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Hi everyone, I'm Carter Roy and I host a podcast called Conspiracy Theories, a show about the greatest lies in history. For over six years, we've been covering some of the world's biggest controversies, mixing in tales of real proven conspiracies with ones that are just fun to think about. Today, I have an episode for you that deals in psychological warfare, political sabotage, and manufactured chaos.

It's about two suspicious deaths that occurred 20 years apart. Despite the gap, they might have been the same culprit. A secret police organization pulling strings from the shadows.

You can listen to it right here. And if you like what you hear, you can get new episodes of Conspiracy Theories every Wednesday, wherever you get your podcasts. And now our episode on the Stasi, East Germany's secret police. Most secrets die with the people who keep them. But there are some that manage to live on if you look in the right place. Take the Stasi files.

They contain four decades of meticulous records. Roughly 70 miles of paper in peach-colored folders in 14 offices spread around Germany. And that's just what didn't get destroyed when the Berlin Wall fell.

The Stasi, or East German secret police, are famous for their intense surveillance. Their files document 40 years of espionage, the activities of a million spies, and millions more targets, at the very least. I say at the very least because, as of 2024, not all of the files have been recovered.

When East Germany dissolved in 1989, Stasi officers went on a paper shredding spree to conceal their operations. But before they could fully destroy the scraps, the modern German government arrested them and inherited more than 16,000 bags of torn up secrets. Over the past 30 years, German archivists have slowly reassembled the files, pasting them together like jigsaw puzzles.

and unveiling hidden history. In 2016, newly uncovered records provided the evidence needed to charge ex-Stasi officer Martin Nauman with murder. Nauman went to trial in March 2024.

But Naumann's not the only person whose guilt may be hidden among scraps of paper. As the archivists work to reassemble the aging files, new details of Stasi operations could resurface at any time. So today, we're looking at two suspicious deaths. Each was assigned an innocuous explanation, but some people think they were Stasi hit jobs. And the truth might be hiding.

Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. You can find us here every Wednesday. And be sure to check us out on Instagram at TheConspiracyPod. And we would love to hear from you. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. Today, we're reexamining the deaths of Benno Onezork and Uwe Barschel.

Officially, Onazork was the victim of police brutality and Barschall died by suicide. But many suspect they were victims of a divided Germany. You see, both victims were citizens of West Germany. But some people think their deaths were secret East German operations done by the Stasi. For those unfamiliar with the Stasi, they're basically the East German KGB.

They were literally started by the KGB to control the area. The Stasi operated from 1950 to 1990. If they had a hand in the deaths of Bena Onezork and Uwe Barschel, East Germany's Stasi was pulling political strings no one knew existed.

Before we get into this story, amongst the many sources we used, we found the reporting of German newspaper Der Spiegel and a visit to Deutsch Espionage Museum in Berlin extremely helpful to our research. Stay with us. The shot that changed the Republic. That's what Germans call the bullet that killed Benno Ohnesorg on June 2nd, 1967.

Everyone agrees on who shot Onezork, where, and even how it altered the course of German history. The mystery is why exactly Karl-Heinz Kuras fired his gun. It happened in Berlin. At the time, the city is a microcosm of the Cold War. The Berlin Wall, a very literal symbol for the ideological divide of the Iron Curtain.

On one side, capitalist West Berlin, part of West Germany, occupied by the US, UK and France. On the other, communist East Berlin, part of East Germany, occupied by the Soviets. And in the middle of it all, the Shah of Iran. He's in Berlin on an official state visit, here to forge ties between Iran and West Germany.

But many West Germans don't want to forge ties with Iran. Young people especially see the Shah as a fascist dictator, known to torture his opponents. So they protest every stop of the Shah's tour. On the evening of June 2nd, 1967, the Shah visits the opera house to see the magic flute. Outside the venue, German youths raise signs and chant, Murderer.

But they aren't the only group there. The Iranians brought their own set of pro-Shah counter-protesters. And they're ready to fight. So are the West Berlin police. They come at the crowd from multiple angles, squeezing them together with a threat of wooden clubs and high-pressure water guns. Some of the protesters run from the square into a parking lot. Officially, the police have done their job. The protest is breaking up.

