WEBVTT
00:00.310 --> 00:11.672
[SPEAKER_01]: There are stories that slip through a cracks, victims who vanish from headlines, cases that grow cold, not because no one cares but because the system failed them.
00:11.932 --> 00:17.613
[SPEAKER_00]: Some killers are caught, some walk free, and others hide in plain sight for years.
00:18.173 --> 00:21.654
[SPEAKER_00]: Their crimes forgotten, their victims extinguished.
00:22.094 --> 00:22.834
[SPEAKER_01]: But not here.
00:23.334 --> 00:23.934
[SPEAKER_00]: Not with us.
00:24.874 --> 00:29.275
[SPEAKER_01]: We're here to dig of the truth, case by case, victim by victim.
00:29.720 --> 00:35.224
[SPEAKER_00]: because they mattered, they still matter, and someone somewhere knows what happened.
00:36.826 --> 00:43.011
[SPEAKER_02]: Welcome to Extinguished, where David McClam and Ladana Humphrey share stories of the missing and murdered.
00:43.932 --> 00:44.352
[SPEAKER_02]: Missing.
00:45.853 --> 00:46.213
[SPEAKER_02]: Murdered.
00:47.678 --> 00:49.520
[SPEAKER_02]: their lives were extinguished.
00:49.680 --> 00:54.224
[SPEAKER_01]: There are entire generations of Americans who grew up believing danger looked a certain way.
00:55.124 --> 00:58.347
[SPEAKER_01]: Danger was supposed to be the stranger hiding in the shadows.
00:58.808 --> 01:00.989
[SPEAKER_01]: The mysterious van park near the playground.
01:01.650 --> 01:08.496
[SPEAKER_01]: The faceless monster children were warned about before they rode their bicycles down the street or walked home from school alone.
01:09.317 --> 01:12.860
[SPEAKER_01]: That was the image burned into the public imagination for decades.
01:13.652 --> 01:31.824
[SPEAKER_01]: and yet when you begin studying crimes against children seriously, not as entertainment, but as internet gossip, not as simplified television narratives, but as an actual pattern of human behavior stretching across communities and generations, you discover something deeply unsettling.
01:32.704 --> 01:35.286
[SPEAKER_01]: Most predators never looked dangerous at all.
01:36.006 --> 01:39.129
[SPEAKER_01]: They looked familiar, they looked trustworthy,
01:41.948 --> 01:45.031
[SPEAKER_01]: They coach little league, they volunteered at churches.
01:45.571 --> 01:47.993
[SPEAKER_01]: They still behind counters that convenient stores.
01:48.574 --> 01:58.743
[SPEAKER_01]: They worked around schools, camps, bowling alleys, skating rinks, youth groups, arcades, fairs, and community events.
01:59.597 --> 02:12.612
[SPEAKER_01]: They embedded themselves into the rhythm of ordinary American life so completely that entire communities often struggle to recognize what was happening until years, sometimes decades later.
02:13.690 --> 02:15.051
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is one of the reasons.
02:15.571 --> 02:17.972
[SPEAKER_01]: The extinguished podcasts were inquired for a while.
02:18.732 --> 02:25.395
[SPEAKER_01]: Because during our hiatus, La Duna and I started having difficult conversations about what true crime has become.
02:26.236 --> 02:30.978
[SPEAKER_01]: We talked about the rise of sensationalism, the monetization of tragedy.
02:31.618 --> 02:45.407
[SPEAKER_01]: The performance of outrage on social media in the disturbing way some victims are turned into content while actual human suffering becomes secondary to clicks, downloads, and algorithms.
02:46.487 --> 02:54.452
[SPEAKER_01]: But more importantly, we started asking ourselves where the true crime was still willing to confront uncomfortable truths, honestly.
02:55.433 --> 02:58.275
[SPEAKER_01]: Not dramatic truths, not theatrical truths.
02:59.077 --> 02:59.757
[SPEAKER_01]: real truths.
03:00.597 --> 03:04.938
[SPEAKER_01]: The kind of truths that force people to reexamine systems they trusted for years.
03:05.958 --> 03:14.140
[SPEAKER_01]: The kind of truths that reveal how often vulnerable children were ignored because the adults preferred comfort over confrontation.
