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For a good officer, training doesn’t end at graduation. The skills learned in the classroom, and kept sharp throughout a career, shape how an officer handles a traffic stop, a crisis call, or a homicide scene.   Therese Apel and Sara Perkins-Ricks sit down with Tony Carleton, executive director of the Mississippi Law Enforcement Officers Training Academy, to talk about why training and education throughout an officer’s career matter, not just for police but for the communities they serve and protect.   Carleton has held leadership roles at several agencies over his career. Now he’s bringing that operational experience to MLEOTA, where he focuses on tactical training and leadership development for Mississippi’s next generation of officers.   Have a question for Tony, Therese, or Sara? Send it in, and join the conversation.   Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.

In April 2023, Byram officers responded to a house fire on Gary Drive and found people badly burned and a home fully engulfed. What looked like a tragedy turned out to be something else entirely. It became Detective Judson Magloire’s first homicide case as an investigator.   Magloire sits down with Amanda Johansson and Therese Apel to talk about that case and what it taught him. He also tells the story of a teenager he couldn’t save.   Magloire met him when he was 13, back when Magloire was on patrol. They shot hoops together on neighborhood courts. He was a talented kid, and Magloire watched him slide into trouble anyway. Today that young man is in prison, and he and Magloire still write letters.   That loss became the seed for the Blue Dawgs Youth Camp, a free summer program Magloire spearheaded that has seen youth crime drop by about half.   Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.

Allegations of gang rape at Cornell have been headlining news outlets lately, and meanwhile Law & Order: SVU remains one of the most beloved shows on television.    But what is the reality of being the person who works sex crimes at an agency? It's not wrapped up in an hour, and the cases rarely come with a tidy confession.   This week, Madison County Sheriff's Office Investigator William Horton joins us to talk about his experience working some of law enforcement's hardest cases. Horton has spent 20 years in the profession, four of them as an investigator with Madison County, and law enforcement runs deep in his family.    Listen in as he pulls back the curtain on what it really takes to work the cases most people only see on TV.   Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.

In September 2022, Jaylen Lewis, 25, was shot and killed during a Capitol Police stop at West and Mayes streets in Jackson. Two officers fired that night: Steven Frederick Jr. and Michael Rhinewalt. Both were charged with manslaughter, and the case drew strong reactions from every direction, about the shooting itself and about the two men on trial.   After almost a week in Judge Faye Peterson's courtroom, a Hinds County jury deliberated less than five hours before finding Frederick not guilty. Jurors could not reach a verdict on Rhinewalt, and Attorney General Lynn Fitch announced hours later that her office will not retry him.   In this exclusive interview, Therese Apel and Amanda Johansson sit down with Steven Frederick to hear firsthand what the past four years have been like, from the night of the shooting through the verdict, and how he says God carried him through it. Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.

August 1990. A young mother working the late shift at the Western Sizzlin in Flowood stops at a Brandon Texaco for cinnamon rolls for her kids' breakfast. She's inside for only a few minutes. Half a mile from home, a man rises from the back of her van with a knife to her throat. Thirty days later, a nurse leaving a Memphis hospital lives through the same nightmare. The attacker made both women the same threat, and then he disappeared for more than three decades.   The case went cold, then colder. A false confession from a Missouri inmate went nowhere. Early DNA testing produced a profile but no name, and the evidence sat in a vault for years. But one Brandon officer never let it go, and a Rankin County prosecutor who had read everything he could find about the Golden State Killer had an idea. Forensic genetic genealogy, a trash pull in Oklahoma, a discarded CPAP mask, and a match of 1 in 660 quintillion led investigators to Daniel Ray Skaggs, a truck driver whose crimes spanned the 1970s through the 1990s and multiple states across the Southeast.   Tonight on Investigation: Homicide, Therese Apel and Sara Perkins Ricks sit down with that prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney Ryan Berry. A career prosecutor with nearly 20 years in the Twentieth Circuit Court District, Berry won the Mississippi Prosecutors Association's Trial of the Year Award for State v. Skaggs. He has since presented the case at the International Symposium on Human Identification in Denver and at Bode's annual conference in Atlanta, and it was featured on Bloodline Detectives with Nancy Grace. We'll talk about how the science finally caught up, what it took to tell a victim face to face after 33 years that her attacker had a name, and why prosecutors believe the women in Brandon and Memphis may not have been Skaggs's only victims.   Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, the toll of a quarter-century spent on high alert is written into the bodies of the people who answered the call. This week, Sara Perkins-Ricks and Therese Apel sit down with Sgt. Jordan Jones to talk about what constant high-intensity service does to those who serve, and how they recover. Jordan is the founder and CEO of Holos, a performance optimization and wellness company built for military personnel, law enforcement, first responders, and other high-stress professionals. He brings more than two decades of military service to the conversation — more than half of it as a Special Forces Medical Sergeant — along with his experience as a Human Performance and Wellness Coordinator within Army Special Forces, where he helped design programs to strengthen resilience, recovery, and well-being for elite operators. He launched Holos to bridge the gap between tactical excellence and holistic wellness, giving professionals science-backed strategies to sustain peak performance without sacrificing long-term health.   At the center of the conversation is Operator Syndrome, which is the cumulative physical, neurological, and psychological toll carried by elite military personnel and Special Operations Forces after years of constant high-intensity service. Rather than a single standalone condition, it shows up as an interconnected web of clinical symptoms driven by years of high allostatic load. And as it turns out, it's not just in the military.   On the 25th anniversary of 9/11, Jordan, Sara, and Therese look at the challenges facing not just the military, but first responders and everyone whose work lives at the intersection of high stress and high trauma, and what the last quarter-century has asked of the people who carry that weight.   Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.