Unofficially, a smaller squad of officers chase the runners, hoping to catch the movement's leaders. Among them, police inspector Karl-Heinz Kuras. He's stocky, with round features of average height, and usually keeps his dark hair slicked back. Today, he's on the job, wearing his West Berlin police uniform.

Meanwhile, 26-year-old Benno Onezork strolls down a nearby street with his wife, Krista. Benno's got a small mustache and wears slacks and sandals. Very European. Krista's blonde with a big smile. But she isn't smiling when she and her husband hear the commotion and see terrified people running into the parking structure. Benno wants to investigate. He's a student himself, working on a degree in humanities.

Krista declines. She's newly pregnant. So Benno Onizork walks over alone and gets caught in the brawl. Amid the chaos, police inspector Kouros pulls his pistol trigger. The bullet pierces Benno Onizork's skull. According to Der Spiegel, another officer yells at Kouros and Kouros replies something to the effect of, the gun just went off.

The superior officer tells Kuras to get out of there, and he does. Meanwhile, other officers push away a doctor trying to help Onazork. They insist on calling paramedics, so it takes an hour before Onazork can receive medical attention. At that point, he's already dead. According to Der Spiegel, hospital doctors note his cause of death as "skull injury by blunt force."

Though the protest is over, the fight between the left-leaning youth and the right-leaning government is just beginning. Onazork's death sparks a new wave of unrest in his name. The tragic loss of an innocent young man and father-to-be becomes the symbol of everything wrong with the government. He didn't even protest, and yet he was killed with a government-issued weapon.

To the movement, it's proof the West German government is overstepping the bounds of democracy and must be stopped. Fuel piles onto this fire when that same government bans protesting, which of course doesn't stop it. Tensions rise as police inspector Kouros goes to trial charged with manslaughter. Kouros claims the protesters were attacking him. Some of them had knives. He didn't intend to shoot.

According to Der Spiegel, Kouros gives multiple accounts of the day's events and they don't all line up. But the police union believes Kouros. They say he shot in self-defense and fund his legal case. Meanwhile, the prosecution faces major evidence gaps. The day after the shooting, Kouros took his police uniform to the dry cleaners.

and he conveniently lost the gun's bullet magazine. Also missing: parts of Benno Ohnozork's skull. Doctors removed the pieces damaged by the bullet during the autopsy, and the bones somehow got thrown away. Moreover, the investigation didn't collect testimony from the officers at the scene.

Even though witnesses reported that police officers beat up Onazork before and, by some accounts, even after the gun went off. In the end, the court acquits police inspector Kouros. Too little evidence. Young Germans are outraged. This is the very fascism they were protesting against.

The anger sparks the flame of several terrorist groups. First, the June 2nd movement, named for the date of Onazork's murder. Then, there's the Red Army faction, also known as the Bader-Meinhof gang, who you might recognize if you are currently experiencing the Bader-Meinhof phenomenon.

That's when you learn about something new, then suddenly it's everywhere. Because for Germans in the 70s, it felt like the Baader-Meinhof gang was everywhere. Behind kidnappings, bombings, bank robberies, even murders. All in the name of fighting fascism. The public outrage is so widespread, Kouros is retried in 1970. People want justice for Benno Onezork.

But they don't get it. Kouros is acquitted a second time. And a few years later, he's back to work as a West Berlin police officer. Eventually, the fervor dies down and the social unrest stops. Germany reunifies in 1989 under a new democratic government. The violence fades, though the fear of fascism remains unresolved.

Even today, Germans don't hang flags or hold parades. In their eyes, national pride markers like this can be a slippery slope to a dangerous dictatorship. It's not worth it. 20 years after reunification, Germany has mostly moved forward. Until an accidental discovery changes everything they thought they knew about the past 40 years.

It's 2009, and historians Helmut Müller-Enbergs and Cornelia Jobs are knee-deep in files at the Stasi Records Agency. In her research, Cornelia finds a reference to an unusual file, one that apparently no one has reviewed yet. According to Der Spiegel, the German name for this document translates to, I kid you not, Secret File 2 of 70.

