Suspect, Three Years Later
On the unlikely origins of a hit podcast about a murder at a Halloween party
This is part of Inside the Tent, a series going behind the scenes of Campside’s award winning podcasts.
All episodes are available on Apple Podcasts and ad-free for Wondery+ and Amazon Music subscribers.
The inaugural season of Suspect, one of the first shows ever developed by Campside, debuted nearly three years ago, in the early fall of 2021. By December, it had spent several weeks in the top slot on Apple Podcasts, and had been named one of the best shows of the year by New York magazine and The New Yorker.
The New Yorker said,
“The series raises essential questions about police procedure, DNA analysis, and confirmation bias, and does so organically, in a gripping, character-driven story that always foregrounds the humanity of its subjects, most of whom we empathize with and respect. It’s also a master class in tone, focussing on justice forthrightly without patting itself on the back.”
I try not to put a lot of stock in reviews, negative or positive, but I treasure that one, largely because it so closely matched what co-creator and co-producer Eric Benson and I (Matt Shaer, Suspect host and Campside Media Co-founder) wanted to accomplish with the project. We hoped it would be big and impactful, but accessible, too––”chocolate-covered broccoli,” we called it.
All the more strange, then, to look back even further at the very small and very unlikely (and extremely chocolate-free) origins of the show, which lie in a few letters I had received years earlier, and which I’m publishing in full here for the first time.
Actually, let me rewind: even before the letters were the texts, which were sent by a guy named Michael Williamson, an inmate at a jail in Washington State. Williamson explained that he had become friends with a man who was facing murder charges, apparently entirely on the basis of DNA evidence, and who claimed he’d had nothing to do with the killing in question.
I’d recently finished a long investigative piece for the Atlantic magazine on the potential pitfalls of DNA science––would I be interested in looking into this case, too?
I’ve been writing about criminal justice matters for a long time, and during that time, I’ve become accustomed to getting messages from incarcerated folks. A good rule of thumb: It’s impossible to answer all of them, at least not in the way you’d like, so you have to be selective about how you engage. Based on––what? Well, a gut impulse, I suppose. The sense that there is something there. That you can actually help.
This text, from Williamson, qualified.
I texted back, gave him my mailing address, and a few weeks later, I got my first letter from Emanuel Fair, a young Black man who had spent years in jail, awaiting trial for the murder of Arpana Jinaga, an Indian immigrant to the US.
Fair’s case was unusual on a lot of different levels. The most obvious distinction was that the murder in question had taken place at a Halloween party, at an apartment complex in Redmond, outside of Seattle––everyone had been in costume. Everyone had been jammed into a bunch of small rooms. And after the party was over, one of the hosts, Jinaga, had been killed.
And therein the second point of interest: The entire apartment complex was smeared with fingerprints and cellular matter and DNA. Including Fair’s DNA, which had ended up on the victim’s body. And that had subsequently led to his arrest and indictment for the killing.
In his earliest letters, Fair argued his innocence; later, he detailed the experience of his trial, which ended in a hung jury––and a mistrial. I’m including that letter here. He put things simply:
"Next month will be a full 8 years I've been in this jail. I would like to bring awareness to this case, and in doing so I believe more interest will come."
It was written as Fair and his attorneys explored next steps in the aftermath of the mistrial––did he really have to do it all again?
I hope it’s not too much of a spoiler to say that he did, and that it would be another year-plus before Emanuel was removed from the limbo in which he’d been placed.
That removal, in all its forms, would be the subject of Suspect.
But what a distance to travel, in retrospect––from out-the-blue text to hand-written correspondence, to finally meeting Emanuel in person, to reporting, to the completion of the podcast, in late 2020.
It feels so far––again, so unlikely.
Still, the unlikely is often where the most interesting stories begin.
Thanks for reading, and subscribe now for updates on Suspect and all of Campside’s hit shows.
Matt