Speaker 1: I'm here with Paul Solataroff, the writer and host of
Speaker 1: Bone Valley Season five, The Devil's Quarry, as well as
Speaker 1: Liz Garber Paul, the Rolling Stone editor who published Paul's
Speaker 1: feature story The Devil You Know in Rolling Stone. The
Speaker 1: new season Bone Valley Season five, The Devil's Quarry, will
Speaker 1: begin on June tenth, and it's also an official selection
Speaker 1: for the twenty twenty six Tribeca Festival. Welcome, guys. Really
Speaker 1: nice to see you, guys. Are you guys ready to
Speaker 1: talk some Bone Valley podcasting?
Speaker 2: Absolutely?
Speaker 1: All right, good, Paul, Let's just start with your journalism background,
Speaker 1: because you know, I've been following you for many years
Speaker 1: and I was just so thrilled to see that the
Speaker 1: guy who's broken all these big stories is now doing
Speaker 1: something with Bone Valley. So can we just talk about
Speaker 1: your background a little bit? And you know what you
Speaker 1: were doing when you stumbled onto this case.
Speaker 2: So I took a series of left turns from graduate
Speaker 2: writing programs into a job at the Village Voice in
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty seven eighty eight, wound up writing my first
Speaker 2: ever story about homeless children on the docks of the
Speaker 2: West Side Highway, which inadvertently became this enormous cluster of
Speaker 2: a story because it outed an organization called Covenant House, which,
Speaker 2: through the front doors, was bringing in all of these broken, abandoned,
Speaker 2: kickout children of the crack pandemic in New York City
Speaker 2: and then selling some of them out the back door
Speaker 2: to corporate donors. That story launched me on a trajectory
Speaker 2: to eventually Rolling Stone, where I have now been for
Speaker 2: thirty four years. And my remitt a rolling Stone has
Speaker 2: always been the pursuit of justice for those who otherwise
Speaker 2: had no shot at it, whether it was homeless kids,
Speaker 2: whether it was brainbroken NFL veterans who had been utterly
Speaker 2: screwed out of a pension, or even any kind of
Speaker 2: clinical acknowledgment of what was this enormous pandemic of chronic
Speaker 2: traumatic encephalopathy. That was my story, and over the years
Speaker 2: I have gone after the kinds of stories that yielded
Speaker 2: the most horrific, unspeakable acts of official misconduct on the
Speaker 2: parts of crooked cops, big city cops, on the parts
Speaker 2: of corrupt prosecutors, on the parts of in the bad judges.
Speaker 2: The larger rubric for my career has been America's War
Speaker 2: on drugs, which very early on in my career I
Speaker 2: realized was nothing more than the war on the poor.
Speaker 2: And so I have essentially kind of appointed myself the
Speaker 2: public advocate for the poor who had been caught in
Speaker 2: the most horrific domestic policy decision of the American century,
Speaker 2: which is this headlong attempt to arrest our way out
Speaker 2: of the drug pandemic and create a massive incarceral state
Speaker 2: that left us five years ago with a quarter of
Speaker 2: the world's in prison population.
Speaker 1: Paul, where do you think this came from? I mean,
Speaker 1: looking back decades of doing this kind of work, was
Speaker 1: there something that affected you as a child, or some
Speaker 1: kind of you know, awakening to these issues.
Speaker 2: Where did they come from? I was a bit of
Speaker 2: a red diaper baby. My father was a famous literary editor,
Speaker 2: my mother a translator of Tulstoy and Chekhov. None of
Speaker 2: that was interesting to me. What was interesting was they
Speaker 2: dragged me to DC for the March on Washington, to
Speaker 2: the rallies in Central Park in the sixties. I wound
Speaker 2: up going to the School of Music and Art, which
Speaker 2: in those days was in Harlem, directly across the street
Speaker 2: from CCNY, which was a seeding ground of the SDS,
Speaker 2: ultimately the weather Underground. So I was very much subscribed
Speaker 2: into radical politics as a child, but I was raised
Speaker 2: to be a novelist and trained to be a novelist.
