Episode 1 - Sitting Ducks

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Subject to change. If you've ever scrolled through TikTok, then you know it's full of people sharing the most intimate and sometimes the most mundane parts of their lives.
People who film everything they ate in a day, everything they purchased on the internet, everything they wore on vacation. People who see their lives as content.
Daisy De La Oh was not one of those people. She was not an influencer or a vlogger or a content creator.
She didn't like to share her secrets with the world. Sometimes she even hid them from the people closest to her.
When she was murdered at the age of 19, her Instagram contained just five posts, only two of which showed her face. Slightly more than 100 people followed her.

They were mostly friends from high school and college,

people she knew in real life.

Nobody else would have known to find her there.

Her real name wasn't even on the account.

To anyone outside of her social circle,

her profile was essentially unsearchable.

Her LinkedIn page, created just six months before her death, listed no activity and no connections. And her Facebook, it seemingly hadn't been touched in years.
For the most part, Daisy lived her life offline, and that was the way that she liked it. But when her life was cut short in February of 2021, a strange thing happened.
Daisy went viral. Photos and videos of her began to appear online.
And there was this one TikTok that really told the story of her life and death. The first frame of it showed Daisy on a carnival ride.
It's the one where you grip the steering wheel and spin it around and around in circles until you either puke or lose your voice from screaming so much. Five words appear across the screen.
This is my friend Daisy. Daisy is wearing wingtip eyeliner and a gold septum ring.
She's got black and turquoise hair peeking out from under her beanie. The neon lights from the carnival cast this purple glow across her face.
And there's something about her expression. It's like, I don't know, the way she's looking off to the side and her eyes and her mouth are wide with joy that is just really magnetic.
A few seconds later, the TikTok cuts to a new image. And this one has no carnival rides, no smiles, no neon lighting.
There's no joy. It's mostly black, with a collage of photos of someone else.
Someone suspected of murdering her. This TikTok, it was posted on May 26th, 2021.
It was less than a minute long, but it accomplished two things that nobody had been able to do up until that point. Not the media and not the police.
It got people to care about this woman they'd never met, who came from an immigrant family and a low-income neighborhood. I've watched this TikTok over and over again.
I've studied it, like pausing the frames and zooming in and out and analyzing it like it's this piece of art. And I don't know, it's not like I'm looking for some kind of secret message within it.
It's more that I'm just in awe of its storytelling. It has this precision to it.
It hooks you in, gut punches you with a series of emotions.

Joy, horror, sadness, anger.

And it conveys this sense of urgency, this need for justice.

Not later, but right now.

And not from the authorities, but from the community.

It gives us permission to look for answers, to take control,

to be the sleuths we wish to see in the world.

I'm Jen Swan.

From London Audio, iHeartRadio, and executive producer Paris Hilton, this is my friend Daisy.

Episode 1, Sitting Ducks. the IRS flagged for possible identity fraud last year.
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There's a type of soil in Mississippi called Yazoo clay. It's thick, burnt orange, and it's got a reputation.
It's terrible, terrible dirt. Yazoo clay eats everything.
So things that get buried there tend to stay buried. Until they're not.
In 2012, construction crews at Mississippi's biggest hospital made a shocking discovery. 7,000 bodies out there or more.
All former patients of the old state asylum, and nobody knew they were there. It was my family's mystery.
But in this corner of the South, it's not just the soil that keeps secrets. Nobody talks about it.
Nobody has any information. When you peel back the layers of Mississippi's Yazoo Clay, nothing's ever as simple as you think.
The story is much more complicated and nuanced than that. I'm Larison Campbell.

Listen to Under Yazoo Clay on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, you're listening to On Purpose with Jay Shetty.

And today my guests are none other than Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco.

I can't wait for you to hear this episode about their love story, about their relationship, like you've never heard it before. I want to go back to the first time you ever met.
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What I felt for Benny, it was everything about him was honest. He'll tell me anything that he's feeling, and it made me feel like I could do the same.
If we would have met each other when we were younger, it would have never worked. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Is this a good time? It's me, Dylan Mulvaney, and my dear friend Joe Locke from Heartstopper and Agatha All Along is my very first guest on my brand new podcast, The Dylan Hour. It's musical, mayhem, and it is going to be so much fun.
I like a man. You like a man.
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Never say never. I cannot wait for all you girls, gaysays and theys to join me on this extremely special pink confection of a podcast.

