Sistas Who Kill: A True Crime Podcast · CAKE MEDIA

Throwback : Paula Cooper

·59 min·4 clips

Would the judge break his morals and sentence a teenager to death, or would he spare her life?

The episode stays on Paula Cooper. The hosts walk through how investigators pieced together what happened inside the jail, where Bernard and Parmalay eventually admitted to sex with Paula, even though the larger issue was always abuse of a child in custody, not just rule-breaking. The dates matter. On June 19 Paula takes a pregnancy test, on June 24 she is determined not to be pregnant, and the conversation keeps circling back to the August 18 encounter and whether it came before or after her August 25 birthday. The stakes stay clear. In Indiana, the age of consent was 16, so Paula being 15 when the investigation began made this more than a messy rumor or a technical violation. The hosts keep pushing on that gap. Sex between a corrections officer and an inmate was against jail policy, but the episode treats that policy line as secondary when the person on the wrong side of it is a minor. Another inmate backs it up. Pookie, who shared a wall with Paula, and another inmate confirm enough of the story that the allegations do not stay in the realm of whispers. That is where the episode gets ugly. The hosts react hard to the fact that investigators still had to decide whether molestation charges would be pressed, and they make the power dynamic feel impossible to miss once the timeline is laid out. They also get louder about the system. A panel is brought in to review policy and procedures, which only underlines how badly the jail failed before anybody thought to review anything. The conversation keeps returning to protection. If a federal facility is responsible for keeping people alive, housed, and safe, the hosts make it plain that letting adults access a 15-year-old inmate is not some small administrative miss. The language stays blunt. The case is framed as exploitation first and bureaucracy second, and the emotional response never really cools off. The episode does not try to be tidy. It sits in the mess of the case, the ugly math of consent, and the failure of the people who were supposed to keep the wall between custody and harm intact.

As heard by us

A raw true-crime listen about a 15-year-old inmate, power, and a jail that failed its duty.

Paula Cooper is treated as more than a crime story here. The focus lands on custody, age, and power, with a 15-year-old inmate at the center and the adults around her measured against the duty they were meant to uphold.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want a true crime listen that keeps prison power and underage consent at the center.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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