There are many voices around Mississippi speaking on behalf of first responders in the field of mental health. One of the more prominent currently is Kevin Whitsell, a 20-year veteran paramedic and firefighter and the founder and host of “A Silent War Within,” a podcast dedicated to confronting and destigmatizing mental health challenges among first responders and healthcare professionals. A Mississippi native, Whitsell spent years in critical care transport, including pediatric and neonatal patients, before moving into supervisory roles. His advocacy is rooted in his own journey through the mental health struggles that come with the job. Therese Apel and Amanda Johansson discuss some of Kevin‘s experiences in the business, and the importance of making mental health a priority as a first responder.   Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.

In April 1996, a spring afternoon in South Jackson turned into a scene of terror the metro area has never forgotten. This week, Therese Apel and Sara Perkins-Ricks sit down with Charlie Smith, a former Jackson Police Department Crime Scene Investigator, who walks them through one of the most harrowing cases of his career, from the inside. On April 12, 1996, Larry Wayne Shoemake barricaded himself inside an abandoned Po' Folks restaurant at the Ellis Isle shopping center near Ellis Avenue and Interstate 20. From within the building he opened fire on people in and around the center, in a siege that stretched roughly 40 minutes to an hour and left more than 100 shots fired. Early reports counted one person killed and several others wounded by gunfire and flying glass, with later accounts describing an even higher toll. Shoemake ultimately died in the fire that consumed the restaurant. From the first shots to the smoke rising over the shopping center, Smith recounts the investigation as only the man who processed it can: what he saw, what he documented, and what it took to make sense of a day that captivated and terrified an entire community.   Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.

Some of the people who change our lives never know they did it. Capt. Barbara Folsom-McNeal was eleven years old when a police officer walked into the worst night of her childhood and carried her out. She'd been whipped with an extension cord, and to a terrified kid, he was a promise that someone would come through when it mattered most.  She didn't learn his name that night, but because of him, she grew up to wear the badge herself in order to continue to fulfill that promise to others.  A few months ago, Barbara sat down with us and told that story, and said that as she neared the end of her career, she'd made up her mind to find the officer who set her on this path. So we went looking. And we found his family. Tonight, Therese Apel and Amanda Johansson welcome Barbara back, and this time she isn't alone. Chris Dill joins us to talk about his father, Mike Dill, the officer who once lifted a little girl out of harm's way and, by every account, went to his grave with no idea he'd shaped the whole course of her life. This is the episode where the dots connect. It's about the long reach of a single heroic act, the echo it leaves behind, and how the memory of the same good man has shaped two entirely different lives.   Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.

Jackson has held the highest homicide rate per capita in the nation for five years running. Behind every one of those numbers is a name, a family, and a death someone has to answer for. In Hinds County, that responsibility runs through Jeramiah Howard.   As County Coroner, Howard oversees an office that investigates them all: every scene, every call in the middle of the night, every hardest conversation of someone's life. This week, Therese Apel and Sara Perkins Ricks sit down with the man who carries the weight of a city's losses to ask the questions most people never think to: What is that life actually like?    What do you learn about a place from the way its people die? And how do you keep doing this work, year after year, in the deadliest city in America?   It's a raw conversation about death, duty, and the human cost behind the statistics from the man who knows them better than anyone. Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.

