25 Miles South Part 2

2021/7/14

The Idaho Massacre

AI Deep Dive AI Chapters Transcript

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Bob Strickley

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Heather Boots

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James Pilcher

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Katie Lancaster

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Nikki Blankenship

Nikki Blankenship：长期报道俄亥俄州Portsmouth的性交易问题，揭露了Michael Moran的罪行，并为受害者发声。她因坚持报道真相而辞职，最终在社交媒体上发布了相关信息，引发了广泛关注。她强调受害女性没有说谎，她们应该得到关注。 Courtney Armstrong, Stephanie Lidecker, Jeff Shane：本系列节目探讨了俄亥俄州当局滥用职权的问题，从执法官员到市议员，揭露了系统性腐败和权力滥用。 James Pilcher：作为《辛辛那提问询报》的调查记者，他深入调查了Michael Moran的性交易指控，并采访了多名受害女性。他发现Moran利用其律师身份和与当地司法系统的关系，长期进行性交易活动，并与多名官员有牵连。他强调当地媒体的失职，以及大城市媒体在调查此类案件中的重要性。 Bob Strickley：作为《辛辛那提问询报》的调查编辑，他强调媒体有责任让受害者的声音被听到，并对Portsmouth当地长期存在的腐败问题表示谴责。 Katie Lancaster：她的亲戚Megan Lancaster失踪，她认为Michael Moran对此负有责任。她对DEA宣誓书中关于Moran的指控并不感到震惊，反而感到解脱。Moran被捕让她感到欣慰，尤其是在Megan生日前一天被捕。 Heather Boots：作为一名自称是性交易受害者的女性，她证实了Portsmouth的腐败是公开的秘密，并谴责了Michael Moran的罪行。 Michael Moran：他坚决否认所有关于他参与卖淫和性交易的指控，并声称与Megan Lancaster的唯一关系是涉及前客户的案件。他曾开玩笑说Megan可能在他家地下室或后院。

Deep Dive

Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, the host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week, you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm John Walczak, host of the new podcast Missing in Arizona. And I'm Robert Fisher, one of the most wanted men in the world. We cloned his voice using AI.

In 2001, police say I killed my family and rigged my house to explode before escaping into the wilderness. Police believe he is alive and hiding somewhere. Join me. I'm going down in the cave. As I track down clues. I'm going to call the police and have you removed. Hunting. One of the most dangerous fugitives in the world. Robert Fisher. Do you recognize my voice? Listen to Missing in Arizona every Wednesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.

Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio. I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters. But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil. They're just some weird guy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the weird little guys trying to destroy America.

Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome to Haunting, Purgatory's premiere podcast. I'm your host, Teresa. We'll be bringing you different ghost stories each week, straight from the person who experienced it firsthand. Some will be unsettling, some unnerving, some even downright terrifying. But all of them will be totally true.

Listen to Haunting on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to the Pyton Massacre, a production of iHeartRadio and KT Studios. Somebody pretty important in Ohio once asked me why I was so vested and interested in this case and in sex trafficking. I had to be honest with myself, and I had to say, when I first heard it, I didn't believe it. I didn't think it was widespread, and ever since then, it's been like, these women aren't lying, and they deserve all of our attention. ♪

This is The Piketon Massacre, Return to Pike County, Season 2, Episode 9, 25 Miles South, Part 2. I'm Courtney Armstrong, a television producer at KT Studios with Stephanie Lidecker and Jeff Shane. Throughout this series, we've examined abuses of power by authorities in Ohio, from law enforcement officials to city councilmen.

Investigative reporter James Pilcher drew a through line in the cases of Pike County Sheriff Charlie Reeder, Michael Moran, and the corruption that has infiltrated the Southern Ohio criminal justice system. "Why do I think this is happening in these kinds of counties so much? Either A, you had ineffectual or corrupt or both law enforcement, right?

You had a community or a culture of lawlessness that has descended upon many places in rural America. And I think that's one of the reasons nobody's watching. Nobody cares to watch. Not to, you know, enhance or blow up the importance of journalists, but if you don't have some kind of watchdog or somebody holding officials accountable, it doesn't always work well.

In 2017, reporter Nikki Blankenship uncovered an affidavit filed by the Drug Enforcement Agency. The document detailed an FBI investigation into a Portsmouth, Ohio lawyer and former city councilman named Michael Moran. Its content supported stories Nikki had long heard from area women who claimed that Moran was involved in sex trafficking and prostitution.

