Speaker 1: Good morning, Maggie. How are you doing.
Speaker 2: I'm well, how are you well?
Speaker 3: I'm very excited to share yet another conversation with you
because I knew during season one. I knew that there's
no way that you're going to get away with just
doing one season on this because there is so much
going on. And I got to tell you, the community,
the society needs what you are doing, because you are
digging up bones in places that people have buried them.
Speaker 2: You know what I mean.
Speaker 3: I mean, because whatever courage you've got to do this,
my god, share it.
Speaker 2: It does get scary.
Speaker 4: I mean, especially when you're going up against the police force.
At times, it certainly is scary. But yeah, I mean
I always say that the courage I get is from
these people that are in prison. I mean, to survive
that I could survive anything.
Speaker 1: I'd say, Well, let me tell you something.
Speaker 3: When you talk about prison and stuff, I mean, I mean,
sure we see all the TV shows and the movies
and things. I guarantee if I were doing what you're
doing and I was walking into a prison, I would
be peeing my pants. I'm not gonna lie to you,
because that even the four walls of that building scare
the Bajebi's out of me.
Speaker 2: You know what it is.
Speaker 4: It's terrifying, But in some way, I know how many
good people are in there. And it don't even mean
innocent people. I mean people locked up for a petty
drug crime. How many times could I have been locked
up for that? So you know there's a lot of
good people behind those walls. And actually often I go
in and there's a lot of community.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 4: I learned from Suave, who I did the podcast on.
He created a group of men that all got their
education and started a mural arts program. And you know,
there is so much community and beautiful people in there
that I think, because I know that, it's a little
less scary to me.
Speaker 3: When you go into Graves County. I mean the town
you went into a city of ten thousand right away.
I am shot back to Lewistown, Montana, me in nineteen
eighty one, and I remember being in that town and
you know, I was just a jock on the radio,
but every night somebody had to throw spit wads at
the building. I really thought, Oh, I'm in trouble now.
This town of tent and wants me out of here.
How do you deal with with the small town mentality.
Speaker 4: So this one was a little more less scary than
when I was an alliance Ohio.
Speaker 2: I was doing a story there and.
Speaker 4: We were live reporting from there, so people knew we
were there, so that was quite scary. We were followed sometimes,
like we had to be really careful, and you know
what I mean, I don't know, yeah, and I don't know,
you know, if people know what I look like, I'm
not particularly you know, inconspicuous, so.
Speaker 2: It's quite easy to spot me.
Speaker 4: But yeah, the small town mentality, I mean, everyone knows
who you are when you're an outsider. They know you're
an outsider. So it's it's tough, you know. I do
my best to blend in and just not stand out.
Speaker 3: One of the things that really kind of puts shivers
inside my soul is is when Jessica's body was found,
because it's one of those you know, you always see
it in scary movies, but when it's in reality or
you hear about it on a podcast, it's like, no,
we're talking reality here. Is like reading front page of
a newspaper.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, no, it's you know hers was.
Speaker 4: Her death was particularly horrific because she was left outside
in the public for days. People who walked by the
middle school. She was outside in the backyard of the
middle school. Once they found out that it was a
deceased young woman, they said, oh my gosh, I thought
that was just trash bags for a few days. So
it was particularly horrific for this town.
Speaker 3: See, and you saying that still puts the shivers through
me because I walk through this forest every single day,
and the scent of death is always found out here
because of deer that have fallen or birds.
Speaker 1: And stuff like that.
Speaker 3: Man, I don't know what I'm going to do if
I ever come across a body that belongs to someone
like Jessica, because I mean it's like, you know, keep
your calm, keep your peace, because one day, I can
almost tell you, in this state of this nation, it's
gonna happen. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think of that all the time. I mean,
I'm from New York City and just walking through Tompkins.
Back in the day, you used to see people you
were unsure if they were alive or dead. But I
think about that all the time, Like what would I do?
Would I have thought those were trash bags? Would I
have walked over what would I have done if I
saw her. I mean certainly something that yeah, I think
about and you think about.
