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For years, Gone South has been a podcast about crime in the American South. But in Season 5, we’re widening the lens.Through deeply reported, narrative-driven stories—and conversations with journalists, historians, musicians, and people who’ve lived these stories firsthand—we’re digging into the myths, scandals, and power structures that still shape the South… and, in many ways, the country itself.From re-examining the cultural meaning of the Alamo to tracing the family history of Alex Murdaugh to investigating the federal indictment of New Orleans’s former mayor, each episode stands alone. Together, they paint a picture of what this region really is and how it came to be.Gone South is a show for people who want to understand how history lingers and why it still matters now.Written and hosted by award-winning journalist Jed Lipinski, Gone South is the recipient of the Edward R. Murrow Award for Outstanding Achievement in Journalism.Previous serialized seasons include:Season 1: Who Killed Margaret Coon?Season 2: The Dixie MafiaSeason 3: The Sign CutterFollow Gone South to get new episodes every week.
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Part One left off with Jema Heffernan taking in a man named Javon Donahue — and Javon nearly strangling her to death. In Part Two, that single act of violence hardens into a decade-long "hostage relationship": Javon controls her money, her car, her ability to leave, and every time she manages to get away, he finds her. In 2017, after a four-hour standoff that ends with Javon forcing the gun into her own hand, Jema shoots him, and survives being shot herself. What follows is a botched cover-up, a shallow grave, and a trial where prosecutors argue that a decade of documented abuse doesn't excuse the killing. Jema is convicted and sentenced to 10 years. Justine van der Leun tells us what happened next, including the day, seven years later, she was there to pick Jema up. Subscribe to our newsletter: https://jedlipinski.substack.com/ Connect with Jed Lipinski: https://www.instagram.com/gonesouthpodcast/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/gonesouthpodcast/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jed-lipinski/
Lloyd Lockridge: Journalist Justine van der Leun set out to find the untold stories of women serving murder sentences after surviving years of abuse — women whose only official record reads "guilty," with no mention of what came before. She mailed 10,000 letters to incarcerated women across the country and got back more than a thousand replies. One came from Jema Heffernan, a mother of three serving 10 years for killing her husband, Javon Donahue. Jema's childhood in a military family took a dark turn after she was raped at 13 — and her small Missouri town turned on her, not her attacker. Years later, she took in a man freshly out of prison as a favor to a friend, never imagining he'd become a father figure to her daughter, and then the man who nearly strangled her to death in her own living room. In Part One of this two-part episode, Jema tells us how a "roommate situation" spiraled into a relationship she never chose. Subscribe to our newsletter: https://jedlipinski.substack.com/ Connect with Jed Lipinski: https://www.instagram.com/gonesouthpodcast/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/gonesouthpodcast/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jed-lipinski/
In the mid-1960s, McDonald's sued a tiny Mobile, Alabama fast-food chain called Colonel Dixie — over golden arches, green sidewalks, red and white trash cans, and a stolen operations manual. Colonel Dixie won on the trademark claim and went on to become a beloved local institution, famous for the Dixie Dog. But the brand still carries a whiff of scandal, because in 1983 its co-founder, Paul Leverett, was convicted of hiring a hitman to murder his wife. Elizabeth "Liz" Leverett was killed while her husband drove their children around Mobile in a carefully constructed alibi. She had decided that week to file for divorce. The case went cold — until a burglary across town led investigators to a pawn shop owner, a stolen diamond hidden in a necktie, and an x-ray taken years earlier. Lagniappe journalist Kevin Lee tells us how it unraveled. Subscribe to our newsletter: https://jedlipinski.substack.com/ Connect with Jed Lipinski: https://www.instagram.com/gonesouthpodcast/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/gonesouthpodcast/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jed-lipinski/
Jacklean Davis was the first Black woman to make homicide detective in the New Orleans Police Department. She grew up in Central City, inspired by a Black patrol officer known on the street as Christy Love, and she rose fast — cracking the 1986 case of a killer who had been hiding in plain sight, presenting himself to detectives as a witness. Ebony asked whether she was the best homicide detective in the city's history. Whoopi Goldberg looked into playing her. Her colleagues shredded her case files and stuffed dog waste in her desk. Then, in 2002, a dispute over a $5,000 security detail at an Essence Fest after-party became a federal extortion case, and Jackie went to prison in Tallahassee. Journalist Ethan Brown, who spent months with her and thousands of pages of her records, tells us how her rise and fall tracked the NOPD's own — and why a prosecutor's anonymous internet comments would later cast a shadow over her conviction.
