22 Hours, An American Nightmare
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Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast. I am your Norwegian host, Thomas Waborg Thun, and tonight I bring to you, as promised, a true morsel of true crime delight. This is a standalone episode outside of my regular scheduling because I simply could not let this opportunity pass by.

I have with me Megan Cloerty and Jack Moore. They are behind the brand new podcast 22 Hours, An American Nightmare. It was a case nightmares are made of. A DC power couple, their 10-year-old son and housekeeper held hostage for nearly 24 hours and murdered inside a burning DC mansion. WTOP examines the complicated trail of evidence that police say led to the finding

of their killer and why they say he committed such a brutal crime. I have the privilege of having them on my show, Megan and Jack. Welcome to the show. Real excited to have you on board. How are you? Good. How are you? Thank you for having us.

I'm doing very well here in Norway. It's rainy and quite cold, so I'm a bit envious of you guys. Yeah, it's getting a little muggy and hot here in Washington, D.C., but it's been about a couple months since the trial. You know, the trial of Darren Wendt ended in November, and we're about to debut this podcast in June, so we're very excited to share it with you.

Yes, I know it's debuting the 10th of June, if I'm not mistaken. Correct, yes. Yes, and before we dive into the meat of the matter, please tell my listeners a bit about yourself. Who are you, and what's your background, and how did you get into true crime?

Well, my name is Megan Clowerty. I'm a reporter at WTOP. We're a radio station, an all-news radio station in D.C. And I cover crime in courts for the most part. That's my beat. Usually, you know, there's a lot of crime in D.C. and we try and follow it from the crime all the way through the court process and follow the story. So really, true crime is my day job.

But this case, when it started, it really just grabbed the attention of everyone in our community just because of how seemingly random it was, where it was located, and we can get into all of that. But we decided that there was so much detail and it was so complex that we would sort of take it to a new level and cover it through a podcast. That's how I found myself here. And Jack and I work together. Yeah, and I'm a digital writer editor for WTOP.com. And

And sometimes we work on our own projects and sometimes we work together with the on-air reporters. And because this trial was so complex, Megan and I worked on it together. And then from our work there, that's how the podcast was born. All right.

And both of you are natives of Washington, D.C., or do you hail from somewhere else? I am. I'm from right outside Washington, D.C., in Maryland. And I'm actually originally from Ohio, the Midwest, and I moved to D.C. about 10 years ago. Okay. I've heard the teaser episode out on Podcast One for 22 Hours on American Nightmare. It's really good. I'm especially impressed with the production quality.

I guess that comes with the territory when we're talking about the good folks from the land of radio. The podcast is produced by a radio station you mentioned. Is that right? Yes, actually, we're the only two people working on it. So Jack basically writes the episodes and we work together on that process. And then I voice and cut them. So I'm the production side of that. Right on. And the radio station is WTOP. What does that stand for?

Well, it started because when we were one of the first radio stations in D.C. and we got to choose what our dial was. So we chose the top of the dial. So they decided to name it W Top.

W.T.O.P. And it was fifteen hundred a.m. And now we are an FM station here and here in Washington. And we just we basically cover news that the concept of our station is that, you know, you can listen for 15 minutes and you will have all the news you need to know, including sports and business and traffic and weather, as well as international, national and local news.

All right. I envy America. You guys have radio that is far superior to here in Norway. Radio in Norway is quite horrible. I'm sorry to hear that. You guys can stream us anytime, although I'm not sure you'll really want to know about the local news in D.C., but sometimes D.C. local news is national news and international news. Yes, I know. I mean, the documentary series House of Cards is... It's true. It's true.

Very popular, although it's over now, I guess. Yeah, it's too bad what happened with that show. In my introduction to this featured episode we are recording now, I told my dear listeners a very brief summary of the topic. Can you tell us a somewhat shorthand version of what 22 Hours and American Nightmare covers? What are the main facts, the main players, and locations?

So, yeah, just to start with, you know, as you mentioned, you know, this being a case that nightmares are made of, that's what the prosecutor said in the trial. And it really kind of summed up what this case is about. This family, he was a wealthy businessman here in D.C. He ran a construction company.

