Mark Vandegrift 
Welcome to the latest episode of the Brand Shorthand Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Vandegrift, and with me today is our true crime aficionado, Lorraine Kessler. Lorraine, how are things?

Lorraine Kessler 
Oh my gosh, they're good. I have committed no crimes, but I have learned new tips about how not to ever be caught.

Mark Vandegrift 
I figured that was built in your DNA.

Lorraine Kessler 
Yeah. Well, those were the old days, the good old days for criminals.

Mark Vandegrift 
Well, it's time to move to part two of our true crime topic. And last time we covered what makes this genre of podcasts so interesting and how so many use the principles of good positioning to keep listeners engaged. So Lorraine, Dick Maggiore always taught us start where you last left off, pick up where you last left off. So give us a quick rundown of some of the principles that you see overlap between what we do as positionists and these true crime podcasts.

Lorraine Kessler 
Well, firstly, each podcast that really, I think, has found a great following is distinctive in either its attitude and or combined with a point of view, right? So that's what we might call positioning. They position themselves a little differently for the audience. Some of them are lawyers who spend a lot of time really giving you the background to what's going on in the courtroom when there's a trial and what an objection means and why the judge may have overruled or sustained a ruling and why a defense attorney may have made a point, et cetera. So you get to learn a little bit more about the courtroom proceedings. Everything from, there might be 12 jurors, but four of them are not going to be deciding the case, right? They're kind of removed at the last moment because only eight jurors are going to be designated. So it's kind of an interesting world. And it differs by state. So you have that. Then you have investigators, actual past law enforcement. And many of them, of course, focus more on the law side of law and order, remember the TV show? So they focus more on the law side and give you lot of insights into what the investigators are probably doing or have done and what they will run down. So that's always insightful. And then you have some real journalists like Joel Waldman or Ashleigh Banfield or even Nancy Grace who've approached it more from a journalistic standpoint. And I've always say this, I think Surviving the Survivor Joel Waldman has one of the most interesting blatant positions. He says, you know, best guest and the global phenomena Surviving The Survivor. And he truly does have the best guests and then he adds that on another tag, best community. And he does have the best guests. He'll bring in a lot of different people from Anne Burgess and Gary Bucato who are, I think they're forensic psychologists. I know Anne Burgess who's in her 80s, but she created profiling, the actual idea, the science, and she did it through, she's a nurse, and she actually did it through understanding that research is key to anything medical or treatment of patients. She's amazing. And Gary Bucato, and I think he's affiliated, if I'm right, with Is it Penn State? I think it's Penn State. He's written a great book, The New Kind of Evil. They're just, break out the psychology, like what we might expect. And a lot of the guests on the shows, different, and one of the things about this community, and we would talk about this as part of positioning, they're, these podcasts are customer intimate in a way that, Network can never be, right? They not only will post and comment on the chat that's going on live when they're broadcasting, but they know some of these regular people who frequently watch the show and comment. And so I think what you have is authenticity in a way that we've not, network has not been able to ever deliver. So, I think that's it's just really great. You really feel part of the family. So when they say community, it's not just words. You really feel part of the community. You can basically email or text message almost any of these hosts and they'll respond in a very timely and polite way to whatever you're sending. Unless you're rude. Unless you're rude and say something bad.

Mark Vandegrift 
Well, and of course, it's what we call content marketing, right? I mean, it's endless content, crimes created every day, the gift that keeps on giving.

Lorraine Kessler 
It never stops because yeah, crime doesn't end. I mean, some of the things that people do and these commission of these crimes and don't understand about today's world with license tag plate readers and ring phones and Nest cameras and just what their devices do, even when you're not attending to it, it's still data that police can pick up. They don't realize the digital footprints they leave. They don't realize their car with GPS is a digital footprint. It's really interesting.

Mark Vandegrift 
So give us some of these endless content, like give us some examples that people find ways to kill or hurt or surprise us with complete and abject evil.

Lorraine Kessler 
Well, supposedly, I mean, apparently women, which I always thought we were above this, as gender.  

Mark Vandegrift 
Not so much, huh?

Lorraine Kessler
You know, first of all, women tend to kill by poisoning. I don't know if you know that, but that tends to be their choice.

Mark Vandegrift
Interesting.