Well, naturally, Cornelia reads the secret file and a familiar name pops up. Karl Heinz Kuras. This file leads her to 16 more undiscovered files, revealing that Karl Heinz Kuras was actually an East German spy, an undercover Stasi agent. At some point, someone removed Kuras from the Stasi records index and

They intentionally buried his activities under mountains of paper. To Cornelia and everyone else in Germany, Karl-Heinz Kuras's name is infamous. The discovery instantly sparks a conspiracy theory. Was Benno Ohnozork's murder part of a Stasi plot? According to Der Spiegel, the uncovered records show that not long after Kuras shot Ohnozork,

He sent the Stasi central office a lengthy message. It was redacted. In 2009, newly uncovered Stasi records reveal that Karl Heinz Kuras was an East German spy at the time he shot Banaona Zorc. When the news goes public, Kuras is still alive, age 81. He denies everything, naturally. It's only when confronted with the records that he confirms his espionage.

insisting he was an unpaid Stasi volunteer informant. Onezork's death was an unrelated, tragic accident, but the Stasi archives reveal a different story. It starts in 1955, after the Allies occupied Germany, but before things have settled into a new normal,

On the east side, the newly formed Stasi exists as an extension of the KGB. The organization was established in 1950, but it'll be a few years before it spins off into an autonomous organization. The Berlin Wall isn't even built yet, so when Karl-Heinz Kuras decides to cross the east-west border snaking through Berlin, he doesn't have any trouble.

At the time, he's a disillusioned 27-year-old who loves guns and hates the direction the West is going in. He marches right into the Socialist Unity Party's Central Committee office and offers his services on a silver platter. He's ready to quit his job as a cop and start working for East Germany. The bold move gets him a meeting with Stasi officers who tell him to keep his day job and

because they would love to have a mole inside the West Berlin Police Department. With that, Kuras becomes a spy, codename Otto Boll. He joins the cadre of secret agents crawling through Berlin. Germans working for the USA, Germans working for the Soviets, Germans working for the British, Germans working for the French, who all believe they're working for the Germans.

According to Der Spiegel, the Stasi pay Kuras handsomely, in direct contradiction to Kuras' own account. And he isn't just getting cash. The Stasi supplies him with unusual and hard-to-get weapons. For a gun enthusiast like Kuras, it couldn't be better. Eventually, the West Berlin police suspect a mole.

They form a task force to sniff out double agents, but in a twist of fate, they put Kouros in charge of the task force. The West Berlin police see him as extremely loyal, even while he's feeding their secrets to the Stasi. Kouros has a perfect cover, and isn't afraid to sell out his fellow Stasi informants to maintain it.

For the next 12 years, Kouros' dedication grows. He even completes Stasi missions when he's on vacation. He's described as a spy the Stasi could ask anything from. Well, except one thing. Kouros allegedly hates being a honey trap, one of the most common jobs for East German agents. Honey traps, also called Romeos, work to seduce a target, or Juliette.

Once the target is compromised, they coerce or blackmail them into helping the Stasi. Kouros would rather spend his time at the gun range. The last currently known Stasi records on Kouros are from 1976, nine years after Onazork's death. At the time, Kouros is back inside the West Berlin police and seeking more assignments. Records don't show him getting one,

but they also don't account for his activities during that nine-year span. But even when you put the pieces we do have together, Karlheinz Kuras sounds like the perfect man for a Stasi mission to incite chaos. The plan could have been this simple. Enter a moment of pandemonium, pick an innocent bystander, shoot, and watch the masses lose trust in their government.

He didn't have to shoot Bene Onizork. Kuras could have shot any West German civilian. Onizork was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. That is, if the Stasi really engineered a police brutality death to incite chaos in the West, which feels like something out of a spy novel, then again, this kind of operation was exactly the Stasi's style.

Their brand of psychological manipulation was so specific, there's a German word for it, Seherzetzung. Seherzetzung roughly translates to chemical decomposition. But the idea was to slowly rot away the target's sense of trust with actions they could plausibly deny. Using info acquired from constant surveillance...

The Stasi hit where it'd hurt most. Family, career, home. Tactics range from spreading malicious rumors to breaking into a target's house and moving their furniture just a few inches to the left. They'd also block job applications and promotions, flatten tires, and even send child welfare officers in on surprise calls.

The Stasi notoriously used Seher Zitzung on East German citizens to prevent rebellion and dissent, because no one's going to lead a protest if they're worried about losing their kids.

It'd be a logical next step to use the tactic on the other side of the Berlin Wall. By inciting terrorists from the inside, they'd take the West's attention off the East, weaken the already fragile Republic, and maybe even push the capitalist state towards socialism. All of which happened after the murder of Benno Ohnesorg.

