Ghostwatch

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Speaker 8 The program you're about to watch is a unique live investigation of the supernatural. It contains material which some viewers may find to be disturbing.

Speaker 8 No creaking gates, no gothic towers, no shutter windows. Yet for the past 10 months, this house has been the focus of an astonishing barrage of supernatural activity.

Speaker 9 On Halloween night in 1992, at 9.25 p.m., an unusual television show aired on the BBC.

Speaker 8 So welcome live this Halloween night to the first ever TV Ghost Watch. We're going to investigate one of the most baffling and fascinating areas of human experience, the supernatural.

Speaker 8 Tonight, television is going ghost hunting in an unprecedented scientific experiment. We hope to show you, for the first time, irrefutable proof that ghosts really do exist.

Speaker 9 The host, a longtime BBC talk show host and journalist named Michael Parkinson, told viewers how the live investigation would work.

Speaker 9 The BBC Sarah Green would be spending the night at a house that was said to be haunted with a small camera crew, reporting live on whatever happened at the house.

Speaker 9 During the show, people at home could call a phone number, broadcast on the screen, and share their own experiences with ghosts, and also to comment on whatever they were seeing on the show.

Speaker 9 This style of live broadcast was popular at the time. There was a show called Crime Watch that also had a call-in element, and one called Hospital Watch.

Speaker 9 This one on Halloween night was called Ghost Watch.

Speaker 9 The host, Michael Parkinson, introduced a woman in the studio with him as an expert on the paranormal, who would help explain what was going on during the show.

Speaker 9 She said she had been investigating the haunted house, which was in London, on a street called Foxhill Drive, for months.

Speaker 10 We ran a computer programme of all the haunted locations in the UK and then we did a census of all the various investigators and they were all unanimous that Foxhall had more tangible phenomena on record than, well, I was going to say, any place in the world, but certainly any place in the UK.

Speaker 8 Was there chance do you think of us seeing anything tonight?

Speaker 10 I don't honestly know.

Speaker 10 Sometimes we saw nothing for weeks, and then other times things were coming through thick and fast. I mean, so much so that we had difficulty logging it all.
I mean, some nights it was like

Speaker 10 being in a circus or a war zone.

Speaker 12 A war zone?

Speaker 8 What What about Halloween? Will that make any difference, do you think?

Speaker 10 Yeah, I think it will.

Speaker 10 Certainly there are more reports on Halloween than almost any other night of the year, but maybe that's because people expect to see things.

Speaker 13 I've always been interested in ghost stories.

Speaker 9 This is Stephen Volk.

Speaker 9 By 1992, when Ghostwatch aired, he had written a few horror movies. One of them was directed by the same person who directed The Exorcist.

Speaker 9 Another was a reimagining of the vacation to Switzerland that inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein.

Speaker 9 He'd been interested in the ways novels like Frankenstein or Bram Stoker's Dracula are constructed. Both novels are presented as non-fiction, a series of letters and journal entries.

Speaker 13 And it struck me that many, many literary ghost stories that you read begin.

Speaker 13 I'm going to tell you something that's quite unbelievable, but I really want you to know this really, really happened to me. I know you're not going to believe me, but it really did happen to me.

Speaker 13 And being a television writer, I always thought to myself, what is the television equivalent of telling that kind of ghost story with that kind of authenticity?

Speaker 13 And it struck me, well, what they would do in TV if they told a ghost story is just put a camera in someone's face and the person would tell you, this really happened to me.

Speaker 13 This is, you know, what

Speaker 13 non-fiction TV is all about. You interview people straight to their face and they tell you the story.

Speaker 9 So Stephen decided to do just that.

Speaker 9 He wrote a ghost story and pitched the idea to the BBC.

Speaker 9 It would be a ghost story presented as an actual live documentary investigation. Everything was designed to look as real as possible, but it only aired once.

Speaker 9 I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

Speaker 9 Stephen Vog was used to writing movies, but writing what was supposed to look like live television was something else altogether.

Speaker 9 Live TV was full of mistakes and interruptions, and you never knew what would happen.

Speaker 9 He studied telethons and roving reporter pieces and shows in front of live audiences.

Speaker 13 It was a bit of guesswork

Speaker 13 and I had you know for instance in a movie when you're writing a movie you never put exposition on the screen.

Speaker 13 You never have someone saying oh I moved into this house and it was haunted and my kids were scared and you just don't do it like that.

Speaker 13 And of course that's the complete reverse of what you do on television.

Speaker 13 You always thrust a microphone into someone's face and have them tell you a story or interview them and ask them questions straight. So I had to construct these kind of interview situations and

Speaker 13 question and answer sessions rather than the way I'd normally do it in a movie.

Speaker 9 And what was the reaction from the BBC when you first brought them this idea?

Speaker 13 I don't think they quite got what it was trying to be, which was basically something that looked like something else.

Speaker 13 So

Speaker 13 when the BBC saw what we were up to, it was a bit kind of taken aback and kind of bemused.