03:15.100 --> 03:23.201
[SPEAKER_01]: The kind of truths that expose how predators survive not because they are criminal masterminds, but because silence protects them better than
03:29.152 --> 03:37.398
[SPEAKER_01]: Tonight's episode, The Place's Predator's Hide, is the beginning of a completely new chapter for the distinguished podcast.
03:38.299 --> 03:47.306
[SPEAKER_01]: This is not a traditional true crime episode with the neat timeline, a dramatic arrest, or a cinematic ending waiting at the conclusion of the story.
03:48.367 --> 03:54.392
[SPEAKER_01]: Instead, this episode is about something larger and honestly, fall more disturbing.
03:55.298 --> 04:00.041
[SPEAKER_01]: It's about the environment predators have historically used to gain access to children.
04:00.922 --> 04:02.823
[SPEAKER_01]: It's about the psychology of trust.
04:03.804 --> 04:08.327
[SPEAKER_01]: It's about the silence that protected offenders inside ordinary communities.
04:09.367 --> 04:19.534
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's about the uncultivarialization that millions of adults are now looking back on their childhoods with entirely different eyes than they have while living through them.
04:20.908 --> 04:36.241
[SPEAKER_01]: Because what many people are beginning to understand now is that childhood in America, doing the 70s, 80s, and even 90s, operated under assumptions that often left children profoundly vulnerable.
04:37.222 --> 04:41.166
[SPEAKER_01]: Kids disappeared for entire afternoon without anyone knowing exactly where they were.
04:42.086 --> 05:08.973
[SPEAKER_01]: Georgia Hitchite, young teenagers wonder shopping malls, bowling alleys, skating rings, in arcades largely unsupervised, parents trusted communities more instinctively, adults trusted other adults more instinctively, and while that freedom created beautiful memories for many people, it also created enormous blind spots predators understood long before society fully
05:11.682 --> 05:23.885
[SPEAKER_01]: You see, according to the National Children's Alliance, more than 530,000 children are identified while authorities as victims of abuse in neglect annually in the United States alone.
05:24.946 --> 05:36.829
[SPEAKER_01]: Meanwhile, organizations studying child sexual abuse consistently report that most abuse is committed not by strangers, but by individuals children already know and trust.
05:37.952 --> 05:41.933
[SPEAKER_01]: Some estimates place that number above 90 percent.
05:42.754 --> 05:46.715
[SPEAKER_01]: That reality fundamentally changes how we should understand danger.
05:47.575 --> 05:54.297
[SPEAKER_01]: Because danger often arrives through familiarity, through trust, through institutions.
05:55.037 --> 05:58.158
[SPEAKER_01]: Through ordinary places, communities believed were safe.
05:59.159 --> 06:05.141
[SPEAKER_01]: In full Adana, one of those places was a bowling alley, and Western Oklahoma called
06:06.886 --> 06:14.873
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the most difficult things about studying crimes against children is realizing how rarely these stories are actually about isolated evil.
06:15.894 --> 06:31.987
[SPEAKER_00]: They are usually about ecosystems, about environments, about silence spreading quietly through communities until harmful behavior becomes normalized, ignored, minimized, or explained away because confronting the truth feels too destabilizing.
06:33.096 --> 06:40.000
[SPEAKER_00]: And honestly, when you examine enough of these cases over time, patterns begin to emerge that are almost impossible to ignore.
06:40.860 --> 06:46.523
[SPEAKER_00]: Predators often seek access to vulnerable environments rather than vulnerable locations.
06:47.364 --> 06:53.067
[SPEAKER_00]: They placed themselves where children gather naturally and where adults are conditioned to lower their guard.
06:53.887 --> 07:00.931
[SPEAKER_00]: In my situation, when I was nine years old, a man tried to abduct me from hilltop lanes in
07:02.958 --> 07:13.004
[SPEAKER_00]: I won't go into a lot of detail other than to say that he was not successful, but we later found out that he did something similar to someone else and he hurt that child.
07:13.925 --> 07:18.327
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was all built around a bowling alley because of course, people were busy.
07:18.367 --> 07:24.171
[SPEAKER_00]: My dad was on a bowling league on a team and he was conditioned to believe that that was a safe place.
07:25.847 --> 07:41.515
[SPEAKER_00]: And these predators, they build trust slowly, they manipulate that familiar airity, they understand social discomfort, and perhaps I think the most disturbing thing is they understand how deeply communities want to believe that danger exists somewhere else.
