WEBVTT
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[SPEAKER_01]: For a while, these microphones win silent.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And honestly, I think both of us needed that silence more than we realized at the time.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Welcome to Extinguished, where David McClam and Ladana Humphrey share stories of the missing and murdered.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Missing.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Murdered.
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[SPEAKER_01]: their lives were extinguished.
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[SPEAKER_01]: When you spend years immersed in true crime, reading case files, speaking with families, studying investigations, listening to survivors, and watching communities fracture under the weight of violence and unanswered questions, eventually you reach a point where you have to step back and ask yourself a difficult question.
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[SPEAKER_01]: What exactly are we contributing to this conversation?
00:45.546 --> 00:49.069
[SPEAKER_01]: Because during our hiatus, some of them became increasingly clear to me.
00:49.769 --> 00:54.873
[SPEAKER_01]: True crime has changed dramatically over the last several years and not always for the better.
00:55.894 --> 01:06.922
[SPEAKER_01]: But once felt like a space for investigative storytelling and public awareness has in many corners become an industry fueled by speed, outrage, and emotional spectacle.
01:07.985 --> 01:10.146
[SPEAKER_01]: every week, another podcast launches.
01:10.907 --> 01:15.970
[SPEAKER_01]: Every week, another creator promises exclusive revelations or bombshell evidence.
01:16.710 --> 01:23.974
[SPEAKER_01]: Entire investigations now unfold publicly in comment sections and TikTok clips before facts are even verified.
01:24.615 --> 01:30.118
[SPEAKER_01]: Victims become content, rumors become headlines, and certainty becomes performance.
01:31.018 --> 01:33.039
[SPEAKER_01]: And somewhere in the middle of all that noise,
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[SPEAKER_01]: Because these are not fictional narratives, these are real children, real families, real victims, real survivors, and real communities, caring trauma that often lasts decades longer than public attention ever does.
01:54.030 --> 01:58.214
[SPEAKER_01]: That reality weighed heavily on both of us doing this break.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'm David McClam.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm Madonna Humphrey.
02:02.254 --> 02:10.760
[SPEAKER_01]: At tonight, we want to talk honestly about where the extinguish podcast is headed moving forward because this is not simply a relaunch.
02:11.560 --> 02:14.302
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a complete evolution of the show itself.
02:15.363 --> 02:20.106
[SPEAKER_01]: When we first started discussing coming back, we both agreed on one thing almost immediately.
02:20.726 --> 02:24.789
[SPEAKER_01]: We could not return doing the same thing everybody else has already doing.
02:25.570 --> 02:35.294
[SPEAKER_01]: We are not interested in becoming another podcast that simply recycles famous murder cases, or summarizes documentaries, people have already watched three times.
02:36.094 --> 02:49.540
[SPEAKER_01]: We are not interested in dramatic storytelling for the sake of emotional manipulation, and we are certainly not interested in turning offenders into dark celebrities, while victims become secondary characters in their own tragedies.
02:50.540 --> 02:53.841
[SPEAKER_01]: What interests us now are the deeper patterns underneath
02:56.547 --> 02:58.989
[SPEAKER_01]: We want to examine the systems surrounding violence.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The environments predators exploit the institutional failures that allow abuse to continue unchecked.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The community shaped by silence.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The victims who were overlooked because they were considered inconvenient, troubled, poor, indigenous, addicted, vulnerable, or easy to dismiss.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Those are the stories that stay with us now.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That's right, and honestly David, those are the stories that have always mattered most to me.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Even before I fully realized that was the direction this podcast needed to take.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Because when I think about the cases that haunt me personally, they are almost never the big celebrity cases that everybody already knows.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They are the stories where somebody was ignored from the very beginning.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The missing child that got labeled a runaway.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The witness nobody believed, the woman whose disappearance received little attention because she struggled with addiction, the family who begged for help, but lacked influence our money or media connections.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The small town case where everybody whispered privately, but nobody wanted to speak publicly.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Those are the stories that linger.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And during this hiatus, I spent a tremendous amount of time thinking about why certain victims receive empathy and why others receive suspicion.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Why some cases become national obsessions while others barely survive a few local newspaper articles before completely disappearing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And why communities will sometimes protect reputations more aggressively than they protect vulnerable children.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Those questions became impossible for me to ignore, and I think that's why this new direction for extinguished feels so necessary to me personally.
