who have gone missing, people that have kind of gone off the radar of law enforcement, and actively kind of keep

the search alive. And the first thing they told me straight up was like, look, it's great you're doing this on brook but there's actually a ton of people that are missing in this area. And they were they had like a map in their house with all the pin points of the people and where they went missing. And it wasn't like they were all connected and this was some conspiracy. It was just they were like the custodians

of these people's memory. And then they drove with me up to the dark corner where Brooke may have gone missing, and the whole thing was so intense for Tammy she didn't want to go, but she reluctantly went with us in the pickup truck. And it was it was one of these scenes where it was kind of late at night and were driving down some shadowy roads in the mountains, and I just got a sense for like, this is how these people spent their weekends. And it just made

you think about all the stories we can't tell. And I kind of get to this at the end that we often fixate on very particular types of stories that kind of play into the fem fatale or that have some sort of Hollywood appeal, But there's all these kind of nameless cases of people that go missing. And there was just something really poignant and powerful about this couple and their pickup truck kind of winding their weight on the darkened roods of this county, kind of going to

the last spots where these people were. And they're doing great work, and I hope that they hear a shout out for that in this bonus episode. Another listener question. One of Estra's lies was that she was a professional chess player. So did anyone ever ask Estra to play chess,

that ever threatened to blow her cover? I know, such a crazy thing to make up that there, I get, you know, she was apparently a pretty solid chess player, because you know from the podcast what happens when she says I'm a tennis player, and then she's like, oh shit, I don't actually not to play tennis. I did talk to one former boyfriend who didn't go on the record, but he did play her in chess. He did ask her she did beat him. You, Yeah, exactly. I mean

we're talking about this backstage a second ago. Like I would be intimidated if I met if you just said I'm a professional chess player, There's no way in hell I wouldn't even played checkers with you. So I suspect that's scared off enough people that she could pull it off. Yeah. How do you think Esther's case would have been handled

differently today? Well, we kind of we kind of talked about this a little bit the way that my mind goes to the media, and I just think that I would hope that I would hope that the ass that we wouldn't just kind of immediately. Look, when you have a story as a journalist, right, when someone brings you a story and you're operating on impartial information, right, your brain spins out. There's vast terra incognita, and we when we go on our runs. Oh, I think I talked

to some of Esther and she might have done that. Well, you ask me a question. I don't know, but I have an idea of where the story maybe. But that story that I have that I'm projecting out into Terra Incognita is actually probably based on books I've read and crappy movies I've watched, and local news stories I've read, and is prompting me to make assumptions about who that person is and how the story is in fact going to play out based on like probably templates, like the

fem fatal template. So what happens is you get like part way into the reporting, and inevitably you start getting facts that challenge the assumptions that you've made in the template. And our mutual friend Jack Hit always says, and I think this is so wise. He says, as soon as the story turns out not being what you thought it was, that's when your story begins. But there's dissonance there because you're like, oh shit, this isn't the story I thought.

I'd mean, I told my editor and my producer was going to be this, and I promise that, And now you have to go back and say it's not quite that. And I think that sometimes it's easier when you get to that point and just say, wow, it's basically right. I mean, she did have three boyfriends in one year, and they were at military institutes, so she did kind of go through them, and you could see how if you just keep pushing and sticking to the preconception have

you could just plow down that road. And I say that with empathy because I feel like, as a journalist, I've stared down that and probably done some version of that. I would think in this moment now, where there's more awareness of the way, you know, we depict among other people women in the news and such, that someone would say, hey, wait a minute, here is this story that we're progressing on.

Does it all check out? Are we making assumptions? Are we playing into stereotypes and templates that may not be one hundred percent justified. That's why I would hope we would play out differently today. Yeah, I mean some of this is it just really depends on Esther's honesty. I mean I think that that was a really I'm going

to use the word lucky. Maybe that's not right, But somewhere in the alchemy of your interviewing her and her reflecting there's some like pretty gritty candor that comes across right, I think. And I would also say that like in fairness to people that were reporting her on back then, Let's be honest, this was a person who had his history of not being candid when she was younger. Now is a different story, she's a professor, it's a different life.