Speaker 3: So what is more common inside your inquisitive mind, fear
or suspicion?
Speaker 2: Suspicion?
Speaker 4: Yeah, sure, I'm suspicious of everybody, and uh, you know,
especially investigators because unfortunately, in my line of work, I'm
here because the investigation was either very poorly done or
in some way nefarious. So I mean, in my w
of work, I'm very suspicious of law enforcement.
Speaker 3: Well, how often do you have to pull from personal
experience in order to kind of put more focus on
what is going on presently?
Speaker 2: I would say very often.
Speaker 4: But one of the things with my personal experience that
I think makes me able to do this work is
because I can relate to so many of these people
in prison, not only because they're innocent, and you know,
any misstep I took at sixteen, and it could have
led me there. I was not an angel, but you know,
because I in a way, you know, I was told
this by Hank Skinner. He recently passed away on death row.
He was an instant man on death row for over
thirty five years. Died of a brain tumor, but he
said to me. We wrote letters back and forth, and
at the time in Texas, we couldn't talk on the
follow and he couldn't see pictures of me, so we
just wrote letters.
Speaker 2: And he was really nasty in his letters. He had
spent thirty five years on death row.
Speaker 4: He had all kinds of journalists come in and out,
and so he wasn't he was kind of done with
inquisitive journalists. And when I finally met him in prison,
he said, you know, Maggie, if I knew this is
what you looked like and who you were, I would
have been a lot more open to you. And what
I took that as was he saw me. You know,
I have a lot of tattoos, and I just look
like a person you'd see on the street.
Speaker 2: People often don't know that I'm a fulletzer many journalist.
Speaker 4: So and he felt that that I was just a person,
and I wasn't showing up with you know, a white
collared shirt and cameras and kitten heels and some kind
of tied up agenda. I wanted to listen to him.
I understood him, and I think that's been really important
for me, getting into prison and talking to these people
and having them open up to me.
Speaker 1: See.
Speaker 3: I call that the fourth dimension. You open up the
eye to a different dimension where you can go into
a story and not have to be you know, because
people assume what we're supposed to look like and how
we're supposed to act, and oh my god, this TV
show said this, We're supposed to be this way. But
when you are genuinely dedicated and loyal to what you're
doing on Bone Valley three and all the other years,
the thing is is that you're going in there to
get not only a story. Can we find a cure
here as well or a solution?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 4: And you know the sad thing is is that when
we start looking, you know, we've looked at this case,
and this specific prosecutor has been in office since nineteen
eighty two. We just found five, what I believe our
wrongful convictions under her belt. You know how many others
are there? So when I start digging, what I find
is it gets really overwhelming because you're like, this might
not be the only one that happened in the eighty
two years, or sorry, not eighty two years, since you
were in office since nineteen eighty two.
Speaker 3: Please do not move. There's more with Maggie Coming up
next the name of the podcast Bone Valley Season three,
we are back with Maggie, Quincy omar Cross. That name
people are they're not going to forget it, but they've
got to hear the story, and I guarantee somewhere in
their life they're going to say, oh, oh, that's happened
near me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Quincy was just a kid. Again.
Speaker 4: You know, we're dealing with small town people that often
get into drug dealing. You know, he was just a
petty dry dealer, came into this town and that put
him on the radar because he was arrested that night
for drugs. And you know, when these citizens start looking,
they see this out of towner arrested for drugs, and
they just hone in on him immediately.
Speaker 1: See.
Speaker 3: And the thing about it is so is that what
I saw with Quincy was the fact that, you know,
I didn't grew up a cool kid. I was.
Speaker 1: I was in the South side of Billings.
Speaker 3: We were a group. How we didn't end up in jail?
I have no idea. So when I see that the
group of young people, you know, they falsely accused of murder,
I'm going that could have happened to me. And that's that,
to me, is the relatable part of this whole entire thing.
We didn't come from the straight kid family. We all
broke the dang rules mm hmm.
Speaker 2: And that's why I relate to these people because I
was the same.