There is so much darkness in this world.

And what I think we could all use more of is a little joy.

Listen to the Dylan Hour on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Love ya.

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I would never see my daughter grow. Susanna Salas is broken, a mother grieving her only daughter, Daisy De La O.

If you lived in L.A. in the summer of 2021, you might have come across the story on the local ABC7 station.

It was the kind of story that TV news shows seemed to love to spotlight. It was about a promising young girl, the senseless violence that ended her life, and the single mother left shattered.

There were tearful interviews set to a slow piano instrumental. The whole thing was deeply tragic.
Like, unspeakably sad. But the news segment also had this unexpected element.
L.A. County Sheriff's detectives tracked every lead and Friends of Daisy launched their own campaign on TikTok.

The TikTok campaign.

It immediately piqued my interest.

This idea that TikTok, a platform nobody outside of Gen Z seemed to understand,

and which the federal government wants to ban,

could actually lend a voice to the people who needed it the most. And then there were the photos of Daisy herself that drew me in.
I didn't know her, but she reminded me of myself and my friends in high school. The piercings, the rainbow hair colors, the fishnet stockings.
She dressed like I did when I was a teenager, when I didn't quite know who I was, but I knew I wasn't like everyone else. Or at least that's what I told myself.
And there was something I couldn't get out of my mind when I first saw this news segment. Susanna, grateful to the LA County Sheriff's Department detectives who vowed to hunt down Daisy's killer.
It was the way detectives had been celebrated in that news clip. The narration was so over the top that I almost wondered if it was a PR stunt for the sheriffs.
L.A. County homicide detectives worked endlessly on the case.
I found it confusing. Because it raised this question for me.
If that was true, if detectives had been working endlessly

on this case, then why did Daisy's friends feel the need to get involved and try to solve it

themselves? To take matters into their own hands and launch their own seemingly rogue campaign?

I had the sense that there was something missing from the story, something that just couldn't be

contained in this short news segment. And I immediately wanted to know what it was.

Thank you. that there was something missing from the story.
Something that just couldn't be contained in this short news segment.

And I immediately wanted to know what it was.

So I got in touch with Susanna Salas.

We talked for hours.

And she told me about something one of the detectives on the case had told her.

It was something I'd heard her talk about

on that news segment.

And he'd say, I promise you, Mijap,

we're going to find them.

But then she told me something that didn't make it onto that new segment. And he'd say, I promise you, Mija, we're going to find them.
But then she told me something that didn't make it onto that TV segment, which is that the detective's words did little to reassure her. When she heard them, she thought to herself, Bullshit.
It's a Mexican-American girl. Who's going to care about her? It turned out a lot of people.
Daisy's friends made sure of it. I spent a lot of time speaking with them in the months following Daisy's murder.
At that point, they hadn't been interviewed on the news or by anyone at all that I could tell. I wanted to understand what had compelled them to become their own detectives, to put their trauma on display for the world.
And it became clear pretty quickly that these teenage girls hadn't made these TikToks and Instagrams and Facebook posts

for clout. They definitely did not want to be investigating their friend's unsolved murder,

but they felt they had no other choice. And this thing they did, it was pretty gutsy,

