S-Town - Chapter I
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These first two episodes of s town are free, but to hear the whole series, you'll need to subscribe to the new york times where you will get access to all the serial productions and your time shows. And it's super easy. You can sign up through apple podcast or spotify.

And if you're already a time subscriber, just link your account and you're done. Chapter one, when an anti clock breaks a clock that's been telling time for two hundred or three hundred years, fixing IT can real puzzle. And o clock like that was handmade by someone.

You might take away the time with a pendulum, with a spring, with a police system. You might have bells that are supposed to stack the hour, or a bird that's meant to pop out. And coco at you, there can be hundreds of tiny individual pieces, each of which he needs to interact with the others precisely to make the job even tRicky.

You often can't tell what's been done to o'clock over hundreds of years. Maybe there's damage that was never fixed or fixed badly. Sometimes entire portions of the original clockworks er missing.

But you can know for sure because they're rarely diagrams over the clock, supposed to look like a clock that old doesn't come with the manual. So instead, the few people left in the world who noted do this kind of thing rely on what are often called witness Marks to get their way. A witness mark could be a small dent, a hole that once held to screw.

These are actual impressions and outlines and discoveries left inside the clock of pieces that might have once been there. They're clues to what was in the clock makers mind when he first created the thing. I'm told fixing an o'clock can be mainly you're constantly wondering if you've just been hours going down a path that will likely take you nowhere and all you ve got to these vague witness Marks, which might not even mean what you think they mean. So at every moment along the way, you have to decide if you're wasting your time or not.

Anyway, I only learn .

to at all this, because years ago, an anticlockwise contacted me, john b. Mccall, and ask me to help himself a murder.

Something happened, something has absolutely happened in this time. There's just so much little crap for something not to have happened, and i'm about had enough to shit down and things that goes on.

From cereal in this american life i'm brian read. This is ship time.

John b. McClair lives in shit town, alabama. That's the subject line that catches my eye one day in late two thousand and twelve, while i'm reading through emails that have coming to our radio show, this american life emails from jumping Michael Moore, shit town is capitalized.

I am an old time listener who just recently rediscovered your show, john rights. I live in a crummy little shit town in alabama called woodstock. I would like to tell your producers of two events that have happened here recently.

I would hope you of the facilities to investigate one of the events, john rights involves a local police officer with the county sheriff department. John heard that a woman has been saying this officer sexually abused her, the guys still on the force, so that's one. The other event is a murder of a guy in his early chinese named Dylan nickles.

The murdered, john says, is the son of a prominent local family. His name is cbm bert. The birds are millionaire. They have lots of land in the area, as well as a large timber Operation with lumber yards and saw mills all over, one of which is right near johns called k three number Johnson.

That seems the bird family has effectively made this event disappear, except the cab room is now going around town bragging about IT, quote, bragging about how IT only took thirty seconds of kicking this boy, Dylan nickles, in the head firm to become a paraplegic, and only a few more days for him to die. We really need people like you to come down to this pathetic little baptist shit town and blow IT off the map. Jn, rights, I would like to talk you by phone if possible. This is just too much to type.

John, hello.

Hi bryan.

Here we are.

This is happening that that awkward moment of silos would you realize have to about a year IT finally happened .

when I make this call. It's been a year since jn, first, we'd ring back and forth a couple times over the months, but we never talked until one day he's at me a message. And this time I had a link to a news report.

The news story was about a surgeon with the bib county share of department bib. Countries where john lives had been indeed for pulling women over and forcing them in the sexual acts, both on the side of the road and back at the station. Another guy allegedly helped cover up this abuse.

I thought, if corruption like this existed in the big county share of department, then maybe the other rumor Janet write me about could also be true. Then maybe IT was possible and murdered. IT happened, and IT then been covered up. So finally, I get him on the phone, and we talk for a while.

But, you know, my life is kind of health, because I take care. My mom has altima and we're about our south right theory of yet. So sorry about the other day when you tried to calm mol.

hell, busted. lose. No, i'm sorry to that. Sorry.

of course, lose in the dog the other way they didn't help. You know, I take in stress, which shouldn't surprise you. You know, considered who are I live, you shouldn't the least the surprise at these paper here.

Just dump their dogs on the side, the road. At one time i've had his many air twenty warn. I got fourteen. Now, well, thirteen? yes. So that was that was really hard because that was an old I got a good dog, but you have another one of my projects that take go and i'm sort of the local human society.

Do you do have a lot of property?

I like to say it's my grandfather's property. It's a it's one hundred and twenty eight I kers and you .

grow you grew up in what stock is that right?

