Hi there.
I'm Steve Fishman with Orbit Media and we're here today with Dax Devlyn Ross. Today we're dropping the first episode of Dax's new true crime series, Crime Wolf. But before we get to that, some of you will remember Dax. He's the co founder a co founder of Orbit Media, also author, lawyer, journalist, and recently I hear a writer of science fiction. Dax and I worked together co hosting The Burden, which was Orbit's first splash in the true
crime universe. I like to think I discovered Dax for podcasts.
Thanks for having me on the show, Steve may or may not be familiar with me from the work I've done with the one and only toast of the Town himself, Steve Fishman. So it's great to be here.
So the band is back together. Unbelievable, right, you know, twenty twenty six. It's what should happens, you know, it's how it should be. A few interesting tidbits about Dax before we get to the episode. All right, So see now this is this is Dax. He's always traveling. It's like a mysterious man. I can't keep up with him. I don't know what.
I really can't tell you where I was this week. This was like I was in like a room. I will tell you I was at a I was in a convening where there was like security all over the floor. Like it was secure. It was a secure like you couldn't tell. You had to like give your badges when you got there, take them there to give, take your back, and you couldn't leave with your badge.
See, Dax is making it sound like it's a one off, but this is how dactually. It's his life, and he won't tell you what he does. You know, he says like, uh, well, I just worked for the department, so I got no idea. I'm sure, I'm sure he's out righting wrongs.
But trying to man, that's it. You know, it's a lot of wrongs to right in this world right now.
And you know, as I I do like to point out, Dax is also on the pathway to perfection. You know, he's almost erased sleep as one need, pops out of bed at you know, like a quarter past midnight and does one hundred finger tip push ups. And then of course he's lucky he has to live in chef who makes him a calorie free breakfast.
Well that would be great, right, Calari free. Right, that's called black coffee from a cure. That's with that.
So Dax and I were last partners on our our flagship podcast, The Burden, which took I think six eight months to make.
That's all.
That's all took about four years to make, and it actually was really good, especially the showdown in the final episode.
I still wake up thinking about it. Although people have given me flak over the you know a cloud couple of years, right, everybody has their opinions about how that should have gone down.
Jax went on to host solo host a pretty brilliant podcast called Crying Wolf. I will say I think has gotten not enough attention. It's a kind of brilliant role out of a situation that we're sadly familiar with, the wrongful conviction. But in this in this instance, there's this amazing friendship at the center of it. Is that right that?
Yeah, it is a story about two friends who meet in prison, and they meet and the meeting is fortuitous and so far as it's you know, somewhat short lived. They only are in actual cellmates for less than a year, but becoming self mates for less than a year. One guy, Robert is, you know, this young Jewish guy who's in
prison because he has a drug problem. And he meets this character who has been accused of and convicted of murder, heinous murder, named Lee Harris, who's convinced and has never ever swayed from the you know, the expression of his of his innocence, and Robert listens, and when Robert gets out, he says, I'm gonna, I'm gonna look into this, and looking into this becomes the next twenty years of his life. And he finds the witness that was used against Lee,
that was basically the one who sealed the deal. He finds this guy and he talks to this guy, and he finds out that this guy was a government you know, snitch, and he discovers that that Illinois, the Cook County knew it. They knew he was a snitch, and that they never revealed that to the to the jury, to the court. And so unfortunately Lee dies shortly after he gets out.
He gets out in twenty twenty three. But what's left behind is like twenty years of tape because they've recorded the phone calls for years, and that becomes like the spine is that you hear this relationship between these two guys on the phone over the years.
Today we're dropping the first episode of the series to listen to the rest Crying Wolf's Look for Crying Wolf wherever you get your podcasts, and if you don't like the many ads they stuff into every episode, subscribe to True Crime Clubhouse on Apple Podcasts and listen at free Enjoy.