Lorraine Kessler
But we just had the big trial of Kouri Richins from, surprise, surprise, Utah. Another, there's like. Florida, Utah, Idaho, like these states. I don't know what's going on in these states, but a little bit of California. Ironically, New Jersey has not factored hugely, although there is one big murder that just happened there. But Kouri Richins is the trial that just ended huge. She was guilty, found guilty on five counts of aggravated murder, attempted aggravated murder, because she tried to kill her husband before, two counts of insurance fraud, forgery on an insurance document. And it was a very interesting case because they were never able to emphatically prove that she bought the fentanyl that she or how she gave it to her husband. They just know he ingested it. So it was very circumstantial, but people misunderstand circumstantial. They think that, oh they always say, well, it's just a circumstantial case. Well, there's very few murder cases where you actually see the murder occur. You know, where you actually see someone shoot someone and you can identify them. So circumstantial is really powerful if you have many, many strands that you can rope together into a tight, thick rope. And that's kind of what they did. And the ironic part about this, frankly, is she did it to herself. Her own Google searches, you know, like, you know, how do you know if someone was poisoned right after he was, she found out that they found in the autopsy that he died of fentanyl intoxication, but obviously he ingested. And then she wrote this walk the dog letter in jail, which was basically telling her mom what to tell the brother so that she would get out of jail. Like, make sure he says this and says this and says this. And so she absolutely sunk herself. But that was a crazy case. And you have Shannon Gardner. Her family, her mother and her father started the stamping up business, you know, the scrap bit. 

Mark Vandegrift
Oh yah wow.

Lorraine Kessler
Yeah, they're multi-millionaires. So she, with her very strange second husband, Henry, hired a guy named Henry Tenon. They hired some guy to ambush her ex-husband, Jared Bridegan. I'm saying, Bridegan, I'm not sure how to say his name. It's B-R-I-D-E-G-A-N, I think. He was a Microsoft exec, 33 years old, and he had remarried. So he had a little two-year-old in the car, his two-year-old daughter from his second marriage. So they've been divorced for a while. But it's a custody battle. So she gets her husband, Mario Fernandez Saldana, and this guy, this poor hapless ex-out-of-it criminal, Henry Tenon, to ambush this father with his daughter in the car and they kill him right in front of the daughter like shoot. Now so Henry flips of course and then pleads guilty now he's pleading not guilty so that trial hasn't happened yet but she has millions of dollars to fight her case so we'll see what happens. And then of course those who really know the Karen Read case and this is a case where social media has played a huge role today. Bigger than ever before in these cases. Of course, we saw a lot of media. We're seeing a lot of media, of course, on Nancy Guthrie, that case. But Karen Read kind of showed the mold of this. And this was in Canton, Massachusetts. And she was accused of running over her policeman live-in boyfriend, John O'Keefe, after a night of drinking. Yeah. But, Turtle Boy, whose name is Aidan Kearney. He's an online journalist. He believes she's innocent as could be and that these cops from Canton, Massachusetts are kind of like if you ever saw the movie Copland with Sylvester Stallone, which is by the way one of his best movies ever, and Harvey Keitel. But these cops are corrupt. They're all watch each other's back. So Turtle Boy jumps on, says it was all this conspiracy. Someone in the house, because all these cops were in this house, killed him and then threw him back outside. And so there was hundreds of protesters around the court with free Karen Read t-shirts and signs and then they actually had a free Karen Read Facebook page. mean, everything you would want to create publicity. Plus, they had a showman defense attorney in Alan Jackson, who is, by the way, he's brilliant. He is just brilliant, but he is a showman. He was a great prosecutor in California when he was a prosecutor. And you'll see a lot of times these great prosecutors become defense attorneys and then make a lot of money so I mean, she ended up being acquitted. There's a civil trial now, I believe, but she was acquitted and they, they really did not pass the muster in terms of reasonable doubt in convicting her. My personal feeling is, yeah, she hit him. She ran over him. It was an accident. She was drunk. She was mad. She didn't realize it, but, they overcharged her, which I think was part of the problem. But the social media on that was like nothing you've ever seen. So it's media covering media in a way. And then of course you have Lori Daybell Vallow, or Lori Vallow Daybell, got that, another Utah who kills her ex-husband and two of her children. Tylee 16 and JJ 7. And as her boyfriend, Chad Daybell, they call her the Doomsday Mom because they believed in this doomsday kind of cultish, extreme theological construct that they themselves came up with.

Mark Vandegrift 
Sounds like they're demon possessed.

Lorraine Kessler 
She thinks, in their thing, she thinks that she has special, she's a goddess, she has special powers, and that Chad had special powers, and the portal to heaven is his home, and their children end up becoming zombies because they're enemies, and they need to be killed to be saved or something like that.

Mark Vandegrift 
Oh jeez.

Lorraine Kessler 
So the juries were not fooled by this, even though she tried to use her charm in her. And there's the other thing that's weird. She and Donna Adelson from Miami, the 75-year-old grandmother who orchestrated the hit and killing of her daughter's ex-husband over a custody thing in Florida, she and her son hired two guys to kill Dan Markell, a Florida State University law professor, in his driveway as part of a custody dispute with her daughter. Anyway, Donna Adelson and Lori Vallow Daybell, and I shouldn't even use the Vallow name because she was married like five times. So Lori Daybell, they were both on Wheel of Fortune like Lori in 2004 and Donna like in the 80s. So I don't know. Is there some I need to have, I need to seek some sort of celebrity? I don't know. It's really crazy. And those are the women.

