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Speaker 3: You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking
Speaker 3: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 3: written about them Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Night Stalker DTK.
Speaker 3: Every week, another fascinating author talking about the most shocking
Speaker 3: and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with
Speaker 3: your host, journalist and author Dan Zufanski, Kid evening when
Speaker 3: her missing boyfriend is found murdered, his body encased in
Speaker 3: cement inside a watering trough and dumped in a cattle field.
Speaker 3: A local sheriff's deputy is arrested in charge with his murder,
Speaker 3: but as New York Times best selling author and investigative
Speaker 3: journalist M. William Phelps digs in the truth, leads to
Speaker 3: questions about her guilt. In his first full length original
Speaker 3: true crime book for Wild Blue Press, Phelps delivers a
Speaker 3: hard hitting, unique reading experience, immersing readers in the life
Speaker 3: of the first female deputy in Oglethorpe County, Georgia, who
Speaker 3: claims a sexual harassment suit she filed against the sheriff
Speaker 3: led to a murder charge. Is Tracy Fortson. Guilty or Innocent?
Speaker 3: You read and decide. The book that we're featuring this
Speaker 3: evening is targeted a Deputy, her love affairs, a brutal
Speaker 3: murder with my specialized journalist, an author and filmmaker M
Speaker 3: William Phelps. Welcome to the program, and thank you very
Speaker 3: much for agreeing to this interview. M William Phelps.
Speaker 4: Dan has always called me and thanks again for having me.
Speaker 7: I love your show, so it's really an honor and
Speaker 7: a pleasure to be honest.
Speaker 8: Thank you very much. Here we are in Halloween so
Speaker 8: Apara pos to talk to one of the masters of
Speaker 8: true crime, Matthew I will call you so. Thank you
Speaker 8: very much. Matthew. Let's talk about some of the stuff
Speaker 8: that you talk about in the beginning of this book,
Speaker 8: because you say some very very interesting things about the industry,
Speaker 8: the future of true crime, and what's going on in
Speaker 8: right now presently. You were involved with Dark Minds for
Speaker 8: since twenty twelve and investigation. Tell us a little bit
Speaker 8: about Dark Minds and what you've just come from the
Speaker 8: last book we had on we were talking about your
Speaker 8: relationship with the serial killer involved in Dark Minds. Tell
Speaker 8: us a little bit about just what you've been doing
Speaker 8: recently that will inform that has informed you in preparation
Speaker 8: for this book targeted.
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, thanks Dan. I mean, for the most part
Speaker 4: the Dangerous Grounds. Dangerous Ground rather was a kind of
Speaker 4: a hybrid true crime menoir. So it's about my license crime,
Speaker 4: my sister in law's murder, and my relationship with Keith
Speaker 4: A Happy Face Jessperson aka Raven d Mind, my investigation
Speaker 4: Discovery series. And so that book started me down the
Speaker 4: road to where it wasn't the first time that I
Speaker 4: became part of the story. I had written a book
Speaker 4: called I'll Be Watching You about a serial killer here
Speaker 4: in Connecticut, and I became part of that story. So
Speaker 4: I had written about, you know, in the first person,
Speaker 4: as as a charen the story myself before and ultimately
Speaker 4: as a writer I've spent a number of times if
Speaker 4: you write professionally long enough, you're ultimately going to write
Speaker 4: about yourself. What it did for me was open up
Speaker 4: a new way to look at cases for me, you know,
Speaker 4: injecting myself into the story and just to the story
Speaker 4: of my investigation rather than just reporting on it. So
Speaker 4: with Dark Minds, with Dangerous Brown, I tooked into these cases,
Speaker 4: and I talked about how they affected me personally, professionally, spiritually, psychologically,
Speaker 4: emotionally really And so then this case of Tracy Fortune
Speaker 4: came around, and if I can, then I'll just tell
Speaker 4: you a little bit about how it came to me,
Speaker 4: which is another interesting thing that really sparks my interesting cases.
Speaker 4: I do a lot of work not only on investigation Discovery,
Speaker 4: but I do lots of work for Oxygen. I do
Speaker 4: lots of work for other television networks. So I know
Speaker 4: a lot of producers and one producer in particular, Donna Dudeck.
Speaker 4: She produced an episode of a series on Oxygen called Snapped,
Speaker 4: and Tracy Portson was the subject of that Snapped episode.
Speaker 4: And so Donna was here one day interviewing me on
Speaker 4: another case, and she said, Phelps, you know, you really
Speaker 4: need to take a look at this Tracy Fortson case.
Speaker 4: It's it's got your name written all over it. I mean,
Speaker 4: it's it's really it's perfect for your analysis, for you know,
Speaker 4: for you to dig into and look at. So I said, well,
Speaker 4: send me what you have and I'll take a look.
Speaker 4: Just sent me a couple of things and I started
Speaker 4: to look at it. I started to say, interesting. So,
Speaker 4: you know, I juggle five or six crime cases at
Speaker 4: the same time until I picked the one that I'm
Speaker 4: usually going to write about in book for him. And
Speaker 4: then my next My next move was to write to
Speaker 4: Tracy Fortson, to contact some of the people involved in
Speaker 4: the case, start talking to people, see what they thought.
Speaker 4: And immediately Tracy Fortson was I didn't do it. You know,
Speaker 4: I was framed, I was set up all of this
Speaker 4: And as you know, Dan, I mean, I hear this
Speaker 4: with every murder case I've written about. Whenever I interview
Speaker 4: the murderer, the murderer is always innocent. And I think
Speaker 4: Keith Justerson really is the only murder I've ever interviewed
Speaker 4: who said I did it. I did it, man.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So when I started a conversation with Tracy Fortson, I
Speaker 4: started to listen to her. You know, I'm rolling my
Speaker 4: eyes talking to me. You know, of course, I'm looking
Speaker 4: at the evidence in this case, and I'm as you know,
Speaker 4: you you know, you read the book, you look at
Speaker 4: the evidence in this case, and it's like, well, jeez,
Speaker 4: this is a slam dunk. I mean, this is you know,
Speaker 4: there's there's no question about who did this, No question
Speaker 4: at all, Right, So I became very interested in that,
Speaker 4: exploring that question of why, sixteen years later is Tracy
Speaker 4: Porson so stuck on the idea that she didn't do this?
Speaker 4: So I just started down that route and it led
Speaker 4: me to target it.
Speaker 8: Now, you talk about some of the things that happened,
Speaker 8: but let's talk about the characters themselves. You obviously talked
Speaker 8: to Tracy, so you got everything in this book from
Speaker 8: her early life right to how she came into the
Speaker 8: position that she did to be involved with this Doug
Speaker 8: and this case. So tell us about Tracy Fortson, you know.
Speaker 4: And I want to say something about the about the
Speaker 4: title of this book, targeted. It's the perfect title, really
Speaker 4: because it's it's her contention that she was targeted, and
Speaker 4: it's the court's contention, the prosecutor's contention that she targeted
Speaker 4: Doug Doug Benton, the victim in this case. So so
Speaker 4: it was the perfect title that anytime you have a
Speaker 4: dual title, it works. So that's the way I from
Speaker 4: both sides. So I begin to get to know Tracy,
Speaker 4: and she is an abrasive She's a tough, talking, abrasive
Speaker 4: kind of type a personality who likes to tell you
Speaker 4: how it is, and maybe maybe I'm describing myself, likes
Speaker 4: to tell you how it is, and and kind of
Speaker 4: get in your face and kind of say, I challenge you,
Speaker 4: I challenge you to prove me wrong, that sort of thing.