Speaker 4: I could have been any one of them, just in
the wrong place at the wrong time. And you know,
I love that you mentioned that, like, yes, they were kids,
Like when the murder actually happened, they were all in
their early twenties, which I consider a kid. I mean,
one of the main witnesses was fifteen, a literal child.
So they were just kids doing kids shit and.
Speaker 2: Got wrapped up. Yeah. But Maggie, you question, No, I
didn't mean to curse.
Speaker 3: No, no, why not, man, I mean, come on, I mean,
it's not even cursing anymore. It's how we speak.
Speaker 4: Man.
Speaker 3: If you were to meet me out on the field
to Montana right now, you would see a completely different arrow,
because I mean, isn't that's just what we do with
the prairie dogs because they screw up my damn field.
And the thing but the thing about it is they
had five different alibis going on here. You would think
as close as they were, they would really have their
shit together.
Speaker 2: Mm hmm. No, it was crazy.
Speaker 4: It was really crazy because the first investigation in two
thousand when she was murdered, arrested two different people.
Speaker 2: Then those charges were dropped for no other.
Speaker 4: Reason than the police did not hand over discovery. They
lost near twenty video and audio tapes, and so the
case had to be dropped. So those first two people
were actually decent suspect, they knew her, they were her boyfriends,
one of them she had a baby with, but that
was dropped. So then you get to investigation number two
the Kentucky State Police five years later, and that's when
we get this citizen sleuth, and Quincy's name comes up.
So the timeline of just whose names, who's involved? Nine
people were implicated in this.
Speaker 2: In some way.
Speaker 3: I don't know how you get your sound bites and
keep your library together. I just know what my notes
look like and what I have to do. But I
mean you you must have like just ample amounts of
just writing, because you've got to be able to go
and find these sound bites immediately, because whoever's producing and
directing your shows, they've got to have that stuff to
make this thing work and they're doing it right.
Speaker 1: Well it's me, Well congrats me.
Speaker 4: It's me and my co producer were back abada and
we do it all together.
Speaker 2: I mean yeah, you know, we go through.
Speaker 4: Every piece of tape, every audio interview, we listened to,
got hundreds of hours of this court trial, and yeah,
we just have note documents. I just like, hey, this
is a great clip at this time stamp. You know,
this is where we got to use this. It's chaos,
but it works somehow.
Speaker 3: So now what happens here and this once again, this
sounds so every day the fire chief's daughter is gone
eighteen years old. Okay, this is happening in America and
around the world every day. But the thing about it is, though,
is that what's the motive? And this is what I
love about you, Maggie, is you're asking that question, what's
the motive? What led to this situation? There had to
be a pre story in order to get to this story,
and what is going to be the post story?
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's really really rare to just find someone who
will just find a girl walking alone on the street
and just brutally murder, you know, light on fire. This
crime just seemed so personal and Quincy did not know her.
He was from Kennessee. He was not from Kentucky. You know,
they were forty minutes away. He didn't go to that town.
So the first two people arrested were her boyfriend and
baby daddy.
Speaker 2: That makes a lot more sense to me.
Speaker 4: And why that was something that wasn't picked up on
in the third investigation by the Kentucky State.
Speaker 2: Police is beyond me.
Speaker 4: I mean that investigation is the one that started making
up these insane stories about you know, orgies and all
of this stuff that really is bizarre because her autopsy
does not show any kind of sexual assault in any
sort of way.
Speaker 3: See how you were, This is what you do. This
is what you do. That's why I would love for you, Maggie,
to come to Charlotte and go deeper into this story
of the Ukrainian girl that was killed on our transit system.
I don't yeah, I swort of got it looked more
like a hit. I want to know the story. I
want to know what really happened before that moment and
how did it play out the way that it did.
And I need someone like you, Maggie, to come in
here and get this thing down.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Yeah, that was devastating. I watched that because I'm
curious too. I watched it multiple times saying how did
this happen? How did this happen? Like this horrifying?
Speaker 3: Yeah, how do you keep it together? Because I couldn't
sleep at night? I mean I have to do a
defrag journal every day just to keep my thoughts in process.