It's two thousand and one fifty miles southwest of Chicago, Joliet Penitentiary, ring a bell it should It's the prison from the opening scene of Blues Brothers. Prisoner number n eight one seven one seven. Lee Harris is tense. He's waiting on a new selly. Lee's had his share over the past decade, and it's always a crapshoot. A space seven feet by four feet with a bunk bed and an open toilet, intimately shared with another convict. There's a few ways this could go, as far as Lee's concerned,
none good. You can be sure Lee did not expect someone like Robert Chatler to walk in on the outside. These men would have never cross paths. Lee, a black man and career scammer raised in Chicago's most notorious projects, now pushing fifty. Robert, a white Jewish kid from the suburbs half his age, an odd ball who sought solace rescuing insects and animals. How was this gonna work? In short order, Robert would drive Lee to his wits end. He chained smoked from sun up to sundown, all while
playing radio dub Beetles cassettes on repeat. Lee hated smoking, and let's just say the Beatles weren't exactly his flavor. But all that would fade away because on that day, Lee Harris was about to meet his future best friend, brother from another and the key to his freedom from iHeart Podcasts. I'm Dax Steblin Ross and this is crying wolf.
White victim, female, pretty wealthy black defendant.
I mean, as soon as I saw it, I'm like, fuck me, this is gonna be bad.
He says the police from his friends, and then that's it.
They turn on it.
I get ninety years for killing somebody I have never seen.
They got the wrong That Lee's mouth was Lee's downfall.
Along with dirty colls.
There's a list of police officers who deserve a special place in health. As I walked down the hostel, said my home address.
Upline came from the world of how the Techniques?
Why didn't be your restaurant of grant? Why? How do you see?
Don't you fear?
Guys?
I realized that I was from.
The beginning, fell and killed Dana Filer, and that person's still out here.
Episode one, The Right Guy. It's the late eighties. Paula Abdul and Public Enemy are in heavy rotation on MTV. Michael Jordan has yet to win a title. Some think he never will. Oprah is still on our way to becoming an afternoon icon. Lee Harris is thirty something living in Chicago's Near North Side. He's got a little boy we can't wait to teach the intricacies of softball. His own prospects aren't so bright. By his own admission, he's
a petty crook running out of hustles. The one thing Lee does have going for him, besides his son, the thing that sets him apart is his charm. He could and would talk to anyone.
I remember him walking up to us. You'd see your crew and it'd say, hey, how you doing. Oh hey, mister Jordan, what you guys doing here?
That's Bob Jordan. And if you're from Chicago, you might recognize his commanding voice. Bob's a news veteran with a career spanning six decades. Back in the eighties, he was a general assignment reporter for the TV station WG in Chicago. Every day he'd gather his film crew and had to cover the city's biggest story of the day.
Lee was not afraid to step out and be seen, be recognized, be known. If we're out doing a story, we'd want to find someone whom we could interview and say, you know, what's the problem of the day. People are many times afraid of a camera crew, but Lee wasn't.
Living in the projects meant the media was usually there for one of two reasons, drugs or violence, and often both meant they were looking for a good SoundBite. For some residents, the site of reporters prompted a bline in the opposite direction. Being so amenable made Lee stand out. He stood out for other reasons too.
I've been trying to think of words to describe him. Impetuous is kind of a word, because he was outside the norm. He was probably smarter than the average kid he ran around with because he knew how to work the system, and if I do this and do that, I can gain the system. I might be able to use it to my advantage. But he was unpolished. He was vulnerable to his own recklessness.
The same unabashed approach Lee took with journalists like Bob Jordan extended to local beat coops too.
He was very affable, he was very friendly, He was very you know, he respected as we were the police, but we respected, you know, we had different lifestyles.
This is Harry Siwak and her partner Joseph Roberts Signoretti, but he also goes by Bob. Back in the day, Lee was a recurring character on their beat.
He's a scam artist. There's an alley off of Rush Street. They call it Drug Alley Lee. He would sell fake drugs, burd bags.
You know, the number dried herbs instead of weed. A regano meant whatever. A hustler can entice some thrill seeking inner city tourists with.
And all the suburbanites would go across and walk, you know, so a black guy coming up and telling, you know, saying, hey, do you want anything.
And more often than not they'd fall for it. But once a sale was made, real drugs are not. Bob would have to step in.
The Sorry, Lee, you're gonna have to go to jail or or sometimes they just shag them out of there and you tell them get out of here because you don't want to hassle with them, and bray and stuck while he did, don't want to touch them, you know.
So it was a any kind of dance back then between Lee and the police. Sometimes after a saale, Lee would hang around to get arrested on purpose. A trip to the precinct with his cop piles could be more pleasant than the wrath of a returning customer.