And the crime involved him, his wife, his 10-year-old son, and the family's housekeeper, who were taken captive inside their own home, held for 22 hours, which is where the title comes from. And while they were being held, $40,000 was withdrawn from the businessman father's company's bank account and then dropped off at the house. And once the money had been delivered, the victims were disqualified.

brutally killed, and then the house was set on fire. And then quickly, the question became, who would do this and why would they do this? For a while in the beginning of the investigation, DC police were telling us that this couldn't have been committed by one person. It was much more likely it was more than one person who took control of three adults and a child.

and held them for that long, were able to extort money out of them and eventually killed them. So for three years until between the crime and the trial was about three years time. And we were waiting for more details on who these other people were who took part in the crime. And it ended up that it was just one man. And the prosecution was able to prove in court how one man could have done it. So Darren Wint was convicted in this crime. It's not a whodunit podcast.

But similar to your show, Thomas, it's about how this happened, why this happened. And we lay out all of the evidence and the testimony presented in trial. We talk to witnesses and sources after the fact, after they took the stand and lay out chronologically kind of going with you through the journey of this crime and how it happened and what happened.

And we should say Darren went, he was convicted. He was sentenced for life terms, which was the harshest penalty he could get in the District of Columbia, which does not have the death penalty. However, he maintains his innocence. He took the stand in his own defense in this trial and said he's completely innocent.

and he is appealing his conviction. So one of the things, we're not raising questions about his conviction or even the evidence that links him to the crime, but we do lay out all of the evidence and we do give what his defense team, their claims, we give them an airing too. So we think that the case was, the jury made the right decision, but we lay out all the evidence for everyone to make their own consideration. That's good. Fair and balanced.

is something you guys in America like to say, isn't it? So, yes, I think some station I think says that, yeah. Okay, so can you briefly tell me what his defense consists of? What's his main spiel? Why does he claim his innocence?

Well, I mean, it was actually, it ended up being a bombshell is what we called it. The first day of trial, we finally learned who Darren Wint said committed these crimes. And he in fact blamed his two brothers.

So it was interesting, right out of the gate, you have the family, the two families who were affected because not only was the Savopolis family, the son and father and mother killed, but then their housekeeper, Viralisha Figueroa, was also murdered. So her family was in mourning. So not only do you have one family or two families torn apart who were the victims, but then you also have

The defendant's family, Darren Wint's family, now in turmoil because he was blaming his two brothers for doing this and basically said that he had kind of been tricked into coming to the house. Some people might remember this being on the news or seeing it on the news because the way that police ended up finding the killer was through a piece of pizza.

They tested a piece of pizza, Domino's pizza crust that they found at the house after the killings. And it ended up that it had his DNA on the pizza crust. So he essentially said, you know, this was my brother's doing. They told me there was a job going on at the house that I could help out with, like a painting kind of job.

And he showed up and they had pizza there and he had a piece of pizza, left it there. And then when he got an inkling of what was going on, that there may be something untoward happening, he left. That was his defense. It's interesting though, now in...

the times that we're living in, how it changes investigations as far as technology goes. So not only do you have to account for DNA, but you have to account for your cell phone and where it's pinging off of and GPS coordinates in your car and all of these different things that kind of came into play. And he really had to account for all of the evidence against him. It ended up the jury didn't believe him and they found it was enough reasonable doubt to convict him. But it was an interesting trial. There was a lot of detail and and

And he actually took the stand in his own defense. You know, that's an interesting thing to continue Megan's point. When we look at the evidence in the case, in a lot of ways, the evidence was really not in dispute, but it was, well, from what perspective do you look at the evidence? So for example, while the family was being held hostage, their killer basically forced them to order a pizza and the killer ate it. And when they tested the

Pizza crust, they found his DNA on the pizza, but his version of events was he was just at the house. He didn't know anyone was being held there and he ate the pizza. So yes, of course my DNA is on the pizza because I ate it. Another interesting piece of evidence that really just matter depends on how you look at it is

He was an avid Facebook user. That's really how he kept in contact with all of his friends. This is the convicted killer we're talking about. And over the time, the two days that the victims were held hostage and then killed, he goes radio silent, doesn't send a single message on Facebook, doesn't ever update his status, doesn't do anything on Facebook. So to the prosecution's point,

Point of view that that was very damning because here's somebody who's constantly using Facebook. And then over the time that these four people are being held captive and killed, you know, obviously you wouldn't have time to be on Facebook.

But when he took the stand, he presented a completely alternate theory for why he would not be using his Facebook at all. And we get into that, you know, throughout the podcast. So it was really interesting the way that the evidence looks really solid. And it was, but it also depends on kind of how you interpret the evidence. Of course.

But you mentioned earlier that the prosecution thinks that, or at least in the beginning, didn't think this was a crime possible to commit by only one person. So are there any more suspects in the pipeline, or how is that?