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[SPEAKER_01]: One thing we need to say very clearly tonight is that this shift toward discussing crimes against children, predators, institutional abuse, and systemic failures is not about sensationalism.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, it's the exact opposite.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We are not interested in shock value.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We're not interested in graphic storytelling design to horrify people for entertainment.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And we are absolutely not interested
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[SPEAKER_01]: What interests us is understanding how predators operate it successfully and playing site for so long, because once you study enough of these cases carefully, you start noticing the same patterns over and over again.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Predators rarely survive because they are criminal masterminds.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Most survive because communities underestimate them, institutions hesitate to confront uncomfortable truths and vulnerable victims are easier to dismiss than powerful or respected adults.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's the part of these stories that fascinates me now.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Not the monsters themselves, but the systems that allow them access.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I agree and one thing that deeply shaped this thinking for me was all this researching I've been doing on my own about childhood experiences connected to hilltop lanes in Oklahoma.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I've spoken publicly before about this disturbing encounter for my childhood.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But what changed me was not simply revisiting that memory itself.
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[SPEAKER_00]: What actually changed me was researching the era of surrounding it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In the more I studied predator behavior David in the late 70s and 80s, the more I realized how different childhood looked during that period in America.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Kids moved through the world with an enormous amount of freedom.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We truly did.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We rode bicycles across entire towns, and we disappeared for entire afternoons.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And parents often did not know exactly where their children were every minute.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There were skating rinks in arcades and bowling alleys and county fairs, church camps, neighborhood stores, youth programs, and all of these spaces were children gathered relatively unsupervised.
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[SPEAKER_00]: and predators understood those environments long before society fully understood the risks that were attached to them.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Adults trusted adults automatically back then.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Children were often dismissed as dramatic and reliable or confused.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Warning signs were always minimized.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I can think of multiple examples of this.
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[SPEAKER_00]: records were fragmented, information traveled slowly, small towns, handled things very quietly, entire communities sometimes prioritized preserving appearances over confronting disturbing realities, and some offenders absolutely flourished in those conditions.
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[SPEAKER_01]: What's on selling is how many of those same dynamics still exists today, even if the technology has changed.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Predator still seek environments where questioning authority feels uncomfortable.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They still target vulnerability.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They still manipulate trust.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They still place themselves inside institutions that provide credibility and access.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's why this season is going to focus heavily on environments instead of simply individual offenders.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We want to examine the places where abuse survives quietly, churches, schools, youth organizations, sports leagues, community programs, small towns, recovery spaces, and online communities.
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[SPEAKER_01]: because when you look closely enough, patterns begin to emerge.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You start seeing how silence functions socially.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You start understanding how the NIO protects systems.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You start recognizing how institutions often respond defensively when allegations threaten their reputations.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And honestly, some of the most disturbing stories are not the crimes themselves.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes the most disturbing part is how many adults quietly look the way afterward.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In that silence fascinates me too, David, because silence has its own psychology.
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[SPEAKER_00]: People convince themselves they are protecting stability.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They're protecting their church, they're protecting their school.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They want to protect their community or their family.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But predators understand that hesitation.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They understand social discomfort.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They understand that most people desperately want to believe danger exists somewhere else.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And one thing we are going to discuss openly this season is how often vulnerable children and vulnerable adults become easy targets, precisely because society already views them as less credible.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So that's gonna include children from unstable homes, children struggling economically, emotionally.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Kids connected to addiction in the family, indigenous victims, runaways, people living in poverty, women battling substance abuse,
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[SPEAKER_00]: When someone already exists on the margins, socially, their victimization often receives less urgency and less empathy.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That's a painful reality, but it is one we have to confront honestly, if we care about understanding crime beyond the headlines.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Another major focus for us moving forward is the ethics of true crime itself, because social media has changed this landscape dramatically, and not always responsibly.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Today, investigations often unfold publicly in real time, rumors spread instantly, amateur sluice and certain selves into active cases.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Families become overwhelmed with misinformation.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Witnesses are harassed online.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Creators sometimes build entire audiences around certainty before evidence even exist.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And one thing I have grown increasingly uncomfortable with is how confidence itself has become
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[SPEAKER_01]: People are rewarded for sounding certain.
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[SPEAKER_01]: New wants gets punished.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Cosson gets ignored.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But real investigations are messy.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Witnesses contradict themselves.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Memories fail.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Police make mistakes.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Journalists make mistakes.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Trauma affects perception.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Evidence changes.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Timelines evolve.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And we are not interested in pretending every difficult case has easy answers simply to sound authoritative.