Speaker 4: Take a look at this. But she's also in you
Speaker 4: the respect. She's also a person who when you throw
Speaker 4: stuff in front of her, when you put it in
Speaker 4: front of her and say, look, well, look at this here,
Speaker 4: how do you explain this? She wants to look beyond
Speaker 4: it and move on to the next thing. So she's
Speaker 4: really a person who I believe believes what she's saying. Now,
Speaker 4: whether it's the truth or not, is besides this point
Speaker 4: that I'm trying to make is that she believes what
Speaker 4: it is she is saying at this point sixteen years later.
Speaker 4: So it was really an obstacle in the beginning. And then,
Speaker 4: of course, as you know reading the book, point in
Speaker 4: time where I cut ties with her, she cut ties
Speaker 4: with me. We stopped talking for three months, you know,
Speaker 4: and then I kind of just gave her one more shot,
Speaker 4: you know, and she kind of came around.
Speaker 8: Do you know from all these books that and the
Speaker 8: more you do this I think, or more anyone doesn't.
Speaker 8: As an investigative journalist, do you realize that you never
Speaker 8: can come to conclusions without more questions? It seems there's
Speaker 8: never any certainty to anything the more you look at
Speaker 8: all kinds of possibilities. Now, what I'm saying might sound confusing.
Speaker 8: What about the idea that and you must consider this,
Speaker 8: that she is indeed guilty, but she has indeed had
Speaker 8: enough years to look at this and say that she
Speaker 8: didn't have a fair trial. And what do you do
Speaker 8: with that type of situation? And how do you address
Speaker 8: that in your writing and in this book?
Speaker 4: Those are great questions. And the beginning of this the
Speaker 4: fact that she's had all these years and she's decided
Speaker 4: that's not been a fair trial. Well, all her appeals
Speaker 4: have been exhausted, and all the appeals courts said she
Speaker 4: has had a fair trial. So legally speaking, judiciously speaking,
Speaker 4: she's had many fair trials. In fact, you know, her
Speaker 4: first trial, her second trial. You know, so there's been
Speaker 4: there was two trials in this case, and and and
Speaker 4: and and I don't want to give away the outcome
Speaker 4: to either one of them, but you know, uh, she's
Speaker 4: had plenty of chances in the courtroom to prove her innocence,
Speaker 4: and she has yet to do that. And then every
Speaker 4: time she she doesn't get the chance to do it,
Speaker 4: and and the chance falls to the wayside and she
Speaker 4: doesn't accomplish the goal. It's the or it's this one's
Speaker 4: fault for not coming forward, or it's this one's fault
Speaker 4: for not signing an AFFI David, or it's that, you know.
Speaker 4: So there's always this or that or this and geez
Speaker 4: i I you know, when I look at the evidence
Speaker 4: in this case, like I say in the book, if
Speaker 4: I'm on the jury, I'm voting for guilty. There's no
Speaker 4: other possible way I can vote for anything other than
Speaker 4: guilty because of the evidence. Is there some sketchy stuff?
Speaker 4: Is there some questions revolving around certain witnesses? Is there
Speaker 4: some questions revolving around expert testimony and questionable evidence? Absolutely
Speaker 4: there is. But when you look at any trial, there
Speaker 4: is there's no trial that's infallible. There's no trial that
Speaker 4: is that is devoid of any you know, mistakes, errors,
Speaker 4: mistakes and judgment. People on the stand, lying, people lie
Speaker 4: all the time in court. That's not that's nothing. That's new.
Speaker 4: I mean, you know, if you're a pathological liar or
Speaker 4: you lie, you're gonna lie in court too, What does
Speaker 4: it matter to you? What really struck me is that
Speaker 4: when one avenue didn't work, she changes her tune to
Speaker 4: another avenue of a red flag right there. Because if
Speaker 4: you if you get if you go down a road
Speaker 4: and you're like, well, this is the road that I'm on,
Speaker 4: and if that road doesn't lead you to the destination,
Speaker 4: you say, well that was the wrong road. Now I'm
Speaker 4: on this other road. Well, you know what, I question
Speaker 4: your your your objectivity, I question what you're saying. I
Speaker 4: question everything really at that point.
Speaker 8: What's interesting though, too, is in this book you really
Speaker 8: do have the reader decide, and what you do is
Speaker 8: is providing the information. Where you have the Georgia Bureau
Speaker 8: of Investigation, Ralph Stone, and you talk about the crime scene.
Speaker 8: He's a crime scene specialist, but he calls himself a
Speaker 8: crime scene reconstructionist. He had never been to the actual
Speaker 8: crime scene. It's just very interesting what could be used
Speaker 8: if it was nefarious here, if there was some intent
Speaker 8: to cover up or conspire. Tell us a little bit
Speaker 8: about this very interesting crime scene specialist.
Speaker 4: Well, That's a great point because you come to Ralph
Speaker 4: Stone in the book and you're like, Okay, he wasn't
Speaker 4: at the crime scene, but he's the prosecution's crime scene reconstructionist,
Speaker 4: and how does he reconstruct the crime scene for photographs,
Speaker 4: through interviews that he's read, through other pieces of evidence.
Speaker 4: I know one of the best crime scene reconstructionists in
Speaker 4: the world, you know him personally, names doctor Henry Lee,
Speaker 4: who runs a school here in West Haven, Connecticut where
Speaker 4: he reconstructs crime scenes and teaches that. And it's incredible
Speaker 4: the amount of work he's done in this field. And
Speaker 4: he goes to the crime scene and he reconstructs what happened.
Speaker 4: So in this case, you know, you have a guy
Speaker 4: that's given his expert testimony on something he's just seen
Speaker 4: in photographs and stuff. And granted, he might be qualified
Speaker 4: to do that, but the more the bigger problem here
Speaker 4: that I see is that who's challenging this guy in
Speaker 4: the witness stand. He didn't have much of a challenge
Speaker 4: on the witness stand. So I'm gonna take advantage of
Speaker 4: that situation. I'm not gonna lie, but I'm gonna take
Speaker 4: advantage of this situation. You know, and I also think
Speaker 4: and by the time you get to Ralph Stone in
Speaker 4: the trial, you've absolutely made up your mind about her already.
Speaker 4: You know, he's just kind of he's just kind of
Speaker 4: patting the bow down to make sure the bow isn't
Speaker 4: like blooming too much off the package. But he's just
Speaker 4: patting the bow down, saying perfect, that ball is perfect.
Speaker 8: You point out though, that it's very very interesting exactly
Speaker 8: how you point out that he's asked to speculate. So
Speaker 8: there's a lot of speculation leading to if you accept
Speaker 8: that speculation or that conclusion based on that speculation, that
Speaker 8: it's somewhat tenuous, if to say the least, all of
Speaker 8: these things put together. And it is to me surprising
Speaker 8: that he was allowed without objection, as you point out,
Speaker 8: to be able to do that, to be able to
Speaker 8: make sort of references and connections, and so as you
Speaker 8: do in the book describe a little more what he
Speaker 8: was able to do, the prosecution was able to use him,
Speaker 8: to be able to say which was quite conclusive.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, I mean, the point I remember most
Speaker 4: is is that I believe he was asked the question
Speaker 4: who do you think committed this crime? One or two people?