Yes, this whole area needs to day to find. If you look at the demographics charts of the state of alabama and over the post counties, bb county is yet the fifth worst kind to live with you. We are one of the child moster capitals of the states.

We have just an incredible amount of police corruption. We have the post education. We've got twenty five churches in this dame county.

We have two half school, no secondary education, and we got jee bus because jeb s is common. And global warmers, hooks know there. No such things. Climate change in our life. Yeah, I am in an area that .

just hasn't advanced .

for lack of a Better world. I will have to eat the terms here. Sorry about it's Alfred Sherry flavoring once that would be the first one to .

half about your stomach fathering you.

I have cost. Don't asked the reforms. You don't hate all.

Well, so why can you tell me? Why did you email me?

Well, you know, the original, the original reason, which I gave with just some of the things i've heard about.

some of the going down.

down here, your brother told you about the boy dilling nickles that get murdered. And apparently that was swept under the rogue. I guess what cover that when first?

Yeah, tell me. So just tell me what happened. I mean, you'd kind of mention this in an email, but there wasn't a lot of detail.

and I did a little google online and didn't really fine much. So tell me what is that? Dyle nickles who went to school down here, IT was blocked in high school. Basically, i've got these kids out here, dig a hole between the house in the yard in the summer and we're going to plant some cast iron plant. It's as pedestrian elector cash out a little.

I don't know what either of the things you just said are, but that's fine.

This that's career place. You know how these kids talk on cellphone's all day long? You can't you can't get to do nothing because wrong with cellphones and they're wait and y're youtube but and they're all his own facebook.

I'm out there on the back porch if you keep your mouth, sure you they surprise what you can learn. Get around here growing up so destitute theyll enough since to be a shame to think think they're just tell everything one yeah in a way that the dynamics is in search. And search hospital is a qual play.

Jc nail, he just got into a fat with k ben bird, and he's not expected to live to the net. But when I heard the last name bird, you know what changes picked, decided to stick my most and ask, this is a binary chance related to the famous part family down there that runs the k free lumber store and Green pon and the, you know, K, K, K. Lumber million ancien IT. Oh yes, that's candle.

Son took him my diet or so to do .

their work out here. And I chatted and chat about IT over the course of the next few days. So then tween the girl friends and tween other friends IT come the past.

So then dynamic fit dad didn't hail and cab room birds whereout ts was, no, no. Well, later on I have the good things working out here. Two boys, just so happens to one of them like good son.

Apparently they knew the keep on bullet and right, if they turned little sayers pizza and winstock just happened to run into, hadn't seen him for a year as we be. And well, i've ve been in druggy here. I know such in such month, and we have, well, what happened that's when the carbon body just get out there and spill the turn things.

And a story that I was to is that they were at some party and the nickles boy cable and his body had ganged up. Lemon was calling a bit boy and a bit boy or a bitch boy and all. And the boy eventually smacked one album, and they jumped on him. Well, the boys, they jumped down and still in.

Nick pulled that little map and cut the of key from his friend well, k room, pulled his belt off and wrapped IT around the neck of the friends who throws that cut and get the nick to boil down the ground somehow, and kicked him in the head repeatedly and kicking him in the head until he was basically unconscious course. You know, the rest of the story from the first part that I told you, you know, the body. I place that a few days, jack, he knows that he asked him how he just get back so easy.

And you know, the bulk burnt, told them I just claimed that was self defence and the other jack have to sing a mouth shot. Course kermis families got plenty of money. So naturally IT wasn't murder.

Now suggest to clarify, so what? So you're hearing this from a guy, jake goodson. He ran into k room and and cave room told him that we told the other guy to keep his mouth ire, and we claim self defense. That's what he told him.

Are you go now? At some time, I up there that hardware store and candle, as kim's father is back there on the phone, yet in that big male place on all these big male russian about types, loves Green, big, run, net mail, run that now. And when I heard come out at office was he's my son, I love, but he's guilty is hell no. What make family realize someone was standing out, they're waiting to be waiting on and pulled up, slay on the hail and they on the or and then got a lot quiet with that .

conversation.

really. We've obviously got too much little dipstick goss had going on around for something not to have happened. We've got to care out bragg about IT for the little sales takes to her. And we've got a tiny snipped of conversation in conveniently audited over at the store one afternoon. So this crap happened.

And as far as you know, is cabin bert just a living in town?

Now the day of check, three number orties covered up with tears. They almost skin and bonbons. They looks like a crack.