07:42.376 --> 07:53.682
[SPEAKER_00]: They wanna believe it's not here, it's not in my church and my school, it's not in my bowling alley, it's not around someone everybody knows, but history tells us a very, very different story.
07:54.987 --> 08:00.490
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, when we were talking about this episode, David and I did some research surrounding child sexual abuse.
08:01.200 --> 08:12.009
[SPEAKER_00]: and grooming that repeatedly demonstrates that offenders often rely on trust-building behaviors, specifically designed to avoid detection and discourage disclosure.
08:12.089 --> 08:28.422
[SPEAKER_00]: Grimming itself is now widely recognized as a deliberate process involving emotional manipulation, isolation, normalization of inappropriate behavior, and a gradual boundary violation that frequently appear harmless at first glance.
08:29.455 --> 08:41.505
[SPEAKER_00]: Many survivors do not even fully recognize what happened to them until years later because the abuse was wrapped inside trust, familiar airity, mentorship, or emotional dependency.
08:42.245 --> 08:53.034
[SPEAKER_00]: In my specific case, David, the man that was at this bowling alley that started talking with my sister and I led me to believe that he knew my father.
08:53.674 --> 08:55.256
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's why I grew to trust him.
08:56.469 --> 08:59.550
[SPEAKER_00]: And when my father looked over and waved at us, the man waved too.
08:59.670 --> 09:02.392
[SPEAKER_00]: So in a nine-year-old's mind, what do you believe?
09:02.452 --> 09:03.272
[SPEAKER_00]: He must know my dad.
09:03.292 --> 09:04.032
[SPEAKER_00]: Why would he wave?
09:05.053 --> 09:06.694
[SPEAKER_00]: That's how predators work.
09:08.034 --> 09:14.137
[SPEAKER_00]: And the reality is one reason, so many adults now look back on childhood memories differently than they once did.
09:14.997 --> 09:19.299
[SPEAKER_00]: A strange interaction suddenly becomes something that makes a lot more sense.
09:20.100 --> 09:22.721
[SPEAKER_00]: And adults who want to see merely friendly now
09:25.845 --> 09:32.867
[SPEAKER_00]: an environment that wants felt safe, now carries a completely different emotional weight decades later.
09:33.888 --> 09:38.710
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think millions of Americans David are quietly re-evaluating those memories right now.
09:38.990 --> 09:39.550
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't you think?
09:40.450 --> 09:41.010
[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely.
09:41.851 --> 09:44.332
[SPEAKER_00]: I just think times have changed.
09:44.632 --> 09:45.732
[SPEAKER_00]: We have more knowledge.
09:46.032 --> 09:48.313
[SPEAKER_00]: We understand predators in those systems.
09:49.130 --> 09:56.954
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think what makes this even more painful is understanding how differently society responds to victims depending on who they are.
09:57.855 --> 10:06.739
[SPEAKER_00]: Children connected to poverty, addiction, foster care, systems, unstable homes, marginalized communities, and so on.
10:06.839 --> 10:09.381
[SPEAKER_00]: They're often treated differently from the very beginning.
10:10.271 --> 10:16.616
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, indigenous victims run away, classification, and children are viewed as troubled historically.
10:17.216 --> 10:20.859
[SPEAKER_00]: They've received less urgency and less media attention.
10:21.539 --> 10:29.445
[SPEAKER_00]: And sometimes even less investigative intensity, than children who've been society's preferred image of innocence, think about John Benet Ramsey.
10:31.256 --> 10:32.478
[SPEAKER_00]: This is not speculation.
10:32.698 --> 10:33.339
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the truth.
10:33.499 --> 10:40.650
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a pattern that is visible and it's been visible throughout decades of missing persons cases and abuse investigations.
10:41.682 --> 10:45.903
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that those disparities matter because predators absolutely notice them.
10:46.424 --> 10:53.186
[SPEAKER_00]: If we, as investigators, as podcasts, as true crime journalists, can see them, then you know that the predators know and are watching.
10:53.826 --> 10:56.447
[SPEAKER_00]: Because they understand who is vulnerable.
10:57.147 --> 11:04.890
[SPEAKER_00]: They understand that society has this weird hierarchy that places value on certain lives and not on others.
11:06.347 --> 11:11.470
[SPEAKER_00]: They understand which victims in society that will be less likely to be protected.