Speaker 4: And I believe he answered something to the fact of
Speaker 4: and I'm summarizing, I believe it. I believe it was
Speaker 4: one person, and I believe that person knew him, and
Speaker 4: that person, you know, was very angry with him. That's
Speaker 4: clear speculation that that, to me, is just outrageous on
Speaker 4: the defense attorney. I'm standing up and objecting to that,
Speaker 4: having it stricken the whole thing, because a hell, can
Speaker 4: this guy say, who committed this crime? You know, who
Speaker 4: we just described was Tracy Fordson. That's who he described.
Speaker 8: The other idea is that we haven't talked about the
Speaker 8: crime itself, but we did mention in the introduction that
Speaker 8: Doug was Tracy's husband, was encased in cement and inside
Speaker 8: disguised in inside a watering trough that had been disguised.
Speaker 8: Now in this it doesn't look like you say it's
Speaker 8: a slam dunk, that it's Tracy Fortson. According to a
Speaker 8: couple of his friends, there was another interesting a part
Speaker 8: of the investigation. It seems a miss. And you do
Speaker 8: point out some of the things in the investigation, some
Speaker 8: of the practices that were done that don't seem to
Speaker 8: be normal investigative procedure. And one of those was the
Speaker 8: question of when they talked to Jeff Bennett right after
Speaker 8: and the idea that somehow he knew and made a
Speaker 8: statement regarding cement. Could you talk about that just a bit.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, you know, and look, in any investigation,
Speaker 4: me as the third party, the outside party who has
Speaker 4: the benefit of hindsight, meaning that I collect all the documentation,
Speaker 4: and I collect all the interviews, and I sit down
Speaker 4: and I look for mistakes. So I wasn't there, you know,
Speaker 4: in real time. You know, look, this was this was
Speaker 4: something that this this Sheriff's department hardly ever saw. I mean,
Speaker 4: here you had a guy, Doug Benton, who was Tracy's boyfriend,
Speaker 4: not her husband, but her boyfriend, in cased in cement
Speaker 4: inside that watering trough. That watering trough spray painted, cameouflage,
Speaker 4: you know, crudely cameouflaged with spray paint, and it was
Speaker 4: dumped in a field, a pasture with you know, farm animals, Kyle's,
Speaker 4: et cetera. Tracy hunted in and it was way out
Speaker 4: and it was trying to be hidden, and you know,
Speaker 4: you do a quick search. Immediately you find that Tracy
Speaker 4: Fordson bought bags of cement at the local feed store.
Speaker 4: She bought a brand new galvanized watering trough that in
Speaker 4: her garage. She has cans of spray paint that kind
Speaker 4: of matched the camouflage colors. She even spray painted her
Speaker 4: mailbox at some point the same colors. And you know,
Speaker 4: looking at this, and there's there's cement in the back
Speaker 4: of her pickup truck, you know, powdered cement and scratches,
Speaker 4: and there's indications on a tree next to the trough
Speaker 4: that she used a wire to pull the thing off.
Speaker 4: And you're like, holy wow, you know, oh my god.
Speaker 4: And I look at that, and then they asked you,
Speaker 4: Jeff Bennett. You know, a friend of Jeff's about a
Speaker 4: friend of Doug's rather bent and the victim, and you know,
Speaker 4: he mentions the word cement, and and I didn't see
Speaker 4: too much in that. I didn't read too much into that.
Speaker 4: Tracy read Moore into that than I did. He must
Speaker 4: have he must have, you know, knew something about that
Speaker 4: from somewhere else. She liked the point a singer at
Speaker 4: Jeff Bennett. She liked to say that he knew things
Speaker 4: he shouldn't have. But I never found any of that,
Speaker 4: you know, I found a guy to be Jeff's good
Speaker 4: friend who didn't like her. You know, That's what I found.
Speaker 4: I found a lot of her his friends didn't like her.
Speaker 4: I found that a lot of people didn't like her,
Speaker 4: that she was an unlikable person. I think the bigger
Speaker 4: piece of evidence to me that I I don't question it,
Speaker 4: but I do have questions about it. If you can
Speaker 4: understand that Dan is the neighbor. The neighbor, here's a
Speaker 4: gunshot in Doug's house, and remember Doug a shot once
Speaker 4: from the top of the skull. But she doesn't come
Speaker 4: forward with that information for like six months, and that
Speaker 4: that I wondered why, And yeah, so there's a lot
Speaker 4: of questions, you know. So what I'm saying is this neighbor,
Speaker 4: here's a gunshot, she reports, here a gunshot. I come outside.
Speaker 4: I'm thinking someone's hunting. But then I see Tracy come
Speaker 4: out of the house an hour later getting her truck
Speaker 4: and leaves from Dougs. What does that tell you? You hear
Speaker 4: a gun shot, Tracy walks out an hour later, gets
Speaker 4: in her truck and leaves. And I'm a journal I'm thinking,
Speaker 4: most you shot him. And then she cleaned up and
Speaker 4: then she left right right. So there's a lot of
Speaker 4: questions here, and I say that in the opening pages
Speaker 4: of this book. There are so many questions that need
Speaker 4: to be answered. If someone wants to dig further into this.
Speaker 4: I'm satisfied with the perrect I'm satisfied with what happened
Speaker 4: to Tracy. You know, I don't know that a further
Speaker 4: investigation will dig up anything, but I think there's questions
Speaker 4: that need to be answered. And I could say that
Speaker 4: about every case I look into. Dan.
Speaker 8: Yeah, what was it again? We talked about how many
Speaker 8: books that you have written, thirty one plus four history books,
Speaker 8: so thirty i've in total? Is that correct?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 7: I think a beautiful thirty sixth Earlie, we.
Speaker 8: Didn't quite hear that. It was a little garbled, but
Speaker 8: you were saying about thirty six. What I'm going to
Speaker 8: ask is, with all this experience and you do in
Speaker 8: the beginning of the book talk about the state of
Speaker 8: true crime today, what is it that you have brought
Speaker 8: to this book, to this this book and Wild Blue Press,
Speaker 8: And what does Wild Blue Press offer you in terms
Speaker 8: of freedom, what freedom to do? What with this book?
Speaker 8: And what do you bring from all that experience, all
Speaker 8: the work that you've done, the experience on Dark Minds, investigation, discovery,
Speaker 8: everything you've done. And I agree with you taking these stories,
Speaker 8: you have to become part of the story. You're such
Speaker 8: so immersed in these things that you have to be
Speaker 8: part of the story. What is all that experience brought
Speaker 8: to this book that's different?
Speaker 4: Can you hear me? Fine? I just want to make
Speaker 4: sure you can hear me, Dan, Okay, cool? Yeah, I
Speaker 4: mean I just in the beginning of this book, I
Speaker 4: really I actually toned it down right before press. I
Speaker 4: was a little bit more severe about the true crime industry.