Speaker 13 I remember the executive producer, Richard Brooke, when he saw the first cut that Leslie, the director, presented to him, he was quite amazed that there was a shot where one of the technicians kind of moved in the front of the camera and the camera kind of wobbled.

Speaker 13 And he said, why on earth have you left that in?

Speaker 15 One of the things that I love about live TV or what I did love as a child watching live TV are the mistakes.

Speaker 9 This is Leslie Manning, the the director of Ghost Watch.

Speaker 15 To do credit to the story, as written,

Speaker 15 I wanted to make, present it as close to live TV as I possibly could.

Speaker 9 Like Stephen, Leslie says she watched a lot of live TV to prepare. She says she also watched a lot of documentaries to see how she could direct the actors.

Speaker 9 She remembers telling them to dial back their performances.

Speaker 9 In addition to the actors, she included real people on on camera talking about their own ghost stories.

Speaker 9 The Ghost Watch team also decided to use very well-known and respected BBC hosts on the show. People viewers would be used to seeing doing interviews or documentary programs.

Speaker 13 It was a gamble because we were casting people

Speaker 13 like Michael Parkinson, who's kind of like a Larry King kind of

Speaker 13 character, I guess you would say, in terms of America, to kind of be an actor. And there was no guarantee that he was going to be able to do any of it really.

Speaker 9 Leslie says they also didn't want actors playing the camera crew.

Speaker 15 So we asked around the BBC if there was anybody, any of the studio camera guys who actually were happy to be on camera

Speaker 15 and we got two people back, one sound, one camera and they got the job.

Speaker 13 There was a lot of handheld camera.

Speaker 13 Leslie tended to work out quite long takes so that the camera would be moving around the whole time upstairs, downstairs, you know, around the corner and this kind of thing, which is not normally how you'd work on a movie, for instance.

Speaker 13 You know, you'd have hundreds of angles and hundreds of shifts of lighting in order to do one sequence or one scene.

Speaker 13 And it was lower quality. It was a video camera.

Speaker 13 I mean, I think that's what outraged the higher-up people at the drama department because they were used to

Speaker 13 something that was kind of well lit and kind of in a way, kind of well-acted and well-presented. And, you know, the composition of every shot was considered.

Speaker 13 But because of the nature of this, none of those things really mattered. The only thing that mattered was it had to look like it was happening before your eyes.

Speaker 13 And if it's happening before your eyes, all those other considerations don't really matter.

Speaker 15 The point of it was really, do you believe everything you see on television?

Speaker 9 On the first page of the Ghost Watch script, Stephen wrote, I won't believe it until I see it on TV.

Speaker 9 On Halloween night, on the BBC's drama time slot, when they usually showed movies, a short introduction indicated that what viewers were about to see was fictional, but it was vague.

Speaker 9 It described Ghostwatch as a film and the real BBC hosts in Ghost Watch as starring in it.

Speaker 13 If you missed that, then goodness knows what you were expecting.

Speaker 9 According to the BBC, around 11 million people were watching on Halloween night.

Speaker 9 The program began with what looks like time-stamped research footage from a few months earlier. It shows two girls sleeping in their bedroom.

Speaker 9 Then, in the middle of the night, there's a loud banging sound and they start screaming. At one point, the light bulb in the bedside lamp bursts.

Speaker 9 Soon after that, that, the camera goes to what looks like a live feed of the reporter at the house, Sarah Green, interviewing the two girls, Kim and Suzanne, and their mother, Pam, all played by actresses, about the problems they've been having at the house over the last 10 months.

Speaker 17 These terrible noises woke me coming from the walls, like back, like a thudding.

Speaker 9 All around you.

Speaker 17 Yes, like the whole room was going to come apart.

Speaker 10 Did anybody else hear it?

Speaker 17 Yes, Suzanne, Kim heard it.

Speaker 10 Kimmy, if you heard it too,

Speaker 9 what sort of a noise was it?

Speaker 10 I was screaming, I was shouting, what is it, what is it?

Speaker 17 Well, I didn't know what to say. They were that terrified, so I said it was pipes, you know, central heating.

Speaker 17 So afterwards, whenever Kim heard something, she'd say, it's pipes, pipes is here.

Speaker 18 in the studio someone had called into the phone line the caller said they saw something in the earlier footage of the girl's bedroom you know at the beginning when you showed the real footage of that haunted bedroom well i know it was dark but i was sure i could see a figure standing behind against the wall just by the curtain yeah very very vague but definitely a figure there

Speaker 9 Michael Parkinson asked to have the tape rewound so everyone could see it again.

Speaker 9 And then you could make out a figure standing by the curtains.

Speaker 13 But the presenter, Michael Parkinson, says, I don't see anything, do you?

Speaker 13 Whereas it has been on screen. So I imagined everyone at home going, but I did see something.
He's saying he didn't see anything. And I love that idea.
It's an idea that's purely television.

Speaker 13 You couldn't do it in a movie. You couldn't do it in a book.
It's purely the relationship between the presenter and the audience making that moment work.