Speaker 2: And so what I brought inadvertently to journalism was a
Speaker 2: storyteller's use of language, of narrative structure, and of that
Speaker 2: intense fascination with otherness, with the price, the daily price
Speaker 2: of getting out of bed for people without the kinds
Speaker 2: of advantages, privileges, associations I'd come to take for granted.
Speaker 2: And if there was one sort of clincher for it.
Speaker 2: In my hopeless attempt to become a novelist and then
Speaker 2: later a playwright, I wound up for two years at
Speaker 2: the NYU School of Social Work, where my placement was
Speaker 2: in the South Bronx, allegedly ministering clinically to the orphan
Speaker 2: children of the Happy Lands disco fire in nineteen eighty seven.
Speaker 2: And for two years I sat in an office with
Speaker 2: no skills, with really no supervision, attempting to console children
Speaker 2: whose parents had been a obliterated in a basement fire
Speaker 2: in an unlicensed club in the Bronx. And what that
Speaker 2: indenture that to your indenture did was give me my subject.
Speaker 2: So when I started the Village Voice in nineteen eighty eight,
Speaker 2: I was three blocks on West Broadway from the West
Speaker 2: Side Docks, and every day I would take my lunch
Speaker 2: to eat on these abandoned docks, which were rotting peers
Speaker 2: that had become a stroll for the eight nine and
Speaker 2: ten year old kickout children of the crack SROs on
Speaker 2: West forty second Street, and I saw these children selling
Speaker 2: their bodies for five dollars crack rocks. That became my
Speaker 2: first story, but it also became my grail to get
Speaker 2: them the assistance, the robust response from a city administration
Speaker 2: that didn't give a fuck about them. I always tell
Speaker 2: people when asked how I find my stories, I just
Speaker 2: follow my app rage.
Speaker 1: Can you just talk about having, you know, decades of
Speaker 1: cracking these really important stories that aren't just stories for
Speaker 1: our reading, but they actually go on to improve things
Speaker 1: and call attention to issues that you care about. Can
Speaker 1: you just talk about where you were or how you
Speaker 1: stumbled into this case that you wrote about for Rolling Stone.
Speaker 1: With now Bone Valley season five.
Speaker 2: I work very closely with the Innocence Project. They have
Speaker 2: been boone partners on several of my big sort of
Speaker 2: exoneration stories, and they began telling me about what was
Speaker 2: happening in Massachusetts, about this bubbling up scandal in the
Speaker 2: state crime labs. So, in Massachusetts there was this ten
Speaker 2: fifteen year long open scandal wherein the state police crime
Speaker 2: labs in high rotation for seized narcotics by police departments
Speaker 2: West and East in Massachusetts were submitting these seizures to
Speaker 2: be sampled, tested, and certified as narcotics in order to
Speaker 2: corroborate these indictments of low level dealers, primarily possession, use sales. Well,
Speaker 2: what I discovered in the course of that investigation is
Speaker 2: that these two labs in western Massachusetts, one in Boston,
Speaker 2: were populated by chemists who were shooting, snorting, smoking, huffing,
Speaker 2: and otherwise consuming the very substances they were hired to test.
Speaker 2: These bench chemists had wrongly helped convict we believe fifty
Speaker 2: sixty thousand low level offenders. Another of these deep, very
Speaker 2: complicated digs helped to exonerate forty one thousand of these
Speaker 2: level offenders and to get them compensated for their years
Speaker 2: wrongfully spent in prison. Once that story was done, I'd
Speaker 2: get together with Nina Morrison and Peter Neufeld, who were
Speaker 2: running Innocence Project in New York. I said, what's next?
Speaker 2: And they said, ever want to look at small town
Speaker 2: police corruption, prosecutorial misconduct. Have any interest in that? And
Speaker 2: I said, boy do I ever? And so that was
Speaker 2: the launch point to drive up to the town of
Speaker 2: Carmel in Putnam County, fifty miles from Rolling Stone's office
Speaker 2: on Fifth Avenue, Midtown, Manhattan, and meet with two young
Speaker 2: men who had been framed, who had been arrested, framed, convicted,
Speaker 2: and sent away in their teens to the most medieval
Speaker 2: prisons in New York State for life without parole for
Speaker 2: the rape and murder of a girl. They had never met.