We don't think so. It was interesting because we wondered if at any point before the trial started, if Darren Wint was going to flip on somebody, which may be sort of an Americanized term, but rat out somebody else for taking part in this. We didn't know if someone maybe hired him to do it or if he wasn't involved at all and he was the one taking the fall. It turns out that there's not any DNA evidence on anyone else. No one's fingerprints were found there.

There's no one else who came forward in this as a suspect. And in fact, the police actually investigated his two brothers just because they kind of had to. I mean, one of them actually was with him, was with Darren Wendt when he was arrested. And the other is his brother from the same mother. So they have similar DNA, similar hair DNA. So one of Darren Wendt's pieces of hair was found in the bloody bedding

in the bedroom where three of the adults, the three adults were found. And so the police had to make sure that his brother, who could have been a hair from his brother, the way that we've learned that DNA works, it's called mitochondrial DNA. They had to make sure his brother, you know, had an alibi and where he was and all of that. So anyway, it was just, it was a very interesting case just from the crime itself. It happened right near the vice president's residence, just a few blocks away.

in a mansion in a very, very well-to-do neighborhood in Washington, D.C., where there's hardly any, if any, crime. And when the firefighters rushed there, it was the middle of the day when the fire broke out. So in the middle of the day on a weekday, mostly, you know, you don't assume people are sleeping. You don't assume anyone's really in the house, probably. It's probably a kitchen fire or something. And in fact, they end up finding all four victims. Yes, I heard that in the introduction video

episode available on Podcast One, and it's quite gruesome the way the firefighters describe discovering that the bodies that they find are actually covered in blood.

Yes, I don't think they're used to that. They're used to fire injuries where people are overcome by smoke and they can't see much anyway because of the state of the thick smoke in front of them. So one of the, we describe Sergeant Ader is one of the firefighters who responds to the scene and he finds the bodies and is trying to pick them up and take them outside so they can be resuscitated and they keep slipping through his grasp and he can't figure out why it's not making sense to him in the moment.

Later he finds out it's because they're covered in blood and he actually can't get a grip on them. So I know you probably don't want to reveal too many details, but how were they killed? For the most part, they were stabbed and they were beaten. And they were, for the most part, we can tell that the weapons were inside of the house.

So we think that some of the weapons or the prosecutors think some of the weapons were used was a samurai sword, which the homeowner collected, perhaps kitchen knives, and then a baseball bat that was used by the little boy as his little league baseball bat. It actually had his name engraved on it because his grandfather had given him that bat as a present.

And we learned that not only were the adults bound at their hands and feet in chairs in a room together, but they suffered similar injuries that the medical examiner said, it's hard to tell just because there was a fire afterwards. And a lot of times, you know, if there's a fire, it destroys evidence.

And the heat can kind of exacerbate injuries, if you will. But they could tell that all of them had been stabbed in different parts of their bodies. All of them had been beaten with the baseball bat. And the little boy, unfortunately, he was in another room tied to the bed. And the medical examiner could not determine based on his injuries if he died before the fire or because of the fire. He had been stabbed, but they didn't know if he was alive when the fire started.

Yes, my next question was going to be what made this crime especially heinous, but considering what you just said about a little boy being tied to a bed and stabbed to death or burned to death, depending on whatever happened, I mean, I think it's self-explanatory.

Yes. And it's hard to think too, you know, this went on for so long again for 22 hours, they were held against their will. And it's just hard to think about what perhaps the killer was doing to try and maybe get more money or to try and upset the adults, you know, by using the child against them. We don't know that he did, but we don't know that he didn't. And your mind goes to dark places when you think about, you know, how horribly, how

And that's something to continue Megan's point, you know, kind of that adds a layer of really psychological terror that these people experience. Because first of all, you think about people being inside their own home. That's usually a place of safety, comfort, stability. And so to have that turned into a crime scene is, you know, particularly devastating.

disturbing. And there is, you know, kind of, there's a strain of crime in the United States, this idea of the home invasion. And it goes back to, you know, one of the most famous examples of In Cold Blood, the nonfiction book written by Truman Capote in the 1960s, I believe. So this idea, you know, it's very psychologically disturbing to be attacked in your own home. And then when you think about the length of time that it went on, that 22 hours of

of our title, that's a really long time to be held captive. And so, so as Megan was saying, you know, you just, you can't imagine what's going on. And for as much evidence as we, as we have, you know, we don't have an accounting of every single minute, you know, we know, we know roughly when it began, we know roughly when it ended and that's it.