Speaker 9 As the program continued, more calls came in about the figure.

Speaker 19 Well, the strange thing is that we're still getting calls about that shadowy figure that was seen in the haunted bedroom, or people think they've seen in the haunted bedroom.

Speaker 19 Now, what's really weird is these are all tallying with the description. These are all different phone calls.
They're generally all saying that it's an old man or a woman,

Speaker 19 bald with a skull-like head, dark eyes, or some are just saying holes for eyes, wearing a black robe or a dress which is buttoned up to the neck.

Speaker 9 Things got stranger and stranger at the house. There are cat sounds coming from the walls.
Did you hear it? And one of the girls suddenly has scratches all over her face.

Speaker 9 At that point, about an hour into the program, Michael Parkinson tells viewers that they're extending coverage beyond the scheduled window.

Speaker 8 I should tell you if if you joined to see the next program, that in fact we're staying with what we have here from Foxhill Drive because the events

Speaker 8 are so remarkable and dramatic that we'll be staying with them for as long as we have to.

Speaker 9 Things continue to escalate in the house. It seems as if at one point one of the girls becomes possessed.

Speaker 9 Stop it!

Speaker 17 Stop it, Susie!

Speaker 9 Then the connection with the studio is lost.

Speaker 9 And after it comes back, the reporter, Sarah Green, gets trapped in the small closet under the stairs with whatever is haunting the house.

Speaker 3 Sarah!

Speaker 13 Yeah, at that point, Ruth, the producer, always said,

Speaker 13 you know, everyone's going to realize it's a drama now, so we can do what we like. So we kind of went a bit crazy in the last five minutes.

Speaker 9 Back at the studio, unmanned cameras start rolling across the stage. Studio lights are exploding.
And Michael Parkinson seems totally confused.

Speaker 12 I've got a an emergency generator.

Speaker 8 Whether or not we should bring it in, I I don't know.

Speaker 12 I'm not going.

Speaker 8 Studio's completely dark. Just

Speaker 8 blackness now. All the the lights have failed, the the power's

Speaker 8 gone off.

Speaker 8 We've got some

Speaker 8 some lights in the studio.

Speaker 8 I don't know

Speaker 8 There's kit there's cameras, but I don't know which one's working. I mean that

Speaker 8 there are no

Speaker 8 cameramen.

Speaker 1 I mean

Speaker 8 it's difficult to know even if anybody's still still with us, but

Speaker 8 if they are, this is the the scene in this

Speaker 8 in this studio, this totally deserted studio.

Speaker 9 He slowly walks towards the camera.

Speaker 21 Auto cube's working.

Speaker 9 And it becomes clear that he's become possessed by something as the camera fades to black.

Speaker 8 Round and round the garden, like a teddy bear.

Speaker 9 We'll be right back. To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus.

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Speaker 9 The night Ghost Watch aired, everyone who worked on it got together to have a party and to watch the show.

Speaker 9 In part, so that no one would see Sarah Green at a restaurant when she was supposed to be trapped in a haunted house.

Speaker 9 The producer, Ruth Baumgarten, was at the BBC Studios to make sure everything was going well. She wanted to keep an eye on the phone lines.

Speaker 9 They'd posted the normal BBC number on the screen during Ghost Watch,

Speaker 9 both to give the illusion that the calls in the show were really coming in live and to allow viewers at home to call in and react.

Speaker 9 Towards the end of the night, Ruth joined the rest of the crew at the party.

Speaker 13 She said that as she was leaving,

Speaker 13 the technicians

Speaker 13 were looking up at the big screen in the lobby, saying to each other, my God, what's going on in Studio 1?

Speaker 13 And that was the first time she thought, oh my God, even the technicians watching

Speaker 13 the thing go out are starting to worry about what's happening.

Speaker 13 And by the time she got to us, she said the phone system at the BBC was jammed. There were, you know, hundreds of complaints logged and

Speaker 13 it all went a bit crazy.

Speaker 9 Ruth and director Leslie Manning had prepared for some worried callers during the show.

Speaker 9 They had operators ready to tell anyone who called that the whole thing was fake, just a Halloween special.

Speaker 9 But there were too many calls and not enough operators.

Speaker 9 The BBC estimated that 20,000 people called that night.

Speaker 13 The people that complained, there was quite a wide range of different reactions.

Speaker 13 Some people were genuinely scared. Some people were outraged because they feel

Speaker 13 they were made a mug, like someone had played a trick on them, you know, like a candid camera.

Speaker 13 And

Speaker 13 also, there was this additional level of the trust that's invested in the BBC to tell the truth, you know, and to be the nation's protector in a way.

Speaker 13 BBC was the first television station, and for decades, the only television station. So, all the way through the Second World War, both in radio and TV, the BBC was relied on for national news.

Speaker 13 So that's why colloquially it's known as Auntie, because the BBC is relied on as kind of one of the family, if you like,

Speaker 13 for reliability and trust, which I think added to their sense of outrage.

Speaker 15 The phrase that sort of stuck was that Auntie had broken faith with the nation.

