Murder on Fourth Street

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.

Speaker 2 I couldn't even believe it was real.

Speaker 5 Join me, Tatiana Siegel, executive editor of film and media at Variety, for a four-part tale of youthful ambition, artistic integrity, and the dark side of fame.

Speaker 8 Just like my parents talk about they knew where they were when John F.

Speaker 10 Kennedy was killed. Pretty much everyone I know knows exactly where they were when River died.

Speaker 12 Featuring new interviews with Samantha Mathis, Dr.

Speaker 13 Drew Pinski, Corey Feldman, and more.

Speaker 15 Listen to Variety Confidential on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 21 Drew and Sue and Eminem's Minis.

Speaker 21 And baking the surprise birthday cake for Lou.

Speaker 21 And Sue forgetting that her oven doesn't really work. And Drew remembering that they don't have flour.

Speaker 21 And Lou getting home early from work, which he never does.

Speaker 21 And Drew and Sue using the rest of the tubes of Eminem's Minis as party poppers instead.

Speaker 20 I think this is one of those moments where people say it's the thought that counts.

Speaker 21 MMs, it's more fun together.

Speaker 23 Call Zone Media.

Speaker 23 On Friday, June 6th, 2025, ICE agents descended on Los Angeles, California.

Speaker 23 The agents carried out immigration raids at three separate locations, including a home depot in Westlake.

Speaker 23 Dozens of men were snatched by by masked, armed agents.

Speaker 23 Ordinary people, bystanders and shoppers, tried to intervene.

Speaker 23 They tried to rescue the agents' targets, tried to pull them from the grasp of the masked men. They put their bodies in front of the unmarked SUVs the detainees were shoved into.

Speaker 23 Dozens of people were taken.

Speaker 23 As word spread, more crowds began to gather. Protests sprang sprang up organically.

Speaker 23 The people of Los Angeles demanded an end to the immigration raids and the unchecked violence by the ICE agents.

Speaker 23 Over 100 people were arrested that first night, including California SEIU President David Huerta.

Speaker 23 But the raids continued, and so did the protests.

Speaker 23 Nearly a week into the ongoing protests, on June 11th, 2025, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appeared on The Rubin Report, a right-wing political talk show hosted by failed comedian-turned YouTube commentator Dave Rubin.

Speaker 23 The pair were discussing the situation in California. Kind of.

Speaker 23 DeSantis mostly used the opportunity to brag about his commitment to preventing people from freely exercising their civil rights, promising that anyone who stepped out of line in Florida would be arrested.

Speaker 23 But it's not just the police that protesters in Florida should worry about.

Speaker 24 And we also have a policy that if you're driving on one of those streets and a mob comes and surrounds your vehicle and threatens you, you have a right to flee for your safety.

Speaker 24 And so if you drive off and you hit one of these people, that's their fault for impinging on you.

Speaker 24 You don't have to sit there and just be a sitting duck and let the mob grab you out of your car and drag you through the streets. You have a right to defend yourself in Florida.
Florida.

Speaker 23 A day later, on June 12th, Brevard County, Florida Sheriff Wayne Ivey held a press conference.

Speaker 23 He echoed many of the governor's warnings that protesters will face violence from both police and civilians.

Speaker 25 If you try to mob rule a car in Brevard County, gathering around it, refusing to let the driver leave, In our county, you're most likely going to get run over and dragged across the street.

Speaker 23 DeSantis' comments came just a day after a hit and run at a protest in Chicago injured a 66-year-old woman.

Speaker 23 In the days that followed, there were vehicular attacks on protests in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Riverside, California, and Culpeper, Virginia.

Speaker 23 By the time you hear this, there may well have been more.

Speaker 23 This kind of attack isn't new, and it isn't rare. It's become frighteningly common in recent years and is now being openly openly encouraged by right-wing commentators and legislators alike.

Speaker 23 There are too many stories about angry drivers using a car as a weapon because they're unhappy with a protest.

Speaker 23 But there is one in particular that I know all too well.

Speaker 23 I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.

Speaker 23 This is the story of James Alex Fields Jr.

Speaker 23 I wish it weren't. I wish his story was irrelevant, that it was over, that he didn't have to tell it again.

Speaker 23 On August 12th, 2017,

Speaker 23 James Alex Fields Jr. drove his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of people on 4th Street in downtown Charlottesville.

Speaker 23 The attack took place two hours after police declared an unlawful assembly and dispersed the crowd at nearby Market Street Park.

