Investigation: Homicide

Tonight on Investigation: Homicide, Therese Apel and Sara Perkins Ricks sit down with author Charlie Spillers — a man whose life reads like the books he writes. Before he was a bestselling author, Spillers was an ex-Marine, an undercover agent, and a federal prosecutor, and he’s spent his career on both sides of the most dangerous corners of the law.

We’ll talk about Confessions of an Undercover Agent, his memoir of a decade spent infiltrating criminal operations across the South, and Echoes of War, which reaches back to where it all started. It’s a conversation about courage, cost, and what it takes to walk into rooms most people spend their lives avoiding. 

You won’t want to miss this one. Tune in.

 Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.

Amanda Johansson and Nicole Woods sit down with Sandy Middleton, executive director of the Center for Violence Prevention, to talk about what it takes to protect special victims and fight domestic violence in Mississippi.

The numbers are hard to ignore. One media outlet tracked around 80 domestic violence incidents in 2024 that left at least 100 people dead, some of them children and some law enforcement officers. On a single day last September, Mississippi’s domestic violence programs served 348 victims. They had to turn away 68 more requests for help, and nearly all of those were for a safe place to stay. Mississippi also leads the nation in gun deaths among women who are pregnant or recently gave birth.

At the Capitol, lawmakers created a statewide Domestic Violence Fatality Review Team in 2025. This year, though, every domestic violence bill before them died without a vote, including a proposed registry for repeat offenders.

Sandy talks about what victims are up against, where the system is still failing them, and what has to change to keep people alive.

Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.

For a good officer, training doesn’t end at graduation. The skills learned in the classroom, and kept sharp throughout a career, shape how an officer handles a traffic stop, a crisis call, or a homicide scene.

Therese Apel and Sara Perkins-Ricks sit down with Tony Carleton, executive director of the Mississippi Law Enforcement Officers Training Academy, to talk about why training and education throughout an officer’s career matter, not just for police but for the communities they serve and protect.

Carleton has held leadership roles at several agencies over his career. Now he’s bringing that operational experience to MLEOTA, where he focuses on tactical training and leadership development for Mississippi’s next generation of officers.

Have a question for Tony, Therese, or Sara? Send it in, and join the conversation.

Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.

In April 2023, Byram officers responded to a house fire on Gary Drive and found people badly burned and a home fully engulfed. What looked like a tragedy turned out to be something else entirely. It became Detective Judson Magloire’s first homicide case as an investigator.

Magloire sits down with Amanda Johansson and Therese Apel to talk about that case and what it taught him. He also tells the story of a teenager he couldn’t save.

Magloire met him when he was 13, back when Magloire was on patrol. They shot hoops together on neighborhood courts. He was a talented kid, and Magloire watched him slide into trouble anyway. Today that young man is in prison, and he and Magloire still write letters.

That loss became the seed for the Blue Dawgs Youth Camp, a free summer program Magloire spearheaded that has seen youth crime drop by about half.

Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.

Allegations of gang rape at Cornell have been headlining news outlets lately, and meanwhile Law & Order: SVU remains one of the most beloved shows on television. 

But what is the reality of being the person who works sex crimes at an agency? It's not wrapped up in an hour, and the cases rarely come with a tidy confession.

This week, Madison County Sheriff's Office Investigator William Horton joins us to talk about his experience working some of law enforcement's hardest cases. Horton has spent 20 years in the profession, four of them as an investigator with Madison County, and law enforcement runs deep in his family. 

Listen in as he pulls back the curtain on what it really takes to work the cases most people only see on TV.

Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.

In September 2022, Jaylen Lewis, 25, was shot and killed during a Capitol Police stop at West and Mayes streets in Jackson. Two officers fired that night: Steven Frederick Jr. and Michael Rhinewalt. Both were charged with manslaughter, and the case drew strong reactions from every direction, about the shooting itself and about the two men on trial.

After almost a week in Judge Faye Peterson's courtroom, a Hinds County jury deliberated less than five hours before finding Frederick not guilty. Jurors could not reach a verdict on Rhinewalt, and Attorney General Lynn Fitch announced hours later that her office will not retry him.

In this exclusive interview, Therese Apel and Amanda Johansson sit down with Steven Frederick to hear firsthand what the past four years have been like, from the night of the shooting through the verdict, and how he says God carried him through it.

Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.