Speaker 4: And you know, true crime writers have always been looked
Speaker 4: down at by the literary establishment, and those books with
Speaker 4: the tawdry covers and deadly and evil on every cover
Speaker 4: and black and red covers will judge those books without
Speaker 4: even opening them. And I think that's disingenuous. I think
Speaker 4: it's mean spirited. I think it's I think it's people
Speaker 4: who think they're better writers than other people doing. I
Speaker 4: think it's ridiculous, and it angers me because I worked
Speaker 4: my ass off on these books, and I know other
Speaker 4: journalists that work their asses off on these books, and
Speaker 4: you know, they're snubbed and because your book is sold
Speaker 4: at a drug store in a rack that it's cheap,
Speaker 4: it's ridiculous. Stephen King has been mounting that argument for
Speaker 4: you know, thirty years, the same argument, but in a
Speaker 4: different genre. And I just wanted to talk about that
Speaker 4: a little bit in the opening of this book, that
Speaker 4: you know nothing against my other publishers owned and run
Speaker 4: by a true crime author, and Steve Jackson knows the business,
Speaker 4: he knows the work that's involved in these things. And look,
Speaker 4: this book was vetted by attorneys and everything, just like
Speaker 4: any other book. It's the same type of book. It's
Speaker 4: that's been I've written for other publishers. What why offered
Speaker 4: me was my experience when I call Steve Jackson up
Speaker 4: on the phone and I say, I got a great
Speaker 4: case for you, and I want to tell it my
Speaker 4: own way. He says, Phelps, you've earned that respect from me.
Speaker 4: You've written thirty four books, You're a New York Times bestseller,
Speaker 4: you have the respect of the industry. Whatever you want
Speaker 4: to do, Phelps, go ahead, I'll publish it. So so
Speaker 4: that that to me right there, it's it's not like
Speaker 4: I have to I have to jump through a bunch
Speaker 4: of hoops for an editor who's asking me, well, you know, ah,
Speaker 4: you know, it doesn't have an interesting female character, it
Speaker 4: doesn't have a you know, you know, this is true.
Speaker 4: This is true, This is nonfiction, this is journalism. Steve
Speaker 4: knows that I know what a good story is, and
Speaker 4: I know how to tell a good story, and he
Speaker 4: doesn't question that. And I was just so appreciative and
Speaker 4: humbled by that, and and you know, and and that's
Speaker 4: what while Blue Press offers, you know, and and look,
Speaker 4: I'm writing a book now for Kensington Publishing, my old publisher,
Speaker 4: the one the publisher who published Dangerous. I'm writing a
Speaker 4: new book for her about Belly Cochlan, my editor there.
Speaker 4: So you know, I go back and forth. Where there's
Speaker 4: stories that I need to tell, I go find the
Speaker 4: right place to tell them, you know. But yeah, I'm
Speaker 4: a little pissed off. As you can see in the
Speaker 4: author's note about this true crime explosion we're having and
Speaker 4: people jumping on the true crime bandwagon and all of
Speaker 4: a sudden trying to shine up true crime from their
Speaker 4: previous you know, description of it. You know, you've got
Speaker 4: people in true crime right now that basically shunned it
Speaker 4: fifteen years ago. That's basically what I was trying to
Speaker 4: say in that author's note that you know, you have
Speaker 4: some pretty big names now doing true crime who ten
Speaker 4: years ago laughed at you for writing a true crime book.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it's it's interesting in that and encouraging that true
Speaker 8: crime has Again. People a few years ago we're talking about, well,
Speaker 8: how could you watch that or how could you read that?
Speaker 8: It's all right Gore, And they were dismissing something that
Speaker 8: they hadn't even read. And now there it seems encouraging
Speaker 8: at least that we're not people that are true crime
Speaker 8: fans aren't seem so freakish. But like you say, everybody
Speaker 8: is getting in on it, whether they shunned it years ago.
Speaker 8: I'm in Canada and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is like that. Now.
Speaker 8: They wouldn't even report on things through their news agency
Speaker 8: regarding Picton or Bernardo and Homolka, but yet now they're
Speaker 8: producing American stories in Canada for a Canadian audience. Again
Speaker 8: almost totally against their whole ethic, you know. But still
Speaker 8: a bandwagon is a bandwagon. So what I think, though,
Speaker 8: is encouraging is wild Blue Press. Some of the more
Speaker 8: interesting guests that have been on this program that once
Speaker 8: we're with Kensington are now with Wild Blue Press, and
Speaker 8: Wild Bloe Press is going over and beyond what normally
Speaker 8: I think the True Crime imprint would do and being
Speaker 8: allowing authors like you say, to tell their own stories,
Speaker 8: trying them enough to be able to produce the books
Speaker 8: that they feel that the audience will accept. And the
Speaker 8: audience obviously is accepting it. So I agree with you that.
Speaker 4: I mean, Dan, I know what my audience wants at
Speaker 4: this point in the game. If I didn't know, I
Speaker 4: wouldn't be in the game anymore. My audience wouldn't allow
Speaker 4: me to be in the game. I mean, I know
Speaker 4: what they want on TV, I know what they want
Speaker 4: in book form, and Steve Jackson Wildly Press Press is
Speaker 4: a place where I can go to them and say
Speaker 4: they're gonna love this, and Steve's gonna say you're the guy,
Speaker 4: not me. The other thing I want to say is
Speaker 4: you're in Canada. I just want to shout out to
Speaker 4: Trailer Park Boys. I love that show My God. I've
Speaker 4: been a fan of that show for oh my God.
Speaker 4: But it's funny you say that about Canadian television because
Speaker 4: it's it's it's it's one hundredfold here. You know, there's
Speaker 4: there's networks doing true crime now who you wouldn't even
Speaker 4: didn't even know what the words true crime meant ten
Speaker 4: years ago, you know. So it's it's it's really is.
Speaker 4: In many ways, it's in many ways it's disgusting, but
Speaker 4: in other ways it's empowering for me because I like
Speaker 4: being able to go to Kensington Publishing with certain stories,
Speaker 4: and I like to be able to go to Wild
Speaker 4: Blue Press with certain store true crime stores. And I
Speaker 4: like to take historical true crime cases to Lions Press,
Speaker 4: who I've written four books for, you know, historical true crimes.
Speaker 4: So I like to diversify my publishers, you know. I
Speaker 4: like to go to the best place who can do
Speaker 4: the best jobs for that particular case.
Speaker 8: Absolutely. Now, with this book targeted, you got to speak
Speaker 8: with Tracy Forts, and then he's say in the book
Speaker 8: it was essential that you would be able to speak
Speaker 8: with or you wouldn't even have done the project, wouldn't
Speaker 8: have considered it without her cooperation. Correct, Now, with this
Speaker 8: would not tell us tell us about again this many
Speaker 8: years of experience, How did you approach this interview with
Speaker 8: her differently than say, twenty years ago, when you were
Speaker 8: looking at interviews. What did you bring What new techniques
Speaker 8: did you bring to this interview that you hadn't brought
Speaker 8: to previous ones.
Speaker 4: That's a great question, Dan, because I knew that I
Speaker 4: could tell the story anyway that the story dictated it
Speaker 4: to me. So sometimes you're working on a case and
Speaker 4: it changes, it changes your whole perspective of how you're
Speaker 4: going to tell the story to your readers. And with
Speaker 4: this case, when she started talking to me and we
Speaker 4: started to get into it, and we started to disagree,
Speaker 4: and we started to bought heads and fight, and she
Speaker 4: started to question my ethics, I said, that's part of
Speaker 4: this story. Whereas ten fifteen years ago that would have
Speaker 4: been in an epilogue, two pages in an epilogue in
Speaker 4: the back of the book. Sure, now I can incorporate
Speaker 4: it in real time as part of the narrative, which
Speaker 4: I did hear, because it really added an extra layer
Speaker 4: of reporting to this story. You know, it showed just
Speaker 4: a deeper, deeper aspect of Tracy Fordson's character that when
Speaker 4: I pushed her and I pushed her on those hard questions,
Speaker 4: those questions that readers would ask when they're reading the book.
