Rumble Strip · Erica Heilman / Rumble Strip, Erica Heilman

Susan Randall. Hold the Line

September 13, 2025·22 min·1 clip

Susan Randall says her mastectomy reconnected her with her 10-year-old self — and she achieved in one day what monks spend years in monasteries trying to reach.

Host Erica Heilman introduces the episode from her mother's house on Lake Champlain in Vermont, describing the eerie autumn setting as fitting for a conversation with her 30-year friend Susan Randall, a private investigator. Susan arrives having endured a year of compounding losses: the death of her father on November 3rd, followed by an MRI on November 11th that revealed a 3.5-centimeter string of invasive ductal carcinoma — her second breast cancer diagnosis after a 2018 lumpectomy. She describes spending four months seeking second opinions and trying to avoid the diagnosis before being 'cornered' into a mastectomy. Pathology revealed cancer in 8 of 18 tissue slices, described as 'buckshot all through the breast.' Susan counts herself lucky: the cancer had not spread to her lymph nodes, and she required neither chemotherapy nor radiation. She describes the unexpected psychological effect of the surgery — looking like her flat-chested 10-year-old self — as a profound reconnection with a joyful, pre-pubescent identity. She jokes that people spend years in monasteries trying to achieve the detachment she found in a single day at Sloan Kettering. The experience has led her to say yes to invitations and no to people who treat her badly. The conversation shifts to Susan's work in federal criminal defense investigation. She explains that Congress failed to approve sufficient funding for federal defender services for the fiscal year ending September 30th, leaving investigators, attorneys, paralegals, and mitigation specialists unpaid for work already completed and court-approved. Susan describes receiving an 'oops, out of money' message in her inbox after completing tens of thousands of dollars of work on federal cases. She argues this creates a flight of qualified professionals from capital defense work at the exact moment the Trump administration is expanding death penalty prosecutions. She illustrates the crisis with a real case: a client at MDC Brooklyn who learned his case was death-penalty eligible under the new administration on the same day his neighbors were pardoned for January 6th offenses, and who then went without visits from his defense team because no one was being paid. Susan argues that criminal defense funding only becomes real to people when someone they love is falsely accused, and that defunding defense effectively warehouses poor people who cannot afford to tell their story. She connects the defunding of defense to broader cuts to social programs, framing it as a systemic abandonment of poor people and people of color. A call from her friend Angie in Nairobi — who said Americans had 'chucked their democracy down the toilet' and invoked her mother's hunger during the Mau Mau rebellion — prompts Susan to call on Americans to 'hold the line' for the rights won by suffragettes, civil rights activists, and World War II soldiers. The episode closes with a quieter exchange about aging parents, adult children, and the humbling transition from being needed to getting out of the way.

As heard by us

A close, weathered conversation about friendship, criminal defense work, and the hard limits of being useful.

In "Susan Randall. Hold the Line," Erica Heilman meets her longtime friend Susan Randall at a family camp on Lake Champlain, in the strange beauty of late fall.

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Why you'd press play

A late-fall Vermont catch-up with Susan Randall, a private investigator Erica has known for 30 years.

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