EVIDENCE - A True Crime Podcast Transcript
Episode 4: "The Chain"
[AD BREAK - PRE-ROLL]
This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Sometimes the most important question you can ask is the one you've been putting off. BetterHelp connects you with a licensed therapist online, on your schedule. Use code EVIDENCE for ten percent off your first month. Link in show notes.
[INTRO MUSIC]
JOEL: Welcome back to Evidence. I'm Joel Vasquez.
MARA: I'm Mara Chen.
JOEL: I'm going to take the first part of this episode. Mara knows what I found. We talked about it before we started recording. She has agreed to let me present it in order.
MARA: Go ahead.
JOEL: Three weeks ago I started working the transmission chain.
[PAUSE]
JOEL: By which I mean: I started asking where this case came from. Not the Fellowship — we know where the Fellowship came from. I mean the case. This podcast. How did we end up here. Mara told me in Episode 1 that someone sent it to her personally. I started there.
He presented his findings on a Wednesday morning, before recording, in the same coffee shop where he and Mara have worked for six years. He laid out his notes in order. She read them without speaking. Then she said: okay. Let's record.
JOEL: Mara received the case from a woman named Claire Osei. I want to be precise about who Claire Osei is, because I got it wrong in my notes initially — a listener caught it in our live comments last week. I had her down as a print journalist. She's a podcast producer. She covered the Carbon Hill story as an audio piece that was never released. That distinction matters. She knew the format. She gave Mara a case that was already in the shape it needed to be in.
MARA: I want to say something about Claire. She's not a mystery. She's a person I respect professionally. She called me because she thought I was the right person for this story. She was working on something else and didn't have time to do it the way it needed to be done. That's the whole story.
JOEL: I know. I'm following the chain.
[PAUSE]
JOEL: Claire received the case from a man named Thomas Bright. Thomas Bright had attended two Fellowship meetings in the fall of 2021, before the end. He moved away from Carbon Hill in early 2022. His last documented contact with Claire was a message. The message read: you need to look at this carefully. Not the deaths. The method. Start there.
[PAUSE]
JOEL: Thomas Bright cannot be located.
MARA: He moved. People move.
JOEL: His digital footprint ends cleanly. Email account deactivated. Social media accounts deleted. No forwarding address on record. No professional presence. I spent a week on this. I found one photograph — a group photo from a Carbon Hill community event, summer 2021, four months before he attended his first Fellowship meeting. He is standing at the edge of the frame. Someone has cropped the original. He is the only person in the photograph who is looking at the camera.
MARA: You're framing that to sound significant.
JOEL: I'm describing what I found.
[PAUSE]
JOEL: The chain goes cold at Thomas Bright. Which means it goes: Daniel Marsh, to the archive, to Thomas Bright, to Claire Osei, to Mara, to this podcast, to every person listening right now.
[LONG SILENCE]
MARA: What Joel has described is real. The facts are accurate as far as I know them. What I want to resist — and I want to be clear that this is something I've thought about — is the assumption that a traceable chain is a designed one. Journalists pass stories. Producers make referrals. People move and make it hard to be found. These are ordinary things.
[PAUSE]
MARA: I know what it looks like. I've been looking at it longer than Joel has.
[PAUSE]
JOEL: I also want to see the listener messages.
MARA: We'll get there.
JOEL: I've been asking for two weeks. The form — the if someone sent you this episode personally, we'd like to speak with you form — has been live since Episode 1. You've said there's an order to it every time I ask.
MARA: There is an order to it.
JOEL: What does the order need before it's ready?
MARA: (a beat) We'll get there.
JOEL: You said the same thing about your shoulder. You said the same thing about the survivor's email. You said the same thing about the live event.
[PAUSE]
JOEL: What is that order resting on?
[SILENCE: five seconds]
MARA: (quietly) That's not fair.
JOEL: I know.
[PAUSE]
JOEL: I know. I'm sorry. I heard myself.
[SILENCE]
MARA: (after a long beat) We'll look at them together. Before Episode 5. I promise.
JOEL: Okay.
[SILENCE]
[MID-ROLL AD]
This episode is supported by our Patreon community. One note on the private subscriber community: there is a lot happening in there right now. If you're at the fifty-dollar tier, you know what we mean. If you're not — the link is in the show notes. We think it's better if you see it for yourself.
JOEL: I need to tell you something I should have said before we started recording.
MARA: Okay.
JOEL: I'm a subscriber. The private community. Fifty-dollar tier. I've been in there for three weeks. I didn't tell you.