Whether Kuras shot in an act of Zerzatzung or not, the revelations spurred a re-examination of the case evidence, especially the footage and pictures from June 2nd,

In 2012, a joint review by federal prosecutors and Der Spiegel concludes that, at the very least, Kouros was not acting in self-defense. The review uses film enhancement technology to get clearer images of the day. They reveal a man who looked like Kouros approaching Onazork, quote, "...calmly, while carrying something that looks like a gun."

Another image shows Kouros aiming his gun. Kouros' hand rests on another officer's shoulder, as if he's trying to stabilize his shot. According to Der Spiegel, that officer is unknown and was possibly never questioned. Still, there isn't enough evidence to reopen the case. The newly recovered files don't explicitly discuss Onazork.

and Kuras's Stasi supervisor is long dead. In many people's perspectives, Karl Heinz Kuras killed a man, lied about it, and got away scot-free. Even worse, Kuras tells a reporter for Der Tagesspiegel that he shot Onezork "for fun." It sounds like even if Kuras wasn't acting on Stasi orders, he was acting on their ideology

Either way, it brings up a chilling question: Did all of West Germany get played? Was a decade of protest and terrorism an inevitable step toward a brighter future? Or was it the intended consequence of a nationwide psyop? Kouros died in 2014, taking the full truth to the grave. Unless the truth is in shredded Stasi files waiting to be put back together.

If another revelation ever comes, Germany will face a new reckoning. That their history is not what they thought. That the Stasi exerted their terrifying power far outside of East Germany. And the German people will have to wonder what other moments in their history might have been manipulated by the Stasi. Including another mysterious death 20 years after Benno Ohnesorg's.

It starts with Uwe Barschel, the former Minister-President of Schleswig-Holstein. Schleswig-Holstein is one of Germany's 16 states. It borders Denmark and the North and is known for its beaches and cattle. The position of Minister-President is like if an American governor and senator had a baby. Barschel is among the youngest people to ever hold the job. He's only 43 when things turn suspicious.

It's October 11th, 1987. Marshall is scheduled for an interview with Stern Magazine at the Beau Rivage Hotel in Geneva. He's just visiting, making a brief stop on the way home from a vacation in Spain's Canary Islands. The Beau Rivage is a five-star luxury hotel, a family business tracing back more than a century.

It boasts lakefront views and a history including an Austrian empress's brutal stabbing. It's the perfect meeting place for a politician with a story to tell. Though when the stern reporter enters the hotel, he gets a different story than he's expecting. Barshel doesn't come downstairs for the lunchtime meeting. According to the hotel staff,

Barshall's brother has called the front desk a few times in the past hour. When Barshall didn't pick up his room's phone and he missed their breakfast plans, the reporter and hotel staff head upstairs. They brush aside the "Do Not Disturb" sign and enter Barshall's room. Moments later, the reporter finds Barshall in the bathtub, head above the water, fully clothed and unconscious. Barshall doesn't appear injured,

He actually looks great in a suit, except for the fact that he's dead. The Swiss police arrive to confirm his passing. They initially suspect heart trouble, which is odd for a 43-year-old, but not unheard of. The officers stay in the room for some time, moving things around, eating, just hanging out.

Now, in their defense, they don't think it's a crime scene. It really seems like he died from heart problems. So no one bothers to make sure the photos aren't overexposed, to test the bathwater, or to take quality fingerprints. The autopsy proves them very, very wrong. Uwe Barschel's system is full of prescription drugs. His cause of death is ruled as suicide.

But not everyone believes that. Remember, Barschel was a politician, so his premature death was going to make news no matter how it happened. In fact, Barschel had already been in the news the weeks before his death. Remember how I said he was the former minister-president of Schleswig-Holstein? He'd just lost his race due to a major scandal.

Two weeks before election day, news broke over charges that Barshall made highly illegal efforts to discredit his opponent, Bjorn Engholm. Allegedly, Barshall hired a PI to spy on Engholm and wiretapped his phones. Then Barshall's office called Engholm's, posing as a doctor who wanted to let Engholm know he might have AIDS.

And they topped it all off by spreading rumors about tax evasion and sex parties. When this smear campaign came out, the tides of the election turned. Barshel repeatedly claimed innocence. He said he never discredited Engholm. He was set up. But with one man's word against many, the incumbent lost his seat.

