S-town & Ysrael

Brian Reed is the host and senior producer for This American Life.

John B. McLemore is a man who lives in Bibb County "Shitown", Alabama and owns a lumber yard. He is a man who is depressed and about how he is living in a dead end town but he has become too attached his hometown to leave. At first he emailed Brian about two cases. A woman who claims that a police officer sexually abused her and is still on the force. The second case is of the murder of a man in his early 20s, Dylan Nichols, and John says he was murderred by a son of a millionare family Cabrum Burt(?). He claims the Burt family had effectively covered it up. John repeatedly asks for his help because he wants Brian to expose the truth and the corruptness of the town.

When Brian finally calls it was a year after John first emailed and it was after he got a news link from John about a sheriff in Bibb county who had been indicted for pulling women over to force them into sexual acts. This showed facts of the first case John told Brian about and made Brian wonder about the possible truth behind the covered up murder case. In the phone call John explains how Kabrum had showed up a year later after getting out of drug rehab, ran into a friend named Jake Goodson. Karbrum then confessed the murder and how another person involved had kept his mouth shut about it so they could say the murder was self-defense. John also tells of how he heard Karbrum's Dad on the phone in his hardware store office(KKK Hardware) that his son was "guilty as hell" and he knows it, not knowing there were people listening. To John there was too much gossip around town about something that "didn't happen" for it not to have actually have happened.

Brian heads there on the down low, not even there to talk to the law but in effort to talk to Jake Goodson about what Kabrum told him. When he gets there he realizes John is a complete pessimist when talking about his hometown and John suddenly can't get ahold of Jake Goodson. They try to narrow down the date of the murder to the summer of 2012 and head to the library to find the news paper archives. According to the records that they look at they don't find anything and John is beginning to act a bit contradictory. Brian is starting to connect the dots from past conversations to John's odd behaviors when they get to checking the records that John might simply be a lonely guy who is "fucking" with him.

Time in the podcast is talked about how humans have created many ways to tell time; by sand, using the stars(John's favorite), using the sun, regular clocks. Time is also mentioned when Brian explains how John is basically on his own timezone as he does not use day light savings.

Ysrael is a boy in the campo who is the victim of bullying. He is "famous" because he is always wearing a mask because he was bitten as a baby in the face by a pig which left scars along with the fact that when he gets bullied he is able to run away very fast.

Yunior and Rafa are in the campo because their mother works long hours in a chocolate factory and does not have time to take care of them when school is out. The brother's relationship is very interesting. During the summers in the campo they would get along just fine as Yunior would look up to his older brother and listen to his stories of how he hooked up with girls. But when they were back home in the Capital, Rafa would act completely different as he bullied Yunior to impress his friends.