Podcast review: In The Dark

The series interrogates the larger system of law enforcement in the U.S.

It’s like a scene out of the Netflix sci-fi thriller series Stranger Things . It’s a warm October night in an idyllic country town; three young boys are cycling home from a video rental store, when they are waylaid by a stranger with a gun. He forces two of them into a ditch, grabs the third and drives away. The two boys run home to raise an alarm. Search parties scour the area in a widening circle all night, and several days after, but there is no sign of the missing boy nor any clues of where — and how — he may have been taken.

The disappearance of Jacob Wetterling from St. Joseph’s, Minnesota, in 1989 was a turning point in public attitudes and legal provisions relating to sex offenders in the U.S., leading to the establishment of a national registry of sex offenders and crimes against children. It was also a case that remained unsolved for close to three decades, despite unprecedented police attention and resources.

In asking what went wrong, investigative journalist Madeleine Baran of the U.S.-based APM Reports unravels a history of poor crime-solving, a lack of accountability, and the damage this inflicted on so many. It is a story painstakingly documented and told in riveting detail.

In the Dark is a true crime podcast with a difference. It begins with the crime but then goes on to interrogate the larger system of law enforcement. The first season, focused on the Wetterling case, researched the law enforcement machinery in Stearns County, Minnesota, trying to understand how the case had been dealt with and the ways in which it changed the fabric of life in the county.

Through nine episodes, we journey with Baran through the various layers of the story: the event, the search, the media circus, the movement to establish the registry (a primary advocate of which was Jacob’s mother Patty Wetterling), overlooked clues, missed opportunities, collateral damage and finally, the truth of what happened.

The store where Curtis Flowers is said to have shot dead four people in July 1996.

Unlike many true crime stories, the focus is not on the morbid details of the crime, but on the social, legal, and scientific mechanisms that can help or hinder its resolution. The solid investigative reporting draws on data (at one point, Baran invokes the Freedom of Information Act to try to get county-level statistics on crime solving), in-depth interviews, and careful scrutiny of information. The series won a Peabody Award in 2017, for being “deftly incisive in telling the human tale” and “full and unrelenting in its attention to broader policy implications.”

Racial tensions

In season two, Baran and her team turn their attention to the trial of Curtis Flowers, an African-American man who, over the past 21 years, has been tried six times for the same crime, and been sentenced to death each time. He has maintained his innocence over the years, just as the prosecutor has maintained guilt. Baran spent a year in Montgomery County, Mississippi, getting to know Flowers’ family, the community, and the racial tensions that inevitably lie beneath the surface of the American South.

As in season one, each episode goes into a specific aspect of the investigation and the trials, featuring interviews with witnesses and expert commentary on the forensic evidence (I learned, for instance, that the history of lineup-based identification suggests that it is one of the leading causes of wrongful conviction). One episode has Baran and her team sifting through some 8,000 court records in an abandoned warehouse to understand the county’s pattern of policing (a video of this exercise is on the In the Dark website), while APM reporter Will Craft put together a database from countrywide court records to determine the role of race in jury selection (now publicly available on GitHub).

Unlike season one, however, Flowers’ story has not ended. He is awaiting another trial (and Baran’s reporting has yielded evidence that the defence hopes will exonerate him), even as the prosecutor continues to press for guilt and the death penalty.

True crime is one of the fastest growing and most popular genres in the podcast universe — which is not a surprise, given the TV success of this genre, a reflection of our fascination with the seamier side of life. But In the Dark moves us beyond this fascination, with an intelligent and searching look at the deep-rooted social and often systemic failures that keep justice from being served. It’s also a call-out to the value of the earnest pursuit of local stories, seemingly small, obscure events that affect people not often in the limelight, stories that give us unexpected insights into ourselves and our times.

(A fortnightly series on podcasts.)

The Hyderabad-based writer and academic is a neatnik fighting a losing battle with the clutter in her head.