On September 20, 1988, nineteen-year-old Terra Leigh Calico set out on her morning bike ride along Highway 47 in Valencia County, New Mexico. She never came home. In the nearly 37 years since her disappearance, this case has become one of America's most haunting unsolved mysteries, defined by a chilling Polaroid photograph discovered in a Florida parking lot and decades of whispered accusations that have never led to justice. But the story most people know is only part of the truth. 

In this episode of The Redacted Report, we pull back the curtain on the facts that never made it into the official narrative. We examine evidence that was lost, destroyed, or never properly collected, including a suitcase containing telephone wire found during a drug investigation at a nearby motel and later destroyed by a detective.

We explore persistent rumors of a pink bicycle and underwear with Terra's initials that were allegedly found but never logged as evidence, and we reveal the shocking truth about the Walkman and cassette tape pieces that were analyzed and determined not to belong to Terra at all. This episode takes a hard look at witnesses who were overlooked or ignored, including a pivotal eyewitness who reported seeing a group of four or five young men and one woman waiting in Terra's path on the morning she vanished. That witness is now dead, their full account lost to time. 

We also examine the story of a man named Ishmael who came forward, was placed under hypnosis, identified a suspect from a photo lineup, and then was abandoned by the detective who was supposed to follow up with him. We explore the chilling connection to David Parker Ray, the Toy Box Killer, who was born in Belen and whose family had a ranch near where Terra disappeared. Ray closely resembled the composite sketch of the man seen following Terra, but FBI investigators ruled him out based on his meticulous record-keeping, which contained no mention of Terra Calico. With Ray eliminated as a suspect, investigators turned their attention to local young men who allegedly knew Terra and had been harassing her for months before she vanished.

The episode delves deep into the mysteries surrounding the Polaroid photographs, including the famous Port Saint Joe image and two additional photographs found in California and on an Amtrak train. We examine the phone number written on the spine of the V.C. Andrews novel in the photograph, which yielded 300 possible combinations and 57 valid phone numbers, none of which produced any leads. We discuss the beach sighting of a young woman matching the photograph being given verbal orders by several men, and we address Marilyn Manson's claim that he used to drop similar staged photographs in Florida as pranks. We reveal the threatening notes that were left on Terra's car for months before her disappearance, notes that were dismissed as high school antics and have since disappeared from the evidence record. 

We examine the case of Debra Lansdell, a 29-year-old woman from nearby Peralta who vanished on September 21, 1985, almost exactly three years before Terra and nearly to the exact day.The episode covers the breakthrough that came in October 2020 when the Rocky Mountain Information Network completed a two-year analysis of the case and recommended pursuing loose ends that had never been fully explored. We discuss the sealed search warrant executed in September 2021 and the June 2023 announcement that law enforcement believes there is sufficient evidence to submit the case to the District Attorney's Office for potential charges. We examine the statute of limitations problems that complicate prosecution and the ongoing search efforts, including the September 2025 mine shaft investigation that employed fly traps designed to attract insects that feed on human remains.

This is a story about more than just one missing woman. It is a story about systemic failures, about evidence that was mishandled or destroyed, about witnesses who were ignored, about a community that may have known the truth for decades and chosen to remain silent. It is a story about families who waited their entire lives for answers and died without ever receiving them.The FBI reward of $20,000 remains in place. Anyone with information about this case is encouraged to contact the Valencia County Sheriff's Office at 505-866-2400 or submit tips online at tips.fbi.gov.

After 37 years, the truth is still out there. Someone knows what happened on Highway 47 that September morning. This episode is a call to finally break the silence.

On 09/20/1988, 19-year-old Tara Leigh Calico left her home in Belen, New Mexico, for her daily bike ride along Highway 47. She never returned. Nearly four decades later, her disappearance remains one of the most haunting and controversial missing persons cases in American history.

This episode of The Guilty Files traces Tara’s life from her childhood and active years at Belen High School to her studies in psychology at the University of New Mexico–Valencia Campus. We examine the morning she vanished, including her final conversation with her mother and witness reports of a light-colored 1953 Ford pickup truck following closely behind her pink Huffy bicycle.