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[SPEAKER_00]: exactly David, and I think that audiences are actually exhausted by all that too.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I really think that people are tired of outraged cycles, they're tired of exploitation, they're tired of creators turning suffering into content factories.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I think they're tired of emotional manipulation disguised as advocacy.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And honestly, I think listeners are hungry for something deeper now.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They don't want it louder, they don't want it more graphic or theatrical, they want it to be honest.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And that's what we want this show to become moving forward.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Thoughtful, investigative, ethically grounded conversations around the systems surrounding violence, rather than simply retelling crimes like entertainment products.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Because crime does not happen in isolation, there are ripple effects that last free years.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes generations, families fracture survivors as we talked about struggle with addiction and trust and mental health trauma long before public attention fades.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Entire communities reshape themselves around unresolved trauma.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Those are the conversations we want to have now.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's correct.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And one thing we're explicitly interested in exploring this season is rural America and forgotten communities because some of the most revealing cases in this country happened far away from National Media Attention.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Small towns create completely different investigative realities.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Everybody knows everybody.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Witnesses fear retaliation, political pressure shapes investigations quietly, law enforcement resources are limited.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Families carry generations of relationships and loyalties, and silence often becomes survival.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Those environments can create extraordinary investigative blind spots, especially when vulnerable victims are involved.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And frankly, some of those overlooked cases reveal more about America than the famous stories everybody already knows.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, that's true.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I think I want listeners to also understand that this show is not rooted in hopelessness.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, yes, we are going to discuss difficult subjects this season.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to talk about crimes against children, predators, institutional failures, exploitation, and long-term trauma.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But we are also going to talk about resilience, survival, advocacy, accountability, and the extraordinary people who continue fighting for truth long after a public attention disappears.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We want to talk about survivors that finally find their voices
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[SPEAKER_00]: There are going to be investigators that are still pursuing forgotten cases, families refusing to stop searching, communities beginning to confront painful truths, honestly, and ethical storytelling that still matters very deeply.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And that is incredibly important today with me.
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[SPEAKER_01]: More than anything, this podcast is about memory now, who gets remembered, who gets ignored,
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[SPEAKER_01]: Because some people were extinguished long before they physically disappeared, their credibility was extinguished, their childhood was extinguished, their trust was extinguished, their voice was extinguished, and sometimes entire communities extinguished truth itself because silence
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[SPEAKER_00]: And to everyone who stayed with us during our hiatus, thank you sincerely from the bottom of my heart.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Because this is not simply the return of the extinguished podcast.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It is the beginning of an entirely new chapter.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A more investigative chapter, I hope a more thoughtful chapter, and hopefully for both David and I and for our listeners, a more meaningful one.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We're back at this time, we're going deeper than ever before.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Seats a nice conversation was not simply about announcing a new season.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It was about explaining why this podcast needed to evolve in the first place.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Because the truth is, there are still countless stories buried beneath silence, fear, stigma, corruption, institutional failure in public and difference.
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[SPEAKER_01]: There are still children whose disappearances were minimized.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Survivors who spent decades fighting to be believed.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Family still waiting for answers while the rest of the world moved on.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Entire community still shaped by our unresolved trauma and secrets, nobody wanted to confront publicly.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Those are the stories we intend to pursue moving forward.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Not because they are sensational, not because they are profitable, but because they matter.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And there's one other thing I hope listeners understand after tonight.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's that the extinguished podcast is no longer interested in simply recounting crimes chronologically.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We don't want these stories to sound like entertainment products.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Because we know that crime is never just one isolated moment.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There are always ripple effects extending outward long after those headlines disappear.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And often those ripple effects reveal far more about society than the crime itself.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We also want this show to remain grounded ethically, because true crime desperately needs spaces where evidence matters more than virality, where uncertainty is acknowledged honestly, and where victims are treated as human beings instead of content.
17:21.886 --> 17:34.775
[SPEAKER_01]: Social media has created incredible opportunities for awareness and advocacy, but it has also created an environment where misinformation spreads rapidly and in most of the certain, often replaces careful investigation.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We are not interested in contributing to that problem.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We want to slow things down, ask harder questions, examine uncountable truths carefully.
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[SPEAKER_01]: and remain disciplined enough to remember that every case involves real people who's lives extended far beyond the worst thing that ever happened to them.
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[SPEAKER_01]: and you can follow the extinguished podcasts for upcoming investigations, deep dive episodes, and conversations exploring forgotten victims, crimes against children, institutional failures, survivor experiences, and the hidden systems surrounding violence and exploitation.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much for listening.
18:29.177 --> 18:36.662
[SPEAKER_01]: And remember, some stories disappear because time passes, but others disappear because silence helped bury them.
18:37.283 --> 18:43.587
[SPEAKER_01]: And when we stop speaking their names, stop asking questions and stop searching for truth.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Their lives risk being extinguished.