[PAUSE]
MARA: I know.
JOEL: You knew.
MARA: I saw your username. I recognized it.
JOEL: And you didn't say anything.
MARA: There's an —
JOEL: Don't.
[SILENCE]
MARA: (carefully) I thought you'd tell me when you were ready to tell me.
JOEL: (a long beat) Okay. Here's what I found.
Most of it is what you'd expect. People discussing the episodes. Reactions, links to related reading — a thread on the history of high-control groups that is genuinely excellent. People who found each other through a shared interest, thinking carefully together.
Some of it is harder to describe.
There are posts — not many, maybe a dozen out of several hundred — where something in the language has shifted. I kept reading them trying to locate what was different. It's not the content. The content is people processing episodes of a podcast, which is ordinary. It's something in the structure of how they're processing it. The way a sentence will build toward a question and then build again from the question, using the question as a new floor, and the floor becomes the next question, so that what you're reading is not a person working toward an answer but a person who has stopped expecting one, or who expects one in a different direction than the one the sentence started in, or — and I kept trying to find the right word for what the person is doing and the closest I got is: a person finding out what their thinking is resting on by watching it fail to rest, which isn't quite right either, because the failing is the resting, or the resting is what the failing looks like from inside the thing that's failing, which means there's no position from which you could tell the difference, and I kept reading trying to find where it stopped and it — it mostly doesn't stop. It just reaches a point where the writer appears to run out of time or patience and ends the post. Not concludes. Ends. And then there are replies, and the replies do the same thing, and I read those too. And what I kept coming back to, reading the replies, is that they were trying to locate what was different. In the same way I was. Using the same structure.
MARA: People are engaging with the material. They've been listening to someone ask that question for four weeks. The language is going to —
JOEL: One post asked: has anyone else started doing this with the people in their lives? It had forty-seven responses. Most of them were what you'd expect. Two said it caused an argument. One said it caused a good argument. Then someone replied they weren't sure there was a difference between those two things — and then the thread underneath that just kept going, different people asking what that distinction was resting on, whether the idea of a good argument requires a definition of good that's worth examining, whether —
MARA: That's — that's the community doing what communities do. They're finding each other through a shared —
JOEL: One of the forty-seven wrote that they'd been sent the podcast by a coworker, listened to all three episodes in a day, found the whole thing a little too focused on itself. They said they appreciated the production quality. They said they hadn't thought about it since. They weren't sure why they were posting.
[BEAT]
MARA: (quietly) That's most people.
JOEL: It is. How do you know that?
MARA: (a shift — not a stumble, exactly, but the wrong gear for a half-second) Because — that's how these things — most people encounter something and move through it and —
JOEL: What is that resting on?
[LONG SILENCE]
MARA: (very quietly, and not quite to Joel) I don't know why I said that.
[SILENCE]
JOEL: How long have you been looking at it?
[SILENCE: six seconds]
MARA: (quietly, starting something she doesn't finish) Since before — I've been — it's longer than —
[SILENCE]
MARA: The archive.
JOEL: Yeah.
JOEL: Three more entries. I want to read them in order.
First: The ones who find this after will know what to do with it because the method will already be working in them by the time they read this far.
Second: The archive is not a record. It is a curriculum.
[PAUSE]
JOEL: Third.
[BEAT]
JOEL: I am writing this for the person Mara will find.
[SILENCE: four seconds]
JOEL: (quietly) No date. Not filed with the other entries. A separate sheet, folded, placed inside the back cover of the last journal.
[PAUSE]
JOEL: (again, quieter) I am writing this for the person Mara will find.
[SILENCE: seven seconds]
MARA: We'll take a break.
[OUTRO MUSIC]
[POST-ROLL]
Evidence is an independent podcast. We exist because listeners share it with people they care about.
Thomas Bright attended two Fellowship meetings. He has not been located. If you know Thomas Bright, the contact form is on the website.
The private community has four hundred and twelve members.
Before we recorded this episode, Joel said that number out loud in the coffee shop. He said it the way you'd say a number you'd just found. Then he didn't say anything else. Mara didn't either. Then she said: okay. Let's record.
Joel has submitted zero names to the live event form.
The live event form has been live for three weeks. We haven't said how many names are on it. We will. Next episode.
Most of you who found this podcast through someone else thought about it for a while and moved on. That is most people.
Mara said: I don't know why I said that.
Joel asked: how long have you been looking at it.
She said: the archive.
Next episode: continuation.
END OF EPISODE FOUR