August 1990. A young mother working the late shift at the Western Sizzlin in Flowood stops at a Brandon Texaco for cinnamon rolls for her kids' breakfast. She's inside for only a few minutes. Half a mile from home, a man rises from the back of her van with a knife to her throat. Thirty days later, a nurse leaving a Memphis hospital lives through the same nightmare. The attacker made both women the same threat, and then he disappeared for more than three decades.

The case went cold, then colder. A false confession from a Missouri inmate went nowhere. Early DNA testing produced a profile but no name, and the evidence sat in a vault for years. But one Brandon officer never let it go, and a Rankin County prosecutor who had read everything he could find about the Golden State Killer had an idea. Forensic genetic genealogy, a trash pull in Oklahoma, a discarded CPAP mask, and a match of 1 in 660 quintillion led investigators to Daniel Ray Skaggs, a truck driver whose crimes spanned the 1970s through the 1990s and multiple states across the Southeast.

Tonight on Investigation: Homicide, Therese Apel and Sara Perkins Ricks sit down with that prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney Ryan Berry. A career prosecutor with nearly 20 years in the Twentieth Circuit Court District, Berry won the Mississippi Prosecutors Association's Trial of the Year Award for State v. Skaggs. He has since presented the case at the International Symposium on Human Identification in Denver and at Bode's annual conference in Atlanta, and it was featured on Bloodline Detectives with Nancy Grace. We'll talk about how the science finally caught up, what it took to tell a victim face to face after 33 years that her attacker had a name, and why prosecutors believe the women in Brandon and Memphis may not have been Skaggs's only victims.

Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, the toll of a quarter-century spent on high alert is written into the bodies of the people who answered the call. This week, Sara Perkins-Ricks and Therese Apel sit down with Sgt. Jordan Jones to talk about what constant high-intensity service does to those who serve, and how they recover.

Jordan is the founder and CEO of Holos, a performance optimization and wellness company built for military personnel, law enforcement, first responders, and other high-stress professionals. He brings more than two decades of military service to the conversation — more than half of it as a Special Forces Medical Sergeant — along with his experience as a Human Performance and Wellness Coordinator within Army Special Forces, where he helped design programs to strengthen resilience, recovery, and well-being for elite operators. He launched Holos to bridge the gap between tactical excellence and holistic wellness, giving professionals science-backed strategies to sustain peak performance without sacrificing long-term health.

At the center of the conversation is Operator Syndrome, which is the cumulative physical, neurological, and psychological toll carried by elite military personnel and Special Operations Forces after years of constant high-intensity service. Rather than a single standalone condition, it shows up as an interconnected web of clinical symptoms driven by years of high allostatic load. And as it turns out, it's not just in the military.

On the 25th anniversary of 9/11, Jordan, Sara, and Therese look at the challenges facing not just the military, but first responders and everyone whose work lives at the intersection of high stress and high trauma, and what the last quarter-century has asked of the people who carry that weight.

Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.

There are many voices around Mississippi speaking on behalf of first responders in the field of mental health. One of the more prominent currently is Kevin Whitsell, a 20-year veteran paramedic and firefighter and the founder and host of “A Silent War Within,” a podcast dedicated to confronting and destigmatizing mental health challenges among first responders and healthcare professionals. A Mississippi native, Whitsell spent years in critical care transport, including pediatric and neonatal patients, before moving into supervisory roles. His advocacy is rooted in his own journey through the mental health struggles that come with the job.

Therese Apel and Amanda Johansson discuss some of Kevin‘s experiences in the business, and the importance of making mental health a priority as a first responder.

Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.

In April 1996, a spring afternoon in South Jackson turned into a scene of terror the metro area has never forgotten. This week, Therese Apel and Sara Perkins-Ricks sit down with Charlie Smith, a former Jackson Police Department Crime Scene Investigator, who walks them through one of the most harrowing cases of his career, from the inside.

On April 12, 1996, Larry Wayne Shoemake barricaded himself inside an abandoned Po' Folks restaurant at the Ellis Isle shopping center near Ellis Avenue and Interstate 20. From within the building he opened fire on people in and around the center, in a siege that stretched roughly 40 minutes to an hour and left more than 100 shots fired. Early reports counted one person killed and several others wounded by gunfire and flying glass, with later accounts describing an even higher toll. Shoemake ultimately died in the fire that consumed the restaurant.

From the first shots to the smoke rising over the shopping center, Smith recounts the investigation as only the man who processed it can: what he saw, what he documented, and what it took to make sense of a day that captivated and terrified an entire community.

Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.