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

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

The Daily vor 2 Jahren

0:00

48:50

Liz Flatt drove to Austin, Texas, mostly out of desperation. She
had tried talking with the police. She had tried working with a
former F.B.I. profiler who ran a nonprofit dedicated to solving
unsolved murders. She had been interviewed by journalists and at
least one podcaster. She had been featured on a Netflix
documentary series about a man who falsely confessed to hundreds
of killings.

Although she didn’t know it at the time, Flatt was at a
crossroads in what she had taken to calling her journey, a path
embarked on after a prayer-born decision five years earlier to
try to find who killed her sister, Deborah Sue Williamson, or
Debbie, in 1975. It was now 2021.

She had come to Austin for a conference, CrimeCon, which formed
around the same time that Flatt began her quest, at a moment now
seen as an inflection point in the long history of true crime, a
genre as old as storytelling but one that adapts quickly to new
technologies, from the printing press to social media. Flatt met
a woman who would later put her in touch with two investigators
who presented at the conference that year: George Jared and
Jennifer Bucholtz. They were podcasters, but Jared was also a
journalist and Bucholtz an adjunct professor of forensics and
criminal justice at the for-profit American Military University.
Their presentation was on another cold case, the murder of
Rebekah Gould in 2004, whose killer they claimed to have helped
find using a technique that has quickly become a signature of the
changing landscape of true crime: crowdsourcing.

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