Heroes Behind the Badge

Tom Lange was the lead LAPD homicide detective on the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. In the second half of his return to Heroes Behind the Badge, Craig Floyd asks the question that has followed the case for more than three decades: if Simpson acted alone, how did he get rid of the bloody clothes, shoes and knife before catching a flight to Chicago that night?

Tom starts with the clock. His team drove from Bundy to Rockingham three times, and it never took more than four and a half minutes. From there he lays out a theory he says he can't prove: that Simpson carried the evidence behind the guest bungalows, dropped a glove where Kato Kaelin heard the thumps, and then took everything to the airport in a small bag he wouldn't let anyone else carry.

At LAX, a witness watched Simpson push items down into a trash container. The witness went to the defense first and reached Tom months later, after the trash had long since gone to one of two landfills. The prosecution chose not to call him. Decades later, limo driver Allan Park told Tom he had seen Simpson at the same container, and that he had told the prosecution before trial. Tom also explains why the blood on Simpson's socks was spattered, not poured, and what that means for the claim that his partner Phil Vannatter planted it.

The episode closes on Tom's career beyond this one case. He has worked well over 100 homicides, says this one isn't in his top 50 for difficulty, and has never cared for the notoriety. Craig recalls the journal Tom kept from the first day of the investigation, which he donated to the National Law Enforcement Museum.

Across both parts, Tom answers the viewer questions, the Ippolito accomplice claim, and the question of what happened to the evidence that never reached the jury.

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© 2026 Citizens Behind the Badge. All Rights Reserved.

Tom Lange was the lead LAPD homicide detective on the 1994 murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. His first appearance on Heroes Behind the Badge drew thousands of viewer questions, and he returns to answer them with hosts Dennis Collins, Craig Floyd and Bill Erfurth.

The questions start in the courtroom. Tom has known Judge Lance Ito for years and calls him a good man, but he says allowing cameras into the trial was a mistake: "You're not playing to the jury, you're playing to the camera." He explains why the gloves didn't fit Simpson in front of the jury, why only three people's blood was found across Bundy, the Bronco and Rockingham, why Jason Simpson was never a suspect, and what he took from more than an hour with A.C. Cowlings after the Bronco chase. He also explains why detectives were within the law when they went into Simpson's Rockingham home without a warrant.

Then the news. A New York Times report quoted Sam Ippolito claiming that his brother Joey helped Simpson on the night of the murders. Tom reads the three entries on the LAPD clue list that mention Joey Ippolito, which he says had nothing to do with the murders, and walks through how investigators, with FBI footwear expert Bill Bodziak, ruled out marks that had been cited as a second set of footprints. He also tells how he got Simpson's shoe size from Simpson himself, standing in his closet the day after the murders.

Tom's position is the one he took in 1994: everything pointed in one direction. In a case he says has become entertainment for a new generation, he keeps coming back to the same rule of homicide work. "Evidence is evidence."

Part 2 picks up on the night of the murders: where Tom believes Simpson got rid of the bloody clothes and the knife, and the airport witness who never testified.

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© 2026 Citizens Behind the Badge. All Rights Reserved.

For years, Gary Ridgway was at the top of the Green River task force's suspect list, but investigators lacked the evidence and the science to prove it. In Part 2, former King County Sheriff Dave Reichert describes how that changed.

DNA evidence collected in 1982 was sent to an East Coast lab in 1999, which warned that testing might destroy the sample. In 2001 the lab had the technology, and that September the results came back. Detectives brought a chart to the sheriff's office and handed Reichert an envelope. He didn't need to open it.

Reichert explains why investigators kept Ridgway under round-the-clock surveillance for two months, the decoy operation, and the arrest at Kenworth Trucking. He describes the 40,000 tip sheets the task force worked through, the defense strategy that collapsed when microscopic paint spheres tied Ridgway to three more cases, and why detectives supported a plea deal that would give answers to dozens of families rather than risk a trial on seven.

He recounts six months of interviews with a pathological liar, a field trip on which Ridgway pointed out the same trail Reichert had chosen years earlier, his unexpected path to becoming sheriff and serving in Congress, and the personal toll of two decades spent recovering victims and telling families their daughters had been found. Reichert's book about the case is Chasing the Devil.

