The Murder of Carol Stuart | The Proposition | 2

This episode contains descriptions and details that some listeners might find disturbing. Listener discretion is advised. It's just before 9 p.m.

on October 23rd, 1989. Evan Richmond is driving through Boston streets, listening to his police scanner. A few minutes ago, the scanner was full of chatter as officers reported their locations around the city.

They were trying to find something, a crime seen by the sounds of it. Now he's doing the same. Evans, in his early 20s, working his first big job out of college is the late shift photographer for the Boston Herald.

He hasn't been on the job long, but he already knows that he has to move quickly at times like this. If he wants to capture the news as it happens, he can't dawdle.

So when an ambulance turns on its siren and speeds past him, Evan lays on the gas to follow him. A few turns later, he's pulling into a street lit up by the red and blue lights of patrol cars.

Cops are rushing back and forth while EMTs grab gurneys from the backs of a couple of ambulances. Evan grabs his camera from the seat beside him, steps on to the pavement and moves toward the crime scene.

All the activity is centered around a car pulled to the side of the road. He snaps a few pictures of the action. Cops peeking in the walkies and ambulance parked diagonally across the street.

Residents from a nearby building grouped on the sidewalk. Then he gets closer to the car. The light from the first responder vehicles in a street lamp is just bright enough to illuminate the two figures in the front seat, a man and a woman.

The woman is slumped towards the driver, her hair hanging down around her face, obscuring her identity. Evan can't even tell if she's alive. The man's face Evan can see, and he's in pain.

He's tall and leaning back in his seat. His shirt has been ripped wide by the paramedics. There's blood.

Evan aims his lens and presses the button, winds the film, takes a few more shots. He's curious about what happened. Who did this and why?

Will these people survive? But he knows he'll have to find all that out later. For now, he's done his job.

So he takes his camera and walks back towards his car. He has to finish his shift. The news never ends.

From Airship, I'm Jeremy Schwartz, and this is American Criminal.

3:22

A City Divided

In 1974, Federal Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. found that Boston's school system was in violation of the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown versus Education.

In other words, the city schools were illegally segregated. So Judge Garrity ordered that black students be bussed to white schools, and white students be bussed to black schools. And Boston?

It didn't react well to this news. Mobs of white parents lined up to hurl rocks and abuse at the buses carrying black students into their neighborhoods. Then they attacked the police, said to protect the students.

Less violent community members organized marches instead, but the message was the same. We don't want this. The anger wasn't restricted to people outside the schools, though.

When a black student stabbed a white kid, white community members left their places of work to descend on the school. The cops had to bring in decoy buses to distract the mob while the black kids snuck out of the school's back entrance.

In short, it was a turbulent, scary time. Low-income families felt like they were unfairly targeted in the scheme. Black students were scared for their safety, and the city itself was divided by the issue.

And it didn't blow over in a hurry. For the rest of the decade, tensions were high over Boston's busing problem. By the start of the 80s, the worst of it was over, but the memories lingered.

And the new decade presented new challenges for the country as a whole. And wounds that people thought were healed were just waiting to be reopened.

5:08

The Sinister Proposition

This is episode two in our three-part series on the murder of Carol Stuart, The Proposition. It's just after Labor Day 1989. At a crowded sports bar in Revere, Massachusetts, Mike Stuart's watching the Red Sox with his older brother Chuck.

All around them, guys are three or four beers deep, high-fiving their buddies and sharing platters of wings. But Mike and Chuck are more subdued. Chuck's not a big drinker, even when he's celebrating, and tonight, he seems distracted.

Leaning across the table, Mike tries to get his brother talking, asks him if he's excited about his baby. Chuck's wife Carol is due to give birth to the couple's first child just before Christmas. To Mike's surprise, Chuck rolls his eyes and sneers.

That's not working out between him and Carol, he says. He sounds like a man talking about a woman he's been on a couple of dates with, not someone discussing his partner of nearly a decade.

He takes a sip of beer, then leans closer and beckons Mike to do the same. He's been thinking. He mutters so low that Mike can barely hear him.

He wants to know if Mike would help him get rid of Carol. Mike sets up straight, not sure what his brother is asking him to do. But then Chuck raises an eyebrow, well...

Mike puts down his half-finished beer. He's suddenly feeling queasy. He tells Chuck that he doesn't want any part of anything like that.

