At the time of writing, the Dead Man Talking podcast has been downloaded 1.31 million times. Back in October, shortly after it launched, it reached No1 on the iTunes UK podcast charts (knocking Peter Crouch off the top spot) and charted in a further four countries.
Reviewing it in the Guardian, Miranda Sawyer said it combined "the best of American and British true crime techniques" and called it "intriguing”, pointing out how well it walked the line between entertainment and reality.
At the end of 2018, Spotify and Apple in the UK both named it one of their best podcasts of the year.
Why is this important to me? Because my friend Pete Sale and I are behind Dead Man Talking, and I wasn’t entirely sure how all this happened. I wanted to break down how a story that’s been slowly scratching at the interior of my skull for 15 years seems to have resonated with so many people; and how, then, we made a “successful” podcast about that story. What follows is more catharsis for me than anything else.
It all began, as I’ve said in a previous story for GQ, in 2003, with an interview I did with a notorious serial killer on death row in Texas, where I live.
Known as the Railroad Killer, Angel Reséndiz traversed the United States by freight train in the Nineties, hopping off at random and bludgeoning his victims to death. He eventually gave himself up and was sentenced to death in 1999. By the time of his execution seven years later, the authorities believed he could have been responsible for up to 20 murders.
In the interview I did with him all those years ago, he openly discussed these killings, but he also confessed to others — the details of which I don’t think police were aware of. One of the confessions was to a murder in Houston for which two people were sentenced to life in prison.
While I wrote about this and the other confessions back in 2003, fast forward to 2017 and these two people were still languishing in prison for a crime they possibly didn’t commit. I’d lost the interview tape — an old C90 cassette — in the intervening years, but discovered it again at the bottom of a box during one of numerous moves across the pond. I wanted to revisit the story — one which I now thought had the makings of a podcast series.
Robert McKee, in his celebrated book Story: Substance, Structure, Style And The Principles Of Screenwriting wrote that a good story is something worth telling that the world wants to hear. “Finding this is your lonely task... But the love of a good story, of terrific characters and a world driven by your passion, courage and creative gifts is still not enough. Your goal must be a good story well told.”
McKee was talking about writing fiction for film, but I think the same thing applies to nonfiction. I knew we had a good story, but it was vital we told it well. The problem was, I’d never made a podcast before, and the how we told this particular story was going to be a shared endeavour. Step forward Pete Sale, my old mate from my university days in Southampton. After we graduated in 1997, I went on to become a writer; Pete went into audio — and for the last 13 years he’d worked primarily on podcasts.
Pete pitched our idea to a couple of podcast networks, one of which was Audioboom, a company with studios in London, Los Angeles, Mumbai and New York. They offered us an advance so we could make the series (which we knew would inevitably involve a fair bit of travel) and they would also put money towards marketing it — so people would actually knew it existed.
The truth is, though, we’ve made (and are still making) this podcast on a minimal budget. The crime podcast West Cork was the result of three years' reporting and research by Sam Bungey and Jennifer Forde. Journalist Madeleine Baran and her team moved to Mississippi for almost a year to report for the podcast In The Dark. The New Yorker said that APM Reports, the company behind it, devoted “a newsroom’s worth of time, energy and resources to asking hard questions about justice in the United States”. The latest season of Serial credits around 15 people with working on the show. Dead Man Talking had three: me, Pete and our intern, Connor (who disappeared off to university halfway through).
When we started making Dead Man Talking we had an old taped confession, a wish list of interviewees and a very rough outline of 12 episodes (plus four mini episodes we were contracted to make).
It also had a strong personal angle — Reséndiz had told me, after all, about these other murders. This would be my investigation.
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The first thing we did was book Pete’s flight out to Texas. He arrived in the Spring of 2018 for four weeks and we had set up interviews in Blythe, California (Reséndiz had confessed to killing as many as four people there), at a prison in Texas (one of the two people serving life for a murder Reséndiz claimed he committed), and with various people connected with the Reséndiz case in Houston.
