Gone South

In Gatesville, Texas, a group of contemplative nuns visits seven women on Death Row, teaching them the rhythms of convent life: prayer, song, silence, and confession. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Lawrence Wright (The Looming Tower, Going Clear) got rare access to watch it unfold, and the result is his new book, Redemption: Faith, Justice and Sisterhood on Death Row. He talks about persuading silent nuns to open up, and about the abuse scandal in their order’s past.

Wright also found that some of the women may never have been rightly convicted. Melissa Lucio has been declared innocent by the judge who tried her, yet she remains on the row. Wright explains how this changed his view of the death penalty, and whether redemption is truly possible for people who’ve done terrible things.

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In 1999, two teenage girls, J.B. Beasley and Tracie Hawlett, were found shot in the trunk of a Mazda in Ozark, Alabama, a small town in the Wiregrass region of the Deep South. With no suspect and a police department already accused of corruption, locals suspected a cover-up. Twenty years later, genetic genealogy led to Coley McCraney, a Dothan truck driver and church deacon with no criminal record. Journalist Matt Kessler spent years investigating the case and reporting on the trial. His new book, The Wiregrass, argues McCraney may be innocent.

This week on Gone South, Kessler walks us through the case: a contaminated crime scene, a missing car, thousands of undigitized files, and a whistleblower cop’s allegations. He also shares his own theory of what happened that night, and why he believes DNA alone isn’t enough to convict a man of murder.

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It started with a stolen parrot named Mango, who liked to dance to Doja Cat. When reporter Aidan McCahill wrote a quick, quirky story about the theft for The Advocate, he had no idea it would lead him down a monthslong rabbit hole into Magnolia Wilds, a Louisiana animal preserve already under fire from federal regulators — and its founder, Gabe Ligon, who'd just been arrested at a Texas airport on a felony theft charge.

What Aidan found was a menagerie of chaos: porcupines and capybaras escaping their enclosures, animals mauled and trampled to death, kids bitten by otters during $215 swim sessions, and employees quietly bringing kangaroos and lynxes home at night. Behind it all was Ligon himself — a libertarian showman who insisted he loved his animals even as the USDA, his business partners, and his own former staff told Aidan a very different story.

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Part One left off with detectives certain that groundskeeper Brandon Nodier killed pet cemetery owner Dorothy Thompson — but unable to prove it. In Part Two, we dig into an even wilder theory: that Dorothy's own mother, Grace, may have shot two of Dorothy's husbands dead on the cemetery grounds. Because decades earlier, Grace had already gotten away with killing once — fleeing an insane asylum, a Kansas City murder charge, and a fortune in missing gambling money to reinvent herself as a New Orleans flower-shop owner and hymn composer.

Then, 24 years after Dorothy's murder went cold, an anonymous phone call cracks the case wide open. Detective John Doran hears from two men with chilling, firsthand accounts of what really happened to Dorothy Thompson — and sets a plan in motion to catch her killer.

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In 1985, two fishermen pulled a body wrapped in 200 pounds of chains from the Mississippi River. It was Dorothy Thompson, 63, who ran a strange and beloved roadside attraction outside New Orleans called the Azalea Original Pet Cemetery — final resting place for thousands of dogs, cats, and the occasional cheetah. Dorothy's disappearance opened up a murder investigation that quickly ran into a problem: almost everyone around her had a motive.

There was a groundskeeper who'd allegedly swindled her out of her property days before she vanished. Rumors that Dorothy herself had killed two of her four husbands, both found dead on the cemetery grounds. And a mother, Grace, whose own past in Kansas City hinted she might know a thing or two about getting away with murder. In Part One of this two-part episode, we dig into the tangled, decades-long history of one family's blood-soaked pet cemetery.

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In 1982, 16-year-old Roxanne Sharp was raped and murdered in the woods outside Covington, Louisiana. Her case went cold for over 40 years, derailed early on by a serial killer's false confession. Then two Louisiana State Police officers walked into radio host Charles Dowdy's studio with a pitch: help us keep this case alive. The result was Charles's first true-crime podcast, Who Killed Roxanne?, made in real-time alongside an active police investigation.

One year after the show aired, police arrested four men in connection with Roxanne's murder. Charles tells us how a small-town radio show host ended up standing at a press conference that closed a four-decade-old case — and what it's like to help solve the very story you set out to tell.

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Part One left off with Jema Heffernan taking in a man named Javon Donahue — and Javon nearly strangling her to death. In Part Two, that single act of violence hardens into a decade-long "hostage relationship": Javon controls her money, her car, her ability to leave, and every time she manages to get away, he finds her.

In 2017, after a four-hour standoff that ends with Javon forcing the gun into her own hand, Jema shoots him, and survives being shot herself. What follows is a botched cover-up, a shallow grave, and a trial where prosecutors argue that a decade of documented abuse doesn't excuse the killing. Jema is convicted and sentenced to 10 years. Justine van der Leun tells us what happened next, including the day, seven years later, she was there to pick Jema up.

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Lloyd Lockridge:

Journalist Justine van der Leun set out to find the untold stories of women serving murder sentences after surviving years of abuse — women whose only official record reads "guilty," with no mention of what came before. She mailed 10,000 letters to incarcerated women across the country and got back more than a thousand replies. One came from Jema Heffernan, a mother of three serving 10 years for killing her husband, Javon Donahue.

Jema's childhood in a military family took a dark turn after she was raped at 13 — and her small Missouri town turned on her, not her attacker. Years later, she took in a man freshly out of prison as a favor to a friend, never imagining he'd become a father figure to her daughter, and then the man who nearly strangled her to death in her own living room. In Part One of this two-part episode, Jema tells us how a "roommate situation" spiraled into a relationship she never chose.

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In the mid-1960s, McDonald's sued a tiny Mobile, Alabama fast-food chain called Colonel Dixie — over golden arches, green sidewalks, red and white trash cans, and a stolen operations manual. Colonel Dixie won on the trademark claim and went on to become a beloved local institution, famous for the Dixie Dog. But the brand still carries a whiff of scandal, because in 1983 its co-founder, Paul Leverett, was convicted of hiring a hitman to murder his wife.

Elizabeth "Liz" Leverett was killed while her husband drove their children around Mobile in a carefully constructed alibi. She had decided that week to file for divorce. The case went cold — until a burglary across town led investigators to a pawn shop owner, a stolen diamond hidden in a necktie, and an x-ray taken years earlier. Lagniappe journalist Kevin Lee tells us how it unraveled.

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Jacklean Davis was the first Black woman to make homicide detective in the New Orleans Police Department. She grew up in Central City, inspired by a Black patrol officer known on the street as Christy Love, and she rose fast — cracking the 1986 case of a killer who had been hiding in plain sight, presenting himself to detectives as a witness. Ebony asked whether she was the best homicide detective in the city's history. Whoopi Goldberg looked into playing her.

Her colleagues shredded her case files and stuffed dog waste in her desk. Then, in 2002, a dispute over a $5,000 security detail at an Essence Fest after-party became a federal extortion case, and Jackie went to prison in Tallahassee. Journalist Ethan Brown, who spent months with her and thousands of pages of her records, tells us how her rise and fall tracked the NOPD's own — and why a prosecutor's anonymous internet comments would later cast a shadow over her conviction.