Len Davis was a New Orleans police officer known in the Desire projects as Robocop and the Desire Terrorist. In 1994 he ordered the murder of Kim Groves, a 32-year-old mother of three who had filed a brutality complaint against him — and he's since been called the most corrupt cop in the city's history. What brought him down was Operation Shattered Shield, and at the center of it was an undercover FBI agent posing as a high-level drug dealer, known only as J.J. His name is Juan Jackson. He was one of roughly 300 Black agents in an FBI of 11,000 when he entered the Academy in 1983, trained under Joe Pistone of Donnie Brasco fame, and spent two decades undercover — as a hitman for hire in Chinatown, an arms dealer, a money launderer, and a drug kingpin in Waterbury, Connecticut. He tells us how he got Len Davis to strip to his underwear in a wired hotel room at the New Orleans Hilton, and why, testifying for two and a half weeks, he couldn't stop smiling. Subscribe to our newsletter: https://jedlipinski.substack.com/ Connect with Jed Lipinski: https://www.instagram.com/gonesouthpodcast/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/gonesouthpodcast/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jed-lipinski/
In 2019, John Fenley was 39, newly separated, and living in one of his mother's rental apartments in Provo, Utah. Searching LoopNet for the biggest building at the lowest price, he found a 220,000-square-foot warehouse on 17 acres in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, listed at $375,000. He assumed the price was a typo. He had never been to Arkansas. He bought it anyway — and then bought Murfie, a bankrupt Wisconsin startup, inheriting roughly a million CDs belonging to strangers. What followed was copper thieves, a pandemic lockdown that stranded his shipping containers, a running battle with Pine Bluff's zoning office, and a feud with Go Forward Pine Bluff, the tax-funded nonprofit he believed was blocking him at every turn. Then an $890,000 windfall landed in his bank account, and he bought 74 parcels at a tax auction, making him one of the largest landowners in town. Writer Max Read dubbed him "The Man Who Bought Pine Bluff, Arkansas." Four years later, he's still there. Subscribe to our newsletter: https://jedlipinski.substack.com/ Connect with Jed Lipinski: https://www.instagram.com/gonesouthpodcast/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/gonesouthpodcast/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jed-lipinski/
In 1996, a pipe bomb packed with masonry nails exploded in Atlanta's Centennial Olympic Park, killing two people and injuring more than a hundred. The FBI's first suspect was Richard Jewell, the security guard who'd found the bag and helped clear the area. By the time he was cleared 88 days later, investigators had no idea who they were looking for. Columnist John Archibald had covered the Olympics that summer, never imagining the bomber would come to his own city. On January 29, 1998, a bomb hidden in a FedEx box exploded outside a Birmingham abortion clinic, killing an off-duty police officer and gravely wounding nurse Emily Lyons. This time someone saw the bomber walk away — a UAB student named Jermaine Hughes, who followed him to a gray Nissan pickup with North Carolina plates. The name that came back was Eric Robert Rudolph. Within hours he vanished into the Nantahala National Forest, where he'd stay for five years while locals put up signs reading "Run, Rudolph, Run." Subscribe to our newsletter: https://jedlipinski.substack.com/ Connect with Jed Lipinski: https://www.instagram.com/gonesouthpodcast/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/gonesouthpodcast/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jed-lipinski/
In October 1997, a vault supervisor named David Ghantt loaded $17 million into a van and drove out of a Loomis Fargo warehouse in Charlotte, North Carolina. It was the second-largest cash heist in American history. It took him about an hour, working alone. He stole two of the facility's three security tapes. The third one kept rolling. What followed was five months of botched getaways, wild spending sprees, an FBI wiretap, and a murder plot hatched at a Halloween party. Reporter Jeff Diamant, who covered the case for the Charlotte Observer and interviewed nearly every co-conspirator, tells the story of the crime that came to be known as the Hillbilly Heist — and how a crew that studied Goodfellas managed to ignore every lesson in it. Subscribe to our newsletter: https://jedlipinski.substack.com/ Connect with Jed Lipinski: https://www.instagram.com/gonesouthpodcast/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/gonesouthpodcast/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jed-lipinski/