but it didn't exist in a vacuum. It was part of this larger phenomenon of friends and loved ones turning to social media when the so-called justice system wasn't working for them.
I've never once met a family who said option number one to help my family's case is to become a content creator and try to become an influencer. Not once have I met somebody where that was option A.
That's Sarah Turney. She's a true crime TikToker, YouTuber, and podcaster.
If you've ever spent time watching true crime on TikTok, or Crime Talk, as it's sometimes called, then chances are you've seen Sarah's videos. Talking to her over Zoom felt a little surreal.
It was almost like jumping into one of her videos to ask questions. Questions like, what would compel someone to talk about their loved one's murder or disappearance on social media? To ask the public for help in solving a case.
Usually when people begin to tell their loved one's stories, it is their last resort. They don't know what else to do.
You know, they've tried to go on the mainstream media to get them to care. And their last resort is making a podcast or a YouTube channel or a TikTok because that's free and accessible to them.
It's a last resort, Sarah told me, because it requires a degree of vulnerability, which means it can also open the door to harassment. We are sitting ducks for anybody to just prey on us.
We are asking the world, we are begging the world to care about our loved ones. And that comes with a lot of negativity, unfortunately.
I first became aware of Sarah's videos when I saw that someone had tagged her in the comments of the My Friend Daisy TikTok. Can you please help share this? They'd written.
Sarah didn't end up seeing the video, she told me. Her notifications are always blowing up, so it's easy for stuff to get buried.
People who make videos about missing or murdered friends and loved ones, they often tag Sarah, hoping that she'll repost them to her more than a million TikTok followers.

Sarah went viral in April of 2020.

She'd made a TikTok about her sister's disappearance.

She'd tried for nearly two decades to get police to investigate,

but nothing worked.

Until TikTok did.

I started TikTok to ask for Gen Z's help to share my missing sister Alyssa Turney's story. And they are powerful.
Four months after she posted the TikTok, the person she'd been accusing of murder had officially been charged. It was her father.
Today, I am announcing the grand jury indictment

for second-degree murder of Michael Roy Turney.

A jury later acquitted him.

But Sarah's TikTok was like this case study

for others who desperately wanted to have their day in court,

to see charges filed, investigations closed.

And they knew they had a powerful resource at their disposal. The algorithm behind TikTok, you know, it's been likened to a slot machine in which, you know, you'll post a video and cha-ching, it goes viral.
The next few may not, and then again, it goes viral. It's kind of addicting, right? Sarah talks about TikTok as this democratizing tool, this thing with the power to boost stories that aren't getting attention elsewhere.
Like all social media platforms, it also carries a risk of circulating misinformation or just having it spin out of control. But to people like Sarah,

the risks are worth it. I think that is why families gravitate towards TikTok.
It is the

most even playing field out there in terms of all these social media platforms. I think that's one

of the reasons why I got so many responses to the article that I ended up writing about Daisy

for New York Magazine's The Cut. Maybe it was the fact that her story first surfaced on TikTok.
It was the story that otherwise might not have been reported on by the local TV news or by me. But after the article was published, I had this feeling.
It was sort of like that feeling I had when I was watching that news segment. Like, this wasn't the end of the story.
There was still this part of it that I hadn't uncovered yet. Like, what actually went wrong during the police investigation? Why had it stalled? How did it get to this point where Daisy's friends and family felt the need to take it into their own hands? And there were bigger questions I had, too.
Like, was social media the only way to get attention on a murder case when it involved someone who wasn't rich or who wasn't already kind of famous? What was the effect this was having on the families of crime victims, putting themselves in the spotlight as a last resort? Was our justice system fundamentally broken? In other words, how much depends upon a TikTok? When I started making this series, I had already interviewed people who created the posts about Daisy. But I hadn't yet talked to those who had consumed them, who spring into action, who I would soon discover put their own safety on the line and hunted for the suspect in their own backyards.
What compelled them to get involved? I was interested in exploring this idea of vigilante justice. Why did so many people in Daisy's community feel abandoned by law enforcement? And where did their drive come from, this drive to demand accountability by any means necessary? I ended up sitting down with both detectives in person for the first time.