Speaker 2: The first of these wrongfully accused teens, who had spent
Speaker 2: twenty years his entire young adulthood in Attica, Dana Mora
Speaker 2: Auburn Western teaching himself how to read. He was a
Speaker 2: ninth grade dropout when he went away, teaching himself the
Speaker 2: law at Shwongong Prison library and compiling the most extraordinary
Speaker 2: legal brief investigating the actual killer of the decedent, Josette Right.
Speaker 2: And so when I showed up in Carmel. I didn't
Speaker 2: show up in Carmel. My first toe end of the
Speaker 2: story was sitting in the penthouse apartment at Trump Tower
Speaker 2: in New Rochelle of Anthony de Pippo, who had been
Speaker 2: out of prison for five years after exonerating himself in
Speaker 2: a twenty sixteen trial, who had then filed a federal
Speaker 2: civil rights suit for wrongful arrest, conviction, imprisonment against Putnam
Speaker 2: County in the state of New York one judgments I'm sorry,
Speaker 2: won settlements to the tune of fifteen million dollars and
Speaker 2: bought himself a very garish apartment in Trump Tower. Remember
Speaker 2: he was seven team unarrested nineteen, went sent away for
Speaker 2: life of that pearl. His emotional and developmental timeline were
Speaker 2: stopped abruptly as a teen. And so what did he
Speaker 2: buy himself with this fifteen million? He bought himself one
Speaker 2: hundred and fifty replica championship wrestling belts, framed them and
Speaker 2: mounted them on the walls of his apartment. He had
Speaker 2: a nine thousand dollars flat screen TV, which he told
Speaker 2: me only worked in eight K, which was a problem
Speaker 2: because we only had four K at the time. And
Speaker 2: what made it really poignant and what Anthony had intensely
Speaker 2: in common with the other exoneries I've either held free
Speaker 2: or who got themselves free. And then I told their stories.
Speaker 2: Having been entrapped in an eight by non enclosure his
Speaker 2: entire adult life. He was living in this three bedroom apartment,
Speaker 2: in fifteen hundred square foot apartment with spectacular views in
Speaker 2: every window. He wouldn't leave the bedroom. He would pace
Speaker 2: his bedroom and never leave. And I said, Anthony, how
Speaker 2: do you eat? How do you get vitamin D? He said,
Speaker 2: I go down at night when I think the cops
Speaker 2: are out, are gone. So he was so terrified he
Speaker 2: bought himself this gorgeous AMG Mercedes suv that he was
Speaker 2: terrified to drive for fear that he'd be stopped. So
Speaker 2: what happens in these cases of men who have been
Speaker 2: wrongfully accused, tried, convicted, is even after establishing absolute innocence,
Speaker 2: they are always in the dark tunnel, too afraid to
Speaker 2: rejoin the society that snatched them out of their childhoods.
Speaker 2: And so I spent nine months reporting that story and
Speaker 2: the corruption, the incompetence, the sadism of the Putnam County
Speaker 2: Sheriff's office was, if anything undersold to me, it was
Speaker 2: the most lawless law enforcement agency I have ever had
Speaker 2: the honor of delving into. And it had a history
Speaker 2: of criminal misconduct dating back decades. What do you do
Speaker 2: if you were a police department or a constellation of
Speaker 2: police departments that has domestics as its variant of violent crime,
Speaker 2: that has nickel and dime possession as it's underworld, You
Speaker 2: go and you create crime. And one of the ways
Speaker 2: that these police police departments did that was by using
Speaker 2: a confidential informant who turns out to be this central
Speaker 2: figure of the devil, you know, a man in his thirties,
Speaker 2: to sell give away drugs to children, to thirteen, fourteen,
Speaker 2: fifteen year olds of both genders, and then subject them
Speaker 2: to or tip the cops off. They would get arrested,
Speaker 2: you know, they'd all go off to smoke a joint
Speaker 2: in the wood, or to hang out in an abandoned
Speaker 2: shack by the railyard to drink Boone's farm. The sheriffs
Speaker 2: of the cops would swarm the girls. In order to
Speaker 2: get out of the back seat of that cruiser, would
Speaker 2: have to blow the deputy. The boys would have to
Speaker 2: agree to be snitches and sell a nickel of weed
Speaker 2: to their school friends. That's how you build stats if
Speaker 2: you are a corrupt sheriff. In a small town of
Speaker 2: twenty five thousand, it was hard to find a young
Speaker 2: woman who had not been sexually violated or threatened with it,
Speaker 2: or whose best friend had not had to do something
Speaker 2: she didn't want to do to get out of the
Speaker 2: back of that cruiser. And that, for me, was the
Speaker 2: palette I worked with. Those were the earth colors I
Speaker 2: painted that story with. Within that subculture, these extremely vulnerable
Speaker 2: children who, let's remember, this was pre helicopter parenting. This
Speaker 2: was you know, pre you know, children just saying no.