But if he didn't do what he did, then we wouldn't do what we did right.
He was job security.
This love hate triangle between locals, the press, and the police could have typified daily life in any project. But Lee didn't live in just any project. He lived in one of the most infamous of them all, Cabrini Green. You've likely heard of Cabrini even if you couldn't point to it on a map. I certainly couldn't. It's where the Colthood horror candy Man was set. It's had countless mentions in Chicago rap and it was the backdrop for the classic black sitcom Good Times from the seventies. The
title it was ironic in case you're wondering. When the first Cabrini rowhouses and towers went up in the nineteen forties and fifties, they represented optimism, the potential of public housing to provide quality homes for all. It was certainly a step up from the slum land it replaced Little Hell the locals used to call it, who at the time were a mix of Irish, Swedish and Italian immigrants. But by the nineteen eighties, when Lee lived there, things
had changed a lot. The projects had become a new kind of poverty, poverty of gangs, drugs, and violence, and Cabrini's buildings were now exclusively housing black residents.
Most of the police officers didn't want, even want nothing to do with Kabrini.
It was wild.
It was a different world.
Crack cocaine was rife, controlled and fought over by the Mickey Cobras or the gangster disciples, some of Cabrini's most notorious gangs. Oddly enough, none of that phased Bob or Mary.
We got along with all the gangs, the ones that hated and shot at each other. We were like their aunties or something. So it was an unusual relationship we had and Lee was one of those people.
To be clear, Lee was not in a gang, a gangbanger as they used to call it. What's interesting, though, is that he somehow managed to get along with them all. He wasn't afraid of being seen. He also knew how to disappear into the crowd, make himself invisible or if nothing else, non threatening. More than anything, Lee was a survivor, which meant being both nothing in particular and a bit
of everything. This showed up in his various occupations. Being that Kabrini was right next door to some of Chicago's most affluent neighborhoods, Lee would sometimes dabble in more legitimate pursuits, like window cleaning for the luxury high rises, and when window washing and burn bags didn't cut it, there was always a quick buck to be made sharing information with the cops.
We would talk to him about things, Hey Lee, do you know about this or that? Or he said, hey, Lee, if you hear about anything.
But an inexplicable tragedy a mere few blocks from Caribeania was about to shake up the natural order of things and send chills throughout the whole of Chicago. How people endure Chicago winters has never made sense to me. A place that hovers between bone cold and brick for months on end. Then you experience the summer, and suddenly it
all makes sense. Chicagoans live for the summer. It's when the city exhales, when the frozen shorelines of Lake Michigan thaw into tanning mecchas dotted with beach bums and fitness diehards, and by night becomes stages from music, fireworks and joy. Summer in Chicago isn't just a season, It's a resurrection. Summer nineteen eighty nine was no different. Then came the night of June eighteenth.
A twenty four year old woman lies in a coma tonight, the victim of an execution style shooting, apparently near her home on the Gold Coast.
Dana Peitler was smart, attractive, from money as promising as they make them in America. She had just completed an internship at one of America's top banks and was about to begin graduate studies. Moments after returning home from a night out celebrating with friends, She's forced into a nearby alley, shot in the back of the head, and left for dead. The motive is unclear, although police find two ATM receipts in Dana's wallet. The time stamps indicate the withdrawals happened
after she had returned home. Patrol cop Mary sya Way remembers it, well.
She's from wealthy family down in the Gold Coast, right by Astro Street, which is the biggest money street where the governor lives, you know, right where all the concentration of money is. So it was a heater case.
It was an instant heater and yes, it's exactly what you think it is. The heat was on. This kind of thing just didn't happen on the Gold Coast to a white woman. Not only was it one of the richest neighborhoods in Chicago, it was one of the richest neighborhoods in the entire country. Reporter Bob Jordan lived there around that time. He could attest to its bona fides.
There was an air of security and you never felt ill at ease. So when Dana is discovered in this alley, it was a tremendous story because it broke the calm.