Speaker 9 Director Leslie Manning.

Speaker 15 I was totally surprised by the whole reaction.

Speaker 9 The BBC show Points of View read letters from viewers after Ghostwatch aired. One person said the BBC should be locked up.

Speaker 9 Someone else said the show was brilliant and that it wasn't the BBC's fault that people didn't understand that it was fiction.

Speaker 9 Another BBC show called Bite Back also responded.

Speaker 26 Hello and welcome to Bite Back, the program in which you, the viewer, take the programme makers to task and there are hundreds of you who want to do exactly that following Halloween night when the BBC pretended to investigate the supernatural in Ghostwatch, the switchboard was jammed with complaints, reports that children were terrified, pregnant women had gone into labor, and intelligent people felt duped.

Speaker 26 Conversely, many of the 11 million who watched it thought it was a brilliant piece of television. Well, what was it? A treat or a dangerous trick?

Speaker 9 This wasn't the first time the BBC had aired a hoax.

Speaker 9 35 years earlier, on April Fool's Day in 1957,

Speaker 9 the BBC aired a very short segment on a current affairs program about farmers in Switzerland who grew spaghetti.

Speaker 28 After picking, the spaghetti is laid out to dry in the warm alpine sun.

Speaker 28 Many people are often puzzled by the fact that spaghetti is produced at such uniform length, but this is the result of many years of patient endeavor by plant breeders who've succeeded in producing the perfect spaghetti.

Speaker 9 A lot of people believed it.

Speaker 9 In part because not many people cooked spaghetti at home in England in the 1950s, but also because the fake documentary looks real.

Speaker 9 Even the director general of the BBC tried to look up spaghetti in the Encyclopædia Britannica after he watched the segment.

Speaker 9 But the encyclopedia didn't even have an entry for spaghetti at the time.

Speaker 9 Some viewers called in to ask where they could get a spaghetti tree for themselves and whether it would grow in English weather.

Speaker 9 BBC operators had been coached to stick with the joke and say, place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.

Speaker 9 One viewer said he thought the program had used trick photography because quote, spaghetti grows horizontally, not vertically.

Speaker 9 But the BBC reported that most of the callers, quote, did not quite grasp what was going on, but somehow felt spaghetti does not grow on trees,

Speaker 9 and that most of the people who called in took the joke well.

Speaker 9 The viewers of Ghostwatch were much more upset.

Speaker 9 Even though the show ran after 9 p.m., the publicized time when the BBC transitioned to content that might not be appropriate for children, many children did watch it. and many of them were scared.

Speaker 9 One viewer on the Bite Back program said she knew it was a spoof, but her son didn't.

Speaker 16 He reacted instantly, he was very distressed instantly to something very sinister in the presentation, and nothing had actually happened.

Speaker 16 And I think you mentioned that you were anxious to put it against

Speaker 16 the ghost story, against a contemporary background. I think it's that actually that made it most sinister.

Speaker 26 Martin Plum, you want to make a point.

Speaker 27 I didn't know it was a drama. I've got three children, 14, 12 and 10 and

Speaker 27 I just thought that it was going to be a very safe...

Speaker 16 And were they frightened?

Speaker 27 Well, yes, I mean to the degree that my youngest child who was 10 rushed out of the room, vomited in the hall, was absolutely ashen-faced, wouldn't even talk about the thing for two or three hours.

Speaker 27 It was at one o'clock in the morning that I got her to talk about it, and she wouldn't sleep in her own bed for two nights.

Speaker 9 Five days after Ghost Watch aired in 1992, a teenager with intellectual disabilities died by suicide.

Speaker 9 His parents said the show caused their son's death.

Speaker 9 They said he had seemed hypnotized by the show, and that when the pipes in their house made the same banging sound as the ghost in Ghost Watch, he became upset.

Speaker 9 He asked to move bedrooms and spoke to his parents often about ghosts.

Speaker 9 The note he left read, Please don't worry. If there are ghosts, I will be a ghost, and I will be with you always as a ghost.

Speaker 9 His stepfather told reporters:

Speaker 9 In my own mind, I hold the BBC completely responsible for his death.

Speaker 9 His parents sent in a formal complaint to the Broadcasting Standards Council, which eventually concluded that the BBC had, quote, a duty to do more than simply hint at the deception it was practicing on the audience.

Speaker 13 The BBC reaction was really to batten down the hatches and pretend the program never happened. I think a memo went round that nobody should ever mention it again.

Speaker 9 Seven years later, the movie The Blair Witch Project used a similar documentary style approach.

Speaker 9 The movie was presented as found footage that had been shot by three film students who had decided to take recording equipment into the woods to investigate a series of murders rumored to have been committed by a witch.

Speaker 9 The students never make it out of the woods, but what they recorded eventually does.

Speaker 9 The way the movie was marketed made it hard to tell if it was real or not. It was 1999, and the marketing team used the relatively new internet to create confusion.

Speaker 9 They posted missing persons photos in chat rooms, and even the movie's IMDB page made it seem like the cast was missing.