We explore  the infamous Polaroid photograph found 9 months later in Port St. Joe, Florida, showing a bound young woman and a boy in the back of a white cargo van. Conflicting expert analyses—from Scotland Yard, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the FBI—only deepened the mystery. We examine long-standing local theories, allegations of a cover-up involving prominent families, and former Sheriff Rene Rivera’s 2008 claim that Tara was accidentally struck and killed by local teenagers. We also explore a disturbing deathbed confession alleging Tara’s body was hidden by the son of the sheriff in office at the time.

The episode honors the tireless efforts of Tara’s parents, who died without answers, and highlights the work of investigators and advocates who continue to push for the truth. It concludes with the 06/2023 announcement by Valencia County authorities that the case has been submitted for prosecutorial review. As of 2025, no charges have been filed, and the identities of those believed responsible remain sealed.

On April 20th, 1999, two seniors walked into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado and committed what was then the deadliest school shooting in American history. Thirteen innocent people lost their lives that day, and the images of terrified students fleeing with their hands raised became seared into America's collective memory. The mainstream narrative has been told countless times, dissected in documentaries, and dramatized in films.

But that narrative, the one carefully curated and presented to the public for over twenty five years, is incomplete. In some cases, it's outright false.In this episode of The Redacted Report, we pull back the curtain on one of the most scrutinized yet poorly understood tragedies in modern American history.

This isn't speculation or conspiracy theory. This is documented fact drawn from official reports released years after the shooting, from lawsuits that forced the disclosure of buried evidence, from investigative journalists who spent years digging through the wreckage of a botched investigation, and from the families of victims who refused to accept the official story.We begin more than a year before the shooting, when a mother in Littleton discovered a website that chilled her to the bone. 

Eric Harris wasn't just posting the typical angst of a disaffected teenager. He was posting detailed bomb-making instructions, writing about his desire to kill, and making specific death threats against named individuals. When that mother and her husband went to the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office with printouts and documentation, a deputy took the complaint seriously enough to draft a search warrant for the Harris residence. Had that warrant been executed, investigators would have found pipe bombs and detailed journals planning a massacre. But the warrant was never executed. It was drafted, reviewed, and then it disappeared into the bureaucratic void.

For years after the shooting, officials denied it ever existed. They were lying. We examine the catastrophic failures of law enforcement on the day of the shooting, focusing on the tragic death of teacher Dave Sanders. Shot at approximately 11:26 in the morning, Sanders was dragged into a science classroom where students put a sign in the window reading "1 bleeding to death" and called 911. They were told help was coming. But SWAT teams didn't reach that classroom until approximately 3:00 in the afternoon.

For three and a half hours, a wounded man lay bleeding while hundreds of law enforcement officers stood outside the building following protocols designed for situations completely unlike what they were facing. Sanders died from wounds that might have been survivable with prompt medical attention. We delve into the infamous basement tapes, the recordings Harris and Klebold made in the weeks before the shooting that were viewed by select officials but hidden from the public for over a decade before being destroyed in 2011. 

Those tapes reportedly contained statements about who knew about the killers' plans, where they obtained their weapons, and admissions that would have raised serious questions about whether others should have faced charges. Whatever was on those recordings is gone forever, destroyed by officials who claimed they were acting on mental health advice but who had already demonstrated a pattern of concealing their own failures. We dismantle the myths that the media created in the aftermath of the tragedy. 

The Trench Coat Mafia narrative that led to a nationwide crackdown on goth fashion and industrial music. The bullying explanation that provided a comforting but largely inaccurate cause for the violence. The story of Cassie Bernall, the alleged Christian martyr who said yes when asked if she believed in God, a powerful story that became a rallying cry for evangelical Christians but that the evidence suggests probably didn't happen the way it was told.

These myths served various agendas, but they were largely wrong, and they prevented a more accurate understanding of what actually occurred.We explore the fact that the shooting was supposed to be the sideshow. Harris and Klebold built ninety nine improvised explosive devices, including two twenty pound propane bombs placed in the cafeteria and timed to detonate during the busiest lunch period. If those bombs had worked, the death toll wouldn't have been thirteen. It would have been in the hundreds.