Speaker 23 Both the white supremacists who were gathered there to attend the Unite the Right rally and the counterprotesters who'd shown up to oppose them were cleared from the area.

Speaker 23 The day was over.

Speaker 23 The group of people on 4th Street that afternoon were marching to celebrate.

Speaker 23 The Nazis were gone. The city was safe again.

Speaker 23 They were singing and chanting. They were peaceful.

Speaker 23 They were joyful.

Speaker 23 The street they were on was closed to traffic that day.

Speaker 23 They had every reason to believe they were safe.

Speaker 23 He accelerated as he approached them.

Speaker 23 He injured dozens of people.

Speaker 23 He murdered one of them.

Speaker 23 And he will be in prison for the rest of his life.

Speaker 23 And because this is the story of James Alex Fields Jr.,

Speaker 23 that's where I'll focus.

Speaker 23 This is the story of a young man who loved Hitler and hated almost everyone else.

Speaker 23 He hated black people. He hated Jewish people.
He hated anyone who wasn't white. And he hated white people who didn't share the hate that fueled him.

Speaker 23 It was hate that drove him as he drove his car into a crowd of people one hot August afternoon, eight years ago.

Speaker 23 That's what we're talking about.

Speaker 23 We won't talk too much about his victims, the dozens of people who were badly injured and survived. Many of them are very private people, out of necessity.

Speaker 23 They've endured years of harassment from the supporters of the man who tried to kill them.

Speaker 23 For those who try to downplay the violence of what happens in this story, fix your hearts.

Speaker 23 It's been nearly seven years since Fields' trial, but the testimony of those victims is seared into my soul.

Speaker 23 There are pages of my notes where the ink is smeared from tears I couldn't wipe away fast enough as I hunched over the notebook in my lap in that courtroom.

Speaker 23 So I won't tell you how many surgical screws are in their bones.

Speaker 23 How many of them still can't run or jump or lift their children into their arms or make a closed fist with hands once shattered to dust?

Speaker 23 How many of them still have nightmares and panic attacks and can't bear to look in the mirror because the sight of their scars sounds like screeching tires?

Speaker 23 Now isn't the time for that.

Speaker 23 And we won't talk about Heather Heyer.

Speaker 23 Not really.

Speaker 23 That was her name. The woman that he murdered.

Speaker 23 I didn't know Heather.

Speaker 23 I wasn't there when she died.

Speaker 23 But I've met her mother.

Speaker 23 And I've seen the pain in her eyes when she talks about burying her daughter in secret, in an unmarked grave, because conspiracy theorists think she was a crisis actor, and neo-Nazis talk openly about how they'd love to desecrate her final resting place.

Speaker 23 And I've seen her smile with tears in her eyes. Remembering that one of the last things they said to each other was, I love you.

Speaker 23 She's grateful for that.

Speaker 23 And I've heard her friends talk about who she was.

Speaker 23 She was outspoken and compassionate, and she was very much not a mourning person.

Speaker 23 She loved her chihuahua, violet, and her favorite color was purple.

Speaker 23 She was loved.

Speaker 23 But this is a story about the man who took her life.

Speaker 23 And now, with vehicular attacks on protesters on the rise, the story of Heather's murder bears remembering.

Speaker 23 Not just because these attacks bear frightening similarities to the one that took her life, but because the discourse surrounding them is full of lies about her death.

Speaker 23 Lies used to justify more attacks and to call for the release of her killer.

Speaker 23 On August 12, 2017, white supremacists filled the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia.

Speaker 23 The event they'd all come to town for is one I've discussed several times already on on this show, the Unite the Right Rally.

Speaker 23 James Alex Fields Jr. was just one of thousands of people who traveled here that weekend to hear speeches from prominent neo-Nazi and white supremacist activists.

Speaker 23 They never got to hear those speeches.

Speaker 23 The violence in the streets started hours before the event was scheduled to actually begin, and an unlawful assembly was declared by 11.30 a.m.

Speaker 23 State police and riot gear pushed the rallygoers out of the park and into the streets, where violent altercations with counter-protesters continued.

Speaker 23 Maryland Klansman Richard Preston had been threatening to shoot people all morning, and as he exited the park shortly before noon, he drew his gun, shouted, die, N-word,

Speaker 23 and fired a single shot into the dirt at the feet of a young black man.

