『Interview with Doug Kari – S. 12, Ep. 9』のカバーアート

Interview with Doug Kari – S. 12, Ep. 9

Interview with Doug Kari – S. 12, Ep. 9

無料で聴く

ポッドキャストの詳細を見る
This episode of the Crime Cafe podcast features true crime writer, Doug Kari. A writer who isn’t just Googling to get answers. 🙂 Check out the episode. How often do you get to hear stories from an actual “boots on the ground” journalist, these days? Well, their numbers may be dwindling, but they still exist and here you go! And for a PDF copy of the transcript, click here! Debbi (00:52): Hi everybody. I have with me today a fascinating guest for you. He is a true crime writer known for his hands-on investigative approach to research and writing. His work has taken him to places like shallow graves. He just lies in the shallow grave and kind of gets a sense of what it’s like to have to be in a shallow grave, maybe avoiding gunfire or avoiding something. (01:22): And he also has followed leads on missing persons through Death Valley and Mexico, among other places, I assume. Anyway, he was an English major at UC Berkeley and received his law degree—All right, lawyers!—from UC Law, San Francisco. His latest book is called The Berman Murders. It’s my pleasure to introduce Doug Kari. Is it Kari? Doug (01:54): It’s Kari. And thank you, Debbi. It’s a pleasure to be on your show. Debbi (01:59): Well, it’s a pleasure to have you here. Thank you so much for being here. I do appreciate it. And your work just amazes me. I’m just blown away by it. How did you get involved in investigating the Berman murders? Doug (02:13): For the Berman murders case, that was one that was really near and dear to my heart because of the location where the crime took place. It’s a desert valley that’s very difficult to access, that’s in between the Sierra Nevada and Death Valley in Eastern California, and it’s quite inaccessible. To get there, you have to follow a 50-mile dirt road. You have to cross mountains that are sometimes impassable depending on the time of the year. And once you’re in the valley, it’s like being on another planet. It’s the kind of place, Debbie, that attracts counterculture types, the kind of folks I hung out with when I was a student at Berkeley, the hippie crowd, the seekers, and word of mouth, people have come into this valley and they travel there to hang out at Hot Springs. It was sort of like a mini Burning Man before Burning Man ever existed, a very eclectic crowd. (03:18): You might find firefighters mingling with people from a magic bus. Everybody seems to share the same vibe, the same energy, the same aura. So it was quite stunning, quite shocking when in January 1986, a couple of nondescript hippie campers walked off on a morning walk and never came back. And three years later, their remains turned up miles away in a shallow grave. They’d been murdered. Debbi (03:58): Yeah, that had to be kind of shocking. It was in 1986 that they disappeared? Doug (04:08): January 1986. And that was a time period when myself and others that were into mountaineering out there and exploring the desert, we would go to these hot springs. I took my kids out there. In fact, or January 1986 was just a few months before I brought my newborn daughter out there for the first time. So to have a crime like this occur in a place that you think of as being completely off the beaten path, very laid back, peaceful, beautiful, to have people turn up murdered was just outside the realm of what most people could comprehend. And because of that, it was a real shock for those who frequented this valley. And it nagged me for years, Debbi. And finally in 2014, I decided I was going to investigate what happened, because there had never been an arrest or a conviction in the case, and I wanted to see if I could figure out what happened to these people and why. Debbi (05:24): So how much research did you do to create the book? How many hours of research and how many hours of going through doing interviews and going through those interviews and that research before you were able to write the book? Doug (05:42): It was a very lengthy process. I started with a real intense push in the first year, and that resulted in a cover story for LA Weekly about the case. But then off and on, I continued to work on the case over the span of about nine years, interviewing people, trying to gather information. Debbi, information gathering was really tough in this case. Some of the people that I wanted to talk to wouldn’t talk to me, and it took years and repeated efforts for them finally to soften up and agree to tell me what they knew. Tracking down, getting the case files from the sheriff’s office took time. Everything was really difficult in this case. There are cases where there’s a wealth of information available. This wasn’t that kind of a case, but slowly the facts began to emerge. I began getting cooperation from people, locating people. (06:39): I got the records from the sheriff’s department. I went to the scene multiple times, and I already had a lot of knowledge of the area, and I started ...
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
まだレビューはありません