Speaker 2: The town of Carmel, much of that side of Putnam
Speaker 2: County offers fuck all for children after school. If you
Speaker 2: don't play Little League, if you don't play girl soccer,
Speaker 2: there is nowhere for you to go. And they had
Speaker 2: to go somewhere to continue to you know, kind of
Speaker 2: create their own adventure, and they go into the woods
Speaker 2: or they go to a rave up on a hill
Speaker 2: and the police would swarm. So you had this culture
Speaker 2: where this precocious kind of sexuality was what passed for entertainment.
Speaker 2: What passed for after school activities, and a lot of
Speaker 2: it was born out of boredom, but also a lot
Speaker 2: of it was born out of parental neglect. I remember
Speaker 2: feeling this acutely, very early on in my reporting trips
Speaker 2: to Carmel. I had the distinct feeling I was being
Speaker 2: follen because I was such an obvious ringer and because
Speaker 2: I was asking the wrong questions.
Speaker 3: There can be, especially with the smaller communities right outside
Speaker 3: of New York, there can be a resentment to the
Speaker 3: you know, New York media coming in and reshaping these
Speaker 3: foundational narratives. And they didn't particularly They felt very protective
Speaker 3: over their town and didn't love an outsider coming in
Speaker 3: and ripping it all up.
Speaker 1: This I'm going to ask you to go back a
Speaker 1: few years, sure, what was it like when this story
Speaker 1: which later became his story for Rolling Stone? The de
Speaker 1: w no, What was your first introduction to this story
Speaker 1: and what was your reaction at the time.
Speaker 3: So I believe the first introduction was you had filed
Speaker 3: the story to Sean Woods, our editor in chief, and
Speaker 3: he had gone through it. And I've only been a
Speaker 3: Rolling Stone for sixteen years, but I had a history
Speaker 3: of working with Paul. I had fact checked him when
Speaker 3: I was in the fact checking department. It transcribed for
Speaker 3: him early in my career, I had, and I had
Speaker 3: also just finished around twenty twenty one, I had recently
Speaker 3: finished a story that I wrote myself about police corruption
Speaker 3: in Philadelphia, about a guy named Jimmy Dennis who had
Speaker 3: been picked off this street the a twenty year old
Speaker 3: kid in the mid nineteen eighties and had been on
Speaker 3: death row for twenty five years before he won his
Speaker 3: own exoneration, so or not exactly exoneration, but he won
Speaker 3: his So Sean felt like I was in a good
Speaker 3: place to pick up Paul's story and run with it,
Speaker 3: and I was. I'm always impressed by Paul's drafts when
Speaker 3: they come in. He has such a natural talent as
Speaker 3: a storyteller. So so my work as an editor on
Speaker 3: this story was not so much trying to frame the
Speaker 3: narrative or you know, why would the reader care about this, like,
Speaker 3: let's get into that. It was really more let's get
Speaker 3: into the nitty gritty. How do we know what we know?
Speaker 3: How can we safely make the statements we're going to say.
Speaker 3: It's almost just like high level fact checking at that point,
Speaker 3: and I was very fortunate to be working with an
Speaker 3: incredible fact checker, John Bernstein, on this story, and so
Speaker 3: we just kind of we read the story. We're so
Speaker 3: impressed by the way that Paul had just really brought
Speaker 3: this slice of you know, bedroom community nineteen eighties to life.
Speaker 3: And so, yeah, our first job was digging in, reading
Speaker 3: through all of the reporting that he'd been doing over
Speaker 3: nine months and really trying to kind of parse what
Speaker 3: was legend and what was fact. And I think especially
Speaker 3: in a case like this where you have where it's
Speaker 3: historical in one sense.