Speaker 23 As the white supremacists begrudgingly began making the two-mile trek back to where they'd parked their cars, they encountered more counter-protesters walking down Market Street.

Speaker 23 Alex Ramos, Daniel Borden, Tyler Watkins, and Jacob Goodwin were all eventually convicted for the brutal beating of another young black man.

Speaker 23 It was a vicious assault that took place directly outside of the Charlottesville police station.

Speaker 23 At least three other men who participated in the attack were never arrested.

Speaker 23 Two of them have never been identified.

Speaker 23 The third uncharged attacker's identity is known,

Speaker 23 but he can't be charged.

Speaker 23 I identified him myself, but I was a little too late.

Speaker 23 It's a strange and terrible coincidence that I was going back through the video of that assault in February of 2023, and I finally identified Teddy von Newcomb as one of the attackers,

Speaker 23 just two weeks after he died.

Speaker 23 Teddy von Newcomb shot himself in the heart. the morning he was scheduled to go on trial for fentanyl trafficking.

Speaker 23 But back to the morning of August 12th.

Speaker 23 People got hurt that morning. Members of the neo-Nazi street fighting gang, the Rise Above Movement, punched, shoved, and choked counter-protesters standing on the sidewalk outside the park.

Speaker 23 A phalanx of uniformed fascists carrying homemade shields shoved their way through a line of peaceful counter-demonstrators.

Speaker 23 Members of the clergy were assaulted by Nazis.

Speaker 23 The air was thick with mace and screams.

Speaker 23 But that was the morning.

Speaker 23 By noon, they were all retreating to their cars.

Speaker 23 They were disappointed. They were hot and tired and frustrated.

Speaker 23 They were angry.

Speaker 23 But they were leaving.

Speaker 23 James Alex Fields hadn't actually parked his car at McIntyre Park.

Speaker 23 Most people had.

Speaker 23 But many of them had come with a group of some kind.

Speaker 23 Fields came alone.

Speaker 23 He left his home in Maumee, Ohio on the evening of Friday, August 11th.

Speaker 23 He hadn't been sure he'd be able to attend. He only secured the weekend off from work a few days earlier.
But he'd known about the rally for months.

Speaker 23 On Twitter, he followed rally organizers Richard Spencer and Augustus Invictus,

Speaker 23 as well as other prominent white supremacists like David Duke and Brad Griffin.

Speaker 23 He replied frequently to Richard Spencer's posts, though there's no indication Spencer ever took any notice of him.

Speaker 23 In July, Fields retweeted a post containing a flyer for the rally.

Speaker 23 All summer, he enthusiastically posted, retweeted, and commented on posts about violence at right-wing rallies in other cities.

Speaker 23 He seemed particularly thrilled by images of the violence at rallies in California, pictures of members of the Rise Above movement, beating a man in Huntington Beach, a gif of Nathan D'Amigo punching a woman in Berkeley.

Speaker 23 He tweeted often at Baked Alaska, an alt-right internet celebrity. On one occasion, he tagged Baked Alaska in a post that contained just 14 words.

Speaker 23 A very specific 14 words. We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.

Speaker 23 The white supremacist slogan first penned by David Lane. while he was in prison for his role in the murder of Jewish talk radio host Alan Berg.

Speaker 23 Fields posted pictures of Nazis marching in 1940s Germany, captioning it, hashtag Tuesday Motivation.

Speaker 23 He posted often about his belief that black people were genetically inferior, had low IQs, were predisposed to crime, and were more ape than human.

Speaker 23 He self-identified as a nationalist and expressed a willingness to kill anyone deemed to be a threat, writing things like, violence is our only hope for survival as a people, and violence is the only solution.

Speaker 23 Many of the men who attended the Unite the Right rally would later claim that they'd only been there because they love Confederate statues. Protesting the removal of the statue of Robert E.

Speaker 23 Lee was, allegedly, the purpose of the event.

Speaker 23 But Fields is not an outlier here.

Speaker 23 He was not alone in the months that he spent watching the violence at other rallies that summer, months posting violent fantasies of killing for the white race.

Speaker 23 He was here because he was a Nazi, as were many of the men in the park that day.

Speaker 23 On Friday afternoon, he dropped his cat buddy off at his mother's house for the weekend, and he texted her to let her know.

Speaker 23 She replied, as mothers do,

Speaker 23 be careful.

Speaker 23 He texted her back a picture of Adolf Hitler.