Speaker 9 Three years later, the British Film Institute released a 10-year anniversary DVD of Ghost Watch, and many people were finally able to see it for the first time.

Speaker 9 Since then, the documentary style format has become popular in horror movies, like Paranormal Activity.

Speaker 9 But Stephen says that when Ghostwatch came out, This kind of style wasn't so well known. And even people close to him who knew exactly what he was trying to make, were still confused by the show.

Speaker 13 A couple of weeks before it aired on Halloween,

Speaker 13 I spent some time with a friend of mine and said, as I was leaving, oh, by the way, I've got this drama going out on Halloween night. Let me know what you think, as one does.

Speaker 13 And I spoke to her after the event and she said, oh, I thought it was real. And I said, What do you mean you thought it was real?

Speaker 13 I told you I'd written it. And she said, oh, yeah, but when I saw Michael Parkinson, I thought you must have got something wrong.

Speaker 13 And that maybe is the power of the kind of image of TV: that however much you tell people, it might not be real. You know, perceptually,

Speaker 13 it feels real.

Speaker 13 And that for me was the whole purpose of it: is to actually get the audience to think, what am I looking at? What am I listening to? Do I believe this? You know, can I believe my eyes?

Speaker 13 You know, one of the things that happened that was kind of part of our psyche, if you like, when we made Ghost Watch was it was during the time of the

Speaker 13 First Gulf War.

Speaker 13 We remember seeing some footage by

Speaker 13 CNN, would it be, or NBC, news footage of the bombing of Baghdad. And

Speaker 13 the news station had put music over it.

Speaker 13 And Ruth, the producer, said, look at this, they put music over the bombing. And it's kind of like that's a drama convention, but they've used it on news, you know.
And

Speaker 13 I was seeing, you know, like shows like Kill Street Blues or NYPD Blue, where documentary techniques like handheld cameras were being used in drama to make it look like a documentary.

Speaker 13 And documentaries like Rescue 999

Speaker 13 were using actors to reenact scenes that had happened to people. So actors were being used in non-fiction, and fiction was starting to look like documentary.

Speaker 13 So it's a blurring of the edges between these things in the early 90s, and

Speaker 13 that was very much what we were playing with. You know, what is truth and what is made up.

Speaker 9 Many publications have called Ghost Watch a descendant of the most famous broadcast hoax, Orson Welles' 1938 radio drama adaptation of H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds.

Speaker 9 It was broadcast on October 30th, just before Halloween.

Speaker 9 If you don't know it, The War of the Worlds was presented as breaking news about a strange object landing on a farm in New Jersey and what happened after it opened.

Speaker 31 Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most terrifying thing I've ever witnessed.

Speaker 31 Wicked.

Speaker 31 Someone's crawling on one or something, I can see, staring out of that black hole through luminous discs.

Speaker 31 The eyes, it might might be a face, might be almost a

Speaker 31 heavens, something rigging out of the shadow like a gray snake. Now it's another one, and another one, and another one.

Speaker 31 They look like tentacles to me.

Speaker 9 During the rest of the broadcast, reports continue to come in about Martians invading New Jersey and New York, and possibly the rest of the country.

Speaker 9 But the broadcast ends with an announcement from Orson Welles.

Speaker 31 This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen.

Speaker 31 Out of character, to assure you that the War of the Worlds has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be.

Speaker 31 The Mercury Theater's own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying, boo.

Speaker 31 So goodbye, everybody, and remember, please, for the next day or so, the terrible lesson you learned tonight.

Speaker 31 That grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch. And if your doorbell rings and nobody's there,

Speaker 31 that was no Martian. It's Halloween.

Speaker 9 The next day, newspapers reported that listeners had really believed that there was a Martian invasion and had panicked.

Speaker 9 Orson Welles told papers that he didn't expect most people to believe the broadcast was real, but said that

Speaker 9 We can only suppose that the special nature of radio, which is often heard in fragments or in parts disconnected from the whole, has led to this misunderstanding.

Speaker 9 The FCC received more than 600 letters, telegrams, and petitions in response to War of the Worlds, many of them asking it to do something to punish the people who'd made it, or something to prevent this from happening again.

Speaker 9 But many of the letters the FCC received also praised the War of the Worlds and warned against any move that might promote censorship.

Speaker 9 One letter from North Carolina read,

Speaker 9 If you take them to task over this, won't you also have to stop fairy tales and stories about Santa Claus to keep a gullible public from becoming excited?

Speaker 9 The FCC conducted a formal investigation, and in the end, they decided not to take any action.

Speaker 9 And broadcast hoaxes continued.

Speaker 30 This is Kevin Ryder. I work at KLOS in the afternoon, and I was part of the Kevin and Bean Morning Radio Show in Los Angeles at K-Rock.

Speaker 9 We'll be right back.

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Speaker 9 In 1989, Kevin Ryder got his dream job as a radio DJ at K Rock in Los Angeles. He had DJed before, but this would be his first morning drive-time call-in show.