The change is instant. Chuck rolls his eyes again, tells Mike he needs to lighten up. He was only kidding.

He fakes a laugh and turns his head to watch the game. But Mike's not so sure his brother was kidding. Why would anyone joke about something like that?

By the end of summer 1989, 30-year-old Carol Stuart is coming up to the halfway point in her pregnancy. Since she was in high school, she's been excited about having a family of her own. So she's practically counting down the days.

At the same time, Chuck's been working on a dream project of his own. Earlier in the year, he took a one-day course about financing and opening a restaurant, a goal he's had since he took culinary arts at his vocational college.

But a restaurant is not a cheap business to run, and having a child to take care of will dig into the money he'll need to get things off the ground.

For nearly a decade, he's been earning big money as a general manager of a fur store in Boston, but he saved nothing, preferring to live for the moment instead of preparing for the future.

And now that that future is coming at him fast, he's decided that things will be easier if Carol and the baby he never wanted aren't in the picture. So around Labor Day, Chuck starts asking people if they'd be willing to help him kill his wife.

One of the people he approaches is his brother Mike, who's horrified by the idea. Another is David McLean, a friend Chuck's known since they were teenagers. David's surprised to get the call.

They barely hung out since school, and then an out of the blue invitation to dinner? But David drives a truck for a living, which I guess in Chuck's mind makes him more likely to know criminals?

At the dinner, Chuck talks about his life, describing his six-figure job as a dead-end position, and complaining about his wife who's content to live a smaller life. She's standing in his way, he explains. And she flat-out refused to get an abortion.

Can you believe that? He asked David. Then, while David tries to think of what he can say to that, Chuck asks if he knows anyone who'd be willing to kill Carol for him.

Just like Mike, David's got no idea of Chuck's serious. It's such a shocking thing to ask in the middle of a crowded restaurant no less. So he laughs nervously, hoping it's a joke.

Chuck laughs along, too. But it's a laugh that doesn't reach his eyes. After that, the mood is different.

When they're done eating, Chuck picks up the check and says good night to David. They'll never see each other again.

9:42

A Brotherʼs Betrayal

After striking out with Mike and David, Chuck realizes he's not gonna get someone to murder his wife for him. He'll just have to do it himself. But he could still use an assist in pulling it off.

He knows he can't just kill his wife, hide the body and hope for the best. He's at least smart enough to know that he'd never get away with that. But maybe he can disguise the crime.

And for that, he'll need someone with questionable morals, who'd be lured by the promise of a payday. In his mind, there's one person for the job, his youngest brother. Matthew Stuart knows he's never been his big brother's favorite sibling.

Quite the opposite, actually. His hair's too long, he smokes too much, and he doesn't have a real job, not by Chuck's standards.

Matt works at a paint factory, and until recently has spent most nights drinking with his friends and going to a rock club to listen to heavy metal. But Matt's been trying to make a change for the better.

A few weeks back, his girlfriend, who he's been with since high school, told him it was time to shape up, quit drinking, take some classes, get his life together. And he's been trying to make that happen.

But even though he's staying away from booze and taking his work more seriously, he can't resist the allure of easy money. And towards the end of September 1989, that's exactly what's on offer. Chuck comes to Matt with a request.

He wants help pulling off an insurance scheme. Matt's not sure he should get involved, but then he hears how much he'll get as his cut, 10 grand. Now today, that would be closer to 27 grand.

It's hard to say no to that kind of money as a 23-year-old, so he agrees to help out. The plan is this. Chuck says he's gonna hide a bag of jewelry in his basement.

Then Matt will break in while Chuck and Carol are out, grab the bag, then split. After that, Chuck will file the insurance claim. They can sell the jewels at a pawn shop and then split the proceeds.

But when the big day comes, Matt gets into the basement only to realize that Chuck and Carol are still home. He freaks out, thinking that Carol's gonna hear him and ruin the entire plan.

But Chuck creates a diversion so that Matt can make his escape, leaving the jewelry behind. It's hard to be sure, but my guess is that this whole plan was meant to fail.

Chuck just wanted to make it seem like he really does want to carry out some insurance fraud for a little extra cash. Having the first version of the scheme go wrong might have been his way of selling it to his brother.

So in mid-October, when Chuck pitches him a new version of the plot, Matt's primed and ready to go. On the 22nd, they meet up in Boston to rehearse how it's gonna go down.

