Crimes, Killers, Cults and Beer: A True Crime Podcast · Dark Pass Productions

145 The Stayner Brothers, Steven and Cary with Jody Plauche

·1 hr 28 min·15 clips

Bill keeps the tone loose. He welcomes Jody Plachet back, jokes around the cough button and post-production, and then lets Jody start with the story of his own childhood abuse, the kidnapping that came after, and the violent end to the man who hurt him. It turns dark quickly. From there, the conversation keeps circling the way families are forced to absorb trauma, with Jody explaining how long he denied what happened before his parents learned the truth. That case enters that same room. Bill and Jody talk through the morning the police came to the house at 3 a.m., why Kay assumed the call had to be about Carrie, and how the family was told that Stephen had been found. Nobody is pretending this is tidy. The show lingers on the confusion around Carrie's supposed camping trip, the uncertainty around timing, and the way the hosts keep correcting themselves as they work through the details out loud. That looseness is the point. Instead of sanding everything down, the episode lets false starts, side comments, and quick jokes sit right next to the grim facts, which makes the whole thing feel like a real conversation rather than a scripted summary. The emotional weight never leaves. Jody's presence keeps the discussion grounded in survivor experience, while Bill pushes the story forward through the media frenzy, the family response, and the strange public spectacle around Stephen's return. The jokes are still there. Bill and Jody swat at bad movie shorthand, riff on other notorious killers, and use gallows humor as a way to keep talking without pretending any of this is normal. The case keeps widening. What starts as a return-home story becomes a broader look at family rupture, public attention, and the long tail of violence that doesn't stop when the headline ends. It is messy on purpose. That mess gives the episode its shape: a survivor talking through his own past while another infamous California case unfolds around him, with enough candor to make the pain plain and enough banter to keep the room from going cold. It lands hardest on memory. Listeners come away with a sense of how these stories are carried, retold, corrected, and laughed around in real time, which is very much the show's thing.

As heard by us

A loose, conversational true crime episode that stays with Jody Plachet's story and the family fallout.

The episode spends most of its time with Jody Plachet's account of abuse, kidnapping, and the violence that followed, then widens out to Stephen's return and the damage around the family.

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Why you'd press play

You want the Stayner brothers case with Jody Plachet's own abuse-and-kidnapping perspective in the mix.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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