Speaker 30 Which was,

Speaker 30 it's insanity to think that I got my first morning show in Los Angeles at a station like K-Rock.

Speaker 9 For people who aren't from Los Angeles, what is K-Rock? How big of a station is it?

Speaker 30 K-Rock

Speaker 30 is a legendary station mainly because of the, it was really kind of a nothing station with a terrible signal.

Speaker 30 And people that got it started playing interesting music, like punk music in the late 70s, that no one else in Los Angeles was playing.

Speaker 30 And then in the 80s came New Wave, and you've got Depeche Mode, and you've got The Cure, and no other radio station in Los Angeles was playing that either.

Speaker 30 And

Speaker 30 the impact that K-Rock had through the years is, it's impossible to measure. I mean, we were the first station to play the Ramones, first persons to play Van Halen.

Speaker 30 And from that standpoint, it was a monstrous station, even though it was run like a five-and-dime store.

Speaker 9 Kevin says he wasn't qualified for the job, but there was no way he was going to say no.

Speaker 9 He hosted the show each weekday morning with another DJ, Gene Bean Baxter.

Speaker 9 Kevin says they got up around 4 a.m. every day to start getting ready.

Speaker 9 The format was they'd play four songs an hour and talk four times an hour. Sometimes it wouldn't be until the songs were fading that they'd come up with what they'd talk about.

Speaker 9 Kevin says that every day they'd try to find a way to get people to call in.

Speaker 9 And one day, they came up with an idea they called confess your crime.

Speaker 30 It started out as just

Speaker 30 everybody.

Speaker 30 commits crimes, however small they may be. Maybe you go 56 in a 55 mile per hour.
That's committing a crime. So, you know, there's a, there's a whole scale of sizes of the crimes that you commit.

Speaker 30 So we thought it would be funny for people to call in and tell us the crime that they had done and most likely gotten away with. And, you know, we thought it was.

Speaker 30 We thought it would be stupid stuff like

Speaker 30 I stole a car and I got caught the next morning because I was sleeping in it alongside the road, you know, or something like it was, it was a very lighthearted suggestion at first.

Speaker 30 And it wasn't going incredibly well. You get that feeling when you're in the middle of something that it's not really

Speaker 30 what you hoped it would be.

Speaker 9 Listeners called in to confess that they'd stolen bowling balls, that they'd run over a cat, or that they were sleeping with their girlfriend's mother.

Speaker 30 The calls we were getting were really lame. You know, I parked in a no parking zone kind of stuff that's not interesting.

Speaker 30 And so, you know, we were screening for people and we were trying to get calls and it was really it was really difficult because sometimes stuff just doesn't work

Speaker 30 and then this person calls and says uh i think i may have killed my girlfriend

Speaker 34 106.7 k-rock it's k-ro-o-q uh wednesday morning 10 till 9 we're doing confess your crime uh we have some more on hold and let's go to those now hello hi what's your name

Speaker 32 I'd really rather not say.

Speaker 29 You want to confess a crime this morning?

Speaker 32 Yeah,

Speaker 32 I heard you guys talking and I just kind of,

Speaker 32 you know, I don't know, I just kind of felt like

Speaker 32 I really needed to tell somebody about this.

Speaker 29 This guy's so serious. Well, what happened?

Speaker 29 Tell us about it.

Speaker 32 Well, I had this, you know, girlfriend for, you know, like about six years, and we were right on the verge of getting married and all this stuff.

Speaker 12 And

Speaker 32 I came home and

Speaker 32 I caught her with somebody.

Speaker 29 You caught your girlfriend with another man?

Speaker 32 Yeah.

Speaker 32 Okay. And a good friend of mine, as a matter of fact.

Speaker 29 Oh, really? All right.

Speaker 11 So what'd you do?

Speaker 32 And that,

Speaker 12 I don't know.

Speaker 32 I don't. You know, honestly, I don't.

Speaker 32 I don't know what happened, really. I don't know if she's.

Speaker 29 Sir, what are you saying?

Speaker 32 Well.

Speaker 32 I don't know if she's...

Speaker 32 I don't... I don't even know if she's still...

Speaker 32 If she, if she made it through, actually.

Speaker 29 Sir,

Speaker 34 is there a chance, seriously, that that you might have killed your girlfriend?

Speaker 32 Yeah, I know I did.

Speaker 29 Sir, let us try to get you some help.

Speaker 34 Can you hold on the phone just a minute?

Speaker 32 I think I'd really better go.

Speaker 29 I mean, if you want us to get you in contact with me.

Speaker 29 Somebody or hello?

Speaker 11 Hello?

Speaker 9 The call was fake.

Speaker 30 We had called a friend of ours

Speaker 30 in Phoenix, who we had known from working with him at a station there, and woke him up. And we said, Hey, we need to juice up this topic a little bit.
It's not really going well.

Speaker 30 So, can you, you know, we're doing something called confess your crime. Can you just say something that's a little bit, you know, that's got something that gets people's attention?