Thomas, the interesting thing, too, one of the interesting things about this case is while they were being held hostage, some of the victims were making phone calls out of the house to family members, to the bank to try and get that money, to Domino's Pizza. Different calls were made and no one at the end of any of those calls suspected anything was wrong.

And we have some of those voicemails that we play during the podcast. But it also then goes to, you know, how you are listening to this podcast and listening to their voices and thinking, how could you have held it together to make those phone calls and make it sound like everything was fine when everything was so wrong?

Yes, it's very disturbing and it's reminiscent of several films, actually. It's a film called, I think it's called Fun Games or something like that by Werner Herzog, I think, about this American upper class family having this gorgeous summer house by a lake.

Funny Games. That's the name of it. Funny Games. It has a fantastic house, similar to the ones in this story. And like this very typical American power couple with children. And then suddenly these two...

snobbish looking young men are inside their living room and thus begins 22 hours about 24 hours in that case of pure torture and hell it's very similar it's quite airy to listen to this true story and having seen that film funny games it's very very similar because they too exploit the family for money and then they start to just basically torture them for fun

And I mean, in as horrible as it sounds, there are other examples of this happening in real life. There was a case out of Connecticut in 2009, very high profile case. So it is something that, you know, I guess similar to the idea that, you know, there's the serial killer profile. This kind of crime does happen. It's, you know, it's very uncommon. It's not something happening on every street corner in America, but it does happen. There is a history of this happening.

It's something about America when it comes to crime that is unique in the world. I've talked about it briefly on my podcast because it's

Although serial killers, which is my forte, happens all over the world, Russia, Australia, South America, Europe, Canada, and the United States, the United States is overrepresented to an extreme degree. There are so many. According to the FBI, it's about 100 serial killers on the loose at all times in America.

That's an unnerving thought. Maybe I'll just stay in this booth and never leave. Something you said jogged my memory about the motive because it's interesting. You might have some good insight for us as far as your background, but we never felt that the motive that was presented really lined up with how aggressive and seemingly personal the killings were. Essentially, he was able to extort $40,000.

out of Savas Savopoulos, who was the father, and it was his house. As far as we can tell, as far as prosecutors could find, the killer never looked for the house. He never looked for any kind of information online on his phone about the wealth of the family. Didn't know really where they lived, as far as we can tell. Never searched for directions there or anything. And we should say at this point that the convicted killer did work at this construction company

For this businessman, but it was 10 years before the killings. And as far as we learned at the trial, Darren Wendt was let go from the company back in 2005 for missing work. So if he held some kind of grudge about that, it was a decade long.

Yeah. And then the killings end up being so, you know, it's not I don't know how much you know about about this and probably more than I do. But we've talked to a criminologist as well about it because it's not like a shooting can be a little more impersonal. But stabbings are more personal, I think, on the you know, on the scale. And just for how these people were tortured and how they were killed, it seems like you would need more than just to be, you know.

fired 10 years ago to do something like this. It's just, it's unbelievable. And we should say also that prosecutors, they don't have to, in the American justice system, they don't have to, as part of their case, provide a motive. They don't have to say why he did it. They only have to prove that he did it. Although they did offer during the trial,

Their theory of the motive was greed. He got the $40,000 and then he killed them because he wanted to get away with it. But to Megan's point, because this was so brutal, we just couldn't, you know, it was really hard to square the idea that for money, you know, purely out of greed, somebody could commit such monstrous acts. Right. Well, it's reminiscent of a very famous serial killer named Dennis Rader, BTK.

Oh, yeah. We know him as BTK here, yes. Yeah, he's Bind, Torture, and Kill. His modus operandi, if you're familiar with him, is he went into families' homes, typically well-to-do, middle-class families.

As a pretext of robbery, he usually said he was there to take their car and to take any money that was in the house. He needed to tie them up, and as soon as he had tied them up, he promised he would leave with the money. But what, of course, he instead did was that as soon as he had the families tied up, he proceeded to torture all of them and rape them and kill them.

strangle them and then wake them up and rape them some more and strangle them some more and torture them some more and then finally killing them all wow and he did it over and over and over again there's no sexual assault in in this case but it but it is it does sound similar yeah it's uh i mean serial killers have multiple motives depending on who they are and uh

Some of them are sexually motivated. Some of them are violently motivated. They're main, they're sadists. They wish to inflict pain. They get pleasure from causing people pain. That's quite common. Often they also are greedy. I mean, there are several serial killers throughout history that operated from a point of view from greed as the beginning, and then they got a taste for it.