Mark Vandegrift 
Well, you know, it's funny because we're making this connection to positioning and marketing. And one of the things that it sounds like is they have true brand loyalists listening to these shows. So in my mind, it sounds almost like an addiction. What do you think makes these shows addicting?

Lorraine Kessler 
I think we just have an insatiable need or those of us who interact with this community and engage. I have an insatiable why. Why would someone go to this level? Why not just get divorced? All right, it's painful. You're gonna lose more than you would hope, but you might gain and just get through it and these are not, you know, drug dealers and criminals who are trying to vie for position like in the mafia or create hits for those. These are not so much those kind of elimination kills, right? But you have serial killers in some respects, mainly men, sometimes women, rarely, but sometimes. And so what makes them tick? What's the sexual predators? Like what's going on in their psychology. But in these cases that I just talked about, they're all elimination kills. I mean, Kouri Richins killed her husband because she put herself $7 million in debt.

Mark Vandegrift 
Oh jeez.

Lorraine Kessler 
Yeah, $7 million. She was a real estate. And she kept like robbing Peter to pay Paul. She kept taking payday loans to pay what she owed. At the time that she killed her husband, because he was worth a considerable amount of money and she wanted, she thought she would get his insurance. She didn't know that he had created a trust that wrote her out of it. Yeah. So, but she was paying $5,000, she needed to pay $5,000 a day to stay current in her debt. I mean, so you just, I think you're shaking your head. That's, I think for me, and I think the ones who watch, it's one, the why question.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah.

Lorraine Kessler 
What or why would someone do what they did? And then I think there's another insatiable need for like justice for the victim, right? It starts with like, this is a victim who should never have been a victim. And let's, I want our day in court. I want some justice. I want some closure. I know for me having closure is like super important. Like I want to see these people. And I know they're all alleged by the court. They're alleged by our, they're not, they're innocent in our court trial, which is unique in the world, by the way. We are unique in that our judicial system, you are innocent until proven guilty. That is unique. And the bar for prosecutors is very high. That's why they get to do a closing and the rebuttal against the defense's closing. And yet, I learned some states don't even do like opening and closing, which I think is wrong. I you need that. But yeah, so I think that it's those two things. Like why would someone, what would provoke someone to do this and take this kind of action? And then, you know, I'm curious and I want to see that closure. I want to see justice happen.

Mark Vandegrift 
Well, it seems the beautiful thing is communities built into all of this. We could call it the magic bullet. Ha ha ha. Pun intended. But you know, they're merchandising their, uh, podcasts. 

Lorraine Kessler 
Absolutely.

Mark Vandegrift 
In a pretty big way to these communities. Why don't you give us some examples of some of the products and services that you see come out of this, even, you know, in podcast advertising.

Lorraine Kessler 
Yeah, they, well, beyond their community, they all have websites and pages. Some have merchandise by writing books. So they capitalize on their audience and their notoriety that way. They're multi-channel. I think we've talked about how they're so multi-channel and where they might show up, like the different, like on Instagram or on X and on Facebook. So they're multi-channel, there's merchandise. They all do a really good job with logos and brand identity. They even do things like promote their mods. The moderators who have to manage chat, they all have, the good ones all have kind of rules or moderator guides. And so what you see on the screen during a live broadcast is kind of moderated by volunteers. And so they ask people to give them, buy them coffee, which you can do by giving gifts. And that creates the engagement, right? You can, it's free to subscribe, but to become a member, it's a monthly fee. But then you can just simply buy like a badge and buy coffee for someone. So that's all using the interface of podcasting and YouTube very, very effectively. And the hosts themselves act like hometown restaurant owners who come to your table and talk to you. And you're like, that's why I like going there for Mexican food versus the chain, as I know the owner, and he comes to my table, his wife makes the desserts. So you have this relationship. And they're always easy to join, easy to find on your social media. So I think that kind of merchandising and cross-merchandising is great. Then there's this big convention, I think it's called CrimeCon, and they go to it. The other thing that they do, which is very unusual in terms of if you compare it to network news, network news is very much like, did NBC get the scoop? And our announcers don't mix with ABC. Here it's extremely collegial, so they build each other's franchise. You will see the same guests on many different podcasts, whether it be FBI agents or lawyers or whatever. And of course, Joel Waldman with Surviving the Survivor, best guest, best community, tends to have a slew of great guests who then have their own channels. And so that cross-merchandising just of personalities is extremely important because they have a unique following too.