I spoke to lots of people who knew Daisy, and I spoke to a lot of people who had only ever seen her on their phone screens. I sifted through legal documents, and I gained access to records I had never seen before.
Records that really shifted my understanding of this case. And I ended up speaking with the person whose photos I had seen all over the internet.
The person who, according to that TikTok, had murdered Daisy. There's a type of soil in Mississippi called Yazoo clay.
It's thick, burnt orange, and it's got a reputation. It's terrible, terrible dirt.
Yazoo Clay eats everything, so things that get buried there tend to stay buried. Until they're not.
In 2012, construction crews at Mississippi's biggest hospital made a shocking discovery. 7,000 bodies out there or more.
All former patients of the old state asylum, and nobody knew they were there. It was my family's mystery.
But in this corner of the South, it's not just the soil that keeps secrets. Nobody talks about it.
Nobody has any information. When you peel back the layers of Mississippi's Yazoo Clay, nothing's ever as simple as you think.
The story is much more complicated and nuanced than that. I'm Larison Campbell.
Listen to Under Yazoo Clay on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your engagement. What I I felt for Benny, it was everything about him was honest he'll tell me anything that he's feeling

and it made me feel like i could do the same if we would have met each other when we were younger

it would have never worked listen to on purpose with jay shetty on the iheart radio app apple

podcast or wherever you get your podcasts is this a good time it's me dylan mulvaney and my dear

Thank you. on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Is this a good time? It's me, Dylan Mulvaney, and my dear friend Joe Locke from Heartstopper and Agatha all along is my very first guest on my brand new podcast, The Dylan Hour. It's musical mayhem, and it is going to be so much fun.
I like a man. You like a man.
What do I like, Joe? You like a man too. We often...
There's some cross-pollination happening in here.

Not like... No! Have we? No.

No. Not yet.

Never say never.

I cannot wait for all you

girls, gays, and theys to join me on this extremely

special pink confection of a podcast.

There is so much darkness in this world

and what I think we could all use more of is

a little joy. Listen to the Dylan Hour on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
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The last time any of Daisy's family members saw her alive

was February 22nd, 2021.

It was a Monday.

An ordinary Monday by most standards.

Filled with work and chores and errands.

Thank you. 2021.
It was a Monday, an ordinary Monday by most standards, filled with work and chores and errands. But to Daisy's mother, Susanna, this day stuck out.
It's so weird, she told me, but that day, we spent the whole day together. Susanna relayed this to me the first time I interviewed her, in November 2021, nearly nine months after her daughter's murder.
She'd suggested we meet for dinner at a Mexican restaurant in her neighborhood. It was wedged in a suburban strip mall in southeast L.A.
Reminders of Daisy were everywhere. The CVS where she had worked was just a few doors down, and the junior high and high schools she graduated from were a short drive away.
Susanna and I sat on stools at the bar. She told me she goes by Susie.
She had big brown eyes and long brown hair parted to one side. There was this loud mariachi music playing in the background, so the audio from this interview isn't great.
And Susie did not want to be re-interviewed for this series. Talking about it again on tape would be too painful.
We ordered tacos and we got to talking. At one point, the bartender maybe sensed that we were having this difficult conversation.
She brought over two shots of tequila on the house. And Susie proceeded to tell me about this one day she remembered vividly.

She wasn't planning to do laundry that day.

The laundromat was just across the street,

but it meant loading and unloading the car, waiting around for hours,

and she just didn't want to deal with it.

But Daisy convinced her otherwise.

Come on, lady. Come on, Susie remembers Daisy had said.

Daisy had this way about her, this way of cheering on her mother,

rallying her to do the stuff she didn't feel like doing.

At the laundromat, Daisy worked on a crossword puzzle.

And at one point, she looked up and told her mom that some guy was checking her out.

Susie chimed in.

How about that one? He's checking you out. Ew, gross, Daisy had said.
At 19, she was roughly half the age of her mother. They were both adults, and to Susie, their easy relationship felt like a relief, especially after all the hardships of the previous few years.
Years when Susie didn't always know where Daisy was. She was worried she might flunk out of high school, never mind making it to college.
Susie had grown frustrated. She worked long hours, and she didn't have time to track Daisy's every move.
And so she showed her tough love. She let her screw up and then deal with the consequences.
And that was when something surprising happened, she told me. That's when Daisy started getting her life on track.
She started going to night school to make up for all the classes she'd missed. She went to prom with friends.
She wore a floor-length baby blue strapless gown. She looked like punk rock Cinderella, her white blonde hair glowing like a halo.
And by the spring of 2019, she'd made up enough credits to walk at graduation with the rest of her class.