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himself having greed as the secondary motive. You have H.H. Holmes, for example, the very famous devil in the white city. He constructed a murder hotel that originally he used to get money because he sold the corpses to the medical hospitals up in Chicago. But again, he went far beyond what was expected

basically necessary to just get the money. He tortured people, he suffocated them using elaborate methods, he performed vivisections on them without anesthesia, and so on. I mean, you have very, very, very disturbed individuals out there, so I can't speak to this guy if he's one of them, but it does sound very much like a disturbed individual...

That went far beyond what was strictly necessary in order to get $40,000. I mean, I'm pretty sure if he had the family tied up and he threatened their son, that a rich father would have had no problem just giving him $40,000 and then leaving. And if he had a mask covering his face and gloves and everything,

then there would be no reason to kill them because the risk of being caught for murder far exceeds a basic robbery. It's an interesting case. Absolutely. And I mean, that's one of the things that we, after the trial, as we've been putting together this podcast, have really been, you know, kind of struggling with to understand of who was this person because that didn't really come out so much at the trial, in part, large part, because he claims he's innocent.

You know, but we, one of the things that we do have is his

search histories on his phone. So basically everything he had ever looked up on his phone. And there were some incriminating searches after the fact. So searches like how to beat a lie detector test and top US cities for fugitives and even countries with no extradition treaty. So those are very incriminating searches. But beforehand, there's really nothing in his search history to indicate that he was

planning anything or to indicate that he was anything other than a normal person, you know, to one interest, you know, kind of interesting thing that maybe reveal something about his personality or his motivation is that he was obsessed with luxury cars, which the family had.

Porsches and Audis, things like that. So he was searching all the time Lamborghinis and BMWs. And also he was obsessed with playing the lottery.

So even to the point where he would, a family member had given him an old laptop that he would use to tinker around with numbers, probabilities and things. And he was obsessed with winning the lottery, which a lot of people in the United States play the lottery regularly and maybe have dreams that they'll come into a large sum of money. But I think knowing what we know of what he did, which was to kill four people brutally to get $40,000, that's

that obsession with the idea of easy money becomes more sinister. And in fact, after the killings, when he had this $40,000 and he was seen flashing some of it around to acquaintances and they had never seen him with that much money before and they said, where did you get it? And he said, I won the lottery. Well, if he is the killer...

I cannot speak to that. I am going to side with the American courts on this one and satisfy myself with that. But if he is the killer, he sounds like a very stupid killer. It's quite amazing the amount of obvious errors that he did. I mean, first of all, why 40,000? Why not 100,000?

I mean, it should have been quite easy to get a hundred thousand if the family was really rich. So that's odd. Second of all, the pizza. I mean, how dumb are you that you leave food that you've eaten at the crime scene? I mean, it's, it's quite, it's mind boggling.

And not using gloves, not using a hairnet. I mean, these are crime 101. I mean, you don't... We think he did use gloves because there was never any fingerprints of his found at the scene. So I think he did wear gloves. We don't have any glove evidence. Like no one ever found gloves. The $40,000 is interesting because the businessman actually had to call the CFO of his company and the controller of his company to try and get the money out.

and dropped off at his house. And both of those people testified and said, you know, it wasn't uncommon for him to take out that kind of money. He didn't do it on an everyday basis, but every once in a while he would go and buy or go to auctions and buy, you know, very expensive, specialized equipment. And you'd need that kind of money to go to the auctions with. So part of me, I mean, we don't have any facts about this, but I've always wondered if he, if the homeowner, the businessman shows that amount of money because it wouldn't raise any eyebrows.

Because it wasn't so much money that his company would be like, well, that's weird. I wonder if he's okay. It was like, oh, well, he's probably using it for the auctions. The pizza is interesting, too, because D.C. police, for the most part, did not at that time test any perishable items.

So they were in the practice of not testing food for DNA. Maybe that speaks to how their technologies have advanced since then. But it was sort of on a whim that the ATF investigator here, the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Bureau, was helping with the case. And they decided to test the pizza. And that's how they found it.

And, you know, I think maybe the killer thought that he was smarter than he was, and he did set the house on fire. The problem is the whole house didn't burn down. So that's how they were able to get the pizza. Perhaps in his mind, he was thinking the whole house is going to, you know, burn to the ground and there'll be no evidence. Yeah, and it's a weird thing to do because from what I understand, he set the house on fire, not the bodies.