Is I found in this way? You know, I contact with you for a while, and I quit contact with you, and you go to these stages of depression, when you live in an area like this, it's like the darfour region of c day, and you realize you're in all these areas where stuff happens and you can't help IT. And after this, do get arrested. You know that recently email I sent you about that urgently heard that have been no basically faultless, imprisoning women and using them for six lives, no one talks about. That urgently .

heard is the name of the big county police officer who had been sexually abusing women.

He pulled over, decided, you know what? I need to contact him again. I need to get out of depression. I need get over this attitude problem of god, you nothing can be doing. Tell someone some of the crap that goes on day on player.

because what what do you get depressed about?

Oh my god, I am forty nine years, over forty eight, one closure to forty nine, I should have, you know. But if you use this in the future, you'll sure have to have a cool board. Blake IT, I should get out this cut team for in sheet tae, in my twenty, I should have done something useful with my life.

I love my home. I don't know. Hua, you have lived here on my law.

My mom live here on her love. My dad lived here. Most of his law and grandparents ers live here on his life.

Places like that should be important. I'm looking out over a yard without rose garden here. That's three hundred fucked and stay long.

I plan to hedge maze out here. It's only one in the state. You can go to google .

maps and thirty.

as you're telling me, I should actually bring you to the maze.

Tell me the numbers again.

Only three point two o, two, four, six, five, comma, negative eight, seven point one.

I'm going to hide a couple coordinate here for john's privacy. I type up in the google maps.

I should be closed a few feet.

Oh, there. Are that your yard? yeah? Oh my god. It's an erie view of acres and acres of forest. And then there, in the middle of woods, is a huge made of concentrate circles of edges with a path waving through .

them at a day. I also had little gates in IT now, which that picture doesn't show. So you say you can swap the solution around IT actually has sixty four possible solutions to on how you swap the .

gates or real oh, wow. So IT really is amazing.

Sixty four possible solutions.

That's crazy. Do you ever just go in and get lost in the maze?

Not time of gets you only about hip hop and still over. You're able to get off to one day. Yeah.

that is. In other words.

you're asking and that I use IT to walk around. And who i'm finking sure sometimes I do.

Yeah, you know.

i've never head wondering. Sit here and asked me kiss what i'm depressed about because i'm looking out over the trees here and I realize it's the people in the south for trying to park, have a much worse life and I do. But I think the thing that's happened is i've got to myself and almost, you know sort of a person of my own like and wear you all my friends of dad off because I only had contact with people much older than even once a kid in school.

I didn't want to hang around other kids because no kids are talking about, you know, getting girls or dear hunton or you football where as I was interested in the astro lab sound, projective geometry, new life with music, climate change and how to cell rubik cube. But you can't tell a redneck that the cool you Greenland malt falling directly into the least water or the firma highline confected or Normally head back sale is sufficient. Firstly, try to explain that the earth is more than five thousand years old. John.

is there? Is there i'm curious, is there anyone down there that you're able to talk about these gripes or ideas with and you feel like you're you're on the same page.

my lawyer part the tail lawyer is the only is everything i've talked with you about i've talked with you about he lives in task allows he's got too much sense that they living down here but absolutely i'll go over and talk with the cat law you every day but .

that's that's what you've got.

You began to figure this out now.

aren't you?

So why don't a move? There's going to be people in flush a right now or beyroot that just asked each other the same question. You know, the help you get out here, her son, you know, song the answer is, you know I don't know you know that song is probably after and made you know a sand might or so you know his aging mother came to sad which one of her her hush she's got aware that died SHE ends up piano over erself has to clean up and he keeps OK maybe one day i'll get Better although secretly he knows IT ever will you know, I have a so crummy forward truth.

You can't be a red neck live in alam without a damn forward truth, can you? And I keep saying, could I put every thing that I would put IT in that truck and drive down that drive away for the last time? But then again, who took your mama, who feed the puppy? You know, who would watch the flowers to IT pro, the eyes? you. Must like i'm just told that at this point.

no understand at home.

So if I got subject all that .

I can point you back to a little bit. Why do you think it's important .

to turn and figure out what happen with I believe we have a genuine murder that resulted from some kids probably picking on the boy that defined himself. That's almost certainly been covered up.

After that first conversation with john, I do some research online, and I find no evidence of this murder. I see there is a place called A K three lumber owned by the bird family, k three and rural obama. Is that just a coincidence? Family also owns a large timber Operation john called IT, the K, K, K lumber mill, but it's actually named kai kan key ink.

And on the website they explain that the ky can and key, and ky can key referred to the three brothers who currently run the family business, kyle kendall and keep bert. Kevin is candle sun. His name begins with A K two.

By the way, I discover a facebook page for a caver burt in the area, which just a single disturbing post that tells people to raise hell and kill black babies, that we uses a word other than black. I don't know if labor made this page or what. I also find court records for dui charge.