Paul Skalnik was a cop turned con artist turned jailhouse informant. Over two decades, he provided testimony or information in more than 40 criminal cases, trading confessions he claimed to have overheard for reduced sentences and early release. Prosecutors in Florida's Pinellas County knew what he was. They used him anyway. Four of the men he testified against were sent to death row. At least one of them, Jim Dailey, is almost certainly innocent — and after more than 30 years, he's still there. Journalist Pam Colloff spent 20 years at Texas Monthly before joining ProPublica and the New York Times Magazine, where her investigation into Skalnik won the National Magazine Award and helped halt an execution. In this episode, Pam tells the story of a con man who married nine women, posed as an oilman, a lawyer, and an FBI agent — and discovered that his most profitable scam was the criminal justice system itself. Pam Colloff's new book is "Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast" https://www.amazon.com/dp/0593230868?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback Subscribe to our newsletter: https://jedlipinski.substack.com/ Connect with Jed Lipinski: https://www.instagram.com/gonesouthpodcast/https://www.facebook.com/groups/gonesouthpodcast/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jed-lipinski/
n 1985, Charles McCrory was convicted of murdering his wife in their small Alabama hometown — a brutal crime scene with no blood on him, no witnesses, and no physical evidence tying him to the house. What sent him to prison for life was a celebrity forensic dentist who testified that two small marks on Julie's arm were a bite mark made by Charles's teeth. Forty years later, that same dentist has recanted. The science behind bite-mark evidence has been thoroughly discredited. And there are reasons to believe another man — one the police knew about from the beginning — should have been the prime suspect all along. Speaking with Charles himself from inside an Alabama prison, and with his attorney Mark Loudon-Brown, this episode asks how a wrongful conviction can outlast the evidence that built it. Subscribe to our newsletter: https://jedlipinski.substack.com/ Connect with Jed Lipinski: https://www.instagram.com/gonesouthpodcast/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/gonesouthpodcast/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jed-lipinski/
When the federal case against Jim Sullivan was dismissed in 1992, Lita McClinton's family thought they'd lost their last chance at justice. They were wrong — but it would take another fourteen years, a tip from a receptionist in a Texas refinery town, an international manhunt, and a four-year fugitive run through Costa Rica and Thailand before Lita's killer finally stood trial. In the second of a two-part series, writer Deb Miller Landau picks up the story where Part 1 left off: with a wealthy man getting away with murder. She walks us through the trucker who admitted to pulling the trigger, the prosecutor whose phone call may have tipped off the killer, the resort in Cha-Am where the FBI finally caught up with Jim Sullivan, and the verdict that came nearly twenty years after Lita McClinton answered her doorbell. Deb Landau's book is "A Devil Went Down to Georgia: Race, Power, Privilege, and the Murder of Lita McClinton": https://www.amazon.com/Devil-Went-Down-Georgia-Privilege/dp/1639366830 Subscribe to our newsletter: https://jedlipinski.substack.com/ Connect with Jed Lipinski: https://www.instagram.com/gonesouthpodcast/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/gonesouthpodcast/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jed-lipinski/
In January 1987, Lita McClinton answered her doorbell in one of Atlanta's wealthiest neighborhoods and was shot dead by a man holding a white flower box with a pink rose. She was 35, the daughter of one of Atlanta's most prominent Black families, and on her way to court that morning for a pivotal hearing in her divorce from her white millionaire ex-husband, Jim Sullivan. Police were sure Jim had ordered the hit. They just couldn't prove it. Writer Deb Miller Landau first reported on the case for Atlanta Magazine in 2004 — and never let it go. In this episode of Gone South, she walks us through her years-long investigation: an interracial marriage that began in 1970s Macon, a $2 million mansion on Palm Beach, a sloppy hit, a payphone call traced to a Georgia rest stop, and the long, twisting road to justice for Lita McClinton. Deb Landau's book is "A Devil Went Down to Georgia: Race, Power, Privilege, and the Murder of Lita McClinton": https://www.amazon.com/Devil-Went-Down-Georgia-Privilege/dp/1639366830 Subscribe to our newsletter: https://jedlipinski.substack.com/ Connect with Jed Lipinski: https://www.instagram.com/gonesouthpodcast/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/gonesouthpodcast/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jed-lipinski/