From Olivia Benson to Dana Scully to Ziva David, we’ve all got a TV idea of what it looks like to be a female cop. Spoiler alert: you can’t actually run in those heels, and the cases don’t wrap up in 42 minutes. Tonight, Therese and Amanda sit down with Warren County Sheriff’s Office Lieutenant Stacy Rollison, and her story is the real thing. She started as a part-time jailer while raising three kids as a single mom, and she didn’t stop until she became Warren County’s first female patrol deputy, then investigator, then Chief Investigator. AND she’s currently in her third year as Secretary/Treasurer of the Mississippi Deputy Sheriffs’ Association, because apparently she sleeps at some point but we’re not sure when. Stacy talks about what it actually takes to build a career in law enforcement as a woman, the moments that tested her, and why she believes in a department that reflects its community and treats every single person who walks through the door with dignity no matter what they’ve done or where they’ve come from. This is the episode for every woman who ever wondered if there was a place for her in this field, and for everyone who wants to know what real service looks like. Investigation: Homicide — tonight.   Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.

George David Herrin spent a decade as a fixture at the Canton Estates Apartments. The 85-year-old security guard mowed lawns, helped residents with small tasks, and was a grandfather figure to the kids in the neighborhood.   Then, one Sunday night just after 11:20 p.m., deputies responded to gunshots and found him shot multiple times as he sat in his vehicle outside the complex. The Madison County Coroner called it a homicide. Authorities called it execution-style. He died in the hospital the next morning.   Sara Perkins Ricks and Therese Apel are joined tonight by Madison County Sheriff Randy Tucker to dig into a case that still hasn't been solved. They talk through what investigators know, the surveillance footage and witness interviews, the possible suspect named in early reports, and why a man everyone described as kind and generous ended up targeted this way.    The community is still shaken. The people who loved David Herrin are still waiting for answers. Tonight, we reach out to find out if you know something that might help close this case. A $5,000 reward is on the table.   Madison County Sheriff's Department:601-859-2345 Crime Stoppers: 601-355-TIPS (8477)   Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.

In October 2004, Janell Hatton, a 63-year-old real estate agent from the Bunker Hill community in Marion County, was shot during a robbery at her home. Her body was found buried in a barn near Kokomo. Before it was over, five people would be arrested, and the brutality of the crime would make it one of the most talked-about murders in recent Mississippi history. This week, Sara Perkins-Ricks and Therese Apel sit down with Lt. Col. Jimmy Herzog of the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation to walk through how the case came together, from the search for a missing woman to the arrests that followed and the guilty pleas that sent Steven Kirkley and Keith Magee to prison for life without parole. Herzog takes us inside the investigation with the perspective of someone who has spent a career working Mississippi's hardest cases. It's a conversation about what it takes to bring a killer to justice, and what a case like this leaves behind long after the sentence is handed down.   Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.

Sometimes the best conversations are the unplanned ones. Our guest for tonight was under the weather this week, so hosts Therese Apel and Amanda Johansson are flipping the script and opening the floor. Episode 68, "You're the guest," is exactly what it sounds like. No case file, no set agenda, just the two of us talking with you about the stories that pull us in and keep us coming back. We are pulling back the curtain on how Investigation: Homicide actually comes together, what draws us to a particular case or guest, and why we keep telling the stories of Mississippi's law enforcement, first responders, and the crimes and issues that shape their world. We will trade our favorite episodes, the ones that stuck with us long after we stopped recording, and talk about the moments that reminded us why this work matters. But the whole point tonight is you. Bring us the cases you want investigated, the guests you want to hear from, the questions you have always wanted to ask, and the issues you think deserve more attention. Drop them in the comments and get in on the conversation live. This one runs on your curiosity, so pull up a chair. Tonight, you're the guest. Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.

Some stories don't start in a courtroom or a case file. They start at a kitchen table, in a grandmother's voice, in a story carried quietly across generations because the truth was too heavy and too dangerous to say out loud.   In 1937, Roosevelt "Red" Townes and Robert "Bootjack" McDaniels were lynched in Duck Hill, Mississippi. It became one of the most photographed lynchings in American history. For decades, the weight of that story lived in the memory of one family, including a little girl named Jimmie Lee, who would one day pass it on to her granddaughter.   That granddaughter is filmmaker Talamieka Brice, and what began as a whispered family story has grown into a documentary, a public memory initiative, and a community movement asking one of the hardest questions we can ask: how do we tell the truth about the past while still making room for healing? Tonight Therese Apel and Sara Perkins sit down with Talamieka to talk about the case that has lived inside her since childhood, the grandmother who first handed her this story, and the work she's now doing to bring transparency, remembrance, and justice to the memories of Bootjack and Red.   This is Investigation: Homicide.   Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.