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[SPEAKER_01]: all over again.
18:49.316 --> 18:54.860
[SPEAKER_01]: We thank you for listening, and make sure to subscribe for more.
00:00.031 --> 00:02.032
[SPEAKER_01]: For a while, these microphones win silent.
00:02.473 --> 00:07.336
[SPEAKER_01]: And honestly, I think both of us needed that silence more than we realized at the time.
00:08.836 --> 00:15.020
[SPEAKER_02]: Welcome to Extinguished, where David McClam and Ladana Humphrey share stories of the missing and murdered.
00:15.941 --> 00:16.361
[SPEAKER_02]: Missing.
00:17.842 --> 00:18.222
[SPEAKER_02]: Murdered.
00:19.666 --> 00:21.526
[SPEAKER_01]: their lives were extinguished.
00:21.907 --> 00:40.271
[SPEAKER_01]: When you spend years immersed in true crime, reading case files, speaking with families, studying investigations, listening to survivors, and watching communities fracture under the weight of violence and unanswered questions, eventually you reach a point where you have to step back and ask yourself a difficult question.
00:41.271 --> 00:44.592
[SPEAKER_01]: What exactly are we contributing to this conversation?
00:45.546 --> 00:49.069
[SPEAKER_01]: Because during our hiatus, some of them became increasingly clear to me.
00:49.769 --> 00:54.873
[SPEAKER_01]: True crime has changed dramatically over the last several years and not always for the better.
00:55.894 --> 01:06.922
[SPEAKER_01]: But once felt like a space for investigative storytelling and public awareness has in many corners become an industry fueled by speed, outrage, and emotional spectacle.
01:07.985 --> 01:10.146
[SPEAKER_01]: every week, another podcast launches.
01:10.907 --> 01:15.970
[SPEAKER_01]: Every week, another creator promises exclusive revelations or bombshell evidence.
01:16.710 --> 01:23.974
[SPEAKER_01]: Entire investigations now unfold publicly in comment sections and TikTok clips before facts are even verified.
01:24.615 --> 01:30.118
[SPEAKER_01]: Victims become content, rumors become headlines, and certainty becomes performance.
01:31.018 --> 01:33.039
[SPEAKER_01]: And somewhere in the middle of all that noise,
01:37.814 --> 01:53.189
[SPEAKER_01]: Because these are not fictional narratives, these are real children, real families, real victims, real survivors, and real communities, caring trauma that often lasts decades longer than public attention ever does.
01:54.030 --> 01:58.214
[SPEAKER_01]: That reality weighed heavily on both of us doing this break.
01:59.015 --> 01:59.896
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm David McClam.
02:00.713 --> 02:01.934
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm Madonna Humphrey.
02:02.254 --> 02:10.760
[SPEAKER_01]: At tonight, we want to talk honestly about where the extinguish podcast is headed moving forward because this is not simply a relaunch.
02:11.560 --> 02:14.302
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a complete evolution of the show itself.
02:15.363 --> 02:20.106
[SPEAKER_01]: When we first started discussing coming back, we both agreed on one thing almost immediately.
02:20.726 --> 02:24.789
[SPEAKER_01]: We could not return doing the same thing everybody else has already doing.
02:25.570 --> 02:35.294
[SPEAKER_01]: We are not interested in becoming another podcast that simply recycles famous murder cases, or summarizes documentaries, people have already watched three times.
02:36.094 --> 02:49.540
[SPEAKER_01]: We are not interested in dramatic storytelling for the sake of emotional manipulation, and we are certainly not interested in turning offenders into dark celebrities, while victims become secondary characters in their own tragedies.
02:50.540 --> 02:53.841
[SPEAKER_01]: What interests us now are the deeper patterns underneath
02:56.547 --> 02:58.989
[SPEAKER_01]: We want to examine the systems surrounding violence.
02:59.649 --> 03:05.854
[SPEAKER_01]: The environments predators exploit the institutional failures that allow abuse to continue unchecked.
03:06.655 --> 03:08.456
[SPEAKER_01]: The community shaped by silence.
03:09.136 --> 03:20.545
[SPEAKER_01]: The victims who were overlooked because they were considered inconvenient, troubled, poor, indigenous, addicted, vulnerable, or easy to dismiss.
03:21.486 --> 03:24.388
[SPEAKER_01]: Those are the stories that stay with us now.
03:25.088 --> 03:29.471
[SPEAKER_00]: That's right, and honestly David, those are the stories that have always mattered most to me.
03:30.212 --> 03:34.976
[SPEAKER_00]: Even before I fully realized that was the direction this podcast needed to take.
