Buried history, reported slowly and clearly.
White Lies follows old cases where the official story left too much unexplained. Through archival tape, family conversations, sworn statements, and patient reporting, it rebuilds what happened and asks why the truth stayed out of reach.
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White Lies is a serious investigative series about American stories that were never cleanly settled. It works slowly. The reporting returns to Jim Reeb’s murder in Selma and follows the case through the people who were there, the officials who shaped the record, and the families who inherited its consequences. A simple question can become a whole episode: which way did three ministers turn after dinner, what happened to the ambulance, why did a trial accept one version of events and not another? The show is strongest when it lets those details breathe. A street corner matters. A flat tire matters. A filling station matters because of who gathered there and what that says about the testimony built around it. The series also places the murder inside Alabama’s wider civil rights conflict, including white supremacy, segregated juries, political pressure, and the limits of formal justice. It does not flatten people into symbols. Descendants speak with uncertainty, grief, defensiveness, and sometimes a hard-won willingness to face what their families passed down. Related reporting from the same orbit reaches into a Marine friendly-fire cover-up allegation in Iraq, where veterans’ recollections, official fog, and combat trauma form another kind of unresolved record. That material is harsher in language and imagery, but it shares the same method. White Lies listens for what institutions leave out. It compares sworn statements, archival recordings, interviews, and small human memories, then shows how fragile a public truth can be when power has reasons to blur it. The tone is grave without becoming theatrical. It trusts the audience to sit with ambiguity. The appeal is not in a tidy twist, but in the accumulation of evidence, atmosphere, and moral pressure.
Made for: For listeners who like investigative history, civil rights reporting, archival audio, and true crime without sensationalism. It suits anyone willing to follow documents, witness accounts, and family memory through difficult terrain.
What sets it apart: White Lies makes the reporting process part of the story, letting records searches, contradictions, and reluctant conversations shape the drama. It treats atmosphere and evidence as equally important, from courthouse steps to quiet rooms where old family stories start to shift.
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Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
White Lies connects a civil-rights murder to the institutions and family narratives that shaped what could be remembered, denied, and proved.
White Lies rebuilds the 1965 murder of the Rev. James Reeb through archival tape, witness accounts, sworn statements, and interviews with people still living inside its consequences.
A 1965 murder keeps changing shape until every tidy version starts to look suspicious.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
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A patient civil-rights investigation about denial, memory, and the stories families inherit.
White Lies begins with Jim Reeb’s final sermon in July 1964 at All Souls Church in Washington, D.C., and uses his warning about self-delusion to measure the gap between national progress and ordinary life.
A patient investigation that makes the paperwork feel like evidence, not background.
White Lies treats the Jim Reeb case as a search for the details that do not quite line up, and that gap becomes the point of the story. It moves through the flat-tire claim, the ambulance statements, and the trial testimony with steady pressure, letting documents, witness…
A civil rights murder, a rigid legal process, and a not guilty verdict.
White Lies follows Jim Reeb's killing in Selma and keeps its attention on how Alabama handled the murder, then let it sit cold for decades. It also spends time on Richmond Flowers' odd jury selection, where almost every person questioned said they believed in white supremacy,…
A dinner on Washington Street in Selma opens into a murder that ripples through families and history.
White Lies turns a dinner on Washington Street in Selma into the start of a murder story that reaches well beyond one night or one family. The mix of interviews, archival tape, and scene detail gives the episode a lived-in feel, and the quiet setup makes the turn in events hit…
Ashley Flowers and Britt Prawat revisit unsolved murders and cold cases as new evidence surfaces.
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Multi-part true crime narration, from BTK's Wichita letters to Australian cold-case disappearances.
ABC Audio's Theranos fraud series that also introduces its other true-crime podcasts.
LA Times reporter Christopher Goffard traces con man John Meehan's fraud, abuse, and its Bravo TV adaptation.
A tip leads back to Iraq.
White Lies, an NPR investigative podcast hosted by Andrew Beck Grace and Chip Brantley, presents its concluding episode on the 1965 murder of Unitarian minister Jim Reeb in Selma, Alabama, opening with Reeb's own July 1964 sermon warning that believing the Civil Rights Bill had solved racial inequality was 'the most dangerous kind of self-delusion.' The episode centers on the hosts' visit to Marie Reeb in Casper, Wyoming — her first extended interview since a brief hospital statement on March 10, 1965 — where she describes watching Bloody Sunday on television with Jim and driving him to Logan Airport after he said 'I have to go.' The episode then traces the legacy of Elmer Cook's violence through three generations of his family: his son Bob, who describes driving with Elmer at 14 to collect loan payments from Black customers with a billy club and a pistol; grandson Drew, who watched the movie Selma in 2014 and realized his connection; and great-granddaughter Katie, who found Jim's full story through a Google search and sought out the Reeb family to reckon with her inheritance.
A flat tire becomes the pressure point.
Jim Reeb is attacked on a Selma street corner on March 9, 1965, and dies two days later in Birmingham.
Three ministers stand outside a crowded restaurant.