It was fun working together and we got off to a great start. The police chief in Blythe was a warm, thoughtful man and his interview was incredibly revealing: he thought Reséndiz was probably telling the truth about the murders he claimed to have committed there. That was our first "wow" moment.
We used some of the Audioboom advance to buy some decent recording equipment for me to use once Pete had flown back to London (a Marantz PMD661 MKII recorder, Beyerdynamic M58 mics, a portable vocal booth — for any audio nerds).
I still record all my narration in the cupboard in my spare room; the row of winter jackets and spare clothes hanging up in there help deaden the sound. I have Pete (six hours ahead in London) in one ear on my iPhone, and my headphones on top so I can hear what I’m saying in the microphone. I don’t think this is how they do it on Serial but it works for us.
Pete’s an experienced podcast producer and engineer and he’s explained to me there’s a big difference between producing podcasts and producing for radio. “Radio needs a lot of signposting and generally less adventurous production,” he says. “Because people listening to radio programmes are doing other things — driving a car, making breakfast — so it needs to be quite simple."
“With podcasts, someone has taken trouble to download it so you have a captive audience. A lot of people who make podcasts think they’re still making radio so they tend to over-explain everything. With podcast production I can be a lot more adventurous in terms of music and sound effects than I’d ever get away with with on something for Radio 4 for example.”
As for editing the shows together, Pete says he’s adamant that each episode must move the story on. “It can’t be boring. We always end up with four times more stuff than we actually need.”
He starts by clearing up the audio — getting rid of any umms, stumbles and repetitions. Then he de-clutters. It’s the same process for me writing a story for print or the web. One of my favourite books is On Writing Well by William Zinsser in which he says, “The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word… simplify, simplify.”
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That said, when we started, Pete said I sounded like I was reading an audiobook. I was adding little journalistic flourishes to the scripts and Pete told me to take them out on pain of death. “You don’t sound like that when you’re talking,” he told me. “So you’re not going to sound like that when you’re talking to podcast listeners.”
We argued. Sometimes he ignored my text messages. We’re still friends.
We stumbled upon a formula that seemed to work: I’d highlight the bits of an interview I thought were interesting, then start the bare bones of a script. Pete would then rewrite what I’d written and hide it from me when we were recording. It makes it more conversational. Simpler, he said. It’s still tough for me to do it that way, but I’m begrudgingly coming round to believing Pete’s right.
Then there’s the music: we found a fitting song called "The Railroad" by a band called Goodnight, Texas. I was adamant I didn’t want cliched southern blues or country. This was a phenomenal, stomping, dark number that seemed perfect. Now, everyone who has heard the podcast mentions the music.
Dead Man Talking got around 80,000 listeners in the first 24 hours after we’d uploaded it. This can only have been down to Audioboom’s marketing. Rob Peterson, the New York-based director of audience acquisition at Audioboom, said the company felt strongly about the podcast and wanted to put money behind it. They put up a number of billboards in Houston, Texas, where they thought the story would resonate with local people. They took out ads on other crime podcasts they knew would have similar audiences. Then, the prominent podcasting platforms — Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Spotify — got behind us.
We got some good press too. In addition to the nice review in the Guardian, Vulture, the culture and entertainment site from New York Magazine, included us in a roundup of the best new crime podcasts. “Run, don’t walk, to download the just-launched podcast Dead Man Talking,” it said. “The conceit is irresistible.”
And then there’s the audience — our listeners who have stuck with us since that very first episode. They engage with us on social media. Some of them have even helped move the story on in ways we never imagined.
Some have said they can’t wait to see how the story ends. The truth is, we can’t wait either. Because right now, we have no idea. People love to hear stories about the potential for justice, but it’s always a little unsettling to hear from listeners who say they’re “loving” the show. For most who download the podcast it is entertainment. For me, though, weirdly, it’s like I’m working on a piece of journalism with everyone watching every step of the way.
Dead Man Talking is a production of DMT Media and Audioboom, available now at itunes.com. To get involved in the conversation, follow Dead Man Talking on Facebook or hear developments on Twitter.
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