Speaker 1: But also recent history.
Speaker 3: You know, memory is a tricky thing. People are trying
Speaker 3: to tell their story to the best of their ability
Speaker 3: and remember where they were at that time and having
Speaker 3: to kind of sort through legal documents both contemporaneous and
Speaker 3: you know, within the last few years, and then all
Speaker 3: of the incredible interviews that Paul had done with people
Speaker 3: who are remembering this time. You know, it was just
Speaker 3: it was immersing myself into this very troubled community corruption
Speaker 3: that brought them to that point.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and obviously it can be a very dark story
Speaker 1: time you're dealing with the murder and torture of these
Speaker 1: young girls. What was it like within Rolling Stone? Were
Speaker 1: they supportive of these efforts and do they encourage Paul
Speaker 1: to just keep digging or to just maybe focus on
Speaker 1: some of the corruption and less about the actual crimes.
Speaker 1: How does that work? No?
Speaker 3: I mean, I think for a story like this, you know,
Speaker 3: the corruption it's about, how do you how do you
Speaker 3: get a reader to pay attention to to you know,
Speaker 3: the vegetables of the story, right, which is the police corruption,
Speaker 3: which can get somewhat tedious as a reader. And really,
Speaker 3: and what's so incredible about this story is the very
Speaker 3: real characters who come out of it. And so we
Speaker 3: were I mean, we're we're on the culture side of
Speaker 3: Rolling Stone. We don't shy away from the dark stories
Speaker 3: at all. We also don't want them to be exploitative,
Speaker 3: you know, And so how do you tell these stories
Speaker 3: without making it tabloidy?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 3: How how do you bring this town to life without
Speaker 3: making it one dimensional? And that was we just leaned
Speaker 3: right into that. I think one of the things that
Speaker 3: was most surprising to me, as you know, the outsider
Speaker 3: kind of coming into this story, was how committed so
Speaker 3: many people in that community were to the version of
Speaker 3: events from you know, the nineteen nineties, right, the prosecutor's
Speaker 3: version of events that Anthony and Andy were guilty, and
Speaker 3: how hard it was even when confronted with you know,
Speaker 3: legal papers and verdicts and Anthony's release from prison, how
Speaker 3: hard it was for a lot of the folks from
Speaker 3: that community to let go of the narrative that they
Speaker 3: had been sold. And I wasn't really prepared for that
Speaker 3: as much because, you know, working with places like the
Speaker 3: Innocence Project following these stories, you kind of assume that,
Speaker 3: you know, everyone wants everyone does want justice, but what
Speaker 3: that justice looks like can be very different to different people.
Speaker 3: I hope have come to appreciate, especially with you know,
Speaker 3: with Andy's eventual release, like that, there is a lot
Speaker 3: of truth to the story that Paul wrote, And hopefully
Speaker 3: they'll listen to this podcast and get even more depths
Speaker 3: into the reporting that he's done and realize that, you know,
Speaker 3: it's not it's not someone coming in and trying to
Speaker 3: change the story at someone coming in and trying to
Speaker 3: tell the real story.
Speaker 2: Paul.
Speaker 1: I'm just really curious from you from a storyteller's perspective,
Speaker 1: somebody has you know, done print for decades, what was
Speaker 1: it like pivoting the podcast in this audio format? Could
Speaker 1: you talk about some of the things that you found
Speaker 1: different and really satisfying or unsatisfying.
Speaker 2: Well, I'd always thought of my voice as one of
Speaker 2: my very few advantages in life, my speaking voice. And
Speaker 2: then I began listening to playbacks of myself doing narration,
Speaker 2: and I called Kevin Waters in a panic and said,
Speaker 2: can we hire someone to do the narration? I really
Speaker 2: don't want to be the reason that no one listens
Speaker 2: to season five of Bone Valley. I will tell you
Speaker 2: it is an acquired skill. It is a lot of
Speaker 2: failure and a lot of humiliation listening to yourself in playback.