11:12.391 --> 11:17.475
[SPEAKER_00]: And that reality should disturb every single listener to this podcast tonight.
11:18.395 --> 11:22.918
[SPEAKER_01]: And honestly, that is where the reason this podcast had to evolve.
11:23.939 --> 11:29.483
[SPEAKER_01]: Because the distinguished podcast is the longer-interested and simply recounting crimes as isolated events.
11:30.323 --> 11:44.789
[SPEAKER_01]: We are interested in examining the systems surrounding them, the institutions, the silence, a cultural blind spots, the failures, and the environments that allowed harm to continue while communities looked away.
11:45.989 --> 11:55.873
[SPEAKER_01]: We are interested in the victims who were forgotten, the children who were dismissed, the survivors who spent decades carrying shame that never belonged to them.
11:56.820 --> 12:01.064
[SPEAKER_01]: The families who kept searching long after public attention disappeared.
12:02.085 --> 12:14.098
[SPEAKER_01]: And the difficult truths many people still do not want to confront honestly because those truths challenge comforting ideas about safety, trust, power and community itself.
12:15.259 --> 12:19.824
[SPEAKER_01]: This season we are going deeper into those conversations than ever before.
12:20.880 --> 12:26.703
[SPEAKER_01]: We are going to examine crimes against children, grooming behavior, as a traditional failures.
12:27.383 --> 12:29.104
[SPEAKER_01]: We're all investigative realities.
12:29.824 --> 12:36.107
[SPEAKER_01]: So, driver experiences, media ethics, and the devastating consequences of silence.
12:37.208 --> 12:39.228
[SPEAKER_01]: But we are not doing it for spectacle.
12:40.089 --> 12:44.011
[SPEAKER_01]: We are not doing it to glorify offenders or manufacture outrage.
12:44.840 --> 12:57.161
[SPEAKER_01]: We are doing it because truth matters, because memory matters, and because they are countless victims who stories deserve more than to vanish quietly into public in difference.
13:00.678 --> 13:06.942
[SPEAKER_00]: And to everyone listening tonight, thank you for returning with us as the extinguished podcast begins this new chapter.
13:07.663 --> 13:13.987
[SPEAKER_00]: Because these conversations are uncomfortable for a reason, they're going to force us to reconsider environments that we trusted.
13:14.007 --> 13:17.269
[SPEAKER_00]: They're going to force us to examine systems that failed.
13:18.210 --> 13:26.880
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's going to force us to acknowledge that silence has protected predators for generations far more effectively than secrecy ever could.
13:27.701 --> 13:32.007
[SPEAKER_00]: But difficult conversations are necessary if anything is ever going to change.
13:32.886 --> 13:54.211
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for listening, and remember some stories disappear because time passes, but others disappear because silence helped bury them, and when we stop speaking their names, stop asking questions and stop searching for truth, their lives, risk being, extinguished, all over again.
13:55.331 --> 13:57.472
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you, and we'll see you next episode.
00:00.310 --> 00:11.672
[SPEAKER_01]: There are stories that slip through a cracks, victims who vanish from headlines, cases that grow cold, not because no one cares but because the system failed them.
00:11.932 --> 00:17.613
[SPEAKER_00]: Some killers are caught, some walk free, and others hide in plain sight for years.
00:18.173 --> 00:21.654
[SPEAKER_00]: Their crimes forgotten, their victims extinguished.
00:22.094 --> 00:22.834
[SPEAKER_01]: But not here.
00:23.334 --> 00:23.934
[SPEAKER_00]: Not with us.
00:24.874 --> 00:29.275
[SPEAKER_01]: We're here to dig of the truth, case by case, victim by victim.
00:29.720 --> 00:35.224
[SPEAKER_00]: because they mattered, they still matter, and someone somewhere knows what happened.
00:36.826 --> 00:43.011
[SPEAKER_02]: Welcome to Extinguished, where David McClam and Ladana Humphrey share stories of the missing and murdered.
00:43.932 --> 00:44.352
[SPEAKER_02]: Missing.
00:45.853 --> 00:46.213
[SPEAKER_02]: Murdered.
00:47.678 --> 00:49.520
[SPEAKER_02]: their lives were extinguished.
00:49.680 --> 00:54.224
[SPEAKER_01]: There are entire generations of Americans who grew up believing danger looked a certain way.