This episode contains graphic descriptions of violent crime.

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© 2026 Citizens Behind the Badge. All Rights Reserved.

Dave Reichert went into homicide at the King County Sheriff's Office in 1979. In 1982 he was assigned one of the first cases in what became the Green River murders, and he stayed with the investigation for two decades, from detective to task force member to King County Sheriff.

The case began on a river. A rafter floating the Green River saw what he thought were mannequins under the water, then realized they were bodies. On the bank stood a man who waved and wished him a good rafting trip, got in his truck, and drove away. It was Gary Ridgway. Reichert walks through the early crime scenes, the evidence collected and frozen in 1982, and why investigators never assumed water and weather had destroyed it.

Along the way, Ted Bundy wrote to Reichert and his former partner Bob Keppel offering to help. Reichert describes three days with Bundy in prison, Bundy's habit of talking about himself in the third person, and his name for the killer: the Riverman. He then traces a task force that was formed, expanded, joined by the FBI, and finally disbanded by a county spending $2 million a month on the case.

Reichert explains how Ridgway became a Priority A suspect from hand-built lists laid down the length of a hallway, yet passed two polygraph tests and kept the same job for 30 years. He describes Ridgway's habits at work, his three marriages, and what Reichert believes formed him: a childhood stabbing, an unusual relationship with his mother, and a psychopath's complete lack of remorse.

Part 2 picks up when the science finally catches up: the DNA results, the moment Reichert learned the name, and the arrest.

This episode contains graphic descriptions of violent crime.

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© 2026 Citizens Behind the Badge. All Rights Reserved.

Dave Hinners was a Wichita patrol officer, not quite three years on the job, when he became the first officer to speak with the lone survivor of the December 2000 Wichita Massacre. Today he is the executive director of the United States Deputy Sheriff's Association. In this second of two parts, he picks up with hosts Dennis Collins and Craig Floyd the morning after.

By nine o'clock that morning, a 911 caller had spotted a man matching the description dragging a big-screen TV across an apartment parking lot, and the first brother was in custody. Hinners explains that the killers had gone back to the house after the shootings to take what was left, and he still wonders what might have happened if the survivor had seen an unlit farmhouse 200 yards away. The second brother was arrested after his own girlfriend recognized him and made a phone call. Both were in custody within 24 hours.

At trial, the survivor testified the way she had spoken to Hinners in the emergency room: strong, credible and unafraid. He explains why he deliberately never spoke with her again before he testified, and why he still thinks about her. Without her, he says, the case would have depended on another witness or DNA, and it would not have moved as fast. He also describes the crime scene work: a lead investigator trained in archaeology who had the scene gridded and every section collected in its own drum.

Craig Floyd then asks what the case cost him. Hinners calls it one of his demons. He went back on shift the next night after about an hour and a half of sleep. He credits his department's stress debriefings, a close-knit shift and his wife, and argues that officers have to talk about what they carry rather than lock it away.

The episode closes on his work with the United States Deputy Sheriff's Association, which provides free training and safety equipment to underfunded agencies and a $1,000 benefit to the family of every officer who dies in the line of duty. Craig Floyd, who serves on its board, explains how the conversation led to this episode.

New episodes drop every other Tuesday and Thursday. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

Learn more at https://heroesbehindthebadge.com.

© 2026 Citizens Behind the Badge. All Rights Reserved.

Dave Hinners was not quite three years into his career with the Wichita Police Department in December 2000. Today he is the executive director of the United States Deputy Sheriff's Association. In this first of two parts, he tells hosts Dennis Collins and Craig Floyd what happened on the night he became the first officer to speak with the lone survivor of the Wichita Massacre.

The call came in mid-December, in a foot and a half of snow. Dispatch described it first as an assault, then a stabbing, then a shooting. At the house, Hinners found a young woman wrapped in a blanket, bleeding from the back of her head. She had walked about a mile through the snow after being shot, hiding from passing cars in case the killers were coming back. A plastic hair clip had deflected the bullet just enough to keep it from penetrating.