Chuck tells Matt that he'll have just left work, so he'll be carrying the cash he's supposed to deposit from the day's sales. He'll drive his car to a specific intersection, toss Matt a bag full of money and jewelry, then drive off.

Chuck can then just say he was mugged. Easy. That works for Matt.

This new plan means he really doesn't have to do much. Just show up on time, then keep his mouth shut. It'll be the easiest money he's ever made.

13:11

Execution of the Plan

But his brother's not telling him the whole story, so Matt Stuart's got no idea that he's about to help his brother cover up a murder. It's just before 6 p.m. on October 23rd.

Chuck Stuart is the last one in the Caucus Fur Showroom. He sent his colleagues home ahead of him, telling them he'd be fine to close up alone. Now he opens the safe in his office and reaches deep in the back.

His hand closes around something hard, cold, metallic. He pulls it out into the light, a snub-nosed 38 revolver. Years ago, the store's owners bought the gun to fulfill an insurance requirement for a fashion show.

It's sat in the safe beside Chuck's desk ever since, as have the three bullets in their box. Now he's counting on his bosses to never notice the gun is gone. He carefully loads the ammunition into the chamber and places the gun into his gym bag.

He looks at his watch. He's timed it perfectly. Carol's due to pick him up any minute now.

And then they'll head to Brigham and Women's Hospital for a prenatal class. Some people think it's odd that they've chosen to deliver their baby at a hospital in the city. Friends and family have even warned them against it.

Boston's not safe, they said, especially not around Mission Hill, with its housing projects and gang violence.

Obviously, this is a generalization, but it's one based on plenty of recent news reports and an air of fear that's taken hold across the country.

Crack cocaine is a problem no one seems to have an answer to, and the epidemic is being blamed for increased levels of violence in big cities.

Areas of higher African-American populations tend to be the worst affected, along with lower income neighborhoods. Both of which apply to the housing projects in Mission Hill.

It hasn't helped that the two biggest local newspapers, The Boston Globe and The Boston Herald, have been fighting for dominance over the last few years.

And sensational headlines sell papers, which incentivizes editors to play up the violence in the city. More than 100 people have been shot within Boston city limits in the last couple of months alone, which has ratcheted up fears and prejudices.

It's not just Boston either. Earlier this year, a woman was brutally raped and beaten in New York's Central Park. Despite a lack of physical evidence, police arrested a group of black and Latino teenage boys over the attack, the Central Park Five.

Eventually, all of them will be exonerated. But the media coverage of the case has only contributed to the narrative that cities are dangerous places, particularly for white people.

Now, Chuck Stuart was never a strong student, but he understands the way the world works. He reads the papers, listens to people talking about the dangers of the inner city, and he's going to use all of that to cover up his plan to kill his wife.

It's around 8:30 p.m. on October 23rd, 1989. In a parking garage below Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital, Chuck and Carol Stuart are walking towards their car, holding hands.

As she waits for Chuck to unlock the doors, Carol turns to wave to another couple from their birthing class. She's only about two months from her due date now, and she's so excited to become a mom, to be friends with other moms.

But at this very moment, Carol's mostly looking forward to getting home. It was a long day at work, and they still need to have dinner. So she's happy to sit in the passenger seat and let Chuck navigate the city traffic.

She puts her head back in doses, feeling the gentle sway of the car as they glide along the streets and around corners. But Carol notices they're taking a lot more turns than she'd expect if they're just going to the interstate.

When the car comes to a complete stop, she opens her eyes to see what's going on. She's surprised to see they're on a dark, quiet street with tall apartment buildings rising around them.

Chuck puts the car in park and reaches into the back where Carol can hear him rooting around in his gym bag. She asks him why they've stopped, and he tells her he just needs to grab something.

Carol can't think what could be so important that he had to stop now, had to stop here in Mission Hill. She knows that the media often blows things out of proportion, but this is still an unfamiliar neighborhood, and it's dark out.

She's got no idea that the danger isn't outside the car, but in. At the start of this series, you heard Chuck Stewart's version of what happened on October 23rd, but that wasn't the truth.

This is the truth, or at least as close as anyone can be sure of. In that quiet corner of Mission Hill, Carol scans the street in front of them. She doesn't see Chuck's hand close around the revolver he stole from the store.

