Colo. Police Hope True-Crime Podcast Can Crack 2016 Cold Case

By Shelly Bradbury

Source The Denver Post

The video clip posted online Monday has all the trappings of a true-crime show, including urgent dramatic music, photos of a bloody crime scene, a flash of a smiling victim’s face and a catchy name: “The White Whale.”

But the one-minute clip isn’t part of a traditional true-crime production. It’s a video created by the Aurora Police Department to promote the agency’s new podcast, a four-episode look into an unsolved 2016 homicide that investigators hope will spur new tips in the cold case.

Aurora’s foray into the true-crime genre is an unusual approach for Colorado police departments — while a handful of agencies have produced podcasts, the shows typically include straightforward question-and-answer sessions designed to educate residents on the basics of policing or offer insight into the profession.

The Aurora police podcast is intentionally framed to feel like a true-crime show, said Joe Moylan, spokesman for the department. The genre is known for retelling the stories of real violent crimes and packaging the evidence and facts of the case in an air of mystery, relying on sensationalism, morbid curiosity and storytelling techniques to keep listeners engaged.

“We’re trying to tap into that audience,” Moylan said. “It’s a very popular genre; there have been a lot of instances recently where a tip from a podcast has helped solve a case.”

The police-produced podcast is, in some ways, part of a long tradition of law enforcement seeking to connect directly with residents, particularly on social media. But the reality of the true-crime genre also means a police-produced podcast raises questions about ethics and the use of public resources, said Kelly McBride, senior vice president at The Poynter Institute, a Florida nonprofit focused on media ethics.

“Most of the time when a true-crime podcast jumps in to solve a cold case, it’s because the police have failed,” she said. “They are the police. They have all the investigative tools available to them, including the ability to just tell their story. So why create a form of entertainment around it?”

Moylan said the hope is that the unusual approach will generate more attention on the case than traditional methods of sharing information. The police department has for years sought tips on the 2016 killing of Chelsea Yasser, but none have yet panned out.

“My best days at work are when I push out a news release or we kick something out on social media and we find out after the fact that a member of the public saw it, we got a good tip on it, we made an arrest and we solved the case,” he said. “If doing something a little bit different generates some interest, and we are able to get that final piece of the puzzle and solve this case, it would definitely be a cool thing to be a small part of that.”

A criticism of the true-crime genre — and mainstream media — has been the tendency for podcasters and journalists to focus on sensational, high-profile murder cases, often with white female victims, said Michael Tracey, professor emeritus in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder.

“Whenever I lecture about JonBenét Ramsey, I point out that 804 children under the age of 12 were murdered in America in 1996 and you heard about just one,” he said, adding later that it remains to be seen how Aurora police handle their podcast.

“Is it done professionally and ethically with a real aim at solving a crime?” he asked. “If it is only the dead white girl syndrome, that raises some serious issues.”

‘Just a unique homicide’

Aurora’s podcast will focus on the 2016 killing of 21-year-old Yasser, who was stabbed to death in the parking lot of a Burlington Coat Factory. The case was chosen for the podcast because investigators think it is solvable, Moylan said.

Yasser was stabbed inside a minivan in the store’s parking lot, and the attack was captured on surveillance video. Police have long focused on identifying the driver of that van and hope the podcast will bring in new tips, Moylan said.

“We decided on this one because it is just a unique homicide in the fact it was captured on video, for the most part, and we still don’t have any idea who did it,” he said.

The episodes will cover the day of the killing, the victim, early investigative efforts and more recent cold-case investigative efforts, Moylan said.

Tracey said the police department’s approach is a “clever idea.”

“Podcasts are just an emergent form of communicating. It’s how the technology has evolved and is being used,” he said, adding that the video trailer for the podcast suggests police are on the right track. “The Aurora podcast is clearly an effort to use this new medium to engage with this new world with a legitimate end of solving a really nasty crime. To me, that is laudable.”

Listeners of all podcasts — including podcasts produced by police — should consider the source and think critically about what motivated the podcaster, McBride said. She noted that the Aurora Police Department has a “horrible” reputation nationwide in the wake of high-profile use-of-force incidents like the death of Elijah McClain.

The podcast, she said, is a “roundabout” and labor-intensive way of investigating the cold case.

“It makes me wonder if that is what their real motivation is, or if they are trying to change the narrative about the department, which is nationally known for a couple of notorious incidents,” she said.

She noted that investigative material made public through the podcast should also be made public to anyone who wants it.

“Officials are not supposed to play favorites with public records requests,” she said. “If they are making something public, they are supposed to make it public — and they can’t make it public just for themselves.”

Moylan expected the department would release additional materials about the Yasser case. He noted that the podcast — “The White Whale — The Chelsea Yasser Story,” launching June 29 — relied on staff time and resources and did not have any extra production budget.

‘The podcast got them hooked’

Police agencies producing their own true-crime podcasts is not unprecedented.

The New York Police Department has published a true-crime podcast since 2019, exploring both notorious closed cases and unsolved homicides. The Newport Beach Police Department, in California, published a true-crime podcast in 2018 to try to track down a fugitive who was wanted for murder.

That podcast, dubbed “Countdown to Capture,” included six 15-minute episodes. The police department launched it alongside a website where podcast listeners could leave tips about the fugitive and photos related to the case.

“The podcast got them hooked on it, and then they would go to the website and they could see what he looked like,” said Jennifer Manzella, a longtime employee at Newport Beach Police Department who spearheaded the project.

That website received 1.2 million views between the podcast’s launch in September 2018 and the end of the year, she said. The man was arrested in 2019 after someone tipped off police that he was in Mexico, Manzella said.

She couldn’t say for sure that the podcast reached the tipster, but credited the effort for boosting publicity around the case and generating mainstream media coverage.

“The podcast worked hugely in their favor in that (the fugitive) knew we were actively looking for him,” she said. “He was in the news again, all the sudden. And his face was all over the place. He had to move more frequently.”

Manzella said her team intentionally gave the podcast a generic name so that they could use it on other cases in the future, but the agency has not yet produced another season. No other case has been the right fit, she said.

“It is much easier to justify spending a lot of staff time and resources on doing something that can’t be accomplished in any other way, or was an extraordinary need for the department,” she said. “In this case, finding (the suspect) was worth that additional push… There hasn’t been a parallel case where the assistance of the community would have had the same impact for us.”

The Denver Police Department has rolled out a Spanish-language podcast over the last several months to try to educate Spanish-speaking residents on policing after discovering that some residents were afraid to attend police educational and outreach events in person during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, spokesman Doug Schepman said.

The agency also publishes short videos about cold cases that feature interviews with investigators and victims’ families, though the series lacks the hallmarks of the true-crime genre.

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