This suggests that maybe he did disappear for a little while. Like john mentioned, at one point, there was a stretch of court dated and show up for, and I noticed from his lawyer telling the court he hadn't been able to reach cape room. Other than that, I find nothing, nothing about a murder or even assault involving cam or no bitumen for Dylan nickles or any event to newspapers or core filings.

That seems like I could be the fight john talking about. Honestly, there's not much about bib county online at all, but jack kept emAiling me. He kept insisting this was a story I needed to cover and when I call back to say I was having trouble finding anything or to just quickly double check something with them, almost without fail, we end up on the phone for hours with him going on and on, not just about the murder, but about his life and his town. We talked on weekends once he got in touch at one thirty in the morning because a bunch of cops in in yard.

And I had the pretorian choir, towering beha uniform.

IT felt as if, by sheer force of will, john was opening this portal between us and calling out through IT, calling from his world .

a world of prolific decay and decrepit or so.

Eventually I decide, come IT out. I was just .

dying for the research, this house, without a world, if they knew IT.

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Johnson says his hometown is filled with proem, tic decay and decrepitude. I'm not ashamed to say I had to look up the word poetry. Tic IT means using a water phrase in anticipation of IT becoming true when I go to allow obama, I don't want to cause any trouble produced ally speaking so johna, I discuss a plan.

After all, what he's alleging about the murder the camper has beaten someone to death feels comfortable enough to make small talk about IT out the open and a bunch of people know, but no one is done anything. It's pretty scary. A reporter showing up from new york asking questions, who knows how people might react? I do not want to do anything that's going to put you in any kind of danger.

You've get more experience with this than I do. This is your stock and trade.

Well, i've never gone into a small town and investigated a murder. And this is your small town.

I said.

john, I agree. When I come, I need to keep a low profile. I won't talk to any authorities yet.

The one thing I want to do, I tell him, is meet with jake goodson. That's the guy joan originally heard the room or from the one cab. M supposedly admitted everything to outside the little .

and whatever you want to be with IT here, if you're fine with i'm fine with IT.

okay.

Are you sure I guess .

so you guess so today.

i'm like to back out. No.

no, I didn't see that.

So what I don't want I think you're second guessing this more than I am.

On a windy afternoon in october two thousand and fourteen, i'm driving through woodstock, alabama, about forty minutes. Southwest birmingham had to me, john, for the first time to get to his house. Rather than using address, he's suggested I navigate by latitude and longer ude.

And even then I miss this place the first time past IT. Just thick woods all around from the road. I have no idea, others, a house back there. But when I come back by, I noticed an opening in the trees and a dirt driveway cut through the forest.

IT takes me deep into the woods, trees arching over IT, until I finally I reach a clearing with an old wooden house with three chimneys that looks like IT hasn't changed in as a civil war. The whole place feels like it's of another time. And IT is literally, john doesn't follow daylight savings. So as properties on the times on separate from the world around IT, the front door of the house opens and .

a man comes .

founding out of IT.

Nice to meet you.

Hope there's no nice to meet you back. Know how you doing? No handshake. Joon just takes off around the side of the house .

with a pack of dogs following him. Come on, pips break.

He's a red head with red goat and glasses looks a bit Younger than his forty eight years in red jeans and red sneakers and assure when Williams S. T shirt that he probably got for buying a can of paint at .

the hardware store.

Presumably he's giving me a tour, but i'm scrambling to keep up with them. He's naming the plants all around us as we move. Golden rudd, russian sage, a climbing lady.

Banks rose. There are stone walls everywhere, wild the cover bushes, a giant bed of purple portunus stretching for hundreds of feet. There are apple trees leaning on telesis tilt to that a precise angle to link them their stems. There's a sweet smell floating on the breeze, the smell of the thorny eli agonis bush. John tells me john's thirteen dogs are running around freely and theyve a dog house that is an actual house with two floors and a small swimming ll outside made of stone.

You're not afraid to walk one hundred and ten thirty eight.

john, I go passed his workshop, which our later learn is filled with disassembled clocks, as well as the rare machines and tools and chemicals he uses to restore them. We go past a big trailer and two old school buses, one yellow and one blue. They are filled with number for john's house day's aging to get the wood as close as possible to what they used to build the house. Two hundred years ago, we go through a small gated cemetery where the people who built this place have been buried since the eighteen eighties. Having finished lift duty on foot, stone reads they now sweet tly rest later will also meet john's mother mary Grace MC lao you like.

i'm sorry.

how do like? I'm enjoy myself very much, so enjoy .

myself very.