03:35.876 --> 03:42.942
[SPEAKER_00]: Because when I think about the cases that haunt me personally, they are almost never the big celebrity cases that everybody already knows.
03:43.802 --> 03:47.445
[SPEAKER_00]: They are the stories where somebody was ignored from the very beginning.
03:48.286 --> 03:50.368
[SPEAKER_00]: The missing child that got labeled a runaway.
03:51.163 --> 04:04.037
[SPEAKER_00]: The witness nobody believed, the woman whose disappearance received little attention because she struggled with addiction, the family who begged for help, but lacked influence our money or media connections.
04:05.179 --> 04:10.625
[SPEAKER_00]: The small town case where everybody whispered privately, but nobody wanted to speak publicly.
04:11.774 --> 04:13.175
[SPEAKER_00]: Those are the stories that linger.
04:13.975 --> 04:23.080
[SPEAKER_00]: And during this hiatus, I spent a tremendous amount of time thinking about why certain victims receive empathy and why others receive suspicion.
04:23.981 --> 04:32.205
[SPEAKER_00]: Why some cases become national obsessions while others barely survive a few local newspaper articles before completely disappearing.
04:33.586 --> 04:40.170
[SPEAKER_00]: And why communities will sometimes protect reputations more aggressively than they protect vulnerable children.
04:41.063 --> 04:49.799
[SPEAKER_00]: Those questions became impossible for me to ignore, and I think that's why this new direction for extinguished feels so necessary to me personally.
04:50.627 --> 05:02.889
[SPEAKER_01]: One thing we need to say very clearly tonight is that this shift toward discussing crimes against children, predators, institutional abuse, and systemic failures is not about sensationalism.
05:03.610 --> 05:05.790
[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, it's the exact opposite.
05:06.450 --> 05:08.351
[SPEAKER_01]: We are not interested in shock value.
05:08.911 --> 05:13.632
[SPEAKER_01]: We're not interested in graphic storytelling design to horrify people for entertainment.
05:14.312 --> 05:16.212
[SPEAKER_01]: And we are absolutely not interested
05:20.593 --> 05:34.048
[SPEAKER_01]: What interests us is understanding how predators operate it successfully and playing site for so long, because once you study enough of these cases carefully, you start noticing the same patterns over and over again.
05:34.969 --> 05:38.252
[SPEAKER_01]: Predators rarely survive because they are criminal masterminds.
05:38.933 --> 05:50.980
[SPEAKER_01]: Most survive because communities underestimate them, institutions hesitate to confront uncomfortable truths and vulnerable victims are easier to dismiss than powerful or respected adults.
05:51.820 --> 05:55.182
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the part of these stories that fascinates me now.
05:55.842 --> 06:00.225
[SPEAKER_01]: Not the monsters themselves, but the systems that allow them access.
06:01.259 --> 06:12.886
[SPEAKER_00]: I agree and one thing that deeply shaped this thinking for me was all this researching I've been doing on my own about childhood experiences connected to hilltop lanes in Oklahoma.
06:13.606 --> 06:17.509
[SPEAKER_00]: I've spoken publicly before about this disturbing encounter for my childhood.
06:18.392 --> 06:21.815
[SPEAKER_00]: But what changed me was not simply revisiting that memory itself.
06:22.656 --> 06:25.839
[SPEAKER_00]: What actually changed me was researching the era of surrounding it.
06:26.680 --> 06:35.068
[SPEAKER_00]: In the more I studied predator behavior David in the late 70s and 80s, the more I realized how different childhood looked during that period in America.
06:35.860 --> 06:38.981
[SPEAKER_00]: Kids moved through the world with an enormous amount of freedom.
06:39.641 --> 06:40.441
[SPEAKER_00]: We truly did.
06:41.001 --> 06:45.543
[SPEAKER_00]: We rode bicycles across entire towns, and we disappeared for entire afternoons.
06:46.163 --> 06:49.724
[SPEAKER_00]: And parents often did not know exactly where their children were every minute.
06:50.404 --> 07:02.287
[SPEAKER_00]: There were skating rinks in arcades and bowling alleys and county fairs, church camps, neighborhood stores, youth programs, and all of these spaces were children gathered relatively unsupervised.
07:03.252 --> 07:10.319
[SPEAKER_00]: and predators understood those environments long before society fully understood the risks that were attached to them.
07:11.180 --> 07:14.023
[SPEAKER_00]: Adults trusted adults automatically back then.
07:14.824 --> 07:18.748
[SPEAKER_00]: Children were often dismissed as dramatic and reliable or confused.