He followed her to the hospital, and she never stopped talking. Hinners calls her the best witness he has ever had. She knew she was the only one left, and the only one who could solve the case. Over the next several hours he filled a case book, relayed descriptions of both suspects and a stolen pickup truck, and eventually had to tell her that none of her friends had survived. An off-duty partner with a broken hand wrote up the stolen-truck report from the hospital. By the next morning, a 911 call about a man dragging a big-screen TV across an apartment parking lot led officers to the first of the two brothers.

Along the way, Craig Floyd reads the names of the victims — Brad Heyka, Heather Muller, Aaron Sander, Jason Befort and Ann Walenta — and Hinners describes trying to process what one human being could do to another while still doing the job in front of him. He stayed with her until he was relieved the next morning, then went in to write up the cases.

In Part 2, how the second brother was found, the survivor's testimony at trial, and what the case still costs the officer who was there at the start.

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Learn more at https://heroesbehindthebadge.com.

© 2026 Citizens Behind the Badge. All Rights Reserved.

Bill Bratton led six police departments over fifty years, including the NYPD twice and the LAPD from 2002 to 2009. In the second half of this conversation, the policy arguments give way to the people who shaped him — and to the parts of the job that no one applies for.

It opens in Watts. When Bratton arrived in Los Angeles, his community relations sergeant told him to go see Sweet Alice, a sharecropper's daughter from the South who had become the driving force of one of the city's most distressed neighborhoods. She once stood up at a community meeting and told an activist attacking the new chief to shut up. When Bratton left the city in 2009, she told him why her neighborhood had trusted him, in three words he still calls the highest honor of his career.

From there he turns to training, and to the difference between the departments he ran. The NYPD he took over in the 1990s was reactive and discouraged; the LAPD was proud, self-reliant and permanently short of officers, working with a fraction of the numbers he believes it needed. His own academy in Boston in 1970 lasted seven weeks. He argues the country still undertrains its police, and that the cost falls on officers first. Asked for his best moments, he describes lowering his gun in front of an armed man holding a bank teller hostage, and the 2007 MacArthur Park crisis he says was his finest hour as a chief.

Then the worst. For Bratton it is not a single moment but every officer he had to bury, and one night in 1994 when a young officer's widow arrived at a Bronx hospital still in her waitress uniform. He has carried what he heard in that hallway for thirty-two years.

He closes with Steven McDonald, the NYPD detective paralyzed in 1986 who publicly forgave the teenager who shot him, and who rode 235 miles by ambulance to attend Bratton's father's funeral. Across both parts, this is a portrait of a leader who changed American policing and remains unsentimental about what that took.

New episodes drop every other Tuesday and Thursday. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

Learn more at https://heroesbehindthebadge.com.

© 2026 Citizens Behind the Badge. All Rights Reserved.

Bill Bratton is the only person ever to have led both the New York City Police Department and the Los Angeles Police Department. He joined the Boston Police Department in 1970 at twenty-three, badge 1190, and over the next five decades he ran six agencies, presided over the largest crime decline in modern American history, and became the most identifiable advocate for a philosophy of policing that is still argued about today. He now chairs the Homeland Security Advisory Council.

He does not open this conversation by defending the profession. Asked what he would warn his younger self about, he says expectations — and then describes the department he actually joined as one with a lot of corruption, a lot of racism, some degree of brutality and a lot of incompetence. That candor sets the terms for everything after it.

The centerpiece of Part 1 is broken windows, explained by the person who was living it before it had a name. In 1978, four years before Kelling and Wilson published their article, Bratton was running community meetings four nights a week in Boston's Back Bay and finding that residents cared less about serious crime than about the disorder they walked past every day. He connects that directly to stop-question-frisk, which he defends without qualification while insisting on the five conditions that keep it from going wrong: policies, procedures, guidelines, training, supervision and accountability. Along the way he recounts the 9/11 intelligence failure, the two federal agencies that were forbidden by law from speaking to each other, and a working relationship with Rudy Giuliani that he compares to a Rubik's Cube.