Speaker 4: When I pushed her, if I'm innocent, I say this
Speaker 4: in the book over and over again. If I'm innocent,
Speaker 4: I'm going to answer any question off the top of
Speaker 4: my head without any argument whatsoever, because I do not
Speaker 4: have to remember the truth. The truth is inherent.
Speaker 5: Okay, Brown. Two, name something that's not boring.
Speaker 1: Laundry, book club, computer solitaire.
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Speaker 4: Dot com. It's part of who I am. It's in
Speaker 4: my soul. I don't have to recall it. It just
Speaker 4: it's who I am. So so when I push and
Speaker 4: you push back harder at me and then you disappear
Speaker 4: that suspect to me, you know that that I begin
Speaker 4: to question that. And that's what I did to her.
Speaker 4: I kept I kept telling her, as I wrote in
Speaker 4: the book, Look, I don't care how you feel. I
Speaker 4: don't care what you think. I don't care about your speculation.
Speaker 4: All I care about is the truth. How do you
Speaker 4: get me to your truth that you're saying it is?
Speaker 4: How do you get me there? Tracy? I want to
Speaker 4: get there with you. Take me there? And then she'd
Speaker 4: say something that I'd say, but that's speculation. There's no
Speaker 4: there's no way that there's no way to corroborate that
Speaker 4: at all. So, you know, we I ran into this
Speaker 4: brick wall over and over and over again. Like there's
Speaker 4: one section, Dan, and you might recall this where she
Speaker 4: totally misreads the document written by the medical examiner. She
Speaker 4: totally misreads a statement in it, and she thinks it's
Speaker 4: in the fairyest statement. And I said, he's only guilty
Speaker 4: of not putting a comment in the right place in
Speaker 4: that document. That's the only thing he's guilty of. And
Speaker 4: she tried to say that he was lying in a
Speaker 4: document submitted to the court about something that could be
Speaker 4: easily checked. It made no sense to me, you know.
Speaker 4: So those are the types of things that I really
Speaker 4: was like, Jesus, this is you know, you know, this
Speaker 4: is stupid. You know, let's get to the point here,
Speaker 4: Let's get to the point here. You know, she talks
Speaker 4: about recorded conversations that her daughter made with I didn't
Speaker 4: name the guy with someone so recorded conversations that the
Speaker 4: guy she made the conversations with would not back up
Speaker 4: with an affidavit that you could as signed after David
Speaker 4: you could submit to the court. And you know, so
Speaker 4: the court looks at this, The appelic court looks at this,
Speaker 4: and they say, where's the signed off of David. Where's
Speaker 4: his testimony about this conversation. He wouldn't testify, He wouldn't
Speaker 4: sign it off for David. So what does that tell you?
Speaker 4: That tells me a lot. That tells me that person
Speaker 4: is not willing to back off what he said or
Speaker 4: he never said it. That's what that tells me.
Speaker 8: You would think, now, in this same theme, you must
Speaker 8: have before you will go to do this interview. You
Speaker 8: must have realized or wonder what were the expectations for
Speaker 8: Tracy to do this interview. You say, she's exhausted all
Speaker 8: her appeals, she knows who you are. You're probably not.
Speaker 8: Probably you were likely said this is a fourthright about
Speaker 8: your intentions and how you were going to conduct yourself.
Speaker 8: What do you think her expectations were for this interview?
Speaker 8: And how sensible was she? German this entire thing and
Speaker 8: even accessing something from this interview tell us about this.
Speaker 4: I mean that that that that to me is is
Speaker 4: is the question right? Because it's like, I was totally
Speaker 4: upfront with her. I'm gonna report on everything I find.
Speaker 4: I'm gonna tell your story. Sure, you want to say
Speaker 4: this person lied and this is framed, I'll quote you
Speaker 4: on that. But then I'm also going to tell that
Speaker 4: person's story and I'm gonna counter it with you know, documentation,
Speaker 4: et cetera, et cetera. And why do I think she
Speaker 4: ultimately talked to me? Was ultimately they all they all
Speaker 4: want to talk. They all want to believe that they
Speaker 4: can get out of that place. They all want to
Speaker 4: believe that someone's gonna hear them, someone's gonna believe them,
Speaker 4: and that one piece of evidence quotes is there out
Speaker 4: there that's going to get them out of jail. Or
Speaker 4: they're just gonna, you know, get some time again to
Speaker 4: bull horn clause and tell their story again. It's the
Speaker 4: only part of this that bothered me was how much
Speaker 4: of a slam dunk it was. And I think I
Speaker 4: even mentioned that in the book. I'm like, well, this
Speaker 4: is a freaking slam I mean, the evidence is just
Speaker 4: over overwhelming, overwhelming? Is it too overwhelming? And then I
Speaker 4: come to the question and I and I commented a book,
Speaker 4: Well wait a minute. For that to happen, for there
Speaker 4: to be some elaborate frame up, there would be five
Speaker 4: agencies involved, FBI, GBI, Sheriff's department, police department, judges, prosecute.
Speaker 4: I mean, that's stuff that doesn't happen. It doesn't happen,
Speaker 4: you know. And and we're so today, we're so conspiracy driven,
Speaker 4: were so making a murder type of cops are framing
Speaker 4: everybody thinking that just the mention of it today gets
Speaker 4: people's attention, right, So, yeah, so I'm working in that
Speaker 4: world today, you know. And maybe she's trying to take
Speaker 4: advantage of that world. Maybe that's why she helped, right,
Speaker 4: because she's trying to take advantage of that world that
Speaker 4: we live in today. But for me, and I appreciate
Speaker 4: you saying it earlier, Dan, that for me, I just
Speaker 4: laid it all out. This is what Tracy said, this
Speaker 4: is what the cops said, here's what the public record said,
Speaker 4: here's what I dug up for information that I you know,
Speaker 4: it wasn't hard to find, and here it is, you know,
Speaker 4: here's all of it, and you decide, And the overwhelming
Speaker 4: decision of readers thus far is she's guilty as hell.
Speaker 8: You very much like every other true crime book that
Speaker 8: you've done, you have gotten all the information and background
Speaker 8: information on Tracy Fordson's life. Now you talk about she
Speaker 8: had to give you this information obviously, how much was
Speaker 8: she directing that information towards even though she said she's innocent.
Speaker 8: How understandable based on her background, the information she gave
Speaker 8: you to talk about her father and the breakup with
Speaker 8: her mother and her broken heart with her boyfriend Billy Jackson.
Speaker 8: How much of this was she directing towards an excuse
Speaker 8: or was she able just to give you this information
Speaker 8: and you just saw it as well? That makes sense
Speaker 8: that she ended up in the place that she did.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that information there was like, tell me about your
Speaker 4: childhood and then she'd send me four pages, all right,
Speaker 4: tell me about your first love affair. She'd send me
Speaker 4: five pages, all right, tell me when you first met Doug.