Germans name the scandal "Waterkant Gate" and not just for the wiretapping element. In German, "Waterkant" means "waterfront" and Schleswig-Holstein is on Germany's coast. This is all extremely relevant to Uwe Barschel's death because he was supposed to testify at a parliamentary inquiry about the scandal the day after he died.

Almost immediately, Uwe Barschel's family comes out and says, "It's not suicide. It's murder." Mrs. Barschel talks to the New York Times, saying that on their last phone call, Uwe told her, "For the first time in my life, I am afraid." While the Swiss authorities think the case is wrapped up, the Barschels take matters into their own hands.

Which is hard to do. It takes six years of back and forth with the Geneva courts for the family to get Uwe's complete remains and the Swiss authorities' lab reports. Once they have everything, the Barshels hire renowned toxicologist Dr. Hans Brandenberger to do an independent analysis of the remains.

Notably, Brandenberger is Swiss and American, so they believe he's more likely to approach the case with a sense of political neutrality, at least compared to a German. It doesn't take him long to form an opinion. Suicide was unlikely. Brandenberger notes four different drugs in Barshall's system.

One of the drugs, cyclobarbital, was ingested significantly later than the others. So late, there's no way Barshall could have taken that drug at that time by himself. He'd have already been incapacitated from the three other drugs in his system. Brandenberger acknowledges the theory of a, quote, assisted suicide, but doubts that too.

He notes that one of the drugs was administered rectally, which is not in line with humane euthanasia standards. And most crucially, Brandenberger notes a chemical found on the hotel bath mat that causes human skin to absorb drugs more easily.

Brandenberger publicizes his findings and opinions over the next two decades, including penning a lengthy piece in the German paper Die Welt in 2010. And this all gets even more suspicious when paired with a revelation from 1993. Uwe Barschel wasn't the mastermind behind Waderkant Gate. He was framed.

Uwe Barschel's mysterious death came in the midst of a major political scandal. In September 1987, Barschel was accused of using illegal campaign tactics to smear Bjorn Engholm, who was running against him to be the next minister-president of Schleswig-Holstein. In the court of public opinion, Barschel was guilty and he lost his re-election campaign.

Barshel's party was the CDU, or Christian Democratic Union, and Engholm was part of the SPD, or Social Democratic Party. But in 1993, six years after Barshel's sudden death,

It came to light that Angholm and the SPD had hired Barschall's media office consultant, Rainer Pfeiffer, to discredit Angholm in a way that actually discredited Barschall. Yes, Angholm's party was behind his own smear campaign. This new scandal was sometimes called the Drawer Affair because it began when tens of thousands of German marks were found in one of Pfeiffer's drawers.

It was his payment from the SPD. It turned out it was Pfeiffer who filed the anonymous tax evasion complaint, Pfeiffer who made the phone call spreading unfounded AIDS rumors, and Pfeiffer who hired the PI and planted a listening device in Barshall's phone. When the truth came out, Angholm resigned from his position as minister president. It all lined up with what Uwe Barshall said before he died. He didn't do it.

The story gets even wilder when you consider something else Barshall told his family. He traveled to Geneva to meet a man who could prove his innocence. Barshall said the man was named Rudolf Roloff. For years, people thought Roloff was an invention. But when it came out that Barshall was telling the truth about the frame job, well, Roloff sounded a hell of a lot more real.

According to Barshall, Roloff offered him photo evidence that Barshall was innocent. Barshall hoped to bring that to his testimony the following week. It's unknown if Barshall and Roloff ever actually met up. There wasn't anything pointing to it at the crime scene. If Barshall got the photos, someone stole them before his body was found. The revelation points to a rumored suspect in Barshall's murder.

The SPD. Perhaps they killed Barschel to keep the truth of the scandal hidden and keep their party in power. But for my money, this kind of career sabotage sounds exactly like Zerzetzung, the Stasi's oddly specific brand of psychological warfare. Some theorists go as far as saying Rudolf Roloff was a Stasi agent.

They say the Stasi engineered Barschel's sudden downfall, then lured him to Geneva to hit him while he was down. At their clandestine meeting, Roloff poisoned Barschel. If you're thinking, why would the Stasi target Uwe Barschel? The answer lies in illegal arms deals. This next part diverges from the conspiracy theory in that it's true.