The last stretch is the hardest. Six years after George Floyd, Bratton calls the defund movement one of the stupidest ever inflicted on American policing, and he is specific about the cost — officers who left early, and a generation that never applied, because they had been shown a version of the job in which police are oppressors rather than guardians.

In Part 2, the compliment he ranks above every medal he was given, a night in 1994 that has stayed with him for thirty-two years, and what the work took from him and his family.

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Barry Black retired from the FBI after thirty-one years as a master bomb technician and master instructor. On April 19, 1995, he was one of only two FBI bomb technicians in the state of Oklahoma. Part 2 is about everything that came after the blast.

The break was a confidential serial number, stamped on a 300-pound axle thrown into the street by the blast. It came back to Ryder, and Ryder to Elliott's Body Shop in Junction City, Kansas, where a man calling himself Robert Kling had rented a truck. There was no digital imagery in 1995, so a sketch artist produced the faces the country came to know as John Doe 1 and John Doe 2. Fifteen thousand leads followed. A clerk at the Dreamland Motel recognized one of the sketches and remembered the guest in room 25 signing another name: Timothy McVeigh.

What closed the loop was a records search. An offline NCIC query showed that a state trooper named Charlie Hanger had already arrested McVeigh — ninety minutes after the bombing, ninety miles north of town, for driving an old yellow Mercury with no license plate. He was hours from bonding out when the federal hold landed. Barry flew up by helicopter overnight and seized the car himself. Terry Nichols, who had seen the arrest, surrendered the following afternoon.

Barry is precise about what conviction required: phone records, fingerprints, witness identifications, and a business card wedged between the seats of a patrol car reading "need more TNT at $5 a stick." He explains why three men received three very different sentences, and why that decision belonged to a jury rather than to the agents who built the case.

The last third is about cost. Funerals attended while the investigation was still running. Seven-day weeks for two years. A room at the National Bombing Memorial he will not walk into. A rare cancer diagnosed eight years after his deployment to Ground Zero. And a blunt account of what passed for mental health support in 1995, when a team leader told his people that needing a counselor meant they were in the wrong line of work. He now teaches, and tells his students the same thing every time: friends, faith, family — because you are not going to forget it.

New episodes drop every other Tuesday and Thursday. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

Learn more at https://citizensbehindthebadge.org.

Barry Black spent thirty-one years in the FBI. He joined wanting white collar work, having changed his major and his university to get an accounting degree because that was what the Bureau was hiring. He retired a master bomb technician and a master instructor who trained NATO and allied special forces on every continent but Antarctica. On April 19, 1995, he was one of only two FBI bomb technicians in the state of Oklahoma, and he had held the certification for fifty-three weeks.

That morning he was seven miles from downtown, sitting in an unmarked Oldsmobile with another operator, waiting to arrest a fugitive on a white collar case that had taken him years to indict. He felt the detonation before he understood it — 3.2 on the Richter scale, felt sixty miles away in Stillwater. He drove toward the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building with a small kit bag in the trunk, not yet knowing whether he was looking at a plane crash, a gas main, or a bomb.

The response was never abstract for him. His wife was a federal officer who worked in the building; she walked out at nine o'clock, two minutes before the blast, and he would not learn she was alive for ninety minutes. The payroll clerks he handed his check to every other Thursday, women his own age, were all killed. Craig Floyd reads the names of the eight federal agents who died, each of them since added to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial.

Barry also explains the mechanics without ceremony: how he determined this was a vehicle-borne device rather than an accident, what ANFO is and why it needed a booster, and how an explosive theft report filed months earlier at a Kansas quarry would eventually tie Terry Nichols to the bomb through a cordless drill and a drilled-out padlock.

Part 1 ends where the case breaks open — a 300-pound truck axle in the street, and a reserve deputy who spits on his finger, wipes away the grease, and reveals a confidential vehicle identification number. Part 2 follows that number to Junction City, Kansas, through fifteen thousand leads and nearly nine hundred investigators, to a traffic stop ninety miles north of town for a missing license plate.

New episodes drop every other Tuesday and Thursday. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

Learn more at https://citizensbehindthebadge.org.