The Dana Fightler case becomes a real life horror story that everyone is following. The media descend daily on Northwestern Memorial Hospital to get updates from Dana's neurosurgeon, and alongside fears for Dana, Chicago's residents have worked themselves into a kind of moral panic. ATMs are still a weird new invention in the eighties. Was this new technology safe? What was being compromised in the name of convenience? We found some TV footage from the time where a police superintendent
Holess tells a reporter armed police won't use them. What in the devil are you guys doing standing at an ATM? And to top it all, tongues are wagging about the perpetrator. Surely this crime had been committed by a black man and was it only money he was after? First days, then weeks pass and Dana holds on. The city holds its breath. The police chase down leads to feed up the chain of command. The media scramble for tidbits to satiate its audiences. Bob Jordan had a front row seat to it all.
As news crews. We were in the area doing that story daily, trying to do updates, trying to find ways to work the story with new angles and that sort of thing.
Then, out of nowhere, a woman who was out walking her dog the night of the incident comes forward. She has some vital new information. Moments before the attack, she saw Dana being led down a street by three men, three black men. After weeks of waiting for a break, the CPD finally has something. And then just as news from the witness becomes known, Dana's family makes an unusual move. They put up a sizeable reward. Might the promise of hard cast shake loose some new leads jog a few
memories the fighters. One answers the city when the.
Mayor is getting static from his constituents. Then he calls the police chief and says, what the hell's going on with this fight er story? How close are you in getting this wrapped up? And then the police chief calls his neighborhood commander and says, how soon are you getting it wrapped up? That pressure all the way to the patrolan is find somebody, make some arrests.
Armed with this new information from the dogwalker, the CPD puts every cop in the vicinity on high alert, even beat. Cops like Mary and Bob get drafted. They're summoned to an emergency briefing and their orders find any scrap of information they possibly can about that night. And this is not going to be a collaboration effort across the force. This is cop against cop. Whoever brings home the biggest scraps, it's the biggest prize.
It was very doggy dove.
Yeah.
And if you want to be the police, you get the bad guys, then you've got to do battle. You've got to compete.
As Mary and Bob step out of the precinct, they know exactly where the head first, the streets.
There'd be thousands of people out there, you know, in the summertime, everybody be out there, everybody, and there's always somebody that saw all those people all day long, you know what I mean. Somebody always would see what happened.
Someone perhaps like Lee Harris.
He could have been there. Yeah, he could have been there. He was a contender, you know what I mean.
Turns out finding Lee doesn't require much effort at all. Mary and Bob bump into him almost immediately. They fill him in about the crime, but also the reward twenty five large for anyone who can provide information that leads to an arrest.
We're the ones that totally about it.
And back then there was a lot of money, and he was a money guy. He was a you know, can guy five thousand dollars okay, you know, I mean there was a motive for him to want to find out about it.
Because in his situation, you know, there was good money.
Right, always a man to work numerous angles. Lee has also been talking to some other cops who worked the Gabrini beat. Old friends, in fact partners, James Ward and John McHugh. These guys went way back. They used to help Lee out when he got in trouble with the law. They'd loan him money sometimes. They even attended Lee's wedding back in the day. Ward and mceu are much closer
to the case than Bob and Mary. They're working directly for the lead on the Fightler case, Detective Richard Zuley, a tough talking cop known for making cases and making them stick. They tell Lee some enticing insider information. They've got three suspects in the case, well known criminals from
the area. The trigger man went by the street name Cheese, but with no witnesses placing them there, there's no chance of making any arrests Lee gets thinking a twenty five thousand dollars reward has a whole lot of burn bags and cleaning windows. He could start a new life, move his son out of Cabrini. His mind starts worrying. Cabrini, Green and the Gold Coast are just around the corner from each other. We're talking less than a mile walking distance.
And the three suspects are also from the projects. It will be believable that Lee knew them. He thinks, maybe I was there the night Dana was attacked. Maybe I did see something or someone. Lee decides he does know something about the knight of the crime, and he knows who he needs to speak to about it. He heads straight to Area six to find Ward McHugh and their boss, Detective Richard Zulie. Mary was unimpressed.
Those detectives are used to be called Area six. They were all priman honas. I have to admit he hurt my feelings a little bit because I thought that we had a rapport and I thought, you know, because it was a heater case and he would have liked to been the one that you know solved it, because there is an elation to solving a case, getting the right guy, you know, solving it.
And that was the last time that Marry and Bob ever spoke to Lee.
See once he got involved like that, we disengaged because why would we be involved with him?