Mark Vandegrift 
Wow. Well, you know, as I think through what people are consuming and we're certainly in an entertainment consumption age, what do you think has been the societal impact from these shows?

Lorraine Kessler 
Well, I know for a fact that I think the societal impact is really been great. I know for a fact that Karen Read case was extremely influenced by social media, even the outcome. As good as the attorney, they had a wind working for them that, I mean, how many cases happened that didn't have that. So there was a movement behind it. There's a guy named Gavin Fish. And in his, I think, big contribution. And it's a huge one because it's from near my hometown. I think more than 14 years ago, if I have the years right. There was this beautiful, beautiful girl, Ellen Greenberg, who was ruled, her death was ruled a suicide. And in order for it to be a suicide, she was found with 20 stab wounds in her apartment, 10 in the back of her neck.

Mark Vandegrift 
How do you do that to yourself?

Lorraine Kessler 
Yah, with a knife like this. And two post-mortem. Right, and a deep gash, a bruise on her head. It was originally, I believe, ruled a homicide. Then it was changed undetermined. Then it was after a closed door meeting with the Philadelphia police. Yeah, because there's a lot of political influence here and corruption. And because her fiance's father was extremely, her fiance is Sam Goldberg and his father is extremely networked into Philadelphia politics in so far as he's a big supporter of the governor Shapiro, who was then the attorney general. But Gavin Fish has put more than anyone, put focus on this case because the Greenberg parents have been fighting forever and won a civil lawsuit against Philadelphia for $600,000 for their mishandling. It was never investigated as a murder despite how she was found because they just took the fiance's word that she killed herself. So obviously you have to look at his father's connections to the people of power. And also the uncle of Sam Goldberg, the fiance, is a former judge and lawyer. And he showed up at the apartment before the police and they took all of her computer devices. So, but anyway, we would know none of this if it wasn't for Gavin Fish. So what's the impact? Well, the federal government finally or federal law enforcement finally opened a case to investigate this case after I think 14, 15 years. That's huge and that would not have happened in Filthydelphia on its own. Yeah, so I think about that. That's pretty impressive that now there's a federal investigation and I happen to think, and this is just my opinion, we don't really talk politics, but I happen to think the reason why Josh Shapiro wasn't chosen as the VP candidate in the last election was because of this case. Because I think this case was already within the community. It's well known in the crime community. And it would leak out. I mean, how hard would it be to give it more lens?

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah. Wow. Well, tell you what, as we wrap up this episode of the Brand Shorthand podcast, why don't you give our listeners your top three go-to crime podcasts. I know you have like a dozen or more, but give us your top three.

Lorraine Kessler 
Can I do five? 

Mark Vandegrift
Okay, do five.

Lorraine Kessler 
All right. I already mentioned Surviving the Survivor. So please check that out. Joel Waldman was a journalist from New Jersey. Now he lives in Miami and his 86-year-old mother is the oldest podcaster in the true crime space as a child Holocaust survivor. And so check that one out. Grizzly True Crime. If you want to laugh and just smart snark, you want to tune in to Gisela Kay. She's the queen of snark. And she launched in 2021. She has like 450,000 subscribers. That's amazing. I mean, just think 2021 to today and you know, it's a hundred thousand a year almost. Grizzly True Crime. She is fantastic and when she she'll give you a very different kind of the the point of view I would like to have on the case. Courtroom Confidential is Josh Ritter he's a lawyer former prosecutor and defense attorney he's so good that he's now Fox news contributor but his shows great and of course he's more from the legal side and the guy that has gotta be the reporter on the street with the greatest integrity is Brian Entin, E-N-T-I-N, investigates. He's out of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, but he's never there. I mean, he has been in Tucson for like, I don't know, the last six, seven weeks, the whole time. And then he flew from there to Utah and he's everywhere and he's like seems like an independent guy but you can trust him you can take what he says to the bank and he's really enjoyable to, So there's one. Yeah.

Mark Vandegrift
Very good. Well, thanks for giving us your insight on true crime podcast. That's mixing some genres here, marketing and advertising over to the true crime side, but they make a good alignment, especially as these personalities understand that they are a brand. So that's

Lorraine Kessler 
Right, yeah. And we do have to give credit kudos to Nancy Grace because in a way she opened the door for this. Talk about a personality, right? I mean, she is a character. And sometimes the way she talks to guests is really, but that's the cult of personality that many of these podcasters have built.

Mark Vandegrift 
Well, thanks to you Lorraine for joining us and to our listeners for joining us again this week. Don't forget to like and share and tell a friend and of course subscribe, hit that subscribe button and until next time have an amazing day.