That fall, she enrolled at East L.A. College, about a half hour northeast of Compton.

She'd even gotten a job on campus welcoming new students, at least until COVID hit and the school went online. Daisy dreamed of becoming a makeup and tattoo artist, of starting her own business.
She didn't want to work for nobody, Susie told me. But in the meantime, she was super focused on a short-term goal, one she was on the verge of achieving.
She had saved up enough money to buy a used car. It seemed like everything was going perfect, Susie told me.
After they got home that night from the laundromat, Susie said she had no energy to make dinner. And that's when Daisy started in with her rallying cry.
Come on, lady, come on. Susie went to the kitchen.
She made chicken tinga. She and Daisy joined Daisy's grandparents in the living room.
They all lived together, along with Daisy's younger brother.

It was a little cramped.

There was just one bathroom, but they made do.

A Spanish-language news show was playing on the television.

Daisy curled up near Susie's feet, and there was this sense of calmness.

Everyone was in a good mood, especially Daisy.

That's Daisy's grandfather, Juan de la O.

He has a round face, bushy eyebrows and graying hair.

He says that Daisy was about to buy a car.

Especially at that age, he said, you get excited that you're going to have your own car. It was a big deal.
In LA, a car means freedom. Which was probably really important when you share an apartment with your grandparents and your mother and your brother.
Especially because the bus from Daisy's apartment to work took her almost an hour. Took even longer for her to get to campus.
But it was worth it. Daisy was on track to get her associate's degree in just a few months.
Maybe it was her knowledge of all the good things on the horizon that put Daisy in such a good mood that night. Juan says that that night, he was sitting here as usual in the living room where they all used to watch TV.
It was a night that was neither cold nor hot, he said. It was a quiet night.
They were watching their programs, and he said later, you know, their programs.

And he said later, he realized it stood out that she stayed a while longer than she usually would.

Daisy.

Yeah.

That's Miguel Contreras.

He conducted this interview with me, and he also served as a translator.

Miguel and I interviewed Juan in the living room of his Compton apartment.

It's the top unit in a two-story cream-colored building off a busy boulevard. It's the place where Daisy and her mother and her little brother used to live.
Miguel noticed a piece of colored tinsel taped to the wall near the kitchen. He asked if it was for a party.
It was no. The tinsel was left over, actually, from two Christmases ago.
Daisy had decorated, and he hadn't bothered to take it down. He called it silly, but it was clearly important to him.
It was a reminder of her. The night that he was telling us about, it stuck out in his memory because of how peaceful it was,

how calm it was,

how everyone was getting along.

But the energy in the room seemed to change sometime around 10.30 p.m.

That's when Daisy got a text message.

She looked down at her phone

and she announced that she was unusually affectionate.

It stuck out to him, the way she gave her mother and her grandmother this big hug before walking out the door. She assured them that she wouldn't be long.
I'll be right back, she'd said. Early the next morning, Jose Teyes went to take out the trash.
He's the property manager at the building where Daisy's family lived. He's in his late 50s with piercing green eyes, dark hair speckled with gray, and a white goatee.
He was born in Michoacan, but he spent more than half his life here in Compton. And for most of that time, he's lived and worked here.
The property consists of eight buildings. There are these boxy bungalows with steps that wind down the front of them, connecting the second story to the ground floor.
There's 32 units in all. And Jose knows just about everyone who lives here.
A lot of his tenants use Section 8 vouchers, he told me. They're essentially federally subsidized rent payments.
It's not always easy to find landlords who accept Section 8. So tenants here, they tend to stay a while.
Jose is always busy taking care of something or another. Like, on the day that I showed up at the property to talk to him, he was busy trimming trees.
While we talked, tenants came up to ask him questions. He takes pride in his job.
He said he's always working. And that Tuesday morning, in February of 2021, was no exception.
Jose walked across the complex to the patch of concrete where all the garbage bins were stored. He started wheeling them out to the alley, one by one, saving the bulky items for last.
One of those items was a big blue and gray patterned rug. It had been laying on the ground a few feet away from the garbage bins in the walkway between two apartment buildings.
I left the carpet for the last because it's big. I had to roll it.
Jose walked over to it and lifted it up. But when he saw what was underneath it, he froze.
So when I come and pick it up, I saw the body pull naked from the back. And I get scared.
It was a body lying face down on the ground. I'm a man, but I don't get scared of nothing.
But hey, I find something. I'm a man, he said.
I don't get scared of nothing. But hey, I find some person there, and I don't know what I'm going to do.