I she's a tiny bit looking woman who I swear to you can go a whole conversation without blinking once SHE is spent on this land, whole life forever seems .

about right. This is Larry. Yeah.

where we live in real old.

Time I reagon.

Rose married that the winter killed at the house that looks like north fronto.

Finally, john, I reach a hill. We come to the quest. And there IT is the maze stretching up below us, though he and I have completely different reactions to IT.

Oh god, here we go. See the brain from here.

Oh my g johns upset. They've been in a draw out for weeks. A D one draw.

He's been monitoring IT and he sees the hedge's turning Brown. But i'm just in. Aw.

the maze is so cool. Oh my g climate change.

I mean, you may see climate change.

but this is an incredible approach, john. You know, we're going to have to give the day of cutter. I said before you all came out here, I was gonna that here and do something. But IT never happened. I just get measurably to Price and said.

ask grow IT am like, I have chills shao I .

have chills to get all the best bushes over here on this.

I don't even see the brothers, all these Green. This is incredible. How to the maze? And john rearranges, the position of three gates inside.

put to set a .

new solution.

I head and move this one after .

year ago.

That's all straw up. Now, the sink.

John built the maize as a series of splits. One path comes to an end, then its split, left and right. Each of those path, then the baseball left and right, over and over again, you have to choose which way to go. You are walking through .

trying to reach the middle. I N ye, and that's what people feel like.

I do feel like i'm walking around in your brain or something.

Just imagine, and what IT gets over your right.

save. done. John's computer is a comic. And when I think about IT now, I realized that captures his world view perfectly.

It's three drinking glasses with arms and legs and q little faces. Eat with the same amount of liquid inside. The first one smiles and says, I have full. The next one frowns and says, I have empty. The last one throws both arms up and says, I think this is peace.

Later, john n will take me on a tour of the county, and this world view will be on full display to rattle off a constant stream of grievances as we go. Historic buildings are being demolished overnight. Dollar generals and waller ts are popping up in their stead, serving a populist that is .

getting fatter and more tattoo .

by the day no positive comment, no matter how an survives his virtue wash c negativity. At one point, I mentioned that the landscape around here is really quite pretty. You go.

there's are our legacy going .

down the roof truck, carting away that pretty landscape one tree at a time in the afternoon it'll start a thunder storm, something john has been saying all day that they desperately need to combat the drought. So that's good, right?

Or getting run, what about ten weeks to life? now?

Everything's died. Something, everything I say, a beautiful butterfly. Yeah.

we don't have as many butterflies as we should have this year either. Some males, that disturbs me.

It's a comprehensive tour off.

On the right is where I like to high school. I like to call an alsi z .

yeah see the cream matti um .

see the long low killing for sila on either end.

No IT looks like a high school with like a baseball game going out in friend.

他们 大概 20块钱。

Um before the johna runs shit town .

back inside the maze, john, I have stopped walking for a second. We've IT dead end after dead end. And now john is cleaning his neck and scoping out our options. He scouts his direction as .

this kind of folly to be laugh and something you design yourself isn't IT.

Oh, no, we're stuck.

Are you really lost to be? Put them up?

Me loves to our own eyes. Isn't that exciting? I see what idea. See what idea.

Evidently, while the .

various gate combinations create sixty four different solutions, there is one combination that leaves you with absolutely .

no way out of go, is possible to where there is no solution.

And all set, or something no set, are you go. I can tell if john being straight with me, john seems so smart and roll, it's hard to believe he could accidently be stumped by his own maize. I could see him engineering the situation and make things more. I don't know literary conger's this garden path metaphor that he knows I won't .

able to resist. I think like that pretty sour.

good grass on the phone.

Before I got here, john t. Said he could introduce me to jake goodson. Jake again, is in israel twice. He's one of the guys, john e.

Highers, to work on his property and who john first heard about the murder from Jackson want to learn about IT from k. Bram outside the little seizures pizza. But now that a min woodstock of the sun john can't reach jake, he's been working long hours at the local steel mill.

John says a job that won't be around much longer, by the way, once our supply of cheat puzzle fuels and plays. But anyway, john called jake's wife and his brother too, trying to reach him, but still no luck. Eventually ahead of my hotel, and john and I checking layer on the phone.

No word. great. yeah. Just can tell you that I can't get a hold of john keeping emAiling .

me updates. Not the same thing so far. He writes an hour later, just a subject line quote, so far the null set a thirty eight P M.

I had to leave bib count .

y to find a hotel. So i'm in beer, a small city about fifty miles down the highway where the far reaches of the birmingham metro area dissolve into the rural counties like bib to west. I had a best western just off the exit ramp behind a waffle house.