Speaker 4: She'd send me ten pages, and I'd let I'd just
Speaker 4: let it go right. And what I would try to
Speaker 4: do is call people involved and say, hey, you know,
Speaker 4: do you remember this? And a lot of those people
Speaker 4: didn't even want to talk about it. It was so
Speaker 4: insignificant to them. So what I did in the book
Speaker 4: was your story, with the disclaimer that you know, this
Speaker 4: is her voice, this is her story. I'm just kind
Speaker 4: of repeating it for take what you will. And there's
Speaker 4: little nuggets in that, in that whole narrative of her
Speaker 4: life that that show, you know, pieces of who she is.
Speaker 4: There's also what she left out, right, So I know
Speaker 4: there's stuff she left out. There's plenty of stuff she
Speaker 4: left out. She's not gonna tell me about the bumps
Speaker 4: and bruises, you know, She's not gonna tell me about
Speaker 4: the trouble, you know. And yeah, but when you look
Speaker 4: at that, when I look at that, I also looked
Speaker 4: at court testimony of people who knew her, and repeatedly
Speaker 4: you see in both trials, repeatedly you see people who
Speaker 4: just said she's not a good person, she is mean, vulgar, controlling,
Speaker 4: over and over and over. Not one person, not two people,
Speaker 4: not three people, but Jesus, but all the neighbors, all
Speaker 4: Doug's friends, you know, in fact, the only one person
Speaker 4: that really was one hundred percent behind her, save for
Speaker 4: her daughter, was the strangest thing to me was Doug
Speaker 4: Ben's mother, the victim's mother believes that Tracy is innocent,
Speaker 4: and that was the first time I ever ran into
Speaker 4: that and I just found that to be It just
Speaker 4: blew my mind, just blew my mind. But then again,
Speaker 4: talking to the mother, talking to Carol Benton, I can
Speaker 4: see that she's been you know, I hesitate to use
Speaker 4: certain words, but her and Tracy have been talking for
Speaker 4: a long time.
Speaker 8: We talked about this in the introduction to this in
Speaker 8: that there was a sexual harassment suit and she claims
Speaker 8: a sexual harassment suit she filed against the sheriff led
Speaker 8: to a murder charge. Again, what's interesting, and I find
Speaker 8: this continually that it looked like, on the base of it,
Speaker 8: at least from her statements, that there might be something
Speaker 8: to that, at least that there might be some motive.
Speaker 8: Now I don't know if she had time to work
Speaker 8: on that.
Speaker 6: But.
Speaker 8: What did she say I think about that, and how
Speaker 8: she seemed pretty convinced about this part, and it was
Speaker 8: some there's a lot, at least circumstantial evidence to back
Speaker 8: up what she said regarding that.
Speaker 4: And you know, if you look at it on the surface,
Speaker 4: you might come to that conclusion, but then you look
Speaker 4: at it a little bit more. You see is this
Speaker 4: and I had a hard time believing that a sexual
Speaker 4: And when we talk about sexual harassment, we're not talking
Speaker 4: about the Harvey Weinstein type of sexual harassment we're seeing today.
Speaker 4: What we're talking about is no men around the office,
Speaker 4: sheriffs deputies, you know, cracking man jokes with a woman around,
Speaker 4: so nobody was touching her or or nobody was, you know,
Speaker 4: making nasty accusations against her. In fact, what I heard
Speaker 4: from other people in that same office was she was
Speaker 4: cracking her own sexually charged jokes too, right. So so
Speaker 4: then we have this fact that Doug Benton, the victim,
Speaker 4: is the one who pushed her into filing those charges, right, Okay,
Speaker 4: So then she claims, well, the sexual harassment against the
Speaker 4: sheriff was the motivation, was the impetus for them to
Speaker 4: frame her for murder because she made the sheriff look bad.
Speaker 4: I don't believe that for one minute. I think that's bs,
Speaker 4: total bs. But now on the other end of that,
Speaker 4: she says, oh, but Doug Benton was a CI, A
Speaker 4: confidential informant, and I believe he was feeding information his
Speaker 4: sheriff's department, and he got killed over that information. So
Speaker 4: now you have two totally different stories. She's telling in
Speaker 4: the same best. What you're saying is the sexual harassment
Speaker 4: was the impetus for the murder. But then when that
Speaker 4: doesn't work, when I start to push on that, she's, well, well,
Speaker 4: Doug was a CI. You know, he was a CI,
Speaker 4: and I know there were people after him. And there
Speaker 4: I call him in the book, I call the drug dealer.
Speaker 4: I don't name him, I use a fictitious name. And well,
Speaker 4: this guy must have had him killed, you know. So
Speaker 4: it's like, okay, we'll pick your argument here, man, you know,
Speaker 4: pick your hargument here, you know. And and and look,
Speaker 4: the sexual harassment suit never went anywhere. It never went anywhere.
Speaker 4: She also files for unemployment compensation before the sexual harassment
Speaker 4: suit is filed. So there's all kinds of little red
Speaker 4: flags that stick up when we when we try to
Speaker 4: place this sexual harassment suit motivation for frame into the matrix.
Speaker 4: There's all kinds of red flags that just pop up
Speaker 4: to me.
Speaker 8: What was the theory by the prosecution why Doug was killed.
Speaker 4: It's the oldest theory in the book. It's it's the
Speaker 4: oldest love murder story in the book. Hugs said, get
Speaker 4: out of my life. I don't want you in my
Speaker 4: life no more. You're a menace. You won't let me
Speaker 4: work out with my friends. We know that Doug was
Speaker 4: big into bodybuilding, taking steroids, you know, competition, all of that,
Speaker 4: and he had a workout partner, Jeff Bennett, worked out
Speaker 4: all the time, they worked out at the house. As
Speaker 4: soon as Tracy came into the picture, she started working
Speaker 4: out with Jeff, she started causing problems. Finally, she's just
Speaker 4: this menace in his life. She just starts really really
Speaker 4: becoming this domineering, controlling person to Doug, pushing him around,
Speaker 4: basically telling him who he should hang out with, where
Speaker 4: he should go when she he should do it, where
Speaker 4: he should work, how much he should work, controlling his money.
Speaker 4: And Doug is just up to here with it all.
Speaker 4: And he says, you get out of here, get out
Speaker 4: of my life. I don't want you in my life
Speaker 4: no more. Leave. They get an argument, she leaves, she
Speaker 4: comes back that night, he tells her to get out
Speaker 4: of here again, and he's dead two days later. And
Speaker 4: when you look at Tracy's anger issues, when you look
Speaker 4: at her issues in the past. When you look at
Speaker 4: the means and the motive, it all spells out someone
Speaker 4: who just snapped, kind of you know, who snapped and
Speaker 4: kind of might have had the horse trough and the
Speaker 4: paint and all of this on hand and went out
Speaker 4: and bought to some men and just you know, snapped.
Speaker 4: You know, there's that whole cover up of the crime
Speaker 4: scene that we didn't talk about, that relief for your
Speaker 4: listeners to read in the book, that's a major part
Speaker 4: of the story where prosecution believes is killed on one
Speaker 4: day and two days later someone goes into the crime
Speaker 4: scene to try to burn the place down, and there's
Speaker 4: only one person who could have known that this murder
Speaker 4: investigation was going on, and that one person had to
Speaker 4: be in law enforcement, and Tracy was a deputy chef.
Speaker 4: So two and two, you know, they make four a
Speaker 4: lot of the times I'd never seen two and two
Speaker 4: make three, you know, And sometimes we want to look
Speaker 4: for things that aren't as obvious as they are. When
Speaker 4: when you know what the answer is, just that obvious answer.