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, I need to be doing that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I sleep is very difficult because I just want
to be working. Like I honestly, I'm kept up because
I'm like, I've so much to do. There's so many
people I need to help. But yeah, I mean I
lots of sleep medication to just turn off my brain,
just let those like eight hours in.
Speaker 3: Do you become an activator and try to get the
word out more about Kentucky's Innocence Project because I think
a lot more states need to look into something like this,
because I mean, like you said, there are a lot
of great people behind those bars and we're not getting
to see them.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, more states need to More Attorney general's offices need
to create these things. You know, it's not a national program.
Every state, every county, every city needs to be doing it.
So it's really wild that there are places that just
don't have innocence projects or rungful conviction review units or
anything like that. And it's interesting when we go to
the Innocence Conference every year, they do this beautiful ceremony
where they announce all the people who are there, who
how much time they did, where they're from. They can
walk on stage, everyone's cheering. It's wonderful. You know, this
year they all walked on stage to Kendrick Lamar.
Speaker 2: It was great.
Speaker 4: But you could see the states that these people are from,
and based on that, you can tell which states are
doing their job in reversing these convictions. And the last
few years there's been a lot of people from Michigan.
I know that Detroit has a huge conviction review unit.
So that's one of the interesting things I can tell
which states are doing their job.
Speaker 3: I think it's because up there in those states, there's
a little bit more of a brother and sisterhood up there,
and it's about family, family, family, family. You're talking about
my family. We need to do something about this because
your family is my family, it's their family, and we
need to do we need to do something about our family.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: That's such a good point.
Speaker 4: Darrell at Ewing was in prison for a long time
in Detroit, Michigan. The actual killer confessed before he even
went to trial, wrote a letter.
Speaker 2: Saying, I did this. You're putting the wrong man in trial.
Yet Darrell goes to prison for decades.
Speaker 4: But his family, I mean, they were out on the
courthouse steps every single day, and he had an extended family,
so that was a lot of people out there. And
then you know, all the other guys who were wrongfully
convicted into Detroit, their family showed up, so they had
a lot of power. And that's a really good point.
You know, the family's rallying, and the people that I
meet that don't have that, it's it's home breaking.
Speaker 1: Yep, cold lonely.
Speaker 3: What am I going to do? I have nobody here
to support me. Oh, I might as well just die,
I mean and that or figure out. You know, if
God is here, then God make yourself present. Let's make
this happen, dude.
Speaker 2: Yep, yep.
Speaker 1: I mean.
Speaker 4: The only the people we hear the Quincy Crosses that
we hear about it's because they've had advocates on the outside.
And luckily for Quincy, Jessica's father. Joe Curran was one
of those people. I mean he he's joined with Quincy's father,
the victim's father and the person in prison's father have
teamed up to say this is wrong, we need to
fix this.
Speaker 2: So his case is unique in that way.
Speaker 3: Well, I would love to sit in a session with
you in the way that I don't know how you're
getting access, because I'm sure that when you go knocking
on someone's stir they're going, who.
Speaker 1: Are you again? And where are you at?
Speaker 3: What time is it going to be on in the morning?
Will I be able to hear it in my town?
And who's it going to reach? What's your targeted audience?
Let me see your numbers. I don't know how you
do what you do and keep focused.
Speaker 4: Well, I got to say knocking on doors is quite terrifying.
I am not particularly great at it, but I learned
from a seasoned and US negative journalist. Then when you
knock on the door, don't stand in front of the
door because someone doesn't want you there might just shoot
out that door.
Speaker 2: So like you got to do like a little side knock.
But yeah, you know you're you're in You're in Tennessee.
Knocking on doors. Down there in Kentucky, is is kind
of scary.
Speaker 1: Well, I'm down here in the South. I can relate.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you have to watch out for the old
washing machine that's up there on the porch because you
might trip over if you're running. You got to come
back to this show anytime in the future, Maggie.
Speaker 1: I'm telling you what.
Speaker 3: I love talking with you. I was fired up when
I heard that you had a season three and I
just can't wait until we dig even more.
Speaker 2: I super appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1: Will you be brilliant today?
Speaker 2: Okay, thank you