She doesn't notice him twisting around in his seat, or see him hold the barrel of the gun up to her head. Chuck takes a breath and squeezes the trigger. Moving quickly, he turns the gun around, pointing it up towards the ceiling.

He fires again, the bullet punching a hole just above the driver's side visor. That hole in the ceiling is gonna be part of Chuck's story. He's planning on saying the gunman tried to shoot him in the head too, but he dodged out of the way.

Chuck can hear Carol dying beside him. If he had any spare ammunition, he'd use an extra to finish the job. But he has just one bullet left, and he has to be very careful about how he uses it.

It's crucial to selling his story, as is the robbery part. Trying to ignore the sounds his wife is making, Chuck leans over and grabs her hand, pulls two glittering rings off her fingers, and places them on the dash.

He puts his own watch beside them. Then he picks up the gun again. He aims it at his abdomen.

He can feel his heart racing faster than it has all night. He doesn't like pain, fears it even, but it's unavoidable. He squeezes the trigger and feels the bullet rip through his insides.

He was aiming for a wound that looked bad, but that didn't do any lasting damage, but it hurts like hell all the same. Bullets will do that to a person. He looks down to see blood pooling on the seat beneath him.

He struggles for breath, trying to wrap his mind around the pain radiating out of somewhere near his stomach. He wants to lie back, call out for help, but he can't. He has to meet his brother.

Grunting with the exertion, he reaches down and picks Carol's Gucci purse up off the floor. He drops her rings and his watch inside, followed by the gun. He shifts the car into gear and pulls away from the curb.

He drives slowly through Mission Hill until he arrives at the intersection of Parker and Station, where he can see Matthew waiting for him inside his own car.

Chuck pulls up alongside Matt, easing towards the back window which has rolled down just as they planned. Chuck grabs Carol's bag and tosses it on to Mark's back seat. Then, through gritted teeth, he tells his kid brother to get out of here.

Once Matt's gone, Chuck picks up the bulky car phone from between the two front seats.

21:16

The Frantic Aftermath

At 8:43 p.m., he dials the number for the Massachusetts State Police. State Police, Boston, record an emergency 510. My wife's been shot.

I've been shot. Where is this, sir? I have no idea.

I'm off. I've been coming from Premon. Bringing the Women's Hospital.

Hearing that, dispatchers get on the phone with the Boston PD to have them send police to Chuck and Carol's location. But Chuck is struggling to stay lucid. Where are you right now, sir?

Can you indicate to me? No, I don't know. I don't know.

We go to an abandoned area. Okay, sir. Can you see out the windows?

Can you tell me where you are, please? No. I don't know.

I don't see any signs. Are you near Bringham Women's Hospital? No.

We went straight through. Are you in the city of Boston, though? Yes.

Can you give me any indication where you might be? Any buildings? Uh, no.

Okay, has your wife been shot as well? Yes. In the head.

In the head? Yeah. I ducked down.

Delirious from the pain of his self-inflicted gunshot wound, Chuck can't seem to work out where exactly he is. He says that he can't see anyone around him. Even when he drives for a couple of blocks, he's totally alone.

Eventually, the dispatchers in the control room come up with a plan. There are already multiple patrol cars sweeping the areas around Brigham and Women's Hospital. One by one, they're told to turn their sirens on for a few seconds and then back off.

They cycle through until a siren can be heard through the phone line, which lets them know which car is closest. Eventually, they find Chuck and Carol in their Toyota Cressida and summon ambulances to their location.

But the emergency services aren't the only ones on the scene. Mission Hill residents are drawn to the street by the commotion, and newspaper photographers find their way here thanks to police scanners.

One of them, Evan Richmond of the Boston Herald, is quick enough to snap a few harrowing shots of Chuck and Carol still inside the car, their forms illuminated by the pulsing light of emergency vehicles.

She's slumped towards her husband, a tangle of hair mostly obscuring the blood. He's leaning back in his seat, a pained expression on his face. As media document the scene, the first responders do what they can to save the Stewart's lives.

Unconscious and barely alive, Carol's sent to Brigham and Women's. Chuck's loaded into the back of a separate ambulance, ready to bring him to Boston City Hospital. In the seconds before he's taken away, an officer asks him, who did this?