The massacre we remember was their backup plan, what they did when their primary plan failed. This level of premeditation demolishes the narrative of bullied kids who snapped and raises serious questions about how two teenagers could build a small arsenal without anyone noticing.We document the systematic cover up that followed the shooting. The draft search warrant that officials claimed didn't exist until it was discovered years later. The files that were sealed. The deputies who were instructed not to discuss their prior investigations. The sheriff who called grieving parents liars when they tried to tell the truth. The district attorney who never convened a grand jury. The evidence that was destroyed. The officials who retired with their pensions intact while no one was ever held accountable.

We examine the controversial question of Eric Harris's psychiatric medication and what role, if any, it may have played in his violence. We explore what this case reveals about the limitations of mental health treatment and the ability of skilled manipulators to fool therapists, counselors, and parents alike. And we consider the legacy of Columbine more than twenty five years later. The lessons that were learned and the lessons that weren't. The reforms that were implemented and the reforms that should have been.

The patterns of institutional failure and cover up that we've seen repeated in tragedy after tragedy since that April morning in 1999. Thirteen people died at Columbine High School. 

They were Cassie Bernall, Steven Curnow, Corey DePooter, Kelly Fleming, Matthew Kechter, Daniel Mauser, Daniel Rohrbough, Rachel Scott, Isaiah Shoels, John Tomlin, Lauren Townsend, Kyle Velasquez, and Dave Sanders. They deserved better from the people who were supposed to protect them.

They deserved the truth. And they deserved to be remembered not as symbols or martyrs or victims of a myth, but as real people whose lives were cut short by violence that might have been prevented.This is The Redacted Report. The truth is out there, even when they don't want you to find it.

April 20, 1999 changed everything we thought we understood about safety, about schools, and about the capacity for violence within our own communities. In this episode of The Guilty Files, we take a comprehensive and unflinching look at the Columbine High School massacre, cutting through decades of misinformation to separate fact from myth in one of the most misunderstood crimes in American history. Nearly everything the public believes about Columbine has been shaped by early media errors, cultural panic, and narratives that simply do not hold up under scrutiny. The so-called Trenchcoat Mafia was never a factor. 

The idea that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold targeted jocks or Christians has been largely debunked. The widely circulated story that Cassie Bernall affirmed her faith moments before her death did not occur as it was later told. And perhaps most critically, Columbine was never intended to be a traditional school shooting. It was designed as a mass bombing meant to collapse the cafeteria and kill hundreds, potentially surpassing the Oklahoma City bombing as the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history.

The shooting was a contingency plan, carried out only after the bombs failed to detonate.This episode traces the full arc of the crime from beginning to end. We examine the backgrounds of both perpetrators not to glorify them or grant the infamy they sought, but to understand the warning signs that were missed and the systems that failed. Eric Harris, a military child who moved frequently before settling in Littleton, Colorado, maintained a website filled with threats and bomb-making instructions that were known to authorities and never acted upon.

Dylan Klebold, a gifted local student, struggled with severe depression and suicidal ideation that was documented in private journals but went unrecognized until after the attack. We follow the eleven months of planning that led up to April 20, including the alarming ease with which two teenagers obtained four firearms and constructed ninety-nine explosive devices. We examine the gun show loophole that allowed an eighteen-year-old honors student to purchase weapons for her underage friends, along with the illegal sale of a TEC-DC9 handgun by a twenty-two-year-old seeking quick money.

At the center of the episode is a minute-by-minute reconstruction of the day itself, built from the official Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office timeline, witness testimony, surveillance footage, and forensic evidence. From Eric Harris purchasing propane tanks at a Texaco station that morning to the forty-nine minutes of violence that left fourteen people dead and twenty-four wounded, we document exactly what happened and when.

But this episode does what too much coverage of mass violence fails to do. It centers the victims. Rachel Scott, whose writings on compassion inspired the global movement Rachel’s Challenge. Daniel Rohrbough, a fifteen-year-old freshman who never had a chance to escape.  

Dave Sanders, the beloved teacher and coach who saved more than a hundred students before being shot and left to bleed to death for over four hours while help failed to reach him. Kyle Velasquez, Steven Curnow, Cassie Bernall, Isaiah Shoels, Matthew Kechter, Lauren Townsend, John Tomlin, Kelly Fleming, Daniel Mauser, and Corey DePooter. Each had a future, a family, and a life that mattered. 