00:55.124 --> 00:58.347
[SPEAKER_01]: Danger was supposed to be the stranger hiding in the shadows.
00:58.808 --> 01:00.989
[SPEAKER_01]: The mysterious van park near the playground.
01:01.650 --> 01:08.496
[SPEAKER_01]: The faceless monster children were warned about before they rode their bicycles down the street or walked home from school alone.
01:09.317 --> 01:12.860
[SPEAKER_01]: That was the image burned into the public imagination for decades.
01:13.652 --> 01:31.824
[SPEAKER_01]: and yet when you begin studying crimes against children seriously, not as entertainment, but as internet gossip, not as simplified television narratives, but as an actual pattern of human behavior stretching across communities and generations, you discover something deeply unsettling.
01:32.704 --> 01:35.286
[SPEAKER_01]: Most predators never looked dangerous at all.
01:36.006 --> 01:39.129
[SPEAKER_01]: They looked familiar, they looked trustworthy,
01:41.948 --> 01:45.031
[SPEAKER_01]: They coach little league, they volunteered at churches.
01:45.571 --> 01:47.993
[SPEAKER_01]: They still behind counters that convenient stores.
01:48.574 --> 01:58.743
[SPEAKER_01]: They worked around schools, camps, bowling alleys, skating rinks, youth groups, arcades, fairs, and community events.
01:59.597 --> 02:12.612
[SPEAKER_01]: They embedded themselves into the rhythm of ordinary American life so completely that entire communities often struggle to recognize what was happening until years, sometimes decades later.
02:13.690 --> 02:15.051
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is one of the reasons.
02:15.571 --> 02:17.972
[SPEAKER_01]: The extinguished podcasts were inquired for a while.
02:18.732 --> 02:25.395
[SPEAKER_01]: Because during our hiatus, La Duna and I started having difficult conversations about what true crime has become.
02:26.236 --> 02:30.978
[SPEAKER_01]: We talked about the rise of sensationalism, the monetization of tragedy.
02:31.618 --> 02:45.407
[SPEAKER_01]: The performance of outrage on social media in the disturbing way some victims are turned into content while actual human suffering becomes secondary to clicks, downloads, and algorithms.
02:46.487 --> 02:54.452
[SPEAKER_01]: But more importantly, we started asking ourselves where the true crime was still willing to confront uncomfortable truths, honestly.
02:55.433 --> 02:58.275
[SPEAKER_01]: Not dramatic truths, not theatrical truths.
02:59.077 --> 02:59.757
[SPEAKER_01]: real truths.
03:00.597 --> 03:04.938
[SPEAKER_01]: The kind of truths that force people to reexamine systems they trusted for years.
03:05.958 --> 03:14.140
[SPEAKER_01]: The kind of truths that reveal how often vulnerable children were ignored because the adults preferred comfort over confrontation.
03:15.100 --> 03:23.201
[SPEAKER_01]: The kind of truths that expose how predators survive not because they are criminal masterminds, but because silence protects them better than
03:29.152 --> 03:37.398
[SPEAKER_01]: Tonight's episode, The Place's Predator's Hide, is the beginning of a completely new chapter for the distinguished podcast.
03:38.299 --> 03:47.306
[SPEAKER_01]: This is not a traditional true crime episode with the neat timeline, a dramatic arrest, or a cinematic ending waiting at the conclusion of the story.
03:48.367 --> 03:54.392
[SPEAKER_01]: Instead, this episode is about something larger and honestly, fall more disturbing.
03:55.298 --> 04:00.041
[SPEAKER_01]: It's about the environment predators have historically used to gain access to children.
04:00.922 --> 04:02.823
[SPEAKER_01]: It's about the psychology of trust.
04:03.804 --> 04:08.327
[SPEAKER_01]: It's about the silence that protected offenders inside ordinary communities.
04:09.367 --> 04:19.534
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's about the uncultivarialization that millions of adults are now looking back on their childhoods with entirely different eyes than they have while living through them.
04:20.908 --> 04:36.241
[SPEAKER_01]: Because what many people are beginning to understand now is that childhood in America, doing the 70s, 80s, and even 90s, operated under assumptions that often left children profoundly vulnerable.
04:37.222 --> 04:41.166
[SPEAKER_01]: Kids disappeared for entire afternoon without anyone knowing exactly where they were.