07:19.488 --> 07:21.931
[SPEAKER_00]: Warning signs were always minimized.
07:22.572 --> 07:24.714
[SPEAKER_00]: I can think of multiple examples of this.
07:26.053 --> 07:44.229
[SPEAKER_00]: records were fragmented, information traveled slowly, small towns, handled things very quietly, entire communities sometimes prioritized preserving appearances over confronting disturbing realities, and some offenders absolutely flourished in those conditions.
07:44.828 --> 07:52.310
[SPEAKER_01]: What's on selling is how many of those same dynamics still exists today, even if the technology has changed.
07:53.130 --> 07:56.950
[SPEAKER_01]: Predator still seek environments where questioning authority feels uncomfortable.
07:57.711 --> 07:59.311
[SPEAKER_01]: They still target vulnerability.
07:59.891 --> 08:01.311
[SPEAKER_01]: They still manipulate trust.
08:01.871 --> 08:07.152
[SPEAKER_01]: They still place themselves inside institutions that provide credibility and access.
08:15.015 --> 08:21.081
[SPEAKER_01]: That's why this season is going to focus heavily on environments instead of simply individual offenders.
08:21.721 --> 08:38.296
[SPEAKER_01]: We want to examine the places where abuse survives quietly, churches, schools, youth organizations, sports leagues, community programs, small towns, recovery spaces, and online communities.
08:39.095 --> 08:42.557
[SPEAKER_01]: because when you look closely enough, patterns begin to emerge.
08:43.257 --> 08:45.658
[SPEAKER_01]: You start seeing how silence functions socially.
08:46.378 --> 08:49.119
[SPEAKER_01]: You start understanding how the NIO protects systems.
08:49.840 --> 08:56.643
[SPEAKER_01]: You start recognizing how institutions often respond defensively when allegations threaten their reputations.
08:57.411 --> 09:01.732
[SPEAKER_02]: And honestly, some of the most disturbing stories are not the crimes themselves.
09:02.513 --> 09:07.294
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes the most disturbing part is how many adults quietly look the way afterward.
09:07.474 --> 09:12.215
[SPEAKER_00]: In that silence fascinates me too, David, because silence has its own psychology.
09:12.655 --> 09:15.436
[SPEAKER_00]: People convince themselves they are protecting stability.
09:15.876 --> 09:18.697
[SPEAKER_00]: They're protecting their church, they're protecting their school.
09:19.237 --> 09:21.718
[SPEAKER_00]: They want to protect their community or their family.
09:22.198 --> 09:24.379
[SPEAKER_00]: But predators understand that hesitation.
09:24.799 --> 09:26.601
[SPEAKER_00]: They understand social discomfort.
09:27.041 --> 09:31.425
[SPEAKER_00]: They understand that most people desperately want to believe danger exists somewhere else.
09:32.265 --> 09:45.417
[SPEAKER_00]: And one thing we are going to discuss openly this season is how often vulnerable children and vulnerable adults become easy targets, precisely because society already views them as less credible.
09:46.393 --> 09:52.899
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's gonna include children from unstable homes, children struggling economically, emotionally.
09:53.300 --> 10:02.969
[SPEAKER_00]: Kids connected to addiction in the family, indigenous victims, runaways, people living in poverty, women battling substance abuse,
10:03.878 --> 10:11.323
[SPEAKER_00]: When someone already exists on the margins, socially, their victimization often receives less urgency and less empathy.
10:12.064 --> 10:19.429
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a painful reality, but it is one we have to confront honestly, if we care about understanding crime beyond the headlines.
10:20.250 --> 10:30.197
[SPEAKER_01]: Another major focus for us moving forward is the ethics of true crime itself, because social media has changed this landscape dramatically, and not always responsibly.
10:31.112 --> 10:39.799
[SPEAKER_01]: Today, investigations often unfold publicly in real time, rumors spread instantly, amateur sluice and certain selves into active cases.
10:40.519 --> 10:43.081
[SPEAKER_01]: Families become overwhelmed with misinformation.
10:43.902 --> 10:45.703
[SPEAKER_01]: Witnesses are harassed online.
10:46.323 --> 10:51.928
[SPEAKER_01]: Creators sometimes build entire audiences around certainty before evidence even exist.
10:52.808 --> 10:58.473
[SPEAKER_01]: And one thing I have grown increasingly uncomfortable with is how confidence itself has become
11:00.690 --> 11:02.971
[SPEAKER_01]: People are rewarded for sounding certain.
11:03.731 --> 11:04.991
[SPEAKER_01]: New wants gets punished.