We also honor Anne Marie Hochhalter, who was paralyzed during the attack and whose death in February 2025 was ruled a homicide by the Jefferson County Coroner, bringing the final death toll to fourteen. We examine the catastrophic failures in the law enforcement response, including the contain-and-wait protocol that kept officers outside the school for more than an hour after the attack began. 

Dave Sanders was alive for hours, tended to by students as a sign in the window read “One bleeding to death.” Police snipers saw it. Dispatch communicated with people in the room. Help still did not arrive in time. His daughter later won a $1.5 million settlement against Jefferson County, and his death helped fundamentally change how police across the country respond to active shooter situations.The episode also dismantles the myths that emerged in the immediate aftermath. 

The Trenchcoat Mafia narrative. The revenge fantasy. The blame placed on video games and musicians. The Cassie Bernall martyrdom story. We explain what the FBI’s psychological analysis actually concluded about Harris and Klebold and why the truth, while less sensational than the myths, matters far more.Finally, we examine the lasting impact of Columbine more than twenty-six years later. The lawsuits and settlements. The evolution of school security. The gun control debates that surged and faded. Sue Klebold’s memoir and her advocacy for mental health awareness.

And the phenomenon researchers now call “The Columbine Effect,” with more than seventy subsequent attacks directly inspired by or linked to what happened that day. This is not an easy episode. It is long, detailed, and emotionally heavy.

 But it is also an episode that refuses to give the perpetrators the notoriety they sought. Instead, it remembers the dead, honors the survivors who turned trauma into purpose, and acknowledges a community that stood together under the words  “We Are Columbine.”If you take anything from this episode, let it be the names of the fourteen people who should have been allowed to grow old. Say their names. Remember their stories. That is how we push back against the darkness.Content warning: This episode contains detailed discussions of violence, death, and suicide. Listener discretion is advised.

On September fifth, nineteen eighty two, twelve year old Johnny Gosch walked out of his West Des Moines home before dawn to deliver newspapers and vanished without a trace. His case changed America forever, leading to the first missing child on a milk carton and landmark legislation that transformed how we handle abducted children.

But the story most people know barely scratches the surface of what really happened.In this episode of The Redacted Report, we dig into the buried facts, the covered-up connections, and the questions that powerful people have spent four decades trying to silence.We begin with Police Chief Orval Cooney, the man tasked with finding Johnny. What most people don't know is that Cooney had a violent past, including a nineteen fifty one assault conviction. Just months before Johnny disappeared, eighteen of his own officers went on record accusing him of brutality, harassment, and drinking on duty. When volunteers searched for Johnny, witnesses say Cooney climbed onto a picnic table and told everyone to go home, calling the missing boy a damn runaway. He stonewalled the family at every turn until his sudden death in two thousand three, just as a lawsuit was about to expose what he knew. Then there's the newspaper itself. 

Johnny delivered papers for the Des Moines Register, the same company that employed Frank Sykora, who admitted to molesting at least seven paperboys, and Wilbur Millhouse, a former circulation manager found with a list of twenty two hundred boys' names when he was arrested. Millhouse reportedly told people for years that he knew who took Johnny and why. We examine the chilling prediction made two months before thirteen year old Eugene Martin vanished in nineteen eighty four. According to Noreen Gosch, a private investigator warned her another paperboy would be taken the second weekend of August on the south side of Des Moines. She passed this information to authorities. They did nothing. Eugene disappeared exactly when and where predicted. The episode explores the proof of life that emerged after Johnny's abduction. 

A confirmed sighting in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where investigators said a boy crying for help was positively identified as Johnny. A dollar bill with his authenticated signature surfacing in Sioux City three years later. Signs that Johnny was alive, somewhere, trying to send a message. We dive deep into the Franklin Credit Union scandal and the testimony of Paul Bonacci, who claimed he was forced to participate in Johnny's kidnapping. Bonacci knew physical details about Johnny that weren't public knowledge. A federal judge ruled his testimony truthful and awarded him one million dollars in a civil judgment. Yet police never interviewed him about the Gosch case.

he investigation into Franklin led to tragedy. State investigator Gary Caradori was collecting evidence, interviewing witnesses, building a case against powerful people. On July eleventh, nineteen ninety, his plane came apart in midair over an Illinois cornfield. He and his eight year old son were killed. His briefcase of newly obtained evidence was never recovered. A documentary about the scandal called Conspiracy of Silence was pulled from the Discovery Channel before it could air. We trace the trafficking network run by John David Norman, a career predator whose operations spanned decades. His thirty thousand customer index cards were sent to the State Department and destroyed. His associate Phillip Paske worked for John Wayne Gacy. 