In 1954, Dallas executed a 19-year-old Black man named Tommy Lee Walker for the rape and murder of a young white woman near Love Field. Walker had no criminal record, eight alibi witnesses placing him across town at the time, and he recanted his confession the moment he was returned to his cell. None of it mattered. Three months after his arrest, a jury sentenced him to die in the electric chair. Seventy years later, Innocence Project attorney Chris Fabricant set out to do something that had never been done before: exonerate a man who'd already been put to death. Jed talks with Fabricant about the coerced confession, the junk-science polygraph, the racial panic that swept Dallas in 1953, and what it took to finally clear Tommy Lee Walker's name. Subscribe to our newsletter: https://jedlipinski.substack.com/ Connect with Jed Lipinski: https://www.instagram.com/gonesouthpodcast/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/gonesouthpodcast/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jed-lipinski/
In 2016, nine men tied to the College of Charleston's Kappa Alpha fraternity were arrested in what police initially described as a 40,000-pill Xanax bust. The real number was closer to three and a half million, along with cocaine, LSD, weed, luxury watches, a fleet of cars, and a grenade launcher. The crew had spent years pressing counterfeit pills in rented beach houses and shipping them across the country in Skittles bags, fueling an unregulated drug economy that ran straight through one of the most beautiful college campuses in America. Jed talks with journalist Max Marshall, author of the book "Among the Bros," about how he embedded himself in this world, his hundreds of hours of late-night phone calls with an imprisoned ringleader, and what the case reveals about American fraternities and the lives of the men inside them. Max Marshall's book is "Among the Bros: A Fraternity Crime Story" https://shorturl.at/ynPGO Subscribe to our newsletter: https://jedlipinski.substack.com/ Connect with Jed Lipinski: https://www.instagram.com/gonesouthpodcast/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/gonesouthpodcast/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jed-lipinski/
When Australian comedian John Safran flew to Rankin County, Mississippi to confront a white nationalist named Richard Barrett with a surprise DNA test, he had no idea the man would be killed eleven months later — by a 22-year-old Black neighbor he'd hired to do yard work. Safran returned to Mississippi to write his first true-crime book, expecting a clear-cut story about racism and a perfect victim. What he found instead was something stranger: a town built on things left unspoken, a killer who scammed him for gift cards from jail, and a relationship between victim and killer that defied the assumptions he'd brought with him. Jed talks with Safran about his book "Murder in Mississippi," the ethics of crime reporting, and what an outsider notices about the South that the rest of us miss. John Safran's book is "Murder in Mississippi" https://www.amazon.com/Murder-Mississippi-John-Safran/dp/034913426X Subscribe to our newsletter: https://jedlipinski.substack.com/ Connect with Jed Lipinski: https://www.instagram.com/gonesouthpodcast/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/gonesouthpodcast/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jed-lipinski/
In 2003, Dennis Perry was convicted of the 1985 murders of Harold and Thelma Swain at Rising Daughter Baptist Church in Spring Bluff, Georgia. He was innocent. He would spend the next 20 years, six months, and ten days behind bars. This episode of Gone South tells the Georgia Church Murders story through Dennis's eyes — from his arrest and interrogation by detective Dale Bundy, to his trial, his two life sentences, and the years he spent inside Jimmy Autry State Prison waiting for someone to believe him. It's also the story of Brenda Perry, the woman who knew Dennis his whole life, married him in a prison chapel, and never stopped fighting for his freedom. After reporter Josh Sharpe of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution exposed the truth and the Georgia Innocence Project secured his release, Dennis was fully exonerated. This is what survival looks like. Subscribe to our newsletter: https://jedlipinski.substack.com/ Connect with Jed Lipinski: https://www.instagram.com/gonesouthpodcast/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/gonesouthpodcast/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jed-lipinski/