Speaker 2: The main challenge I had is while I write by
Speaker 2: the engine, not by the ord, I also am a
Speaker 2: very self conscious and self scourging stylist of my sentences,
Speaker 2: and they were too pretty. I think your voice is
Speaker 2: fantastic than you know. Really, you just it's it just
Speaker 2: fits the actual show, and you feel like a natural
Speaker 2: character within the show. And so I thought, I know
Speaker 2: how it was for me. I couldn't stand listen to
Speaker 2: my voice. And I even thought the same thing, do
Speaker 2: you want to get another narrator? But you fit that
Speaker 2: you're the person who did the work, you belong in
Speaker 2: the story. But I finally figured out, no, the most
Speaker 2: powerful voice in these episodes is always the victims, is
Speaker 2: always the lawyers, is always the exonerated Anthony to Pippo.
Speaker 2: Their stories are vastly more interested interesting than my sentences,
Speaker 2: and it is time to let go of the wheel
Speaker 2: and let the people whose story this belongs to write
Speaker 2: the narrative through their own recollections, your own traumatic renderings
Speaker 2: of what happened to them.
Speaker 1: I think the other thing I noticed when in the
Speaker 1: whole writing process is right, when you approach it like
Speaker 1: a print story, you insert quotes because you're not hearing them.
Speaker 1: But when you're doing a podcast, that voice becomes much larger,
Speaker 1: and you're right, it's the people who've experienced trauma pain
Speaker 1: that really resonate in the story. And you know, for me,
Speaker 1: I think it was just listening to Leo Schofield talk
Speaker 1: about his case and the pain that he felt just
Speaker 1: constantly being defeated in courts and having to learn that
Speaker 1: I'm going to die in prison if something's not corrected.
Speaker 1: That's more powerful than anything you could write anyway, just
Speaker 1: hearing that voice crack in the emotion, and I think
Speaker 1: that's what really drew me, and I've definitely been hearing
Speaker 1: it in season five. You definitely have these powerful stories
Speaker 1: and interviews with people along the way that just yeah,
Speaker 1: just get out of the way of it, which you
Speaker 1: do really well.
Speaker 2: You're eighteen years old, you're Anthony to Pippo, and yes,
Speaker 2: you're a large young man who thinks he's a backyard
Speaker 2: wrestler at six five and two forty. What you don't
Speaker 2: understand is that when you get to Danimore, the backyard
Speaker 2: wrestlers up there bench four fifty, squat five twenty and
Speaker 2: eat white boys like you for as an amuse boush
Speaker 2: and both of these young men, by the way, Andy
Speaker 2: on a good day is five seven and a buck forty.
Speaker 2: And they entered the as I say, the most raconian
Speaker 2: prisons in New York State. And they went into these
Speaker 2: places with what is called a jacket. You go into
Speaker 2: max prison, you are wearing a jacket of your conviction.
Speaker 2: They wore the worst possible jacket you can wear, child rapist, murderer,
Speaker 2: and they were going to have to save their own lives.
Speaker 2: From the day they walked in. They were going to
Speaker 2: have to fight their own fights. They were going to
Speaker 2: have to convince at least a few of the key
Speaker 2: shot callers on their cell blocks. I didn't do this.
Speaker 2: I got railroaded, you know, Paul.
Speaker 1: When I go out and speak about the cases of
Speaker 1: like Leo Schofield and Jeremy Scott, I often get asked,
Speaker 1: you know, you're dealing with these really dark subjects, really
Speaker 1: about the worst of humanity. Sometimes, what do you do
Speaker 1: for your own self care? And I know for a
Speaker 1: fact that this story stayed with you and haunted you
Speaker 1: for a long time, and you maybe felt you were
Speaker 1: kind of done with it. Can you just talk about
Speaker 1: the process of coming back into it and creating Bone
Speaker 1: Valley Season five?
Speaker 2: So I do these stories, one after another after another,
Speaker 2: and I'm always writing about suffering that's almost unimaginable to me,
Speaker 2: or would be unimaginable, except I've seen it over and
Speaker 2: over and over again. And so while I've learned to
Speaker 2: compartmentalize and to build a layer of callous around my
Speaker 2: heart and my soul, this story, and only this story,
Speaker 2: pierced it. And it pierced it not because of my
Speaker 2: interactions with the devil who is the titular character in
Speaker 2: the series. Those were upsetting, but I know those guys.