Jose had seen and heard a lot during his more than three decades as building manager.

He'd even witnessed death in the back alley.

Two weeks ago, they killed someone over there with a trash shot.

Like four years ago, a prostitute killed it on the corner.

But Jose had never seen anything quite like this. A murder right there on the corner.
But Jose had never seen anything quite like this.

A murder right there on the property.

He started panicking.

But the first call he made wasn't to the police.

It was to his wife.

Gorda, gorda.

What are you doing?

What?

And they're going to come and check.

Call the cops.

Call the cops, she responded.

It seems obvious. But to Jose Jose it wasn't exactly intuitive.
Because like a lot of the people I spoke with in his building, Jose had not had the best experiences with police. He told me it often took them a long time to show up.
And sometimes their presence made a bad situation worse. Like, there was this one time.

I called the police. The police come and arrest me.

It's a long story.

It involves an aggressive former tenant and Jose firing a gun into the air.

He says it was to try to scare him away from the property.

But Jose's takeaway was that the next time he had a problem, he'd deal with it himself.

Less of a hassle than getting the police involved.

But on that morning, when he found the body, he knew this was not something he could handle on his own.

Call 1 on Tuesday, February 23rd, 2021, at 6.48 a.m.

911, what's your emergency? Yes, good morning. My name is...
That's Jose you hear on the 911 call. You have a what? Dead man.
A dead man in your building? Yes, inside of my building. What's your address? The operator asks Jose to speak up.
She sounds agitated. She says she can barely hear him.

But it seems pretty clear it's not the volume's behind the containers. Okay.
You don't know if he's black, white, or he's just covered in a blanket? He looks like a white man. A white man? Or a girl, I don't know.
Okay, let me get fire on the line. Don't hang up, okay?

As Jose waited for the police to arrive, his mind raced with questions.

Who was this person?

How did they end up here?

And who had done this to them? This season on My Friend Daisy. Did you hear anything by any time? Any noise yesterday? Any screaming or anything? No.
There's no cameras here? No. Most people thought, oh, this was an easy case, but we didn't have any witnesses.
I didn't find out about her death until I saw it on TikTok. And I was just, like, shocked.
I was like, nah, like, it's a lie. You know, it's a lie.
It was shocking. It was very shocking.
Like, that could have been my daughter. Like, you never know.
They put out something on social media, and they put out my cell number. So I'd get calls in the middle of the night all the time.
I've seen him everywhere.

He's here. He's there.
He's here. He's there.

I would tell other people too, like,

hey, you want to meet up and look for him?

I'd be so down.

And I did make eye contact with him,

and it freaked me the hell out.

I hate everything that this parasite represents.

The way he viciously murdered her,

like she was nothing.

It's like, how do you think you're going to get away with something like this? Like, you killed somebody. Hello? This is Global Tell Link.
You have a prepaid call from an incarcerated individual. My Friend Daisy is a production of London Audio with Thank you.
for London Audio are Paris Hilton, Bruce Gersh, Bruce Robertson, and Joanna Studebaker. Our executive producer for Sony Music Entertainment is Jonathan Hirsch.
Our associate producer is Zoe Kolkin. Production assistance and translations by Miguel Contreras.
Sound design, composing, and mixing by Hans Dale Shi. Our fact checker is Fendel Fulton Our head of production is Sammy Allison

And our production manager is Tamika Balance-Kolasny

Special thanks to Steve Ackerman, Emily Rosick, and Jamie Myers at Sony

Ben Goldberg and Orly Greenberg at UTA

And Jen Ortiz at The Cut