It should be noted that Michael Moran has strongly denied the allegations. So when I got this affidavit, I immediately took it to my publisher, my editor, and they wanted proof that it was real. It was authentic and all of this was real. And so I contacted private investigators that I knew, had them look into the document further. I called people in court systems that I knew and had them looking into it. I verified it over and over and over.

And ultimately, they said that, no, we're not going to publish. I gave my letter of resignation that day, and I said ethical differences, and I left. During the course of her reporting on sex trafficking in Southern Ohio, the issue had become personal for Nikki. She often spoke with the families of Portsmouth women that had fallen into prostitution and others whose family members had gone missing or been murdered.

After her resignation, Nikki had a crucial decision to make. I had made a promise to the families. I'm tearing up a little bit, but I promised these families, and I shouldn't have as a journalist, promised them, but I did. I promised them that I was going to scream until someone listened. And so when I felt like I was just repeatedly being shut down, I felt very helpless.

I had to do something. I had to put it out there somewhere. And social media is the best way I knew. Even if only local families were able to see that, I thought it might help them in some way and give them something. And as a local journalist, a lot of people locally were on my Facebook page. So I went ahead and I published it and I went to sleep.

When I woke up the next morning, I had hundreds, probably thousands of likes on that post already and hundreds, if not thousands of shares and messages from everyone. But it kind of went crazier than I expected it to.

When you saw the DA affidavit, what ran through your head? I was not a bit stunned. And people, they want me to be stunned. But I wasn't. That's Katie Lancaster speaking with producer Chris Graves. Katie's best friend and sister-in-law Megan Lancaster went missing in 2013. Katie alleges that Megan worked for Michael Moran as a prostitute.

Moran denies these allegations. What went through my head is, oh my gosh, like, I'm not the only one that sees this. You know, like, the FBI sees it. Like, it was just so, just a sense of relief. News of the affidavit spread.

It soon caught the attention of Cincinnati Inquirer investigative editor Bob Strickley, who had once worked for the newspaper The Portsmouth Daily Times. I initially was a sports editor in Portsmouth and was elevated to managing editor. And during my time there, there were always these rumors about Michael Moran and the women that he was around and the circles he ran in. And at the time, the early of my career, it just seemed so far-fetched.

Portsmouth, if nothing else, is a rumor mill, so a lot of things get tossed around without substantive evidence to back it up. But it was quite surprising to receive word that there was something that could actually back this up.

We got a copy of it ourselves and verified it through various attorneys and our own legal counsel. And I went back and looked through notes that I had taken because I never throw away a notebook. From my time working in Portsmouth, I was like, man, a lot of this tracks. And here's a government official saying so. And it's in a sworn affidavit. So it's time for the chips to go on the table and get involved. It's too big of a story to ignore, even if it is a place that is not traditionally in an area where my paper covers it.

I don't know if it initiated a sense of responsibility as much as it triggered a pretty huge amount of guilt that motivated me to go pitch the story to our bosses despite the paper being two and a half hours away from the subject that we were covering. And luckily my bosses were hospitable enough to allow us to explore and then go dig real deep in this story and turn over some rocks that needed to be turned over decades ago.

Reporter James Pilcher was writing for the Enquirer at the time. My boss came to me because I was an investigative reporter and said, what do you think about this? You want to take a look? Is this guy trafficking women all over the country from this little town, this burned out shell of a town that's known as the epicenter of the opioid epidemic? Is he doing this? Is it true? Can we prove it?

I really thought there was no way. There was no way this could be going on for so long and nobody did anything about it.

The other interesting thing was that the paper who got this wouldn't publish it. I mean, it's a federal affidavit and they still wouldn't publish it. Right there in the hometown of Mike Moran, it takes a big city newspaper from two hours away in Cincinnati to come in and do this investigation. Now, granted, we have the resources of USA Today behind us, but why not? If that had been published or if the local newspaper had been truly an independent arm or an independent eye with some of this stuff have gone on, I don't think so.

The first time I went to Portsmouth, I didn't know what to expect. They partnered me full-time with the photographer who was also bylined on the story. She and I were just shooting some footage out at the U.S. shoe factory, and there was graffiti there talking about prostitution and drugs and things like that. And this guy rides up on a bicycle saying, "Oh, what you guys doing?" We just kind of tell him. He said, "By the way, do you know Michael Moraine?" He said, "Oh yeah, that guy runs women."