He poured gasoline in the rooms where the people were and on actually...

tragically, on the little boy and the bed that he was on. So that's where the fire started. The fire investigators were able to determine that. But he didn't put gasoline throughout the house. So really, it was the upstairs floor, those two bedrooms, and a little bit of residual burning. But the rest of the house was relatively... I mean, there was smoke damage, but nothing was erased. And part of the problem for him, so to speak, was that

A person just driving through the neighborhood happened to spot the smoke pretty quickly and was able to call police and the firefighters showed up. So I think, you know, maybe in his mind, you know, the fire would have burned for a lot longer. But I think, you know, it was such a nice neighborhood and it was the middle of the day. Everyone's going to see smoke, you know? Yeah. I mean, it's wildly idiotic. Really, really, really amateurish.

BTK, to get back to him, he got away with his crimes for several decades before he messed up and revealed himself due to his extreme need for attention. But he was highly intelligent, well, is highly intelligent, and went to extreme lengths to not leave any traces at his crime scenes and did a lot of research and research

Yeah. So this guy just sounds so amateurish. I mean, it's, uh, it's quite interesting. And to that point, it remains an open question of when he went in and took the family hostage from the beginning, what was his plan? You know, was he really planning on going as far as he did? And did something change in him over those 22 hours where a sense of desperation of trying to get away with it?

what was actually going to happen. He also didn't have any, as far as the killer's background, there wasn't really as, at least it would seem to me that there would be sort of a ramping up of violence in your background to get to a point where you would kill three people and a child. But the only, I mean, he has had brushes with the law. He had a couple protective orders taken out against him, obviously had some anger issues, but there were really no prior convictions that would have given anyone in law enforcement,

you know, an idea to keep an eye on this guy. Well, definitely not to this degree. There were some, there was an assault, which he actually did serve time. But, you know, this is just a completely different scale, you know, that it's hard to imagine where this brutality would come from. Well, that's the real terrifying thing about psychopaths and sociopaths is that they don't look

They don't act like monsters. They act very normal. They look normal. They lead normal lives. And as Ted Bundy famously said, we are your husbands. We are your neighbors. We are your colleagues. We are your friends. We are your boyfriends. We are everywhere. You never know. And, uh,

The old cliche of the Ed Gein type of psychopath is actually far less common than a really, really normal guy suddenly showing his true face in privacy and committing acts of unspeakable horror. Yeah, I mean, I don't think I can put it any better than that. Right, thank you. And how many episodes is 22 Hours on American Nightmare going to run?

We are expecting it to be 10 episodes. However, we're still in the production process. We have a couple of them done, but we're actually, you know, not only working through potential, you know, we're still talking to people who possibly want to be on the podcast who testified and working through sort of the bureaucracy of getting to them. But we're also interested in seeing if perhaps Darren Wint's brothers would want to talk to us once they learn more.

you know, how we're telling the story or perhaps we'll hear from one of the victim's family members. So it's still a work in progress and it makes it exciting for this to come out and have it still be, you know, in the editorial process. So yes, 10 episodes and the first one, we're dropping them every Monday and the first one comes out on June 10th. Exactly. I'm looking forward to it. I am definitely going to listen. And Megan, you are the one hosting this, correct?

I am. Yeah. For the most part. I mean, during the six week trial, I was in the courtroom and in D.C., you're not allowed to record anything, video or audio. And so during the trial, I would come out of the courtroom and call Jack and tell him all of the details I've learned, mostly so we were on the same page and we could.

report the details accurately. But we ended up recording our conversations and it ended up being kind of like an audio diary of the case. So very early on, we started working together on this. And a lot of throughout the podcast, you'll hear Jack's voice because he really was, you know, from the beginning, my sounding board and helping me

you know, complete this together. So, so I host it for the most part, but Jack is laced throughout the entire thing. It's fascinating to listen to the introductory episode because in it, you have this very professional sounding voice reminds me a lot of the big news network anchors, the way they're talking. Is it a standard American English dialect that we're hearing?