Investigators following witness testimony found an abandoned Colorado ranch with a hidden underground chamber and children's initials carved into the walls. The episode covers Noreen Gosch's claim that Johnny visited her in nineteen ninety seven, fifteen years after his disappearance, and the mysterious envelope of photographs left on her doorstep in two thousand six showing bound and gagged children, one of whom she believes is her son. Johnny Gosch would be fifty five years old today. 

No arrests have ever been made. No body has ever been found. The West Des Moines Police Department still refuses to release their complete case file. Someone knows what happened that September morning. Someone drove the blue Ford Fairmont. Someone flicked that dome light three times. And someone has kept this secret for over four decades. This is the story they buried. This is The Redacted Report.

On September 5, 1982, 12-year-old paperboy Johnny Gosch left his West Des Moines home before dawn to deliver the Des Moines Register—and never returned. His red wagon was found two blocks away, still loaded with undelivered papers. Witnesses reported Johnny speaking with a stocky man near a blue two-toned car, and another man seen trailing him moments later. Within minutes, Johnny vanished.

In this episode, we dig into one of America’s most chilling missing-child cases—and the fallout that changed the country. We reconstruct Johnny’s last morning, then unravel an investigation marked by early missteps and delays that fueled Noreen Gosch’s relentless campaign for reform. Her advocacy helped end mandatory waiting periods for missing-child cases through the Johnny Gosch Bill and contributed to the broader national push that led to the creation of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. 

We also examine the haunting pattern of other Des Moines-area disappearances, including paperboy Eugene Martin in 1984 and Marc Allen in 1986—cases still unsolved and often viewed through the same lens of fear and possibility. 

The story takes darker, more controversial turns: the testimony of trafficking survivor Paul Bonacci, who said he was forced to participate in Johnny’s abduction and later won a civil judgment after a federal judge found his account credible; Noreen’s claim that an adult Johnny visited her in March 1997; and the disputed photographs left at her home in 2006. We lay out what’s alleged, what’s documented, and why the case remains so fiercely debated.


Finally, we cover Noreen Gosch’s updated allegations naming John David Norman and Phillip Paske as potential perpetrators—claims that remain unproven but continue to shape public theories about the case. As of 2025, Johnny Gosch has been missing for more than 43 years. No arrests. No confirmed sightings. Just a family still searching and a case that refuses to die.

This episode of The Redacted Report takes a hard, clear-eyed look at the Golden State Killer case, not by retelling the headlines everyone already knows, but by sitting in the uncomfortable spaces where the story actually lives.

We follow the arc from Joseph James DeAngelo’s earliest known crimes in 1974 through his arrest in 2018 and sentencing in 2020, with one chilling fact threaded through every phase: while California was being terrorized, DeAngelo was also an active-duty police officer. He wasn’t just hiding from law enforcement—he was learning how it worked from the inside, and that advantage shaped the way he hunted, the way he covered his tracks, and the way he stayed untouchable for more than forty years.The episode opens by naming that truth right out loud, because it changes everything.

The person stalking neighborhoods, breaking into homes, and destroying lives wasn’t a shadowy outsider. He wore a badge, carried a gun, and walked into work like any other sworn officer. From there, the story steps back to his early life—childhood trauma, military service in Vietnam, criminal justice studies at CSU Sacramento, and a marriage that, on the surface, made him look like a normal young man building a future. But behind that veneer, something darker was already forming.

We then move into the Visalia Ransacker years from 1974 to 1975, when DeAngelo committed more than a hundred burglaries and his first confirmed murder, all while serving as a police officer in Exeter. It’s the first clear look at his patterns, his boldness, and the early moments when a different kind of attention might have stopped what was coming next. Instead, the case splinters, and the window closes. By 1976, just months after being hired by the Auburn Police Department, DeAngelo begins the East Area Rapist spree. 