11:05.651 --> 11:06.911
[SPEAKER_01]: Cosson gets ignored.
11:07.732 --> 11:09.512
[SPEAKER_01]: But real investigations are messy.
11:10.192 --> 11:11.913
[SPEAKER_01]: Witnesses contradict themselves.
11:12.533 --> 11:13.353
[SPEAKER_01]: Memories fail.
11:13.993 --> 11:15.093
[SPEAKER_01]: Police make mistakes.
11:15.734 --> 11:16.914
[SPEAKER_01]: Journalists make mistakes.
11:17.534 --> 11:19.074
[SPEAKER_01]: Trauma affects perception.
11:19.734 --> 11:20.755
[SPEAKER_01]: Evidence changes.
11:21.375 --> 11:22.835
[SPEAKER_01]: Timelines evolve.
11:23.575 --> 11:30.037
[SPEAKER_01]: And we are not interested in pretending every difficult case has easy answers simply to sound authoritative.
11:30.963 --> 11:35.748
[SPEAKER_00]: exactly David, and I think that audiences are actually exhausted by all that too.
11:36.708 --> 11:46.197
[SPEAKER_00]: I really think that people are tired of outraged cycles, they're tired of exploitation, they're tired of creators turning suffering into content factories.
11:46.838 --> 11:50.821
[SPEAKER_00]: I think they're tired of emotional manipulation disguised as advocacy.
11:51.562 --> 11:54.605
[SPEAKER_00]: And honestly, I think listeners are hungry for something deeper now.
11:55.205 --> 12:00.491
[SPEAKER_00]: They don't want it louder, they don't want it more graphic or theatrical, they want it to be honest.
12:01.191 --> 12:03.694
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's what we want this show to become moving forward.
12:04.194 --> 12:14.044
[SPEAKER_00]: Thoughtful, investigative, ethically grounded conversations around the systems surrounding violence, rather than simply retelling crimes like entertainment products.
12:14.945 --> 12:19.788
[SPEAKER_00]: Because crime does not happen in isolation, there are ripple effects that last free years.
12:20.308 --> 12:32.734
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes generations, families fracture survivors as we talked about struggle with addiction and trust and mental health trauma long before public attention fades.
12:33.675 --> 12:37.937
[SPEAKER_00]: Entire communities reshape themselves around unresolved trauma.
12:38.837 --> 12:41.379
[SPEAKER_00]: Those are the conversations we want to have now.
12:41.983 --> 12:42.663
[SPEAKER_01]: That's correct.
12:42.963 --> 12:56.288
[SPEAKER_01]: And one thing we're explicitly interested in exploring this season is rural America and forgotten communities because some of the most revealing cases in this country happened far away from National Media Attention.
12:57.149 --> 13:00.590
[SPEAKER_01]: Small towns create completely different investigative realities.
13:01.373 --> 13:02.594
[SPEAKER_01]: Everybody knows everybody.
13:03.215 --> 13:11.184
[SPEAKER_01]: Witnesses fear retaliation, political pressure shapes investigations quietly, law enforcement resources are limited.
13:12.005 --> 13:18.932
[SPEAKER_01]: Families carry generations of relationships and loyalties, and silence often becomes survival.
13:19.793 --> 13:26.916
[SPEAKER_01]: Those environments can create extraordinary investigative blind spots, especially when vulnerable victims are involved.
13:27.556 --> 13:34.979
[SPEAKER_01]: And frankly, some of those overlooked cases reveal more about America than the famous stories everybody already knows.
13:35.199 --> 13:35.999
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, that's true.
13:36.079 --> 13:42.502
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think I want listeners to also understand that this show is not rooted in hopelessness.
13:43.534 --> 13:46.816
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, yes, we are going to discuss difficult subjects this season.
13:47.176 --> 13:54.720
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to talk about crimes against children, predators, institutional failures, exploitation, and long-term trauma.
13:55.260 --> 14:07.146
[SPEAKER_00]: But we are also going to talk about resilience, survival, advocacy, accountability, and the extraordinary people who continue fighting for truth long after a public attention disappears.
14:08.427 --> 14:11.348
[SPEAKER_00]: We want to talk about survivors that finally find their voices
14:13.257 --> 14:27.388
[SPEAKER_00]: There are going to be investigators that are still pursuing forgotten cases, families refusing to stop searching, communities beginning to confront painful truths, honestly, and ethical storytelling that still matters very deeply.
14:27.889 --> 14:30.310
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is incredibly important today with me.