It's supposed to be. Yes, it is. I'm teasing. I mean, usually as a reporter, you want to try and get rid of any accent you could possibly have. And that is usually my reporting voice. But

as we've gone on through this podcast, I've gotten more comfortable voicing, you know, using really my own voice and trying not to use a, you know, a reporter or a deeper voice on it. So after a while, it kind of calms down a little bit. It isn't so formal. But in the very beginning, yes, it's hard to do something so horrible, you know, to cover such a horrible crime and use your own persona. At least for me as a reporter, it was hard to do that. So

Eventually I found my voice, but in the beginning I was kind of reporting it like I would a traditional news story. It's interesting with, uh, with America and standard American English dialect and the UK as well, because there it's, it's expected that as you say, reporters remove any, any accents or dialects, but, um, here in Norway, it's, uh, everyone speaks with dialect on the national news networks.

So you can tell where everyone is from, really. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's horribly annoying. So it's very pleasant to listen to American news, in my opinion, because it distracts from the story when people are talking in their own regional extreme dialect. And here in Norway, we have far more

extreme dialects than you have in America. I mean, we have people on the West Coast that speaks so broad that it's very, very difficult to understand what they're saying. So that's a digression.

So can you, before we start to tie this up, can you tell our listeners a little bit about the work going into researching this case, the sources? You mentioned some bureaucracy in getting into contact with the key witnesses. How much time have you spent and can you tell us about that?

Yeah, so we kind of hit the ground running right after the trial ended. So that would have been in last November. But very quickly, you know, we hit the ground running and we ran into a lot of walls because for one thing, you know, trying to talk to government sources is difficult because, you know, they don't want to say the wrong thing. And also this case is being appealed. So the lawyers won't talk to us at all on either side.

And then some of the investigating agencies, because the lawyers won't talk to us because it's being appealed, they don't want to talk to us. And even some of the witnesses that we've tried to reach out to, I think because this case is so disturbing in a lot of ways that they just kind of, there's been a conviction, the trial's over, they kind of want to forget, they want to move on. So that presented some challenges. That being said, we do talk to some of the witnesses in this case who were willing to talk

People with a great deal of insight, including another housekeeper who worked for the family for 20 years, who, while the family was being held, got a text message from the mother saying, you know, I'm making sure you don't come today. And so, you know, consequently, she didn't.

And now she's actually struggles still with a lot of guilt because she wonders, you know, maybe I was supposed to read some kind of message into that. And maybe I could have gone to the house. Maybe, you know, maybe I could have saved them, you know? So she's still this, this happened four years ago. She still is. I mean, this,

She told us she couldn't go to work for a year after this. You know, that's how psychologically impacted she was. And so that's, you know, that was a really key person that we spoke to. We also go to all of the locations. The Porsche from the family's home was stolen and burned. We go to where that happened. We go to where Darren went.

was living and the family's house that has since been torn down outside the police department. We kind of take you with us along for all of the interviews. We interview criminologists and other defense and prosecutors to talk about the strategy that was used to get this outcome. There was also a lot of just digging. I mean, as far as looking into Darren Wynn's history and his criminal background, we had to get the transcripts from the courts.

And interestingly, I mentioned earlier how there's no video or audio in the courts. We actually appealed to the chief justice of D.C. Superior Court because we learned that there are audio recordings that are taken inside the courtroom sort of as a backup for the stenographers who are typing every word. If they miss something, they can go to that audio recording and make sure they got it.

And we asked if we could have the audio recordings so you could hear the killer in his own words when he took the stand. And, you know, we could we could provide our listeners those voices. And that request would be unprecedented because they have these kind of confidential audio recordings, but the court has never released them in its entire history. So now they are considering doing that. And if, you know, they've launched a working group, which in America means they're reviewing it, but.

Essentially, if they do decide to start releasing audio recordings, it could completely change how news is covered in the nation's capital. That's really interesting. Maybe even I could get access to some of those very, very interesting audio recordings. I often try to find original audio recordings for my episodes, and it's notoriously difficult.

It is. It's a case by, I mean, it's a court by court basis. And in DC, you know, all of the justices are appointed by the president. It's a very different court than you'll find in the rest of America. So to ask that is, and to have them consider it is pretty phenomenal. So hopefully we'll end up getting the audio recordings before our podcast is over. But even if we do get them after the fact, we would consider doing, you know, additional episodes so you can hear these voices.

Okay. And this is a podcast courtesy of your radio station. And are you guys fans of podcasts such as Criminal and Serial or have you other inspirational sources that you draw from? We actually like the podcast In the Dark, which is produced by American Public Media.

And it's similar to ours in how you kind of take the listener on a journey with you as you investigate the crime and the investigation itself and how it was run and then the trial. So that was something that we listened to beforehand because this is the first time Jack and I have put together a podcast at all, let alone a podcast about crime and a trial. So we found some inspiration there. We both listen to podcasts.