Over the next several years, the Sacramento region is hit with at least fifty sexual assaults, each one escalating the fear and the stakes. The episode walks through how close investigators came—especially Detective Richard Shelby, who at one point was within arm’s reach of the suspect. And yet, even with the net tightening, DeAngelo keeps slipping through, aided by his knowledge of police tactics and the blind spots that come with assuming the predator is always “someone else. One of the most haunting turns comes in 1979, when DeAngelo is fired from Auburn PD for shoplifting dog repellent and a hammer. 

On paper, it’s petty theft. In reality, those items match the East Area Rapist’s known methods so cleanly they should’ve set off alarms across the department. But they didn’t. The moment passed as a minor embarrassment instead of the massive red flag it was, and DeAngelo simply moved on to the next phase. That next phase takes us south into the Original Night Stalker murders, stretching from 1979 to 1986. Here, the offender escalates from rape to routine homicide, killing victims while maintaining the same signatures and controlling routines seen in Northern California. 

The tragedy isn’t only the violence itself, but the fact that law enforcement agencies failed to connect these crimes to the earlier Sacramento attacks, even though the methodologies lined up like fingerprints. The episode doesn’t just describe that failure—it lingers on what it cost.The narrative then shifts to the years when the case begins to reawaken in the public eye, largely through the relentless work of Michelle McNamara. She coins the name “Golden State Killer,” brings the scattered crimes under a single identity, and spends years pushing the case back into the spotlight.

Her death in 2016 adds a painful gravity to that chapter, but her book, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, leaves behind a surge of attention and pressure that helps fuel renewed investigative energy. Finally, the episode breaks down the genetic genealogy breakthrough that ended DeAngelo’s run. Investigators upload crime-scene DNA to GEDmatch, locate distant relatives, and then do the slow, painstaking genealogical work to narrow the search. 

When DeAngelo becomes the focus, a covert DNA collection from a Hobby Lobby parking lot confirms it. In April 2018, he’s arrested—an ending that feels impossible until it’s suddenly real.

We close with his guilty plea, the survivor testimonies that reclaim the final word from the man who tried to steal it, and a sober look at what this case forces us to confront. It exposes the dangers of law enforcement culture closing ranks, the catastrophic consequences of fractured communication between agencies, and the complicated future we’re stepping into with genetic genealogy—where justice and privacy are now forever tangled together.

In this week’s deep-dive, we’re taking you into a case that haunted California for decades and still sends a chill through anyone who reads the details. For more than ten years, a masked predator moved through neighborhoods like a ghost — breaking into homes, stalking families, and leaving devastation behind. The numbers alone are staggering: over a hundred burglaries, at least fifty sexual assaults, and thirteen confirmed murders. He slipped between counties and police departments, stayed a step ahead of massive task forces, and then — somehow — disappeared. Not into the shadows, but into ordinary suburban life, where he lived free for more than forty years.

This is the full story of Joseph James DeAngelo — the man the world would come to know as the Golden State Killer. We start back in 1974 in Visalia, a small agricultural city where a strange series of burglaries had detectives completely rattled. The person behind them wasn’t grabbing TVs or cash. He was spending hours inside people’s homes, taking small, personal things — a single earring, coins, women’s underwear — and rearranging objects in ways that felt deliberate and unsettling. It wasn’t just theft. It was a message: I was here. I know you. I can get to you.

From there, we follow the escalation as the Visalia Ransacker’s crimes tip into attempted abduction and then murder. We walk through the December 1975 killing of Claude Snelling, a journalism professor who died protecting his teenage daughter from being taken.

And we cover the terrifying near-capture just two days later, when Detective William McGowen fought the prowler face-to-face and survived only because the suspect’s gun misfired at point-blank range.Then the nightmare shifts north. In 1976, Sacramento is hit by a new kind of terror.

The East Area Rapist begins attacking women in their homes with a level of planning and cruelty that left investigators stunned. We break down how his assaults evolved, including the moment he began targeting couples — tying up husbands and boyfriends, stacking dishes on their backs, and forcing them to listen helplessly while he raped their partners. We look at the psychological warfare he used to control entire communities: threatening phone calls, stalking routines, and the methodical surveillance he did before striking again.

As the years pass, his crimes migrate south — and turn deadly. Starting in 1979, the man now known as the Original Night Stalker begins murdering couples in their homes across Santa Barbara, Ventura, and Orange counties. We go crime scene by crime scene, showing how the evidence slowly — and finally — revealed that Visalia, Sacramento, and Southern California were all connected to the same offender.

