By Jeanne M DePaul
arts@inland360.comFeeling a little bit unsettled these days? Me too. In the interest of self-preservation, I’ve kept up on the news about current events — print is better for me to absorb than radio or TV — and left it at that. To take my mind off everything else, I load up on podcasts. There are so many good ones, they’ll last a good long while.
Here are a couple of my favorites in the true-crime genre that already have multiple episodes produced and ready for listening. You won’t have to wait for the next episode to drop, and you can binge listen.
Use any podcast catcher you like — I use Google Podcasts and listen via my phone — but if you’re old school, you can also just search the web for the podcast and listen right on the website on your computer or tablet.
Here are a couple to get you started:
“White Lies” is an eight-part 2019 podcast produced by National Public Radio with Andrew Beck Grace and Chip Brantley as hosts. It tells about events that happened during the 1965 protests and demonstrations in Selma, Ala., and is described on its website as “the story of a murder at the center of the civil rights movement and the lies that kept it from being solved.” The recordings from 1965, and the audio interviews from 2019 show how easy it was to get away with murder, and how the craziest rumors were believed by so many as fact for almost 50 years.
— apps.npr.org/white-lies
“Dirty John” is a 2017 true-crime multiepisode podcast that was one of the first in the genre that I listened to, and it remains one of the best. I may have a bias toward reporters, but the best I’ve heard have been done by print journalists. This originated as a longform reporting project by Christopher Goffard of the Los Angeles Times. After the podcast proved popular, it was made into a TV miniseries of the same name and broadcast on Bravo television. I watched, but didn’t like it nearly as much as the podcast.
The story follows Debra Newell, a successful owner of an interior design company in California, and John Meehan, the man she connected with on an “over 50” online dating site.
www.latimes.com/ projects/la-me- dirty-john/