But at the time, this is someone who had been a serial identity thief, who had told people that she was a chess champion when she was in fact not, who had told lies to her boyfriends, etc. And so I think that's the really tricky part about telling a story with an unreliable narrator is that you must be skeptical, you must be dubious. You can't let them off the hook. But that doesn't give you that blank check to project

whatever you want upon them. And so, yeah, it's easy for me to say that now twenty years later looking back, But but you've learned a thing or two. Okay, speaking of compulsive liars, what about who am I going to say, George Santos? Do you have a better understanding of what motivates people like him? I think George is his own special creature. We can probably all agree on that. Yeah, no, is there a short answer. I mean, I don't. I don't presume to know what's going on with that guy.

I do I think that I think with Esther I did. I did kind of understand it. Like I don't know that Esther agreed with my assessment of it, But I feel like, to some extent, we grew up in a certain town with certain friends and family, and we go away to college, we moved to a different place, and we enjoy being someone different in small ways. And that doesn't mean that we always lie about it, but I think that sometimes it's born from this desire to remove

ourselves from a place where we were. And I think that what happened in Esther's story in particular, is that the law enforcement looked at is there must be some sort of kind of deeper, more methodical, devious play here of espionage or something. And to me, it like just spoke to a more human impulse to just have space

and reinvent. And that is not again to excuse it or to say that it's all right, but to try to understand it as a kind of basic human desire that just kind of, as she says, ran out of control in her case. So yeah, in some ways the answers yes, But with Santos, I don't know, it's in his own category. What led to the media thinking Esther was a potential spy when the story broke Yeah, so, I mean it starts off. I was talking to a listener in the audience during the intermission and we're kind

of on the same page. It started off with a kind of John Campbell trying to come up with an explot It didn't make sense, right, It doesn't make sense. Why do you enroll at college is a different name, and there's no obvious game to be made for it, and so in the absence of that knowledge, start putting together other possible theories. Oh, she's dated two guys from West Point and the shipman. Maybe it's this. I mean, in some ways, that's what detectives are supposed to do.

They're supposed to speculate. But what happened was, for those of you that listen to know, is that when they were trying to get the word out about the case, the police chief in Traveler's Rest of the time told John he should owe the detective, he should open the

file and feel free to talk to the press. And that's when John started to air some of his theories about espionage, and there was a local news station that ran some of them, and then there was a kind of middleman who job it was was to find interesting local stories and selve them to the national media. And he quickly wrote up a press release based on this impartial information, and three days later later it was running nationally. And so the story just kind of got a bit

ahead of itself. And that that's how I mean, that's what we do an episode four, we kind of connect the dots of this pipeline of how it comes from kind of you know, speculation to kind of headlines. Yeah, sou new question. Part of the story is themed around tough mental health challenges and also running away. What advice do you think Esther might give to someone in a

similar situation? You know? This is It's interesting because when we first started talking to Esther, I'm not sure how exactly I posed it, but sometimes I'll often say this is a version of like when I was asking you before about nor like what do you want out of the story, because it's just you don't always get an honest answer, but it's helpful sometimes you do. And she said, look,

I was suffering from real mental health issues. And I think that I felt and I made some bad choices, and if I had had someone to talk to, OH, I could have been honest about what was going on, and I had been gotten some help earlier, I might have made some better some better choices. And so I think that she looks at this as situation of what happens to kind of anxiety and desperation, and she has social anxiety when it's kind of unchecked and left left

to kind of spiral with no help. And so to me, I think that was a large part of the motivation of her, of her of her talking about the story, and she's now currently it's interesting that this is her big thing, is like advocating for mental health kind of premptively before people go off the rails and end up in incarcerated. You know. One thing that strikes me about Esther and Nora is that they had really strange things happened to them that they participated in, but that like

also are just hard to explain. And I think there is something about having someone just lay out your story clearly. Noura sometimes says that she just like feels like she can just take the magazine and hand it to people just as an explanation of what happened. Anyway, I wonder if that's something that helpful to esther, and I mean, probably it is, right, I think so. I mean, I didn't you know, we did this very intense session with her when before it came out, where we went back

over it. I read back what other people said about her, and I read back what I said to her, and it was it was hot and it was intense. She was not happy with some parts of it. But I think that that even that even that conversation was a conversation that she hadn't had in any of the previous media treatments of it, And so I think that there was When we talked to her a few days later, she's like, I appreciate that we had at least the chance to do that, and she was, but it's awkward.