We also dig into the long, frustrating decades of investigation: the dead ends, the jurisdictional chaos, and the breakthroughs that came only when DNA technology caught up to the case. And of course, we cover the seismic moment in 2018 when genetic genealogy identified the suspect, leading detectives straight to DeAngelo’s quiet home in Citrus Heights — the same kind of suburb he once terrorized.

The twist that still hits like a gut punch? During the height of his crime spree, DeAngelo was a police officer, using his training and insider knowledge to stay invisible.We close with the plea and sentencing — a historic reckoning where fifty-three victims and family members stood up in court to face the man who had stolen so much from them. Their impact statements are heartbreaking, powerful, and a reminder that this story isn’t just about the monster — it’s about the people who survived him. This episode is the result of hundreds of hours of research across court records, investigative files, victim testimony, and years of reporting. 

Our goal was to tell this story with care, accuracy, and respect — honoring the victims and the investigators who refused to let the case die. The Golden State Killer investigation didn’t just end with an arrest. It changed law enforcement forever. Genetic genealogy opened a door to solving cold cases that once seemed impossible, and we talk about both the promise of that tool and the ethical questions that come with it.

And we take a moment to recognize Michelle McNamara, whose relentless work on I’ll Be Gone in the Dark helped reignite national attention and kept pressure on the investigation. She died in 2016, two years before DeAngelo was caught, but her voice and determination are woven into the story of how this case was finally solved. If you think you know this case, stick with us — because when you lay every chapter out in full, the scale and horror of what happened, and the way it was finally unraveled, is almost impossible to comprehend.

In this deeply personal and explosive episode of The Redacted Report, Brian — a former Atlanta police officer with sixteen years on the job — breaks his silence about one of the most devastating and shameful incidents in modern APD history. On November 21, 2006, ninety-two-year-old Kathryn Johnston was shot and killed in her own home during a botched narcotics raid that ultimately exposed systemic corruption inside the Atlanta Police Department.

Brian goes beyond the early headlines and the department’s initial story — the one that falsely portrayed Johnston as a drug dealer who fired first — and lays out what really happened: a chain of lies, planted evidence, and institutional pressure. Three narcotics officers fabricated a warrant, forced entry into Johnston’s home, and opened fire after she fired a single warning shot in self-defense. She was struck thirty-nine times. While she lay dying on her living room floor, the officers attempted to manufacture justification for what they had done. Officers Jason Smith, Gregg Junnier, and Arthur Tesler later pleaded guilty to federal civil rights violations and received prison sentences of five to ten years — but as Brian explains, they were not the lone villains.

They were the predictable outcome of a system engineered to produce tragedies like this.Drawing from his own experience, Brian exposes the department’s crushing quota-driven “productivity points” system. Officers were expected to earn seven points per day: an arrest counted as five points, while answering a call for service counted as only a quarter point. In practice, that meant an officer could respond to twenty-eight community calls and still fall short — or make two arrests, even questionable ones, and exceed expectations. 

The episode also highlights how confidential informant Alex White became an unlikely catalyst for the truth. Refusing to carry the cover-up forward, White contacted federal authorities and exposed the conspiracy — a decision that put his life in danger and ultimately forced him into witness protection. The resulting federal investigation uncovered a broader pattern of corruption: officers lying on warrant applications, planting drugs saved from prior arrests, inventing “informants” who didn’t exist, and stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from seizures. One of the most damning revelations is what didn’t happen after the convictions. 

Brian details how the three officers went to prison, but the supervisors who shaped and enforced the quota culture faced no real consequences. Sergeant Wilbert Stallings kept his rank and pension. Lieutenant Mark Pratt retired with full benefits. Captain Dennis O’Brien was promoted just six months after the shooting. The reforms that followed, Brian argues, were largely cosmetic — the quota system was rebranded, not removed, and pressure to generate arrests only intensified as the department tried to repair its image through statistics.Brian also shares the quieter, untold casualties of the same machinery — people whose lives were shattered without ever making the news: Fabian Sheats, who served three years on planted evidence; Frances Thompson, whose family was torn apart by a false raid; and Marcus Williams, whose education and future were derailed by fabricated drug charges. Their stories never sparked investigations.

