THREE

This podcast provides an in depth look at a case that is plagued with questions, and allows for various perspectives on what happened that led to the murder of a teenage girl. However, there are some issues: most importantly, the perspective of one of the killers’ close family friends allowed for victim blaming. This podcast aired, quote, “if she [skylar, the victim] was really having all those problems with the girls… why would she go with them?” Why is the podcast seeking to elevate the voice of someone who would blame Skylar for her demise? Additionally, some of the people interviewed did not offer anything of note (for example, the neighbor of Rachel). The podcast could have been shorter and more interesting by eliminating these. My final comment is that there was a lot of turning up and turning down my volume to try and understand what was being said. We have the technology and most of these were recent interviews so I’m not sure why so much of the recording was unclear.

Just binge listened to the whole 1st season. Very thorough in their telling of the story and how they included Skylar’s parents was such an important part of the story.

This podcast is well paced and I liked how the narrator stuck to Skylar’s parents and kept them in the forefront of the story. What they could lose is the Ashley Flowers weirdly enthusiastic off tone ads opening nearly every episode. 😒

The subject matter is a sad one and I appreciate learning about Skylar and the efforts to bringing her killers to justice. That said this podcast is about twice as long as it needs to be and doesn’t have a clear narrative sequence of events due to insufficient editing. At times it was difficult to keep track of the timeline and how and what things occurred, for example by the time Rachel is questioned I had to rewind a few times to try to fully grasp why she was being questioned and confessed. The keyboard clicking and tweet sounds are really unnecessary any annoying. I avoid digital keyboard clicking in my own interactions with tech and hate that I’m subjected to it in listening to a podcast. We know how tweets and texting work, we truly do not need the sound effects. They take away from the seriousness of the subject.

This show takes very odd turns into some really irresponsible places. There are at least two detectives interviewed who admitted on the podcast to doing some outrageous misconduct and one of them even admitted to repeated instances of police brutality unrelated to the topic. The creators cast these officers in a very sympathetic light and don’t question anything they say, and this type of bad reporting is present throughout every interview included in the series. There is almost no evidence or testimony from the case included. It was as if the creators thought that because there was a verdict and conviction in the case that their speculation about the murderers’ motives were just as valid as anything that could be found in court records. The whole production seems like an attempt to make the perpetrators in this case look as monstrous and inhuman as possible. They do this through the creator’s speculation about the three girl’s social media posts and through the speculation of the people the creators interviewed and present all of it as fact. This might have been an interesting new take on a very popularly known true crime story if they looked at the murder through the lense of social media what role it might have played, but the only message I got was ‘social media bad’.

Really disappointed in this podcast because I had high hopes initially. There’s an enormous amount of detail and context, carefully prepared and presented, but it wholly fails to make the argument that social media played an important role in this case (after listening, I actually strongly believe it did not). While I appreciate victim-focused crime journalism, the close relationship of the writers with the victim’s family prevents them from fully investigating the humanity and complicated motives of the murderers (especially Rachel).