Speaker 23 Along with the image, he typed,

Speaker 23 we're not the ones who need to be careful.

Speaker 23 He didn't get here in time for the torch march that night.

Speaker 23 He drove through the night, arriving in Charlottesville around 2 or 3 a.m.

Speaker 23 Sitting alone in his car in a McDonald's parking lot, he scrolled through social media.

Speaker 23 He saw a tweet from David Duke. with pictures of the torch march.

Speaker 23 Duke wrote, Our people on the march. Will you be at Unite the Right tomorrow?

Speaker 23 Fields saved the pictures onto his phone, and then he texted them to his mother.

Speaker 23 He also asked about his cap.

Speaker 23 He nacked a little bit in his car in the McDonald's parking lot, drove to Waffle House to eat breakfast alone, and then returned to that McDonald's parking lot downtown early Saturday morning.

Speaker 23 As other attendees gathered in McIntyre Park, nearly two miles from the location of the rally, he was already downtown, just a few blocks from his destination.

Speaker 23 I know that's a lot of seemingly extraneous information about where people were parking their cars.

Speaker 23 And it probably means nothing to you unless you live here and you can picture in your mind how close the McDonald's on Ridge Street is to that park downtown.

Speaker 23 But getting back to various parked cars becomes a key piece of this timeline, I promise.

Speaker 23 So, Fields' car is downtown at the McDonald's. But most of the attendees have parked their cars at a different park, one that was far away from the park where the rally would be.

Speaker 23 Fields had probably planned to sit there in his car until closer to noon, when the rally was scheduled to begin.

Speaker 23 But from where he was parked, he could see that people were starting to walk in that direction. So he joined them.

Speaker 23 By around 9 a.m., he was among the first attendees to arrive at Market Street Park.

Speaker 23 Photos taken that morning show Fields standing with members of Vanguard America. That's a now-defunct neo-Nazi group that later that year would morph into what we now know as Patriot Front.

Speaker 23 There had been an ongoing power struggle within Vanguard America that summer, and the group's official leader, Dylan Hopper, didn't actually attend the event.

Speaker 23 In Hopper's absence, the group was commanded on the ground that day by the man who was trying to wrest control of it from Dylan Hopper.

Speaker 23 It was an 18-year-old whose name you might already know.

Speaker 23 It was a young Thomas Rousseau, the current leader of Patriot Front.

Speaker 23 Everyone involved has always maintained that James Alex Fields was not a member of Vanguard America. They claimed they'd never met him before.

Speaker 23 But there he was,

Speaker 23 marching in their ranks, dressed identically to their members, and holding a round wooden shield with their logo on it.

Speaker 23 According to deposition testimony from Dylan Hopper, it was Thomas Rousseau himself who handed Fields the shield that morning. From his deposition,

Speaker 23 he told me that he let James Fields into Vanguard America's formation at Charlottesville when nobody knew who he was.

Speaker 23 He didn't come with anybody and they just gave him a shield and said, hey, march with us.

Speaker 23 And Thomas Rousseau's reasoning was to make Vanguard look like a larger organization in front of the news media.

Speaker 23 Vanguard America's official position was that James Alex Fields was not a member of their organization.

Speaker 23 But they also claimed that they didn't actually have any kind of list of their members that they could show that didn't have his name on it, because there was no list.

Speaker 23 The organization was one of many named defendants in a lawsuit filed by people who were hurt that day.

Speaker 23 And over the years of litigation in that suit, Vanguard America never produced a single document.

Speaker 23 They expect us to believe that they didn't have a single text message, email, organizational communication, or internal document that was responsive to the discovery request.

Speaker 23 Hopper claimed they kept no records of any kind, and he didn't even know the real names of most of the group's members.

Speaker 23 So they're able to swear under oath that they know for sure that Fields wasn't a member,

Speaker 23 but they couldn't actually tell you who was.

Speaker 23 For what it's worth, I do think it's pretty plausible that a teenage Thomas Rousseau was foolish enough to hand a shield to a stranger, purely to make himself look more important so that it looked like he was commanding a larger group of Nazis in front of a TV camera.

Speaker 23 Videos show Fields standing with the Vanguard America shield wall at the perimeter of the park.

Speaker 23 He's joining in racist, sexist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic chants, and he seems to be having a pretty good time.

Speaker 23 When the police cleared the park at 11.30, Fields left with with everyone else.