They never received justice. They were simply collateral damage.The episode ends with Brian’s personal reckoning. He acknowledges that while he never planted evidence or pulled the trigger on an innocent person, his compliance and silence made him part of the machine that killed Kathryn Johnston. He reflects on the brutal irony that Johnston — born in 1914, a woman who survived Jim Crow, the Great Depression, two World Wars, and the Civil Rights Movement — was ultimately killed at ninety-two by officers chasing a daily quota.This is not just a story about three corrupt cops or one horrific night in Atlanta.

It’s an indictment of a nationwide policing model that rewards numbers over humanity, treats poor communities like occupied territory, and enables predictable, preventable tragedies while the architects of the system retire with full pensions. The Kathryn Johnston case briefly pulled the curtain back — but as Brian warns, nothing fundamental has changed. There will be more Kathryn Johnstons until the structure itself is confronted.

The Redacted Report is both confession and call to action. Brian challenges listeners to demand reforms with teeth: an end to arrest quotas in any form, independent oversight with real authority, accountability for supervisors and policy-makers — not just street-level officers — and the demilitarization of narcotics policing.

Until those changes happen, he argues, we are all living inside a system that can turn any home into a crime scene and any innocent person into a casualty of the war on drugs.

This is investigative storytelling at its rawest — told by someone who lived inside the culture, understands how the damage is manufactured, and can no longer stay silent about the redacted truth behind one of American law enforcement’s darkest moments.

This case is personal. It happened just months before I began my career with the Atlanta Police Department, and it shaped the way I understood the job, the institution, and the stakes of unchecked power. On November 21, 2006, three Atlanta Police Department narcotics officers executed a no-knock warrant at 933 Neal Street in northwest Atlanta—the home of 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston. 

The warrant was built entirely on fabrication. Officers Jason Smith, Gregg Junnier, and Arthur Tesler claimed a confidential informant had bought crack cocaine from the residence earlier that day. No buy occurred. There was no dealer, no “Sam,” no surveillance. There was only an elderly woman living alone in a high-crime area, protected by burglar bars and an old revolver she kept for self-defense.

Around 7:00 p.m., officers cut through the security bars and forced entry. Johnston believed she was being robbed. In the dark, unable to see who was coming through her door, she fired one shot over the intruders’ heads. Officers responded with 39 rounds, striking her five or six times. As she lay dying on her living room floor, Smith handcuffed her and then planted three bags of marijuana in her basement to manufacture justification for the raid. T

he officers also pressured their informant, Alex White, to lie and say he had purchased drugs at the home.White refused to participate in the cover-up and went public six days later. His decision triggered an FBI investigation that uncovered systemic corruption inside the APD narcotics unit: falsified warrant applications, planted evidence, coerced informant statements, and a quota culture demanding nine arrests and two search warrants per officer each month.

Officers who failed to hit numbers faced transfers and punishment; those who exceeded them received rewards and incentives. Investigators determined the same marijuana planted in Johnston’s home had been used earlier that day to frame another man, Fabian Sheets. Sheets was then coerced into providing the false tip that sent officers to Johnston’s address. Every step leading to her death was driven by lies, pressure, and a performance system that valued arrests over truth.

The legal fallout was swift but damning. In April 2007, Smith and Junnier pleaded guilty to manslaughter and federal civil rights violations, with Smith admitting to planting drugs and lying on the warrant. In October 2008, Tesler pleaded guilty to federal civil rights charges. Sentences followed: Smith received ten years in federal prison, Junnier six, and Tesler five.

The scandal dismantled the narcotics unit, forced policy changes requiring multiple controlled buys before warrants, sharply restricted no-knock entries, and accelerated the creation of Atlanta’s Civilian Review Board. The city settled with Johnston’s family for $4.9 million in 2010. Her house was later demolished, and in 2019 the Kathryn Johnston Memorial Park opened near the site. 

Her death became a lasting symbol of the dangers of quota-driven drug enforcement and the human cost of militarized policing—foreshadowing later no-knock tragedies like Breonna Taylor’s killing in 2020.

This episode examines the full chain of corruption that led to Kathryn Johnston’s death, the cover-up that followed, and the institutional pressures that made it possible. It is a case about power without accountability, policing distorted by metrics, and the irreversible consequences when truth is treated as optional.