Ward and mckue are all ears. Dana is still in a coma, fighting for her life. They want to nail this case before anyone else does, and now it looks like they might have a reliable witness putting their suspects in the frame. It's a win win. Lee is a shoe win for the reward money and the police get their suspects and maybe some promotions as well. Warden and mcew are at the ready to help Lee prepare his words ahead of making his formal statement to Detective Zuli.
I was having a coffee and dunkin Donuts when I saw three black guys running out.
Of the out.
Quickest twenty five k Lee whatever make But a few days later, his friends Warden mcew ask if he wouldn't mind coming back for another statement. A little more detail would be really helpful. Lee thinks, sure, why not? What starts out is just one statement soon becomes two, then three, four, five, six, and each time warden mcew reminding Lee of some helpful details from the night Dana was shot, the exact alley she was shot in, a black garage door, an ivy
covered wall. Before long, Lee is not just offering peripheral scraps of information about the night of the crime. He's the key to it all, the state star witness. So much so he's moved out of Cabrini for his own safety, all on the taxpayer's dollar way win right, But Ward and McHugh are hungry for even more information. They need Lee to be closer to the action. Maybe he was part of the gang that attacked Dana. They assure Lee not to worry. This is all just so they can
nail Cheese and the other members of the gang. Detective Zuli gives Lee his word and so and yet another statement. Lee tells Zuli he was the fourth member of the gang. The police are getting closer and closer to closing the case, and those statements from Lee keep on coming. In total, he gives twenty two and then on the tenth of July, three weeks after the attack.
After lingering in a coma for twenty one days. Dana Fightler taken off life support systems and died. Police are giving on very little information. They're being very tight lip. This is a high priority case and they're being very careful.
It's a tragedy for the Fightler family and for the CPD. The pressure is really on. They are now on the hunt for a murderer, and thanks to Lee, they finally have the evidence that they need to make that arrest. Bob Jordan is at work one morning waiting on his assignment for the day when the news breaks Dana Feitler's murderer has been found, but when he hears the name, it comes as a big shock. Turns out it's someone he already knows, Lee Harris.
When they arrested Lee, I remember saying to my camera, man, hey, you know this guy. They're arrested. We've interviewed him, We've seen him around. He was always around. The switch around is baffling. The CPD's star witness has become their prime suspect. But in the end, what choice did they have? All those statements Lee was giving, all twenty two of them. With each one he.
Was clearly incriminating himself and then, to top it all, the dog walker that saw Dana moments before the attack. She has identified Lee, not Cheese or any other members of the gang in a lineup. Solving a heater case is like winning a championship, but instead of a parade, you get a press conference, a really big one. After weeks of waiting, wondering and wild speculation, the entire press corps summoned. Camera's ready, Mike's hot.
Every TV station was there, all the newspapers, everyone.
Bob Jordan and his cameraman Mike elbow their way to the front. Everyone is thirsty for the money shot, the purp walk, that moment when the cuffed perpetrator, flanked by police officers, is finally revealed to the public.
I can only imagine what that must be like to come through a door and face a whole wall of probably ten or twelve TV cameras in lights. That's how big a story. It was just the sound alone of the flashbulbs going off and the cameras rolling, and these were noisy cameras back in those days, and you know, there was a cacophony of sound in that room and the lights flashing, and reporters of screaming, Lee, did you do it? Did you kill her?
Did you shoot her?
You know?
Where were you?
Bob manages to hold his position at the front. It's enough to get Lee and I shot.
Remember the look on his face. It was a look of shock and amazement, and it was like he had seen something unreal. I don't know if he saw me. I think he did. His eyes bulged and it was like he wanted to say something but couldn't or was too afraid, or was too in awe of the moment. But he ducked his head and then was escorted away.
Crying Wolf is an iHeart and Clockwork Films podcast in association with Chalk and Blade. I'm your host Dax Devlin Ross. The series producer is Sarah Stolart's. The senior producer is Laura Hyde. The serious script is written by me and by Sarah Stolart's. Bonus episodes are written and produced by me Dax Devlin Ross. Our executive producers are Christina Everett for iHeart Podcasts, Naomi Harvey and Jamie Cohen for Clockwork Films, and Ruth Barnes and Jason Phipps for Chalk and Blade.
Sound design is by Kenny Koziak and George dre bing Hicks. Our theme music is by Kenny Koziak. Additional production support from Stephen Pate