At that point, we're like, "Oh my God, everybody in town knows this. The guy on the street knows this guy. We didn't even ask."

In 2018, Pilcher began the difficult task of locating area women and asking them to open up to him about their alleged experiences with Michael Moran. June of that year, I got the first woman to come forward and say, here's exactly how he did it. And then by July, we had one or two on the record. And if these allegations proven true, this guy was in the seat of power.

He had these vulnerable women coming to him for help from a legal perspective. And he offered them the other way out. Do this and maybe I can get these charges lessened for you. We heard that story over and over again. Do this and you won't go to jail. And how much of a worse abuse of power could there be?

You started this story not believing this is possible. How does that make you feel? I'm 6'7", 240. I look like a cop. Got a big black goatee, wear a black fedora. I'm not warm and cuddly, and people don't immediately warm up. Now, I'm a good conversationalist, but I was the government kind of accountability reporter and getting women to open up and tell me these awful things that happened to them. That was eye-opening, and it was a new skill that I had to learn. I

I also had to be the reporter. I also had to be the objective reporter. And the hard part was I also had to fact check all these women. I couldn't just take their word for it. My publication's reputation was on the line. My reputation was on the line. I had to believe but be skeptical. So when they would tell me, "Oh, I remember that I got arrested in this particular place," and I'd have to say, "Okay, where, when, what can you tell me?" I'd have to go look up the court records, all of those things, and try to make sure that the timelines matched.

And ever since then, it's been like, you know, these women aren't lying and they deserve all of our attention. The more Pilcher investigated, the deeper the ties into the Portsmouth legal system grew. We reported several times that women were saying that Moran would brag about his relationship with former Seattle County Common Police Court Judge William Marshall.

Now William Marshall was one of the Marshall boys. He and his brother were the son of the former Judge Marshall in that county. So Bill Marshall took his dad's place as one of two common police courts judges which oversees all the serious cases and all the felonies and all the high-end civil cases at a county level. It's an elected position. There were allegations that Moran was guiding them to have relations or go to parties with Judge William Marshall.

It should be noted that Judge William Marshall has staunchly denied these allegations or any illicit ties to Michael Moran. Though a judge is mentioned in the affidavit, Marshall has repeatedly insisted he is not the judge referred to as working in collusion with Moran and has not been charged in connection with that probe.

But the allegations made by area women didn't stop at a local judge. One of the women who did go on the record for that first story told us that she partied with the former police chief, she partied with former members of the police department, all because Moran set it up.

These women came forward and said, "These guys used their position to either traffic me." One lady got sent up to Chicago, not knowing what she was getting into, and then turned into a prostitute up there. And then other women were talking about how the probation department, his brother, the guy who ran the probation department, was using his position to lessen her probation. That's how deep this went. One of the best lawyers and a politician and a sitting judge all possibly involved in this network.

And that's when we knew we needed to get more women who had been through this experience to talk about what they'd been through. The following is audio from an interview the Cincinnati Inquirer did with a woman named Heather Boots. She claimed to have been a sex trafficking victim in Portsmouth. She went on the record about her alleged association with Michael Moran. He's ruined so many people's lives. This has been happening for decades.

Because the judges and the corruption here, they're all of them. It's a known fact. You can stop at any house in this town and they will tell you everything. Like it's no secret.

James Pilcher began further exploring the Megan Lancaster case. "Katie Lancaster thinks very strongly that Michael Moran lured Megan into this life, and it's his fault she's dead or missing. Now whether he actually was directly involved, all we know is she left behind a heck of a lot of notes about all of her different liaisons and all the people she would go to for money. She kept all of it. Katie found it. She has copies of everything."

We called every single number in that book. Some people acknowledged, yeah, about sex with her. And she became like a slew of women went missing or got killed that were addicted prostitutes, sex workers up in Ross County in Chillicothe, which is two counties to the north. I mean, we're talking dozens, dozens more women.

Michael Moran has denied any involvement or responsibility in Megan Lancaster's disappearance.

Moran has stated numerous times in interviews that the only involvement he had with Megan Lancaster was in a case involving a former client where Lancaster acted as an informant. He has said that he had no other relationship with her and that she did not work for him. Additionally, authorities have not brought any charges against him in the case. At this time, it's unclear whether they have questioned him in the matter.

