Deadline Podcast

Deadline Podcast puts a single host, Jay, in front of a real crime and lets him talk it through. Many episodes start with the same two questions: is the listener ready for a fright, and can they handle a scare. From there the approach is plain. Jay reads out the record of a case, including the victims and their ages, the dates, the investigators and the evidence recovered, and he regularly steps outside it to react. Those interruptions are where the show lives. A case whose motive comes down to money prompts him to explain that he does not lend to anyone beyond his immediate family. In '#61 North Pole Killer' he is openly puzzled that people kept going about their lives while a killer was at large. A detail about a Santa suit melting onto an attacker's skin in the Covina Massacre draws a blunt, grimacing aside rather than analysis. None of this is dressed up. He loses his words, corrects himself mid-sentence and apologises for an upload that never arrived because work had worn him out. The December stretch shows how he likes to shape the show. He dedicated the month to Christmas massacres, a run that took in the Covina Massacre, the Lawson Family Murders, the LRA Massacre and the Anderson Massacre. The LRA case left the United States entirely, turning to attacks on civilians in Africa over Christmas 2008. Jay was frank that several of these were cases he had first covered a year earlier, in his first year of podcasting, and that he was coming back to them to give them due justice. The Anderson case, about Michelle Anderson, closed the series after the calendar had already turned to January, which he waved off as just the way it is. With the Lawson case, he goes over the rumours that the man who died by suicide may not have been the one who killed the family. He also says he has always preferred older cases to newer ones. '#67 Poison, Death of the Innocent' departs from his usual single-case pattern by covering two poisonings. One is Janie Lou Gibbs, who killed her husband, three sons and a grandson with rat poison, deaths first put down to liver disease. Episodes end with thanks, a promise of the next one and an open invitation to message him on Twitter with stories he should cover. For a listener who wants the facts of a crime alongside one person's unfiltered reaction to them, that combination is the draw.