Even though i'm exhausted from traveling, I turn on the lamp and pull out the bedtime reading. Johns given me bedtime reading. That's what he called IT. There's William fokina short story, a rose for Emily, narrated by the gossipy collective townsfolk of imaginary jeffson, mississippi, who tell the tale of miss Emily gerson, an unmarried, needle aged outcast who lives alone with her father and after he dies, holds up in her house for years.

There's the gee m up as on story at the necklace about a woman who longs for a much grander, more spectacular life than the one he has and gets IT for a single night, only to have to pay for IT dearly every day for the next ten years. And then there's the relegate by surely Jackson about a woman who recently moved from the city to a small country town whose family dog lady is accused one morning of killing neighbors chickens. The woman listens in growing red throughout the day as town's person, after town's person laughs at the torture and death that will befall the as a result, including finally, the woman's own children, who described to the lady's face and gleeful detail how they will use a Spike color to chop off her head. I noticed a unifying theme to all these stories of creeping sense of for boating in these places that are allegedly home to played society and .

under current of the privity.

Morning comes no word from jake. In the meantime, I tried to come up with some other ideas. The obvious one in situation like this would be to contact the victim's family.

But at this point, I still don't know if anyone's actually died. And so that's an awkward phone call to make. I can't get local hospital records.

I try, but they're not public. Did IT with death records in alabama also not public? Again, I found no orbit or new story about any of this.

In the papers. I was able to find two dulin nicois m of county, both of the right age, early twice. One spelled his first name D Y L A N.

The other spelled D I L O N. IT looked like D Y L N have played football, the county high school of years earlier. But other than that, he had basically no footprint online, which is strange for someone in his age.

Like, maybe that means you're dead. D I L L O N, on the other hand, appeared to be alive and well and actively maintaining his facebook page. Not only that, he'd gone to cAmber's high school and with facebook friends with them, which made both hony wonder if somehow the rumour got mess up.

And maybe dulan wasn't the dead guy. Maybe he was a friend with cabin who got in his throat cut and kept quiet about the whole thing. So I held off on contacting him. So too afraid to talk to the cops, too afraid to talk to the birds or the nicklas is I let out another idea of john.

My thought is we will believe the murder happened sometime in the summer of twenty twelve, if we can somehow narrow the time period to just a couple weeks, maybe we can go the public library and look through the archive a bit. Countys local newspaper, the central press, the old issues are online. So maybe there's no batur or some other clue in there that I have been able to see. John has an idea for how we can nail down a more precise date.

So what is this? Just every time I spent IT or work in on this.

he shows me a notebook, a makeshift ledger, where he keeps a detailed track of all the projects on his property. We sit on his twin bed and he flips through and shows me his whole system, how we notes the people who worked each day, a rotating crew of Young guys and handy man types from around town, what they were working on.

how much you paid them. The read means IT was for the yard. Poor if IT doesn't have the red is in the house, if you see a letter im with a circle around IT that me, we were plant the eyes.

john, pretty sure they were laying the slate area behind this house when word was going around about the murder. Whenever they're working on that, that's probably what to happened he says.

your child rock roof tar, yet working out pin slight bridge this this thing what happened right around this time period, August of twenty twelve, August eighth.

August, what was nine hundred dollars and five hundred dollars in the August twelve? At the same, you paid him twenty box and August weth.

oh yeah, that makes somebody enough cash to go home.

Can we pinpoint any closer than August .

what you think probably pin point between the seventh and twenty first would send real good close as you're gonna up twenty years of the twenty first seven and the twenty first?

So we're after the library to the microfilm machine in the back room, though by this point i'm noticing that john's been acting kind of weird, weird for him like invasive. I'm trying to get to look through the newspaper archive with me, but instead he just wandering over by the bookshelves, avoiding me joon to see .

thing. We're trying to figure .

out this guy died now my things .

for two faces. And first.

Then as we're going through issues, real news, I don't know, feels like he's trying to rush me through this, like he doesn't me to be a throw as m being or something.

What if we go all the way in the september and don't find anything a bitters know where you probably need to go past?

It's to september.

And look at this front page.

This is wednesday, september. Finding the broken microfilm wheel my finger, I read through every issue of the central express mid july through september. IT gives a pretty detailed snapshot of the summer of two thousand and twelve and deep county obama, some cousins, driver in from for site georgia with a four tear cake for Kelsey kono sweet sixteen party one thousand nine hundred sixty five people called complaints into the share of office.

Twenty people violated probation, and police discovered fourteen illegal piles of garbage. The mayor of center started campaign for reelection. Some brothers, when off to space camp together, a guy hired to hit man to unsuccessfully trying kill the west blocked.