Speaker 23 There was some hope that the rally would regroup back at McIntyre Park and they could still hear the scheduled speeches.

Speaker 23 So even though he was so close to his parked car, which again was downtown, he walked with the crowd back to McIntyre Park two miles away.

Speaker 23 At trial, an FBI analyst testified about the geolocation data extracted from Fields' cell phone.

Speaker 23 This shouldn't matter. This is tedious and and it's boring and it's nitpicky and it shouldn't matter.
It shouldn't matter where he was from minute to minute between 11.30 a.m. and 1.40 p.m.

Speaker 23 It should be enough for me to tell you that he left the park around 11.30

Speaker 23 and by 1.40 p.m., he was committing a murder. The two hours in between are just a long hot walk.

Speaker 23 Why does it matter?

Speaker 23 But unfortunately, it matters a great deal.

Speaker 23 A conspiracy theory has broken containment, and I feel compelled to try again to set the record straight.

Speaker 23 When people like Ron DeSantis or Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey encourage people to run protesters over, they claim they're talking about self-defense.

Speaker 23 But the self-defense that exists in their imaginations doesn't really have any relationship with reality.

Speaker 23 It's the same self-defense that James Alex Fields would claim after his crime. The same self-defense his supporters have cooked up elaborate imaginary scenarios to justify.

Speaker 23 What Fields did was not self-defense.

Speaker 23 He was convicted by a jury.

Speaker 23 He eventually pled guilty to similar charges in a federal court.

Speaker 23 But the recent popular enthusiasm for murdering protesters has broken free from the confines of hardcore violent extremist chat rooms. It's gone mainstream.

Speaker 23 And the conspiracy theories about Fields' crime are spreading now too.

Speaker 23 And I want to give you the facts you might need to combat those lies if you encounter them out there in the world.

Speaker 23 Some of those lies are easy to debunk quickly. There are people who will tell you that Heather Heyer didn't even get hit by the car.

Speaker 23 That her death was from a heart attack.

Speaker 23 To that, I offer you the testimony of a DNA analyst from the Virginia Department of Forensic Science.

Speaker 23 She performed testing that confirmed that a piece of human flesh that was embedded in the car's broken windshield was a DNA match to Heather Heyer.

Speaker 23 Testing performed on bloodstains found on the vehicle showed at least 10 distinct profiles.

Speaker 23 10 people's blood was on that car, including Heather's.

Speaker 23 The medical examiner who performed Heather's autopsy showed showed the jury x-rays of a displaced fracture to Heather's right femur.

Speaker 23 Her broken ribs cut her lungs and her liver.

Speaker 23 Her aorta was completely transected.

Speaker 23 The doctor's exact words, according to my notes, were,

Speaker 23 it was snapped in half.

Speaker 23 The aorta is the largest artery in the human body. taking blood directly from the heart out into the body.

Speaker 23 Completely severing the aorta is not a survivable injury. She bled to death internally very quickly.

Speaker 23 The official cause of death was blunt force trauma to the torso.

Speaker 23 Anyone who is stuck arguing that the car never struck her or that she died of anything other than being struck by that car is willfully ignorant. These facts are quite concrete.

Speaker 2 I couldn't even believe it was real.

Speaker 5 Join me, Tatiana Siegel, executive editor of film and media at Variety, for a four-part tale of youthful ambition, artistic integrity, and the dark side of fame.

Speaker 8 Just like my parents talk about they knew where they were when John F.

Speaker 10 Kennedy was killed.

Speaker 11 Pretty much everyone I know knows exactly where they were when River died.

Speaker 12 Featuring new interviews with Samantha Mathis, Dr.

Speaker 14 Drew Pinski, Corey Feldman, and more.

Speaker 16 Listen to Variety Confidential on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 26 Let's be real.

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Speaker 28 Liz went from being interested in true crime to living true crime.

Speaker 29 My husband comes back outside and he's shaking and he just looks like he's seen a ghost and he's just in shock. And he said,

Speaker 30 your dad's been killed.

Speaker 31 This is Hands Tied, a true crime podcast exploring the murder of Jim Melgar.

Speaker 33 Liz's mom had just been found shut in a closet, her hands and feet tied up, shouting for help.

Speaker 29 I was just completely in shock.

Speaker 3 Her dad had been stabbed to death.

Speaker 5 It didn't feel real at all.

Speaker 35 For more than a decade, Liz has been trying to figure out what happened.

Speaker 29 There's a lot of guilt, I think, pushing me, and I just want answers.