Speaker 2: It was the half dozen survivors of this monster who
Speaker 2: had told these stories first to the cops, then do
Speaker 2: it udge, then in courtroom juried settings, and who had
Speaker 2: never been believed, had never been supported, had never been
Speaker 2: able to feel safe again for the rest of their
Speaker 2: adult lives. I had a nervous breakdown first and only
Speaker 2: of my career when I finished reporting this. I was
Speaker 2: not institutionalized, but my wife was very close to getting
Speaker 2: me admitted somewhere. And what did it to me? It
Speaker 2: was living with the stories of this half dozen living
Speaker 2: witnesses and their untreated horror, fear traum.
Speaker 3: What was so striking about the story was just the
Speaker 3: brutality and the way that this string of girls who
Speaker 3: had been victimized by this same man had just gone
Speaker 3: under the radar, and hearing the way that they were
Speaker 3: able to describe their experiences in such kind of stark
Speaker 3: terms was very affecting. It's very hard sometimes to get
Speaker 3: to get victims of sexual traumatic abuse to speak, and
Speaker 3: even just reading their accounts, not listening to them, just
Speaker 3: reading their accounts was difficult. They had to kind of
Speaker 3: force myself to do it because reading those accounts was
Speaker 3: it was giving me kind of visceral reactions because we're
Speaker 3: talking about teenage girls and sometimes pre teenage girls who
Speaker 3: are raped and abused with the knowledge of the adults
Speaker 3: around them, sometimes and not given any kind of resources
Speaker 3: or ability to get out of those situations.
Speaker 2: And so when Various and Sundry approached me to do
Speaker 2: the podcast version, I said absolutely not. I mean, Jason
Speaker 2: approached me five years ago to do this. I would
Speaker 2: not go near it because I was very, very fragile
Speaker 2: for a minute. And then something happened a year ago
Speaker 2: this spring, I got a call from not one, but
Speaker 2: two of this monster's victims who told me, Paul, he's
Speaker 2: getting out. Paul, he has a release date. I am terrified.
Speaker 2: Is there someone you can call? Is there someone who
Speaker 2: you can take me to who will believe me? This
Speaker 2: monster will be released without an administrative tail from a
Speaker 2: neighboring state, no probation, no parole. A man who has
Speaker 2: lived since a child in the woods in a tent
Speaker 2: off the grid will return to the tree line, where
Speaker 2: he will be sight unseen until the time of his choosing,
Speaker 2: and a victim of his selection, and at that point
Speaker 2: I had enough distance between me and the secondhand trauma
Speaker 2: of those nine months in Carmel, and I enlisted with
Speaker 2: Lava for Good to get final justice for those young
Speaker 2: women and for the generations they bore who also carry
Speaker 2: that almost umbilical feed of rage. I will do everything
Speaker 2: in my power, short of shooting him myself, to make
Speaker 2: sure he never disappears into a wooded area and pops
Speaker 2: out again as a school bus of children goes back.
Speaker 2: I cannot tell the listeners of this series strongly enough
Speaker 2: we need you and your outrage. What we are up
Speaker 2: against is the most staggering corruption, the most staggering stone wall,
Speaker 2: and only the fear created by the passion of our
Speaker 2: listeners will help finally get to a place of truth,
Speaker 2: justice and healing for the girls of Putnam County.
Speaker 1: Well, Paul Is, I can't thank you enough for being
Speaker 1: here and talking about the Devil's Quarry. I just think
Speaker 1: this is just a fascinating podcast that's going to grip
Speaker 1: people from week to week.
Speaker 2: I think the.
Speaker 1: Story is just enhanced by the work that you've put in,
Speaker 1: and the audio is phenomenal. I think you're going to
Speaker 1: see a difference. I think you know, at Bone Valley
Speaker 1: we like to think we want stories to make a
Speaker 1: difference in the outcome, not just entertain people, but actually
Speaker 1: go on to help increase justice and healing and all
Speaker 1: of those things. And I think you've gone a long
Speaker 1: way towards getting us there with this story. So thank
Speaker 1: you again. We're looking forward Bone Valley season five.
Speaker 2: The Devil's Quarry. Thank you so much. Gilber, of course,
Speaker 2: thank you