And police chief and gene grimm served chicken salad for lunch one day to bennie joe russo. You know what did not happen in the summer two thousand twelve, according to the reporting of the interval, press a murder by a guide named keep on bert or the death of a guy named Dylan nickles. After looking at every police blotter, every arbitrarily, we've got nothing, nothing, nothing.

nothing that or not. The john .

doesn't .

seem to care .

that .

we're not making much progress. He's goofing off one afternoon. I find him in a shop with Taylor goodson. Jake goods' s. Brother Tyler does work on john jyar two.

He's here to chop of a fAllen tree, but it's also clear he and joe know each other pretty well. Dick t easily and Tyler has a power belonging that he's keeping here at john's house while he's trying to get a permanent place to live. If taller is sure on, you know, he must be going to core, at least that's what his mom, al, tell me one day today. Apparently he's not the dock because he's standing here. Shirt, listen, tattooed with an anatomical harden, his chest that says misery loves company sharpening at chain saugh tooth by tooth johns pointing to the bottle of wild turkey .

in the workbench drive you do not know what nowhere do no pain IT over here you anna hit ran .

sure like you stick your poker oh hey.

don't hate IT like I do. John is .

getting drunk. Taylor is filing away, telling stories about runners with the cops. I am standing in an anti clock shop in the middle, the woods.

I take a drink. Then Tyler and john show me the thousand, nine hundred century french carriage clock. They're storing that. They found out the junk yard, its pieces scattered about the bench, and at one point, suddenly, for no apparent reason, and certainly not because I asked, john ranks up a shirt and flashes me.

Go show you that abuse.

The entirety of john's chest is tattoo de and his shoulder too, though it's all perfectly covered. When is wearing A T shirt? The flashing is quick.

So I can't take IT all in, but I see a glimpse of what's possibly a beaker and maybe a clock type thing. IT takes me a back because john is made clear to me how much he loads tatoes. They're one of the things he hates about shit town. I believe you once called them an expression of hopelessness doesn't compute. That's your entire chest, john, in nip piercing.

We will talk about then as if.

of course, this is the next logical subject of discussion, john gans, on the topic of the small quantity hazards waste generators regulation of one thousand ninety eight and its effect on the electoral plating trade.

Travellin goal core and you know key later up with a solution with a single sutas um sn added both for the P H round ten point Tyler and .

night give each other a look. John, meanwhile, is on his own plane. He's rolen Operate .

one hundred and forty one hundred six degrees fair and had IT know two three amps per square foot.

Do you have a spare coin? Jin asks. He wants to make me a souvenir. I did got a dime from my pocket. He starts footling around .

in the back room .

of the shop, untying wires .

filling up beakers like a drunken mad scientist.

Do not anything of that. If you smelly, think that smells like almonds, get.

I'd say it's about this point that I asked myself, is john fucking with me? Is he just a board guy who contacted me on a rock and never expected me to actually follow through? Is this murder not real? And he knows IT is not only the fact that he is right now pouring petasus sni into a bucket in front of me that makes me wonder this.

It's all the little .

moments from our conversations over the months that i've ignored or written off as just one of john quirk, for example, the couple times months in when he casually raised the possibility that you know what, maybe they're nickles do .

actually die. His dad or he's been there a place is one of those two all the .

time he seemed kg about putting me directly in touch with jay goodson.

He doesn't know this is investig. He might get real scared and get real. What if you call and would you want to elude to the fact that I had spoken to you.

or all the times john offered to reivers my employer for my travel expensive to alabama, no matter how much I told him, I D never let him do that because he was so worried that the investigation might turn out to be a good sag.

We're good. We're .

good. We are very lucky. We're good. And then just so many odd little interactions i've had. Wood, john, the poetry recitation is given me the never ending emails about every topic imaginable, the long, personalized lectures on climate change, the uncomfortable moments like this one, when I was talking to john about how he would explain to people in town what I was doing down there, if they saw me with them .

and everyone to to here. Thank them a great well, I just say i'm sucking your domain.

That would be a really good way to introduced me to your neighbors. Now, johns, acting as if he's not interested in the murder and possibly breathing in dangerous chemicals. What am I still doing here.

which i'm sure if I is what you go, how my dance is in .

the shop. Taylor continues to sharp in the chainsaw, and joan drops my dime into a bucket in the large sink, hooks up wires to a car battery, runs them into the bucket, and exams IT cracking up the current until the dime turns gold.

I might be there one day, but you'll have a souvenir from street town, alabama down.