14:31.311 --> 14:38.617
[SPEAKER_01]: More than anything, this podcast is about memory now, who gets remembered, who gets ignored,
14:43.542 --> 15:03.628
[SPEAKER_01]: Because some people were extinguished long before they physically disappeared, their credibility was extinguished, their childhood was extinguished, their trust was extinguished, their voice was extinguished, and sometimes entire communities extinguished truth itself because silence
15:10.247 --> 15:15.891
[SPEAKER_00]: And to everyone who stayed with us during our hiatus, thank you sincerely from the bottom of my heart.
15:16.651 --> 15:20.193
[SPEAKER_00]: Because this is not simply the return of the extinguished podcast.
15:20.854 --> 15:23.255
[SPEAKER_00]: It is the beginning of an entirely new chapter.
15:23.275 --> 15:33.722
[SPEAKER_00]: A more investigative chapter, I hope a more thoughtful chapter, and hopefully for both David and I and for our listeners, a more meaningful one.
15:34.707 --> 15:40.051
[SPEAKER_01]: We're back at this time, we're going deeper than ever before.
15:41.552 --> 15:44.835
[SPEAKER_01]: Seats a nice conversation was not simply about announcing a new season.
15:45.696 --> 15:49.619
[SPEAKER_01]: It was about explaining why this podcast needed to evolve in the first place.
15:50.499 --> 16:02.709
[SPEAKER_01]: Because the truth is, there are still countless stories buried beneath silence, fear, stigma, corruption, institutional failure in public and difference.
16:03.745 --> 16:06.906
[SPEAKER_01]: There are still children whose disappearances were minimized.
16:07.627 --> 16:10.428
[SPEAKER_01]: Survivors who spent decades fighting to be believed.
16:11.268 --> 16:15.270
[SPEAKER_01]: Family still waiting for answers while the rest of the world moved on.
16:16.150 --> 16:22.813
[SPEAKER_01]: Entire community still shaped by our unresolved trauma and secrets, nobody wanted to confront publicly.
16:23.755 --> 16:27.139
[SPEAKER_01]: Those are the stories we intend to pursue moving forward.
16:27.840 --> 16:33.708
[SPEAKER_01]: Not because they are sensational, not because they are profitable, but because they matter.
16:34.889 --> 16:38.030
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's one other thing I hope listeners understand after tonight.
16:38.830 --> 16:44.273
[SPEAKER_00]: It's that the extinguished podcast is no longer interested in simply recounting crimes chronologically.
16:44.913 --> 16:48.474
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't want these stories to sound like entertainment products.
16:49.314 --> 16:52.716
[SPEAKER_00]: Because we know that crime is never just one isolated moment.
16:53.376 --> 16:58.578
[SPEAKER_00]: There are always ripple effects extending outward long after those headlines disappear.
16:59.318 --> 17:04.040
[SPEAKER_00]: And often those ripple effects reveal far more about society than the crime itself.
17:04.664 --> 17:20.890
[SPEAKER_01]: We also want this show to remain grounded ethically, because true crime desperately needs spaces where evidence matters more than virality, where uncertainty is acknowledged honestly, and where victims are treated as human beings instead of content.
17:21.886 --> 17:34.775
[SPEAKER_01]: Social media has created incredible opportunities for awareness and advocacy, but it has also created an environment where misinformation spreads rapidly and in most of the certain, often replaces careful investigation.
17:35.555 --> 17:38.277
[SPEAKER_01]: We are not interested in contributing to that problem.
17:38.997 --> 17:45.482
[SPEAKER_01]: We want to slow things down, ask harder questions, examine uncountable truths carefully.
17:46.203 --> 17:55.313
[SPEAKER_01]: and remain disciplined enough to remember that every case involves real people who's lives extended far beyond the worst thing that ever happened to them.
18:08.275 --> 18:26.406
[SPEAKER_01]: and you can follow the extinguished podcasts for upcoming investigations, deep dive episodes, and conversations exploring forgotten victims, crimes against children, institutional failures, survivor experiences, and the hidden systems surrounding violence and exploitation.
18:27.135 --> 18:28.596
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much for listening.
18:29.177 --> 18:36.662
[SPEAKER_01]: And remember, some stories disappear because time passes, but others disappear because silence helped bury them.
18:37.283 --> 18:43.587
[SPEAKER_01]: And when we stop speaking their names, stop asking questions and stop searching for truth.
18:44.268 --> 18:46.450
[SPEAKER_01]: Their lives risk being extinguished.
18:47.435 --> 18:48.216
[SPEAKER_01]: all over again.
18:49.316 --> 18:54.860
[SPEAKER_01]: We thank you for listening, and make sure to subscribe for more.