04:42.086 --> 05:08.973
[SPEAKER_01]: Georgia Hitchite, young teenagers wonder shopping malls, bowling alleys, skating rings, in arcades largely unsupervised, parents trusted communities more instinctively, adults trusted other adults more instinctively, and while that freedom created beautiful memories for many people, it also created enormous blind spots predators understood long before society fully
05:11.682 --> 05:23.885
[SPEAKER_01]: You see, according to the National Children's Alliance, more than 530,000 children are identified while authorities as victims of abuse in neglect annually in the United States alone.
05:24.946 --> 05:36.829
[SPEAKER_01]: Meanwhile, organizations studying child sexual abuse consistently report that most abuse is committed not by strangers, but by individuals children already know and trust.
05:37.952 --> 05:41.933
[SPEAKER_01]: Some estimates place that number above 90 percent.
05:42.754 --> 05:46.715
[SPEAKER_01]: That reality fundamentally changes how we should understand danger.
05:47.575 --> 05:54.297
[SPEAKER_01]: Because danger often arrives through familiarity, through trust, through institutions.
05:55.037 --> 05:58.158
[SPEAKER_01]: Through ordinary places, communities believed were safe.
05:59.159 --> 06:05.141
[SPEAKER_01]: In full Adana, one of those places was a bowling alley, and Western Oklahoma called
06:06.886 --> 06:14.873
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the most difficult things about studying crimes against children is realizing how rarely these stories are actually about isolated evil.
06:15.894 --> 06:31.987
[SPEAKER_00]: They are usually about ecosystems, about environments, about silence spreading quietly through communities until harmful behavior becomes normalized, ignored, minimized, or explained away because confronting the truth feels too destabilizing.
06:33.096 --> 06:40.000
[SPEAKER_00]: And honestly, when you examine enough of these cases over time, patterns begin to emerge that are almost impossible to ignore.
06:40.860 --> 06:46.523
[SPEAKER_00]: Predators often seek access to vulnerable environments rather than vulnerable locations.
06:47.364 --> 06:53.067
[SPEAKER_00]: They placed themselves where children gather naturally and where adults are conditioned to lower their guard.
06:53.887 --> 07:00.931
[SPEAKER_00]: In my situation, when I was nine years old, a man tried to abduct me from hilltop lanes in
07:02.958 --> 07:13.004
[SPEAKER_00]: I won't go into a lot of detail other than to say that he was not successful, but we later found out that he did something similar to someone else and he hurt that child.
07:13.925 --> 07:18.327
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was all built around a bowling alley because of course, people were busy.
07:18.367 --> 07:24.171
[SPEAKER_00]: My dad was on a bowling league on a team and he was conditioned to believe that that was a safe place.
07:25.847 --> 07:41.515
[SPEAKER_00]: And these predators, they build trust slowly, they manipulate that familiar airity, they understand social discomfort, and perhaps I think the most disturbing thing is they understand how deeply communities want to believe that danger exists somewhere else.
07:42.376 --> 07:53.682
[SPEAKER_00]: They wanna believe it's not here, it's not in my church and my school, it's not in my bowling alley, it's not around someone everybody knows, but history tells us a very, very different story.
07:54.987 --> 08:00.490
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, when we were talking about this episode, David and I did some research surrounding child sexual abuse.
08:01.200 --> 08:12.009
[SPEAKER_00]: and grooming that repeatedly demonstrates that offenders often rely on trust-building behaviors, specifically designed to avoid detection and discourage disclosure.
08:12.089 --> 08:28.422
[SPEAKER_00]: Grimming itself is now widely recognized as a deliberate process involving emotional manipulation, isolation, normalization of inappropriate behavior, and a gradual boundary violation that frequently appear harmless at first glance.
08:29.455 --> 08:41.505
[SPEAKER_00]: Many survivors do not even fully recognize what happened to them until years later because the abuse was wrapped inside trust, familiar airity, mentorship, or emotional dependency.
08:42.245 --> 08:53.034
[SPEAKER_00]: In my specific case, David, the man that was at this bowling alley that started talking with my sister and I led me to believe that he knew my father.
08:53.674 --> 08:55.256
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's why I grew to trust him.
08:56.469 --> 08:59.550
[SPEAKER_00]: And when my father looked over and waved at us, the man waved too.
08:59.670 --> 09:02.392
[SPEAKER_00]: So in a nine-year-old's mind, what do you believe?