In 1985, Harold and Thelma Swain were shot and killed during Bible study at Rising Daughter Baptist Church in Spring Bluff, Georgia. The double murder went unsolved for years — until a man named Dennis Perry was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to two life terms for a crime he almost certainly didn't commit. In 2019, Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Josh Sharpe began investigating the case for the Georgia Innocence Project. What he found was damning: a botched investigation, unreliable witnesses, and a key suspect — Eric Sparre — whose alibi turned out to be completely fabricated. This episode of Gone South follows Sharpe's six-month investigation into the Georgia Church Murders, the wrongful conviction of Dennis Perry, and the evidence pointing to the man many believe actually pulled the trigger. Based in part on Sharpe's book, The Man No One Believed. Subscribe to our newsletter: https://jedlipinski.substack.com/ Connect with Jed Lipinski: https://www.instagram.com/gonesouthpodcast/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/gonesouthpodcast/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jed-lipinski/
New Orleans. 1918. A killer the papers call “The Axeman” breaks into homes at night, mostly targeting Italian grocers, and attacks with an axe taken from inside the house. No robbery. No clear motive. Just terror. The case is never officially solved. In this episode of Gone South, former Times-Picayune editor James Karst walks Jed Lipinski through what the archives actually show: the earliest attacks, the infamous Axeman letter demanding jazz music, and the overlooked suspect Joseph Mumfre, a Black Hand linked extortionist whose name keeps resurfacing. Subscribe to our newsletter: https://jedlipinski.substack.com/ Connect with Jed Lipinski: https://www.instagram.com/gonesouthpodcast/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/gonesouthpodcast/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jed-lipinski/
A unaccredited private school in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana became a national sensation when its students began landing acceptances at Harvard, Stanford, and other Ivy League universities. The viral videos were inspiring. The story seemed almost too good to be true. It was. New York Times reporters Katie Benner and Erica Green investigated T.M. Landry and uncovered a years-long college admissions fraud: fabricated transcripts, invented extracurriculars, and personal essays built on trauma the students never experienced. Behind it all was the school's charasmatic and manipulative founder, Mike Landry. This episode explores the rise and fall of T.M. Landry, the college admissions scandal it exposed, and who really pays the price when a system built to exclude finally gets gamed. Subscribe to our newsletter: https://jedlipinski.substack.com/ Connect with Jed Lipinski: https://www.instagram.com/gonesouthpodcast/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/gonesouthpodcast/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jed-lipinski/ Katie Benner and Erica L. Green's book is "Miracle Children: Race, Education and a True Story of False Promises": https://www.amazon.com/Miracle-Children-Education-Story-Promises/dp/1250759102
Patterson Hood grew up in Florence, Alabama — a deeply conservative, Bible Belt town where his father was quietly making history. David Hood was a session bassist for the Muscle Shoals rhythm section, recording with Aretha Franklin, the Rolling Stones, and Wilson Pickett at a time when it wasn't always safe to go to dinner with the artists you were recording with. Patterson learned early not to mention his dad's job at school. When people asked what church his father attended, he changed the subject. Decades later, Patterson co-founded Drive-By Truckers — a band that has spent 25 years wrestling with Southern identity, racism, abuse of power, and what it means to be American. In this conversation, he talks about growing up progressive in the Deep South, why he thinks a Black and white soul band should replace the Confederate flag as the symbol of the South, and what he hopes listeners will make of his songs 20 years from now. Subscribe to our newsletter: https://jedlipinski.substack.com/ Connect with Jed Lipinski: https://www.instagram.com/gonesouthpodcast/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/gonesouthpodcast/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jed-lipinski/
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Observed September 20, 2026.
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