Speaker 31 Listen to Hands Tied on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 23 The other persistent lie is a little more complicated.

Speaker 23 I mean, the facts are there. I don't mean there's actually any lingering confusion, it's just a more convoluted narrative.

Speaker 23 And the average conspiracy theorist isn't going to sit quietly long enough to have it explained to them.

Speaker 23 The story goes like this:

Speaker 23 he had to do it.

Speaker 23 Fields was terrified of Antifa.

Speaker 23 He didn't want to hurt those people. He was trying to escape from a man who was threatening him with a rifle.

Speaker 23 He was afraid for his life.

Speaker 23 The people who repeat this story often don't know or don't care to know any more than that. The specifics aren't important, only the feeling.

Speaker 23 They feel it must be true because it affirms their existing belief that left-wing left-wing protesters are violent and that right-wing white men are persecuted.

Speaker 23 The problem is,

Speaker 23 this never happened.

Speaker 23 This was a lie born by accident.

Speaker 23 A leftist counter-demonstrator made an understandable mistake.

Speaker 23 You see, there were members of left-wing groups in Charlottesville that day who carried guns. This is Virginia.
It's legal to open carry a rifle in public.

Speaker 23 Regardless of how you feel about that in terms of gun laws in general, protest tactics specifically, whatever, that's just the situation.

Speaker 23 It is legal for people to open carry a rifle in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Speaker 23 Members of an anarchist gun club were in a different downtown park, Court Square Park, which is about two blocks from the Market Street Park where the rally was held.

Speaker 23 In the days after that rally, one of those counter-demonstrators who had been legally carrying his rifle that day posted online that he'd seen Fields that afternoon before the attack.

Speaker 23 He wrote, I used this rifle to chase off James Fields from our block of 4th Street before he attacked the marchers to the south.

Speaker 23 And when he posted that, he believed it to be true.

Speaker 23 He was traumatized. He had survivors' guilt.
He truly believed that he had seen James Fields driving around hunting for victims in the hour before the attack happened.

Speaker 23 But he was wrong.

Speaker 23 After his Facebook post, a Charlesville police detective drove to his home to interview him, and I've obtained a copy of that police interview.

Speaker 23 He said that around 1 p.m. that afternoon, he saw a dark gray muscle car with very dark tinted windows circling Court Square Park.

Speaker 23 The car was driving slowly, as though the driver were trying to observe the people in the park.

Speaker 23 The third time the car drove past, it came to a complete stop, level with where he was standing inside the park.

Speaker 23 And at that point, he says he stepped down off the curb, standing between two parked cars, so not all the way out into the road, but off the curb, and he yelled at the car, something like, get out of here.

Speaker 23 And he says the interaction was brief. The driver did not roll down the window.
They didn't exchange words. His rifle remained slung across his body, muzzle pointing at the ground.

Speaker 23 And he never put his hand on the pistol grip.

Speaker 23 He did not raise his weapon. He didn't step all the way out into the road.
And he was the only person who moved in the direction of the car at all.

Speaker 23 There was no mob. There was no threat.
There was no rifle pointing.

Speaker 23 But more importantly,

Speaker 23 there was no James Alex Fields. He was mistaken.

Speaker 23 After the attack, he saw photos of Fields' dark gray Dodge Challenger, and he believed it was the same car he'd seen earlier that day.

Speaker 23 But it absolutely could not have been. It is not possible.

Speaker 23 At the time of the attack, 1:40 p.m.,

Speaker 23 This man was in the middle of an interview with a reporter. The reporter took photographs of him for the story, and those photographs are timestamped at 1.30 p.m.

Speaker 23 He estimates they'd been talking for about 15 minutes before they started taking the pictures and the incident with the mysterious car had occurred a little bit prior to this.

Speaker 23 So if he's been talking to a reporter since 1.15,

Speaker 23 his best guess is that he saw this car sometime between 12.45 and 1.15.

Speaker 23 It couldn't have been any later than 1.15.

Speaker 23 And we know exactly where James Alex Fields was at 1.13 p.m. because there is security camera footage from a Shell gas station showing him purchasing a blue power aid.

Speaker 23 Fields left his car in the McDonald's parking lot around 9 a.m.

Speaker 23 and he didn't return to it again until around 1.20 p.m.

Speaker 23 Neither Fields nor his car were anywhere near Court Square Park when this man saw a dark gray muscle car slowly circling the park.