09:02.452 --> 09:03.272
[SPEAKER_00]: He must know my dad.
09:03.292 --> 09:04.032
[SPEAKER_00]: Why would he wave?
09:05.053 --> 09:06.694
[SPEAKER_00]: That's how predators work.
09:08.034 --> 09:14.137
[SPEAKER_00]: And the reality is one reason, so many adults now look back on childhood memories differently than they once did.
09:14.997 --> 09:19.299
[SPEAKER_00]: A strange interaction suddenly becomes something that makes a lot more sense.
09:20.100 --> 09:22.721
[SPEAKER_00]: And adults who want to see merely friendly now
09:25.845 --> 09:32.867
[SPEAKER_00]: an environment that wants felt safe, now carries a completely different emotional weight decades later.
09:33.888 --> 09:38.710
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think millions of Americans David are quietly re-evaluating those memories right now.
09:38.990 --> 09:39.550
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't you think?
09:40.450 --> 09:41.010
[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely.
09:41.851 --> 09:44.332
[SPEAKER_00]: I just think times have changed.
09:44.632 --> 09:45.732
[SPEAKER_00]: We have more knowledge.
09:46.032 --> 09:48.313
[SPEAKER_00]: We understand predators in those systems.
09:49.130 --> 09:56.954
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think what makes this even more painful is understanding how differently society responds to victims depending on who they are.
09:57.855 --> 10:06.739
[SPEAKER_00]: Children connected to poverty, addiction, foster care, systems, unstable homes, marginalized communities, and so on.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They're often treated differently from the very beginning.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You know, indigenous victims run away, classification, and children are viewed as troubled historically.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They've received less urgency and less media attention.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And sometimes even less investigative intensity, than children who've been society's preferred image of innocence, think about John Benet Ramsey.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This is not speculation.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's the truth.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It is a pattern that is visible and it's been visible throughout decades of missing persons cases and abuse investigations.
10:41.682 --> 10:45.903
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that those disparities matter because predators absolutely notice them.
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[SPEAKER_00]: If we, as investigators, as podcasts, as true crime journalists, can see them, then you know that the predators know and are watching.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Because they understand who is vulnerable.
10:57.147 --> 11:04.890
[SPEAKER_00]: They understand that society has this weird hierarchy that places value on certain lives and not on others.
11:06.347 --> 11:11.470
[SPEAKER_00]: They understand which victims in society that will be less likely to be protected.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And that reality should disturb every single listener to this podcast tonight.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And honestly, that is where the reason this podcast had to evolve.
11:23.939 --> 11:29.483
[SPEAKER_01]: Because the distinguished podcast is the longer-interested and simply recounting crimes as isolated events.
11:30.323 --> 11:44.789
[SPEAKER_01]: We are interested in examining the systems surrounding them, the institutions, the silence, a cultural blind spots, the failures, and the environments that allowed harm to continue while communities looked away.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We are interested in the victims who were forgotten, the children who were dismissed, the survivors who spent decades carrying shame that never belonged to them.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The families who kept searching long after public attention disappeared.
12:02.085 --> 12:14.098
[SPEAKER_01]: And the difficult truths many people still do not want to confront honestly because those truths challenge comforting ideas about safety, trust, power and community itself.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This season we are going deeper into those conversations than ever before.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We are going to examine crimes against children, grooming behavior, as a traditional failures.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We're all investigative realities.
12:29.824 --> 12:36.107
[SPEAKER_01]: So, driver experiences, media ethics, and the devastating consequences of silence.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But we are not doing it for spectacle.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We are not doing it to glorify offenders or manufacture outrage.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We are doing it because truth matters, because memory matters, and because they are countless victims who stories deserve more than to vanish quietly into public in difference.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And to everyone listening tonight, thank you for returning with us as the extinguished podcast begins this new chapter.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Because these conversations are uncomfortable for a reason, they're going to force us to reconsider environments that we trusted.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They're going to force us to examine systems that failed.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And it's going to force us to acknowledge that silence has protected predators for generations far more effectively than secrecy ever could.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But difficult conversations are necessary if anything is ever going to change.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for listening, and remember some stories disappear because time passes, but others disappear because silence helped bury them, and when we stop speaking their names, stop asking questions and stop searching for truth, their lives, risk being, extinguished, all over again.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you, and we'll see you next episode.