For thousands and thousands of years, we did not have clocks or calendars or any method for telling time in the way we think of telling time now. And time was happening nonetheless, as humans, we must have sensed IT. Maybe we heard IT the rythm of IT as we sharpen the tool.

It's amazing if you think about IT, the sheer of variety of methods we've concocted over the centuries to keep track of time. We pour sand through a glass, we suing pendulums back and forth. We count the cycles of radiation coming off, and adam, we count mississippi. When john was a teenager, he became fascinated with what was possibly the very first formalized way humans came up with to keep track of time, watching the sun and the stars and the phases of the moon. He will dizon version of something called an astro lab, which is showing .

me where we're standing is the thing. Th, at this point over here.

the astro label looks kind of like a clock cross with a compass. It's a flat dial with a map of the night sky laid over IT and a pointer, or I guess, a sight attached on top of that. You pick a star in the sky and air the site at IT twice the sky map until lines with the sighting a certain way.

And then the dial shows you your direction as well as the month, day and time. It's a beautiful, complex device. And as a kid, john long to figure that out, to put himself inside the brains of the people who puzzle through the earliest versions, the greek astronomer of parkas who devised the mathematics behind this, or the ten century islamic scholars who refind the invention to help them time their daily prayers. John wanted to go through what they had to go through to create an astro lab, which is why made his own designed specifically for the coordination of this house IT hang on the wall as mother's bedroom. That's why showing me his astro lab when skylar goods and happens to walk .

in the front door. Oh, the scales here, collect her money. J, oh, you brought beginning. There's jack. Bring in his I S here.

Sky is the wave of jake goodson. The guy have been desperately wanting to talk to, she's twenty one, outgoing SHE has a little sun, whether who's crawling on all forms that are feet, pretending to be a dog, we make some small talk. And eventually, as casually I can, I ask her, you don't happen to know about the incident john and I have been talking about, do you?

SHE knows .

Johnson is quietly, but skylar .

seems confused.

The big fight between Kevin burg and that dude, john tells her that resulted in the dude's death. I can see the skyline recognizes what he's talking about. yes. SHE says, yes. Hey.

china told us that he killed him. Cold blooded.

murdered him. He told you that too. SHE says SHE was with jake when I happened.

The little scissors.

seen capable for the first time after advances for a while, came from telling them he claim self defense and gotten off. According to skylar IT all went down just how Johnson said IT did.

He pretty much, in those words, pretty much said that he admired the guy and use .

the word murder.

Yeah, he killed that. He had killed him.

So numbers or killed.

I probably use a little bit of everything like IT was a casual conversation, like I have been, well, this is going on in my life. I got arrested because I murdered somebody yuta. And let me tell you about IT and is just like there was nothing to that. He had just paid him to death. And I can't, I just can't imagine sit there interPeters ingy hidden somebody into the dark.

can me either?

What did you guys say? I mean, what were you like?

Just there, just there. and.

IT didn't seem like IT was something that usually should be have cash conversation about IT seems like he should still been in .

hadler says sh'd actually heard about .

the murder before talking the k room that IT was kind of an open secret that the thing that freak are out most about this, even a couple years after IT happened, that so many people know and still have done nothing to complicity. I mentioned my trip to the library tour. I hope that they're be some record of this in the newspaper, but SHE is no illusions about that.

Most of it's probably hit and it's not even than in there.

What do you mean .

this time has a way of forgetting information in hiding information? If somebody not want people to know about IT than IT won't be there.

John's stands by a scaler talks he's uncharacteristic ally quiet a small grin on his face i'm hanging on skylar's every word. I can't believe i'm finally getting a first hand account of all this but john is calm matter effect like what's the big surprise is a shit town. This is what have been telling you all on.

The summer is here, at least the sky is overcast. 爱茉莉。 SHE watches her flowers, girl love, we go to give each other roses from a tree.

S town is produced by Julie snider and me with editing from ibc glass to level saracenic and wheel drumming windy danger field as our digital editor starting kind is a story consult fact checking in research by ben fAiling, said linders are director tions mixing by liver smith, matt tones are technical director. The s town staff includes Emily conn, alease bergson, july wii ker and Kimberly henderson.

Music for the show is composed by Daniel heart tray pillar, a lot of negro nics burn and mathematically music supervision by damian grave. Special thanks to Tracy chain and coy wong at studio arrigo rich arris jack hit on a heat loni ceretani Jordan frickin dot down, Anthony roman and barra devo who did the incredible art and illustrations for our website s town podcast that orgues that s town podcast dot org or of course, also on facebook and twitter. And you can follow us on instagram s town podcast or reminder that you don't have to wait for chapter to all seven chapters are available right now as town is a .

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