Speaker 30 And we were talking to a guy who was just waking up while the song was fading. And we threw out,

Speaker 30 you know, you stole a car, you got in a fight, you did whatever, and somebody said something about hurting a girlfriend. And then

Speaker 30 when he said that on the air, he said, I think I may have killed my girlfriend.

Speaker 30 It was

Speaker 30 felt like getting hit in a head-on collision because that

Speaker 30 was

Speaker 30 one billion miles further than we had hoped. And I just remember being in a,

Speaker 30 in a fog, like one second, we were in charge of everything. And the next second, I didn't know what was happening.
And I couldn't process what was being said quick enough.

Speaker 30 So it felt like I was in a haze.

Speaker 30 I don't remember what we said back to him. I don't remember hanging up.
I don't remember any of it. And then the TV stations wanted to interview us about it.

Speaker 30 The timeline that I remember is our producer coming into the studio and saying, I just got a call from KCBS and KNBC, and all these stations want to interview you.

Speaker 30 And I remember, this is the first thing that I remember clearly, is that I said to Bean, we have to go talk about this. And we went into the restroom.
We made sure no one else was in there.

Speaker 30 And I said, look,

Speaker 30 yes, it was faked,

Speaker 30 but we'll get fired if we tell the truth.

Speaker 30 Also, we know for a fact

Speaker 30 that there's no crime, that it was something somebody made up on the phone. So, you know, the police could search for the rest of their lives.

Speaker 30 They would find nothing because there was nothing because it was made up. So I said, because there's no crime for anyone to find,

Speaker 30 let's just

Speaker 30 deny, deny, deny, and it'll go away.

Speaker 9 So they agreed never to tell anyone.

Speaker 30 And within, I don't know, five minutes, we had requests from all the major TV stations to do interviews about that call.

Speaker 30 And what did we know about it? And how did it come about? And did we know the person?

Speaker 30 And, you know,

Speaker 30 could we tell if it was true or not? And, you know, we didn't, we said we didn't have any of those answers. We said, we don't know.
We don't know who calls us and if they're telling the truth or not.

Speaker 9 Later in the show, they apologized to their listeners for what they'd heard on air and read some helpline numbers.

Speaker 9 Kevin says that when they finally finished their show, a sheriff was waiting for them in the station's lobby who was asking for a copy of the air check, the tape.

Speaker 30 And they gave it to a voice expert who said that it was either real or the person deserves an Academy Award.

Speaker 30 And they started

Speaker 30 an investigation into exactly what was said and who could it have been. And does it match any of the cases that we're working on?

Speaker 30 And it just sort of started from there.

Speaker 9 Why do you think he was so convincing in the call?

Speaker 30 I can tell you exactly because I've talked to him about it. It was he was high.

Speaker 30 smoking marijuana and had gone to bed two hours before that. So he was just in a complete complete haze.

Speaker 30 And he almost never answers the phone, but he saw it was us and his room was dark and he picked up the phone and he literally,

Speaker 30 I mean, literally had no idea what was going on.

Speaker 30 And we were probably talking a little too quickly because the song was fading and we needed him to do something.

Speaker 30 So

Speaker 30 that's, he was just out of it

Speaker 30 and was trying to help us out.

Speaker 9 As the days went on and you realized now the police were taking this seriously and trying to investigate it, did you and Jean continue to check in and

Speaker 9 say,

Speaker 9 maybe, maybe it's gone through. Maybe now we've got to say something.

Speaker 30 Oh, you mean with each other? Yeah.

Speaker 30 No,

Speaker 30 not really. I think

Speaker 30 we sort of had cast the die. We sort of had said, okay, well, this is going to be our response.
And every time somebody brought it up in any way, I wanted to crawl in a hole.

Speaker 9 And then the case was covered on the TV show Unsolved Mysteries, which reportedly resulted in 400 people getting in touch with the police.

Speaker 30 One of the things that I said, the only thing that I remember saying other than the line that we had created the whole time, which is, we don't know who calls us, we don't know if what they say is real.

Speaker 30 For some reason, I didn't feel like that was enough for Unsolved Mysteries. So I actually said the sentence,

Speaker 30 there are definite lines that you don't cross, and that's one of them.

Speaker 34 There are real definite lines that you do not cross.

Speaker 34 Obviously everybody's trying to get ratings, trying to get noticed, trying to be this and that, but there are lines that you just don't cross, and that's one of them.

Speaker 34 I don't know that anyone could sit down and say someone confessing to murder will make our ratings go up.

Speaker 9 Then Gene comes in.

Speaker 20 You know, all we could say is, you know, the experts feel that this guy was legitimate. It's no one we know.
And as, you know, as far as we're concerned, you know, that's his story.

Speaker 29 We certainly hope it's not true.

Speaker 20 You know, I'd trade whatever publicity we got from it, you know, for the story not to be true because it's pretty grim, really.

Speaker 9 For nearly 10 months, they kept up the lie.

Speaker 9 K-Rock unknowingly ended up hiring the man who had called in, Doug Roberts. He had never told anyone either.