Throughout 2019, the Cincinnati Enquirer published a series of articles by James Pilcher and his colleagues about Michael Moran and his alleged ties to human trafficking. Everything that was in that affidavit, we reported it out. As outrageous as it sounds, allegations that he was running women all over the country, he was promising women drugs for sex, he had relationships with judges and with members of law enforcement, all of it.

So those allegations, all of this is in this federal document. And yet they never moved on Moran. Now, the DEA says we handed all the stuff about human trafficking over to the FBI. The FBI says we're not going to comment on any potential or ongoing investigation. So you can see how frustrated we were with like, OK, why doesn't anybody move on him? What's going on here?

Bob strictly shared Pilcher's frustration. A very important thing that the press does when it's done well is to shine lights and to offer a vehicle for those people stepping forward, right? Do you find a sense of kind of responsibility of making sure those voices are heard?

What set this one apart was just the amount of women that stepped forward and said something about this to us and talked to us about it. And then also the apparatus that has to exist around a person, Michael Moran, for an operation, as we reported on, to exist in the first place. A lot of people have to turn their heads. Kind of the damnability of people who just turn the other way and don't care about what

What's going on right in front of them in their community is more prevalent than maybe we all realized initially. We're going to take a quick break here. We'll be back in a moment.

Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week, you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind. Stories about regaining a sense of safety, a handle on reality after your entire world is flipped upside down.

From unbelievable romantic betrayals... The love that was so real for me was always just a game for him. To betrayals in your own family... When I think about my dad, oh, well, he is a sociopath. Financial betrayal...

This is not even the part where he steals millions of dollars. And life or death deceptions. She's practicing how she's going to cry when the police calls her after they kill me. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm John Walzak, host of the new podcast Missing in Arizona. And I'm Robert Fisher, one of the most wanted men in the world. We cloned his voice using AI. Come on, Paul.

In 2001, police say I killed my family. First mom, then the kids. And rigged my house to explode. In a quiet suburb. This is the Beverly Hills of the Valley. Before escaping into the wilderness. There was sleet and hail and snow coming down. They found my wife's SUV. Right on the reservation boundary. And my dog flew. All I could think of is him and the sniper me out of some tree.

But not me. Police believe he is alive and hiding somewhere. For two years. They won't tell you anything. I've traveled the nation. I'm going down in the cave. Tracking down clues. They were thinking that I picked him up and took him somewhere. If you keep asking me this, I'm going to call the police and have you removed. Searching for Robert Fisher. One of the most dangerous fugitives in the world.

Do you recognize my voice? Join an exploding house, the hunt, family annihilation today and a disappearing act. Listen to Missing in Arizona every Wednesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your favorite shows. Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio. I spent almost a decade researching right wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters.

But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. I've collected the stories of hundreds of aspiring little Hitlers of the suburbs, from the Nazi cop who tried to join ISIS, to the National Guardsman plotting to assassinate the Supreme Court, to the Satanist soldier who tried to get his own unit blown up in Turkey. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil. They're just some weird guy. And you can laugh. Honestly, I think you have to.

Seeing these guys for what they are doesn't mean they're not a threat. It's a survival strategy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the weird little guys trying to destroy America. Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I'm a neuroscientist at Stanford, and I've spent my career exploring the three-pound universe in our heads. We're looking at a whole new series of episodes this season to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. Why does your memory drift so much? Why is it so hard to keep a secret? When should you not trust your intuition?

Why do brains so easily fall for magic tricks? And why do they love conspiracy theories? I'm hitting these questions and hundreds more because the more we know about what's running under the hood, the better we can steer our lives. Join me weekly to explore the relationship between your brain and your life by digging into unexpected questions.

Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. As part of his reporting, Pilcher tracked down Michael Moran to get his side of the story. Moran vehemently denied all the allegations about being involved in any prostitution or sex trafficking rings. I've talked to Michael Moran three times at length. When we first talked to him, I said, are you a sex trafficker? People have said, you're a sex trafficker.

It says here in this affidavit, you're a sex trafficker. What do you say to that? He tried to play the dumb country lawyer. The following is an audio recording from that interview with Michael Moran. I don't even know what a sex... Give me the definition of a sex trafficker. So then we get all these women lined up. We come back to him and say, OK, we've got these women now saying that you're the guy. And he says, OK. And then he was more angry. He would not go on camera with us that second time.

