Uncertainty and Suspect Season 3: Five Shots in the Dark
When the final beats remain a mystery even as reporting gets underway
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+ subscribers.
After twenty-odd years as a journalist, I have come to believe that there are really only two types of stories (with the caveat that there are a billion sub-variations on each). The first is one in which the ending is already known, if not written: A hurricane strikes a small town. A thief is caught. A trip is recounted.
The second is one in which the final beats remain a mystery even as reporting gets underway. I (Matt Shaer, Suspect Season 3 co-host and Campside Media Co-founder) tend to prefer this variety of article, largely because it is more exciting — you feel your way through each new turn, arriving at the end with the same sense of surprise you hope to evoke from your reader or listener.
A good example: The third season of the Campside and Wondery podcast Suspect, which was released last year under the subtitle “Five Shots in the Dark.” The origin of the show, as Eric Benson and I recount in the first episode, was a conversation with Lara Bazelon, the writer, defense attorney and wrongful conviction specialist. A year and a half ago, Lara and I began discussing a new case of hers, involving a man named Leon Benson, who had been incarcerated for decades for allegedly killing Kasey Schoen. Lara was convinced Leon was innocent; the state was convinced they had the right man.
What if, we thought, we were to make a podcast that would follow Lara’s efforts to have Leon exonerated — with the understanding that these things move very slowly, and that no outcome is guaranteed?
We’d be making a show from inside an attempt to right a legal wrong, as opposed to telling the whole thing in retrospect, as journalism on the topic is often done. Luckily, my colleagues at Campside felt as strongly about the idea as Eric and I did; ditto our friends at Wondery.
It only took a few passes through the legal documents assembled by Lara and her team to know that Leon was definitely innocent — I’ve written about potential wrongful conviction cases that are murky and uncertain, and this was not one of them.
Over the ensuing months, Lara and Eric and I (and Charlie Nelson Keever, an attorney at Lara’s law clinic, in San Francisco) compiled scores of interviews with the people closest to Leon’s case: Witnesses and private investigators; attorneys and specialists in memory; Leon himself. Later, we spoke to the victim’s family, who had arrived at essentially the same conclusion we had: Leon Benson was in prison for a crime he had most certainly never committed.
But next came the downside of an open-ended reporting assignment: We now had five episodes of what I considered to be a very good podcast. We had documented Lara and Charlie’s reinvestigation of the case — we had tracked their efforts to file the paperwork that would lead to Leon’s exoneration. And we had told nearly the entirety of Leon's story from his perspective. And yet we lacked an ending. The paperwork was being reviewed. Leon remained incarcerated.
The show went into stasis — the type of stasis that is the unfortunate side effect of having made a bad bet that a conclusion would, eventually, arrive. As we waited, we gamed out different possibilities: Could we release the show while Leon was still behind bars? Should we put the whole thing on the shelf permanently? I remember those weeks, and the sense of disheartenment that came with them. “Next time,” I said to myself, “I’m not going to make the same mistake.”
If you’ve listened to the show, you know I didn’t stay in that headspace for very long.
One amazing afternoon, while on vacation with my family, I got the notification: Leon was going to be released. And we could visit with him as soon as he was back home. We finally had our ending — we had everything we had hoped for.
And after a period of anxiety and doubt, I had my instincts reaffirmed: Sometimes, the best stories are made from uncertain beginnings.
Thanks for reading, and subscribe now for updates on Suspect and all of Campside’s hit shows. And go here to see an exclusive letter related to Suspect Season 1.
Matt