I cover true crime on a daily basis. So usually I find myself going home wanting a little bit of a break. So I listen to other things. But preparing to do this project, it was helpful to kind of hear how other journalists and other podcasts had done it. All right. And have you listened to my podcast, The Serial Killer Podcast? I have listened to your serial killer podcast. And I actually was interested because in how much you go into the background of the killers is interesting to me.

Not necessarily just the crime, but sort of who these men were before they were found out. And women. And women, sorry. We're responsible as well.

But yes, it is a massive overweight of men. Yes, of course. But surprisingly, a lot of women. And it's often more fascinating cases when it's a woman doing it because it's so unusual. And the killer is often really, really...

not a cliche character. So you mentioned having trouble getting some audio and video from court cases. Do you find it sometimes difficult to get the background of the killers, depending on which government or, you know, where, where the crime happened? Well, yeah. I mean, most of the work of the podcast is research, as you probably know, the recording itself is fairly rapid, but finding background material is, is difficult. And

The one source that really has been invaluable is local newspapers, because they often go far more into detail on the killer's background than the national media does.

That was similar to this case because the national media covered when the crime happened and then they showed up, you know, for the verdict because why wouldn't you? But we really were there the entire time. And I think that was part of what inspired us to do the podcast because we are so used to doing daily turn short form journalism to have the opportunity to really go in depth and to explain the details and how, you know, they fall into the context of the story really was an opportunity we couldn't pass up. Exactly.

So final question. I always ask my guests this. Do you have any serial killer fiction to recommend, films or books? And if not, do you have any true crime films or books or other podcasts than your own that you really like? Jack Moore found... It was interesting. It's a great question because Jack Moore found a movie that was very similar to this crime that was...

published decades ago. Yeah, it's an old black and white movie, I think from the 50s. It's called The Desperate Hours. And it actually predates the Clutter case, which is the case that In Cold Blood is based upon. And so when I found out about this movie, it really kind of, it made clear to me the way that there are kind of cultural currents of

of crime and also of this particular idea of the home invasion. But this case was really fascinating. It's called The Desperate Hours, the movie, and it's based on a real crime that happened. In this case, the family, once again, a nice, well-to-do family,

Two escaped convicts broke into their house, held them hostage. But in this case, fortunately, did not harm the family. And the escaped convicts got away and I think eventually were caught.

But then what ended up happening is the case got a lot of attention and then they dramatized it and they made, I think, first a play about this case and then this movie. But it's actually really interesting from a legal perspective because the family then who had survived this terrifying ordeal then ended up suing for invasion of privacy. Right.

But their case went all the way to the Supreme Court. And their lawyer was actually a former, at the time, a former Republican vice president named Richard Nixon, who represented them before the Supreme Court. But they ended up losing their case on First Amendment grounds because the Supreme Court ruled that, yes, this horrible thing had happened to them and they were victims in it. But because it had garnered so much media attention, so much media coverage,

That they were no longer just your average private citizen. That because of the media attention, they had kind of lost their right to privacy and that journalists and filmmakers had the right to use their story and their coverage and they couldn't be sued for invading their privacy. Very interesting.

America's First Amendment is an example for the world, in my opinion. It's really interesting to see how that works.

amendment made so many years ago centuries ago and still has such an important part to play in modern life overseas here in europe we usually don't have anything as strong as the first amendment in our constitutions and uh the result of it is uh is quite apparent every day so uh

I recommend you take care of it because when you lose it, it's quite horrifying. It's what's going on in Europe at the moment. It's a central part of what we do every day and it protects us and lets us, you know, do our work and not be challenged just because we have the freedom of speech to do so. So it's, yeah, it's my favorite amendment. It's important. Yes, I agree. Yes.

And on that note, do you have any questions for me? Anything that listening to my podcast made you curious about? I've listened, but I'm trying to think of anything because I asked you about that. I was always interested in how you researched just, you know, especially the cases in Russia and the cases, you know, where you just have such limited access, how you're able to produce an entire podcast on such limited information. But I guess you also have the breadth of experience as far as, you know, relating them to other cases.

Well, short story, internet. The internet is amazing. I think we can all agree on that. Yes. Thank you so much for being on my show. I hope you have enjoyed it as well. So I look forward to listening to the new podcast, 22 Hours, An American Nightmare. Thank you so much for having us on TSK. We really appreciate it. Good night and good luck.

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