Speaker 4: It's just that obvious answer. You know that, yes, she's
Speaker 4: not the smartest killer because of the mistakes she made
Speaker 4: and where she bought stuff and when she did it.
Speaker 4: But yeah, yeah. Another argument Tracy Fordson makes is, how
Speaker 4: could they possibly know it was Doug at the CROs
Speaker 4: You know, when they when they lifted up that horse
Speaker 4: trough in the in the field, and and and they
Speaker 4: identified him out in that field. How could they possibly know?
Speaker 4: It is an easy explanation for that, and the report
Speaker 4: a report obviously she never saw. Easy explanation is someone
Speaker 4: saw a pat two on his arm and one of
Speaker 4: the deputies said, I know that guy. He hangs around
Speaker 4: the Sheriff's department. That's basically boyfriend. That's Doug Benton, I know.
Speaker 4: And sure enough they look up and Doug Benton has
Speaker 4: been missing for two weeks. Of course it's them, you know,
Speaker 4: that's not Columbo stuff. That's just you know, a small
Speaker 4: town people knowing each other, you know what I'm saying, Dan,
Speaker 4: mm hmm. Yeah.
Speaker 8: What about her strategy with all of this? What do
Speaker 8: you think of because it seems unusual for a person
Speaker 8: to keep repeating that they're innocent instead of thinking or
Speaker 8: someone advising at some point that because there's no witnesses,
Speaker 8: could at least it seems to be popular to claim
Speaker 8: self defense and then try to build something later that
Speaker 8: as they did with the steroids, and cast doubt on
Speaker 8: other potential people. But at least, what do you make
Speaker 8: of that her continual insistence that she's not guilty.
Speaker 4: Sometimes you run into people who, well most of the time,
Speaker 4: not sometimes most of the time. I mean, out of
Speaker 4: all the female murders I've written about, and I've written
Speaker 4: about female murders, I've written about now probably twenty six
Speaker 4: female murders, right, I've never ever interviewed one that said,
Speaker 4: you know, and I panicked and I'm sorry, and I
Speaker 4: tried to cover it up and it was an accent.
Speaker 4: Never it's always den I deny till the end, till
Speaker 4: the end. And in this case, what you have is
Speaker 4: you have the Sheriff's department immediately onto her and her
Speaker 4: backtracking right away. If you look at it from that perspective,
Speaker 4: Let's take a look at it from that perspective for
Speaker 4: a minute. That she is guilty, and that they did
Speaker 4: a great investigation which led directly to her, and they
Speaker 4: start questioning her. Well, she's backtracking now, and she's trying
Speaker 4: to come up with answers, and these are the answers
Speaker 4: she comes up with you know, she never made in
Speaker 4: the beginning, which leads back to the comment you made
Speaker 4: in the beginning that she's had sixteen seventeen years to
Speaker 4: think about it all now, right, Yeah, of what she
Speaker 4: hangs on now is that bullet fragment and the testimony
Speaker 4: of Bernard at Daisy, the ballistics expert. And sure enough
Speaker 4: I dig up reports of some really bad report writing
Speaker 4: on her part. If you look at the things Bernard
Speaker 4: that baby did, they were done out of laziness. They
Speaker 4: weren't done out in the fairy. It's like, oh jeez,
Speaker 4: I want to frame this guy. Everything she did, every
Speaker 4: mistakes she made that she admitted to those periods, was
Speaker 4: basically done out of laziness. She didn't want to conduct
Speaker 4: twelve pulls of the trigger. She only did ten, all right,
Speaker 4: all right, ten, not twelve?
Speaker 6: Right?
Speaker 4: Doing that is like leading to anybody, you know, her
Speaker 4: trying to frame somebody. You know, you know, does that
Speaker 4: bad testimony belong court? Absolutely not? And I and I
Speaker 4: you know, and she was fired and you know and
Speaker 4: all of that for that. But what does it mean
Speaker 4: that Tracy Fortune is innocent? Hell no, it doesn't. Hell no,
Speaker 4: that bullet that they took out a Doug's skull matched
Speaker 4: the gun in her house, you know what I mean,
Speaker 4: There's just no doubt about that. Scientifically speaking, it matched period.
Speaker 8: Why I think it's important what you bring up though
Speaker 8: with Bernadette Davey, and then your investigation to show that
Speaker 8: she had been sighted sanctioned she had been you could
Speaker 8: at least look at what that might imply, and then
Speaker 8: see how trials and appeals are mounted again based on that,
Speaker 8: and then not to basically not to depict everybody's ignorant,
Speaker 8: but that's a lot different than being innocent, where somebody's
Speaker 8: credibility comes into play and in those cases are reviewed.
Speaker 8: Like you say that, I might open the floodgates to
Speaker 8: cases to be reviewed because of the ethical infractions that
Speaker 8: this Davy did. When I see though, in all of
Speaker 8: this though, and maybe I'm getting the wrong impression, it
Speaker 8: seemed that once law enforcement is absolutely with this slam
Speaker 8: dunk sure that someone is convictable and they're guilty, that
Speaker 8: sometimes they skip certain procedures and steps, and like you say,
Speaker 8: with the crime scene analysis, some things that maybe shouldn't
Speaker 8: have been able to be said again gets through appeals.
Speaker 8: But it seems that once they know someone's guilty, see that,
Speaker 8: they do a lot of stuff to support that, and
Speaker 8: I think that shows sometimes it can be dangerous to
Speaker 8: do that.
Speaker 4: Are you're one hundred percent right? I mean we just
Speaker 4: double back to the OJ Simpson case slam dunk, but geez,
Speaker 4: were their mistakes made? Oh my god? Yeah right? And
Speaker 4: I can just see investigators walking around nervous, like, oh
Speaker 4: my god, this is a slam dunk. He did it.
Speaker 4: The blood leads right to us. We got to make
Speaker 4: sure we button up everything on this, leave no stone unturned.
Speaker 4: And you know what starts happening there is you do
Speaker 4: start making mistakes, and you do start looking kind of
Speaker 4: stupid a little bit because you're overwhelmed. You're overwhelmed. I
Speaker 4: mean if you look at the reports in the beginning
Speaker 4: of this case, which I did, I mean I studied
Speaker 4: up and down. You can see these cops are writing
Speaker 4: the reports and they're like, you know, you can just
Speaker 4: see it, see it in it. It's all leading to
Speaker 4: one person, and it's like, all right, she doesn't have
Speaker 4: a PhD. And how to murder somebody because she bought
Speaker 4: the cement, you know, five miles away. You know what
Speaker 4: I mean or or she bought a horse watering uh truugh,
Speaker 4: you know, a couple of days before, you know, Okay,
Speaker 4: so she's not the smartest killer, but she's still a killer, right,
Speaker 4: And yeah, if you look at these reports, I mean,
Speaker 4: you know, my whole thing was and I made this
Speaker 4: point in the book. I think pretty clearly that, knowing
Speaker 4: what I know about investigations, if it was up to me,
Speaker 4: if I was running that investigations, what I what I
Speaker 4: would have done was I'd have taken a step back
Speaker 4: from Tracy, and I had to put a tail on her,
Speaker 4: and I had to let her go about her business
Speaker 4: for the next month, you know. And and i'd have
Speaker 4: just watched her, you know, instead of just rushing to
Speaker 4: bring her in. You know what I mean, I would
Speaker 4: have I would have watched her make mistakes. I would
Speaker 4: have watched her make one mistake after the next and
Speaker 4: watch her just you know, bury herself if you will,
Speaker 4: no pun intended. So so yeah, I mean, you know,
Speaker 4: and then Tracy makes the whole big deal about the
Speaker 4: forks in the tractor that probably punctured Dug and it
Speaker 4: wasn't a knife, right. That makes this whole case for
Speaker 4: this and what do I say. In the end, it
Speaker 4: doesn't make any difference. It doesn't make any difference. If
Speaker 4: a knife did it or the forks did it makes
Speaker 4: no difference. In the end. What makes the difference is
Speaker 4: the guy was shot in the head on that couch
Speaker 4: as he was laying down. He was shot in the head,
Speaker 4: and then somebody allegedly stabbed him all over the mid section.
