Hi! Welcome to my newsletter…Cults, Crimes, and Cons.
About Me
For the past 10 years, I’ve been in search of the next big story. As a journalist, documentarian, and storyteller I’ve written, produced, or reported over a 1000 episodes across over 100 shows. I travelled to West Texas with Maria Hinojosa to tell the story of Estrella, a trans undocumented woman who’d been framed by her abusive ex-boyfriend for mail fraud. With award-winning journalist Kelly McEvers, I produced a three-part series on police dashcam videos for NPR’s Embedded. With Alexis Madrigal, I produced a 10 part series on globalization through the lens of container ships. In 2017, I told the story of a young man raised in a cult for the podcast Dear Franklin Jones, which rose to #1 on the Apple charts and stayed there. The young man at the heart of story was me.
In 2018, I started Neon Hum, a podcast production company that is now a part of Sony Music. We’ve made some of the most impactful documentary work during a golden age of audio storytelling. Some of those titles, like Dateline and Keith Morrison’s The Thing About Pam and Rachel Maddow’s Bag Man, have been adapted into film and tv works. It’s been an incredible journey that has taken me all over the country into the lives of countless people I never would’ve otherwise met.
Ultimately, it’s landed me here, as the Head of Creative for Sony Music’s podcast division. A big part of my work now is with The Binge, a monthly channel offering up one new riveting, edge of your seat documentary series each month, on the 1st of the month.
During this time, I’ve continued to write, voice, and produce my own work as well. As a follow up to Dear Franklin Jones, I released a series about a computer programming cult leader from the 80s and his tragic death in I Am Rama. Most recently, the series My Fugitive Dad tells for the first time the story behind Ted Conrad: the infamous vault teller who stole a fortune in 1969, and successfully evaded the authorities for over half a century before confessing to the crime on his deathbed to his wife and unsuspecting daughter, who created the series with me.
Over the years, a theme has emerged. The stories that I’m attracted to are deeply personal and complex across the genres that continue to capture our imagination: cults, crimes, and cons.
About This Newsletter
This newsletter will cover the stories I can’t put down: artful dodgers, unsolved crimes, and coercive mind control groups. We’ll take a deeper dive into some of the stories I’ve already published, and some new ones here too, as well as conversations with collaborators and subjects of my stories. I hope this space will be equal parts true crime newsletter and reporter’s notebook.
But more importantly this is a place to talk about those stories, to discuss and to share. I wanted to create a place to do that more than anything.
If you are like me, and endlessly fascinated, by stories of cults crimes and cons, this newsletter is for you.
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