Chuck says that it was, quote, a black male. They need more details, so Chuck says the guy was wearing a black running suit with red stripes. Then the paramedics shut the ambulance doors.

At Brigham and Women's, Carol is rushed into surgery so the doctors can deliver her baby by emergency cesarean section.

But the child is about two months premature, and because Carol's body has been shutting down, the baby's been deprived of oxygen for at least 10 minutes. It's not looking good.

Two miles away, Chuck's being prepared for surgery on his own gunshot wound. As he's put under, he's got no idea if his wife is alive or dead, if his plan to get away with murder has worked, or if he'll even survive the night.

North of the city, Matthew Stuart pulls up to the family home in Revere. He's barely been able to catch his breath the entire way home. He'd heard the wail of sirens in the distance a couple of minutes after he drove away from Chuck.

But that sound wasn't as haunting as the sight of his brother's face, half hidden in shadow. Chuck looked like he was in pain. And his voice when he told Matt to leave, it was almost a gasp.

Matt thought he could see a figure slumped in the seat beside Chuck, but it was too dark to be sure. Now, as he walks up the drive and through the front door, he wonders exactly what he's gotten himself into.

He slips across the foyer and downstairs to his basement bedroom, locking the door behind him. He perches on the end of his bed, looking at the designer purse in his hand. It feels heavy, like there's more than jewelry in here.

He wants to open it, but he's scared of his big brother, so he wonders if he should. After a couple of agonizing minutes, he can't resist. He undoes the clasp and peers into the leather bag.

There's Carol's wallet, a pair of rings and Chuck's watch. Beside them is a silver, snub-nosed revolver. Matt nearly drops the purse in shock.

This was supposed to be a simple fake robbery. Why would Chuck have needed a gun? As his mind whirs, Matt hears the phone ringing upstairs.

A few seconds after someone answers it, the yelling starts. First his mother, then another of his brothers and his sister. Matthew rushes up to find out what's happened.

They've had a call from Boston City Hospital, his sister tells him. Chuck and Carol have been shot. Matt feels ice slide down his back.

He doesn't know what to say. So he just nods numbly when his mother asks him to stay home with his father. Charles Sr.

has Parkinson's, and it's difficult for him to get in and out of the car. Within minutes, the house is quiet. Charles Sr.

sits in his recliner in the living room, waiting for news from the hospital. Matt, who's in a full blown panic, sneaks into the kitchen and grabs the phone. He calls his best friend Jack McMahon to fill him in.

Now, to his credit, Jack's a loyal friend, but both he and Matt make the wrong decision here. They decide that the best thing for them to do is to get rid of the evidence.

So Jack picks Matt up and they drive out to Dizzy Bridge, a railway crossing that spans the Pines River.

It's after midnight when they throw the gun into the dark rushing water followed by Carol's purse, which they hide in a trash bag, weighted down with stones. Matt holds on to Carol's engagement ring though.

For sentimental reasons maybe, or perhaps for leverage. It's all he can think to do right now.

Meanwhile, at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Carol's parents tell the nurses that their daughter was planning on calling her son Christopher, since he was due to be born right around Christmas.

While he's monitored in the neonatal ICU, his mother lingers for a few more hours. Then, just before dawn, her life support is switched off and Carol Stuart dies. She's the first victim of her husband's crime, but she won't be the last.

It's just after sunrise on October 24th, 1989.

28:40

A Misguided Manhunt

In a basement room of Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital, the switchboard is flooded with calls from journalists. Over the last few hours, news has gotten around that a young couple, a white couple, were shot in Mission Hill overnight.

And the fact that the woman was pregnant has only increased interest from the media. An operator presses a button to take another call. It's a producer from one of the local news stations.

He's calling for an update on Carol Stuart. The operator doesn't need to look at the memo in front of her. She's repeated the same information a dozen times in the last half hour.

One single spare sentence. Mrs. Stuart has died.

Her baby is still alive. News of the shooting is on the front page of the Boston Herald on the 24th. Evan Richmond's photo of the Stuart's bloody form slumped in their car takes up half the page.

The headline reads, A terrible night. Gunman invades car. Shoots couple.

Rival paper The Globe didn't get wind of the crime until they'd already gone to print.

But now both they and the Herald have reporters chasing the story down, calling Boston PD, talking to Mission Hill residents, and trying to contact the Stuart family.

