Podcast Corner: Great listening on killer cats and Runaway Joe
Joe Maloney's mugshot from the Runaway Joe podcast on RTÉ. The podcast sets a benchmark for true crime podcasts.
There was a laugh-out-loud line about true crime shows on a recent episode of — the latest podcast from Reply All’s PJ Vogt. The show says it seeks to answer the kinds of question you might ask the internet when you can’t sleep.
It was on a bit of an animal bent last month, with episodes asking: "Where all the roaches have gone?", "why are there so many chicken bones on the street?", and "what are we gonna do about all these cats?" — the latter of which was reminiscent of Reply All’s viral "Feral Hogs" episode.
Talking about Edward Forbush, a bird lover in the 1800s who was among the first to examine cats’ impact on wildlife, Vogt says he wrote about cats “with the same vivid, blood-spattered language that true crime podcasters use when they rewrite the Wikipedia pages of serial killers”. Zing!
It’s a line that comes to mind while listening to , the latest nine-part series from RTÉ Documentaries on One, which has just wrapped and had taken us on a 20th century jaunt around the world — from upstate New York, to South Dublin, East Berlin, Canada, and Cyprus.
This search for Joe Maloney/Michael O’Shea, who was charged with the first-degree murder of his wife June Fisk in upstate New York in the 1960s, spans six decades and took the team over 18 months of work. It goes much deeper than most true crime shows’ Wikipedia "investigations".
It also does what so many podcast series don’t — it reaches a conclusion, a revelation, one that’s genuinely moving and only revealed itself to the team mere days before the final episode was planned to come out.
It reconnects long lost family members, has a frustrated US prosecutor telling host/reporter Pavel Barter, “you uncovered a lot of things that I certainly wasn’t aware of at the time,” and Joe’s first-born child Karen exclaiming: “I’m in shock, but there’s the closure that I guess we needed … Your story’s ended … it’s over, it’s done.”
Co-producer Tim Desmond told me, in an interview ahead of the show’s release: “This is a story that we really believe will develop once people start listening to it." He offered questions which the series subsequently answered: “Is this a story we can bring something new to? Is this a story that can go somewhere while we're in production, while it's happening while the listeners are listening to it? And is this a story that listeners can help us with?”
, like previous Docs on One series such as and , sets a benchmark for true crime podcast. It’s not salacious or speculative, but probing and revealing. An essential listen.