Speaker 9 And then one day, it all fell apart during Doug's show.

Speaker 30 He called us

Speaker 30 off the air one time when he was doing a shift.

Speaker 9 Kevin says during the call, they talked about the murder confession. They thought it was a private conversation.
But the way the studio was set up, two colleagues overheard them.

Speaker 9 And one of them called a reporter at the LA Times.

Speaker 30 So she called a general manager. Trip Reeb, and she said, Trip, I'm really sorry to have to ask you this because I know this is old, but

Speaker 30 is there any possibility that they faked it? And Tripp assured her that there wasn't. And she said, would you mind asking? And he said, yeah, I'll ask, no problem.
So he called us in.

Speaker 30 And Tripp said, was that phone call fake?

Speaker 30 And we said, yeah, yes, it was.

Speaker 30 And he had to call the L.A. Times back and tell them that it was fake.
And then

Speaker 30 it all started again with the L.A. Times.
The headline was, Will K-Rock get away with murder?

Speaker 9 A morning DJ at another radio station was quoted in the article saying,

Speaker 9 I think that morning radio has gotten to be one giant trash bin that we need to examine a little bit.

Speaker 9 Another DJ said, to stoop to such a sleazy level, to get another tenth of a ratings point, spits in the face of everything Bob Dylan and John Lennon and the Rolling Stones and you two stand for.

Speaker 9 Another said,

Speaker 9 they couldn't have bought press like this.

Speaker 9 The general manager of another radio station told the reporter,

Speaker 9 I think they went so far and they couldn't get out. It's like a kid who steals.
All of a sudden you tell a lie and you have to tell another lie to get out of the first lie.

Speaker 9 K-Rock suspended Kevin and his co-host Gene Baxter without pay.

Speaker 30 And the whole time we just were assuming that that was our K-Rock career. That was it.
We had the golden ticket, the great opportunity, and we threw it away,

Speaker 30 and there was really nothing else to be done at that point.

Speaker 9 Kevin and Gene weren't charged, but the company that owned K-Rock told them to pay back the Sheriff's Department $12,170 for the money it had spent on the investigation.

Speaker 9 and to do 149 hours of community service to compensate for the 149 hours the homicide detective spent on the the case.

Speaker 9 The homicide detective told the LA Times that he'd had multiple people contact him about their missing loved ones, hoping the on-air confession would be a clue.

Speaker 9 One woman, whose daughter had been killed a couple of months before the prank call, was quoted saying,

Speaker 9 The DJs have obviously never had anything serious or painful happen in their lives.

Speaker 9 The FCC launched an investigation into the hoax to determine whether management ever knew about it. If they did, the station could lose its license.

Speaker 9 The commission heard testimony under oath from multiple K-Rock staffers. Kevin and Gene were both at the hearing.

Speaker 30 To be denied, this was the ultimate radio. This is the best radio station in the world.

Speaker 30 And it was devastating to think that this radio station that

Speaker 30 we worshipped

Speaker 30 might go down because we were idiots. It just felt like if this happens, I don't know how I'll ever get over that.

Speaker 9 In the end, K-Rock received a letter of reprimand, the lightest punishment the FCC could give.

Speaker 9 Kevin and Jean continued doing their morning show for the next 28 years.

Speaker 30 And I do think since that happened, you know, that was 1991 when we went to court.

Speaker 30 I think we earned that trust back, but it took a while because people were a little hesitant. And it took a while for us to, you know,

Speaker 30 help people understand that we're decent people that you can trust and we're also idiots at times.

Speaker 30 But, you know, we're never going to be that level of idiot again.

Speaker 30 You know, you, one of the things that you, one of the only things that you have between a radio station and its listeners is trust. And that trust, when it's, you know,

Speaker 30 when it's betrayed like that,

Speaker 30 feels like,

Speaker 30 you know, you've been betrayed by a family member.

Speaker 30 And I just,

Speaker 30 if there was one thing that I could edit out of my life, it would be that.

Speaker 30 I wish it didn't happen.

Speaker 9 Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer.
Katie Bishop is our supervising producer.

Speaker 9 Our producers are Susannah Robertson, Jackie Sejiko, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Kinnane.

Speaker 9 Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti.

Speaker 9 Julian Alexander Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com.

Speaker 9 And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com slash newsletter.

Speaker 9 We hope you'll consider supporting our work by joining our membership program, Criminal Plus. You can listen to Criminal, This Is Love, and Phoebe Reads a Mystery without any ads.

Speaker 5 Plus, you'll get bonus episodes.

Speaker 9 These are special episodes with me and Criminal co-creator Lawrence Bohr, talking about everything from how we make our episodes to the crime stories that caught our attention that week to things we've been enjoying lately.

Speaker 9 To learn more, go to thisiscriminal.com/slash plus.

Speaker 9 We're on Facebook at This Is Criminal and Instagram and TikTok at criminal underscore podcast.

Speaker 9 We're also on YouTube at youtube.com/slash criminal podcast.

Speaker 9 Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com.

Speaker 9 I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

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