Speaker 4: Wounds really don't matter to me if I'm looking at
Speaker 4: who did this, you know, they don't matter to me.
Speaker 4: What matters to me is what happens afterwards to clean up,
Speaker 4: trying to you know, burn the crime scene down, that
Speaker 4: whole thing, you know. Yeah, so it's you know, look, look,
Speaker 4: sometimes you look out into the water and you see
Speaker 4: a duck swimming by, and you know, you're certain that
Speaker 4: it's a duck, and you get closer to it and
Speaker 4: you're like, damn it, all, that's a duck, you know
Speaker 4: what I mean. Very rarely you say, well, no, that's
Speaker 4: a loon, you know, because the loon is much bigger, right, So,
Speaker 4: so look, it looks like a duck, acts like a duck.
Speaker 4: You know, it's a duck. And I have seen nothing
Speaker 4: nothing in this case that tells me that Tracy Fordson
Speaker 4: is innocent. I just see questions, questions that can't be answered.
Speaker 8: It seems interesting too, like you say that it seems
Speaker 8: a little lax in this investigation because you say you
Speaker 8: might have wanted them to survey her for a little while,
Speaker 8: gather some more information, let her make some mistakes, be cautious,
Speaker 8: and consider that maybe a Shaff's deputy might know something
Speaker 8: about the be able to cover her tracks. But what's
Speaker 8: interesting to me was when there's the search for Doug Benton,
Speaker 8: if the police aren't aren't really so concerned with her
Speaker 8: reaction to.
Speaker 4: That, right, I mean, that's a great point, you know, Dan,
Speaker 4: That's that's an excellent point. And you know what, the
Speaker 4: other biggest point in this is that you bring up
Speaker 4: really made me think of this point and I and
Speaker 4: I and I say this in the book is let's
Speaker 4: say they framed her. Okay, let's say that that somebody
Speaker 4: framed her. That means that that person would have to
Speaker 4: been watch Tracy Fords in twenty four to seven, watched
Speaker 4: her go to the feed store and buy the cement
Speaker 4: and buy the trial, take it home and then steal
Speaker 4: it and then Barry dug in it. That's what she's
Speaker 4: saying when she's saying she's framed, That's what she's saying.
Speaker 4: That's what she's saying, that they stole that stuff from
Speaker 4: her and framed her with it that she bought. And
Speaker 4: I find that to be the most ridiculous statement of
Speaker 4: this entire thing, because that just it's impossible when you
Speaker 4: look at the logistics of that in the time frame
Speaker 4: and when he's missing and when he's buried, it's impossible
Speaker 4: for that to happen. It's just impossible. It doesn't add up.
Speaker 4: It does not add up.
Speaker 8: Well, like you say, it's fascinating for especially, like you said,
Speaker 8: you're part of this book. And then you go interview
Speaker 8: her and she has every opportunity to say whatever she wants.
Speaker 8: She has years to have planned. She's not a dummy.
Speaker 8: This woman she might have been careless and not a
Speaker 8: again not really a career killer, but she wasn't a
Speaker 8: stupid woman, and she was experiencing law enforcement. So it
Speaker 8: seems so unbelievable that faced with a journalist like yourself
Speaker 8: who tells her right out, because not everyone does listen,
Speaker 8: this is what's going to happen. And yet, like you
Speaker 8: say this obvious lying where you do have the opportunity
Speaker 8: to be able to answer answer your direct questions, and
Speaker 8: yet she's deflecting and offering alternative motives. It is really
Speaker 8: the trademark or the telltale liar for her doing this
Speaker 8: in spite of knowing that she has an opportunity, this
Speaker 8: last opportunity, to be able to provide a plausible not
Speaker 8: guilty defense for herself with this book, and she has
Speaker 8: failed miserably.
Speaker 4: And you know, and one more thing. I mean, you know,
Speaker 4: she would say to me things like, oh, you need
Speaker 4: to talk to this guy from me.
Speaker 8: He's dead.
Speaker 4: This guy could have summed it all up. I've heard
Speaker 4: that over and over and over again from these women
Speaker 4: that ident convicted of murder. Oh if only you could
Speaker 4: speak to this person like she mentions that guy who
Speaker 4: she doesn't know the last name or where he lives,
Speaker 4: and he has information. It's nothing, it's absolutely nothing. It's
Speaker 4: just speculation.
Speaker 8: It's yeah.
Speaker 4: So you know, hey, I think this is a great
Speaker 4: book in the respect that it presents the case from
Speaker 4: all sides and the reader gets to say, well, this
Speaker 4: is what I think. You know, the court thought this,
Speaker 4: She thinks that, and I think this.
Speaker 8: Yeah, no, it's incredible that you put yourself in this
Speaker 8: and you have provided all of that. It is a
Speaker 8: unique experience for a reader to be able to have
Speaker 8: all of that information, and I applaud you for this.
Speaker 8: Thank you very much, Matthew for coming on and talking
Speaker 8: about targeted a deputy, her love affairs, a brutal murder.
Speaker 8: Thank you very much. William. For those people that might
Speaker 8: want to just see what else you've done. Do you
Speaker 8: have a Facebook page your website? Tell us about that, please?
Speaker 4: Yeah, www dot Mwilliamphelps dot com. And then Twitter is
Speaker 4: at m William Phelps and same with Facebook. Just google
Speaker 4: em William Phelps Facebook and you run into my page.
Speaker 4: I think I'm going to start doing these live Facebook
Speaker 4: things once a month maybe or once every six weeks.
Speaker 4: I did one last week and it went over big,
Speaker 4: So I think I'm gonna start connecting with my readers
Speaker 4: that way too. And yeah, you know, you know, with
Speaker 4: the climate today of true crime, you got gotta change
Speaker 4: it up a little bit.
Speaker 8: Absolutely, And I think really it is the trend early
Speaker 8: is that people are going on true crime cruises and
Speaker 8: wanting to talk and listen to stories by authors and
Speaker 8: I think that's an encouraging part of this, and I
Speaker 8: think that the cream of the crop, like yourself, another
Speaker 8: really deserving author, will rise as people get educated, get
Speaker 8: through the shlock, get through that preliminary stuff, and get
Speaker 8: on to the real, serious, true crime. So thank you
Speaker 8: very much Matthew for coming on and talking about targeted.
Speaker 8: It's always been a pleasure. It has been a pleasure.
Speaker 8: Thank you very much. Have a great night. Thank you, Dan,
Speaker 8: talk to you again.
Speaker 4: Good night.
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