Because of its position on the coast, Schleswig-Holstein has always been ideally situated for trade, including the illegal arms trade during the Cold War, like Iran-Contra, which you may recall from our past episodes. As Minister-President, Barschall didn't stop the shady deals. He actively participated in

This included brokering weapons trades with Alexander Sholgoldkovsky, the head of East Germany's "Kommerzielle Koordinierung" which even the Germans shortened to "KOKO". His job was to bring foreign cash and goods into East Germany by any means necessary. But Stasi documents later revealed that KOKO was actually controlled by the Stasi.

According to reporting by Wired, Shalk Golodkowski received his orders directly from the Stasi's head officer. And during his term as minister president, Barschel made routine trips to East Germany, often staying in the luxurious Hotel Neptune, known to be crawling with Stasi spies.

It's possible that two things could have happened here. One, Barshel met Stasi agents like Shaw Golikovsky to cut secret deals. And two, Barshel was targeted by a honey trap. As I mentioned earlier, those are the spies who use the art of seduction to lure someone into switching sides, glean information, or collect material for blackmail.

We can't fully confirm either, but we do know Barshel was involved with an official working for the Stasi. The Stasi organization routinely psyoped people, and they weren't afraid to commit murder. Okay, back to the conspiracy theory. It's possible Barshel had information the Stasi wanted kept quiet, and they'd tried and failed to kill him already.

Less than six months before Barschall's death, he took a private jet from Bonn, the capital of West Germany at that time, back home to Schleswig-Holstein. According to the official report, bad weather and low visibility caused the plane to hit an antenna while trying to land. The plane crashed, killing three of its four passengers. Barschall was the sole survivor. A tragedy,

But one made weirder by the fact that this wasn't the pilot's first plane crash. She moved into the private jet industry after a commercial plane she was co-piloting crashed, killing 22 people in 1971. Was it a coincidence Sparshall was on her flight? Or did someone pull strings to put him in an unsafe situation?

There are also theories that it was someone outside of the Stasi targeting Barshel. Remember, he was part of a vast multinational illegal weapons network, and Geneva has a reputation as an international city filled with agents from the CIA, KGB, Mossad, and Iran, all of whom conceivably had means, motives, and opportunity to quiet Barshel.

Some theorists suggest that one spy agency killed Barshall and then framed another. Here's why I think this is important though. Even if the Stasi didn't kill Uwe Barshall, they may still have covered it up. As The Independent reported all the way back in 1995, "...the key Stasi files that might shed light on the affair have not yet been found. Even if the Stasi was not directly involved in Barshall's death..."

The Stasi's knowledge may still hold the key. It's worth digging into those records. First, for the Barschel family to gain closure and see justice. Also for the German people being able to trust their history books. I'm not saying we have it any better in America. Look at the JFK assassination. But imagine how you would feel if there were archives full of ripped up paper that might have answers about JFK.

That's what Germany is working through. Until all the ripped up Stasi files are pieced back together, the organization can't be ruled out as a suspect in Uwe Barschel or Bana Onuzork's deaths. No one can. And as long as those files remain in pieces, the Stasi legacy continues. Trust no one. Inform on everyone.

So often on this show, we highlight reasons to distrust people and institutions. But today, we want to remind everyone there's a level of trust necessary to a functional society. Whether the Stasi killed Benno Onezork and Uwe Barschel or not, their stories show that a distrustful world is a dangerous one. If you can't trust anyone...

Pretty soon, all that's left is a ripped up pile of paper, and it may be decades before anyone can reassemble the scraps. Thank you for listening to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. We're here with a new episode every Wednesday, and be sure to check us out on Instagram at TheConspiracyPod. And we would love to hear from you, so if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts.

Do you have a relationship to the stories we tell? Send a short audio recording telling your story to conspiracystories at spotify.com. Until next time, remember, the truth isn't always the best story. And the official story isn't always the truth.

Conspiracy Theories is a Spotify podcast. This episode was written and researched by Maggie Admirer. Fact-checking by Lori Siegel. Sound designed by Alex Button. Special thanks to Connor Sampson, Mickey Taylor, and Chelsea Wood. Our head of programming is Julian Boisreau. Our head of production is Nick Johnson. And Spencer Howard is our post-production supervisor. I'm your host, Carter Roy.

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