I could see why hot people don't want to do it because it wasn't fun. It is not fun, you know. Last question, Yeah, it's kind of related to what we're talking about. How do you recognize your past experiences and traumas while covering a story and work to keep them from influencing your interpretation and telling of the story. Wow. Well, I mean, I'll start by saying that I don't think I've had anything as traumatic happened to me as esther had with I mean the loss of her mother at

that age. And if you've listened to the podcast, you know how parents, how her parents divorced and she was struggling. You know, it's interesting. I did say to her at times, like, look, I get it. I didn't say I get it. I said I I am sympathetic because I have had anxiety before, but I don't think i've had it like you. And so I think that it's actually important not to assume

that you've had their experience, because that's the problem. Like, you know, if I start to let myself think that, like, oh, I've had anxiety too, and I didn't make up X number of identities, then I'm not on some level getting it. So I think that it's I think that you have to the starting point almost has to be that I'm not seeing this the way you see it, but like,

try to help me see it, right. I mean, I think you're talking about empathy and one and recognizing the limits of empathy in terms of pretending to stand in someone's shoes, right. I mean, empathy is a tool for journalists like us, but I think we also have to be really careful and how we handle it totally. I mean, I think that's why it's important. You've got to talk

to the other family members. And there's many things that weren't included in this podcast, things that like, in some ways the most you could say, some of the most significant things that that are part of a story, the things that are actually not included because you've debated at nauseum about whether or not to include them, and they would be interesting, but you feel you can't include them.

So yeah, I feel like every twist in turn is like some sort of dilemma in which you know and you're getting back on Twitter, Oh you didn't do this, you do that, and it's like, yeah, I had a reason for it. Yeah, you're all right. You know, we're tried, Like we told one version of the truth, the version

of the truth as best we could see it. And that's where the team of people, the four of us, sat down and went through this understanding, damn well, there's no entirely objective way to tell a story, and you want to tell it as compellingly as you possibly can, so that we have the clicks that justify season four. And yet at the same time, you know that you're telling just one version of the truth, and you're going

to get it from one side to the other. And as my wife says to me, it just has to be a version of the truth that you can live with even if no one else likes, which is really hard to do, but that's the goal. I think. Yes, I feel like I have heard that line from Kasha a number of times from you, and it's like in my head too, which I really appreciate because Kasha is very wise. Jake, this has been so much fun. I am really looking forward to season four. Thank you so much.

In congratulations, thanks for listening to this special live episode of a deep Cover. I want to express my heartfelt thanks to Emily for a great conversation. We'll have another episode coming out next month. I'll be talking with Ben Ford, the current chief of Police and Traveler's Rest, all about Brooke Henson and the continued surge for closure in that case, and I have a favor to ask. It'll only take you about two minutes, I promise. If you like deep Cover,

please leave review on Apple Podcasts. It helps other people find the show, it gets the word out, and it helps us make the case that yes, there should be a season four and beyond. Thank You. Deep Cover is produced by Amy Gaines and Jacob Smith. This episode was edited by Sophie Crane, mastering by Sarah Brugere. Our show art was designed by Seancarney. Original scoring and our theme

was composed by Luis Gara. Special thanks to Nicole Morano, Jason Gambrell, Mia Lobell, Greta Con, Jacob Weisberg, and Karen Shakerjee. I'm Jake Albern. I want to remind you that when you sign up for Pushkin Plus, you'll get access to binge drops of future seasons of deep Cover and exclusive content from other Pushkin true crime hits. Check out Pushkin dot fm or the Apple Show page for more information.