During one conversation, Pilcher asked Moran specifically about Megan Lancaster. Moran denied being her pimp or being involved in any of that kind of activity.

But when James Pilcher brought up the possible whereabouts of Megan Lancaster, he got a shocking response. Pilcher relayed the story to producer Jeff Shane. He joked with me. Hey, maybe she's in my basement. Maybe she's in my backyard. He thinks it's a joke because he knows what the rumors are. Wait, what? So you asked him directly about it? Oh, absolutely. I said, do you have anything to do with Megan Lancaster? And he said, no, but you can check my basement. Everybody else wants to. You can check out and back. He said, I've invited the cops in to take a look.

But he had this attitude that he thought he was smarter than you, that he thought he was smarter than anybody.

And I think what probably from my reporting and my history on all this is that I read a lot of stuff about him and leading up to him. And I'd see stories here and there, but nobody but Nikki Blankenship kept at him. Nobody kept on him. And I can tell you that we never went away.

The photographer person that I worked with was always in the courtroom, bugging him. You know, it was bugging him that she was there. She was always taking pictures or getting video of him in action in the courtroom. We just never went away.

In 2020, authorities finally made their move. Police raided the home of a well-known lawyer suspected of running a national sex trafficking ring for years. March 25th, state and local police raid Michael Moran's house with a search warrant. And Dave Yost, the attorney general, was personally present for that enforcement. When you get the state attorney general showing up to serve a search warrant, you know that there are some very important people watching this case.

I'm looking at the story I did and you can see Moran is sitting on his porch in his stocking feet while police are searching his office slash house. Now, the thing you got to remember too, which is interesting, he has a brick two-story house that sits on the corner right across from the courthouse and right across county corner from the local prosecutor's office. So he literally can walk back and forth from his house slash office to the courthouse and walk right in front of the prosecutor's office.

Just seven months later, it all came crashing down for Michael Moran. A longtime defense lawyer and former city councilman has been arrested in an alleged sex trafficking operation. On Friday, October 23rd of 2020, state and local police teamed up and arrested Michael Moran. This comes nearly seven years after that initial affidavit issued by the DEA.

For Nikki Blankenship, it was a day that marked the culmination of years of tireless work and a victory for dozens of Portsmouth women. When my friend was arrested on October 23rd, he was arrested on the 18 charges that included sex trafficking, racketeering, compelling and promoting prostitution. When that came out, that was a real exciting day for me. I was screaming. I ran through the house screaming because...

because I worried that no one was ever going to check. No one was really ever going to look into it. I really worried. I know that the Cincinnati Inquirer, they had to do their own investigation, but it was approximately a year before they started releasing things. And when they released things, I still didn't know if anything was ever going to happen. And so finally, I was like, okay, at least somebody's finally checking.

Did it kind of validate the journey you had started on? Yeah, yeah, it definitely did. There were also a lot of people who were saying he's a great man. And I worried about that. I'm like, did I make a mistake? Am I wrong? And there's no way I could have seen that I was at this point. I'm like, I have so much evidence, but still, I can't, I don't want to hurt anyone's life like that.

So yeah, I was like, okay, something, it was valid and everything I've worked on for a decade is valid. Yeah.

Katie Lancaster also felt a great sense of relief and was struck by the uncanny timing of Moran's arrest. Moran was arrested October 23rd of 2020, the day before Megan's 33rd birthday. I mean, I was on my way to Columbus and I about jumped out of the damn car while it was moving. I couldn't speak. I couldn't talk. I couldn't tell anybody what was going on. I was just like, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, like,

I just couldn't believe it. And for it to happen the day that it did, it was almost like a sense of, okay, now I know this is a God thing. Like this happened the day before Megan's birthday, almost eight years into it. Like it could not have come at a better time. It was like, oh my gosh, we did it. We got this far. Megan, look what you have done. Like I so just wanted five minutes with her to say, look what you've done.

Let's stop here for another quick break. We'll be back in a moment. Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week, you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind.

Stories about regaining a sense of safety, a handle on reality after your entire world is flipped upside down. From unbelievable romantic betrayals. The love that was so real for me was always just a game for him. To betrayals in your own family. When I think about my dad, oh, well, he is a sociopath. Financial betrayal.