These early hours of reporting on the story paint it as a tragic inevitability, the logical, predictable consequence of the inner city's growing violence problem.

And that'll be the lens many people will view the story through, but it's not the whole picture.

The truth is that this attack on a white couple from the suburbs gets far more coverage than any other individual case of violence in the city, especially when compared with the violence committed against black people.

In the past, the city's media has stoked fears of rising violence in Boston. But the victims of that violence have never been singled out, not in the way the Stuarts are.

They're called an all-American couple, tragic figures who braved the quote-unquote urban menace of Mission Hill and paid the price. Do with that what you will.

As for what the Boston PD are doing, they believe Chuck Stewart, a deputy superintendent tells reporters that they have a solid description of the suspect and will begin the search right away.

But right now, that so-called good description are the words black man, black running suit, red stripes. There's no height or eye color, weight, build, or any other physical characteristics of the person they're looking for.

So that means it's pretty much open season on the young black men of Mission Hill. And with such a wide net to cast, Mayor Raymond Flynn orders every available detective be assigned to the case.

Within 24 hours, over 100 police officers have been stationed in and around the Mission Hill projects, plenty of them decked out in riot gear.

These officers are stopping black teenagers and young men, demanding that they submit to a Frisk search or come down to the station. Not that this is at all unusual for Boston.

This is something the department's been doing in Mission Hill for months, and it's become a point of friction within the community.

Shortly before the Stuart shootings, a superior court judge ordered the police to cease the practice of stop and Frisk. But the Boston PD flat out refused. No judge was going to tell them how to run their streets.

And now, with nothing else to go on, they see it as their best way to find Carol Stuart's killer. The black men who do resist or protest this treatment risk being forcefully strip searched right there in the street.

So the mood in Mission Hill is tense, with animosity between the police and the black community getting worse by the day. But there are two people on the force who aren't so sure that their colleagues are looking in the right place.

Detectives Robert A. Hearn and Robert Tinlin were assigned to the case just hours after the shooting. Seasoned investigators, the pair have an excellent success rate when it comes to solving homicides.

And right away, they began to look at Chuck. I mean, after all, the husband did it is a cliché for a reason. In 2021, 34% of murdered women were killed by their partner.

In a case specifically like this one, it's not unheard of for men to kill their wives and then intentionally injured themselves in an attempt to throw investigators off. But the surgeon who operated on Chuck shoots this idea down.

The gunshot wound Chuck sustained was far too serious to have been self-inflicted. Plus, the angle was all wrong. It just doesn't work.

Still, Ahern and Tinlin don't give up on their theory. On Thursday, October 26th, three days after the shooting, they're finally allowed to speak to Chuck in his hospital bed.

He gives them an account of the attack, with a more detailed description of the man he says shot him and Carol. He was between 28 and 34 with a short afro, high cheekbones and shaggy facial hair. He was skinny, gaunt even, and stood around 5'10.

His voice was raspy and he spoke in a sing-song tone. It's a lot more information for the cops to use in their search. But the way Chuck answers their questions, strikes Ahern and Tinlin is odd.

He's too calm. So despite what the surgeon says, the detectives go to their superior about a week after the shooting and report that Chuck Stuart is at the top of their short suspect list.

Now, this next part could be completely unrelated or maybe it's not. Anyway, a couple of days later, Ahern and Tinlin are informed they're no longer on the case.

Someone at the Boston PD has decided that two of the best detectives on the force aren't the men for this job after all. That decision will turn out to be a harmful, deadly mistake.

From Airship, this is Episode 2 in our series on The Murder of Carol Stuart. On the next episode, Boston's police hunt for a man who doesn't exist. And the secret about Chuck Stewart spreads rapidly through his hometown.

We use many different sources while preparing this episode. A couple we can recommend are Deadly Greed by Joe Sharkey, the television show Rescue 911, and Reporting by the Boston Globe. This episode may contain reenactments or dramatized details.

And while in some cases, we can't know exactly what happened, all our dramatizations are based on historical research. American Criminal is a co-production of Airship and Evergreen podcasts. It's hosted, edited, and produced by me, Jeremy Schwartz.

Audio editing and sound design by Sean Ruhl Hoffman. Music by Throm. This episode is written and researched by Joel Callan.

Managing producer, Emily Burke. Executive producers are Joel Callan, William Simpson, and Lindsey Graham.