Speaker 23 The police have never weighed in on this.

Speaker 23 I wish they would because I think they know the answer. I think they could put this to bed if they felt like it.

Speaker 23 It is my very firmly held belief that the car that man saw that day was an unmarked police car.

Speaker 23 The Charlottesville Police Department did have an unmarked dark gray Dodge charger with dark tinted windows.

Speaker 23 Mistaking a charger for a challenger isn't hard to believe if you saw it only briefly.

Speaker 23 And it's very easy to imagine why a cop might make several laps around the park to try to get a better look at the guys with the guns.

Speaker 23 I don't think we'll ever get an answer to the question of who exactly it was driving around the park at 1 p.m.

Speaker 23 But I can promise you, it was not James Alex Fields.

Speaker 23 Fields left downtown around 11.30 a.m. with the other rally attendees.

Speaker 23 Again, they all kind of hoped that maybe the rally wasn't a total wash and they'd still be able to hear some speeches back at McIntyre Park. So he joined in the crowd walking back that way.

Speaker 23 According to GPS data from his cell phone, Fields was in McIntyre Park shortly after noon.

Speaker 23 He milled around a little, but it quickly became clear that nothing was going to happen there.

Speaker 23 He needed to walk back downtown to get to his car, but he didn't really want to walk there alone.

Speaker 23 He met another man in the same situation, Joshua Matthews.

Speaker 23 The pair soon met Sarah Bolstad and her boyfriend Hayden Calhoun, two other rally attendees who needed to get back downtown, and they all decided to walk there together.

Speaker 23 Fields' cell phone pings show a minute-by-minute progression of this walk. And at 1.13 p.m., he's on camera buying that power aid.

Speaker 23 Joshua Matthews testified that he bought a bottle of wine at the gas station to celebrate getting through the day safely.

Speaker 23 It took another five minutes from there to walk back to Fields' car at the McDonald's.

Speaker 23 All four of them got into his car and he drove Bolstad and Calhoun to their car, which turned out to be right across the street.

Speaker 23 Matthews had parked in the garage downtown, which was another couple of minutes away by car.

Speaker 23 By 1.35 p.m., James Alex Fields is alone in his car after dropping off his last passenger at the Market Street parking garage.

Speaker 23 He typed, mommy, Ohio, into the search bar on the Maps app on his phone to get directions home.

Speaker 23 The streets were empty at that point.

Speaker 23 Everyone had gone home, even the police.

Speaker 23 There were extensive road closures downtown that day for the scheduled rally, and officers had been stationed in the intersections around the roadblocks.

Speaker 23 The officers were gone now, but the streets were still blocked off.

Speaker 23 In hindsight, maybe they should have closed the Market Street parking garage too?

Speaker 23 That part of downtown has a lot of narrow one-way streets and it can be confusing for out-of-towners even without the added complication of the roadblocks.

Speaker 23 But there are a lot of things I think the city would have done differently with the benefit of hindsight.

Speaker 23 And even locals were a little bit puzzled about how to navigate this situation. Two other drivers had run into the same problem, ending up on 4th Street just before Fields did.

Speaker 23 The first driver was a woman I'll just call Elle.

Speaker 23 She was driving home from running an errand and she got mixed up with the roadblocks.

Speaker 23 4th Street was technically closed to traffic too,

Speaker 23 but the tiny wooden sawhorse still standing in the road didn't block it completely. So she turned down that street.

Speaker 23 At the intersection of 4th and Water Street, there is is a stop sign.

Speaker 23 And as she stopped at the bottom of 4th Street, the crowd of marchers is coming up water towards that intersection.

Speaker 23 They're chanting and singing, and they're joyfully reclaiming their city streets from the Nazi invasion.

Speaker 23 And as they approach the intersection, they turn left up 4th Street towards the pedestrian mall.

Speaker 23 They were singing. They were laughing, she said.

Speaker 23 The crowd just felt so positive, so happy that she got out of her car.

Speaker 23 I wanted to get this on film, she testified at Fields' trial.

Speaker 23 This was a moment in history.

Speaker 23 One of the marchers recognized her and ran over to say hi and smile for the Snapchat video she was recording. It was a joyful moment.

Speaker 23 As this is happening, a second car pulled in behind Elle's van as she stopped at this intersection.

Speaker 23 This car, driven by a woman I'll just call T,

Speaker 23 stopped too.

Speaker 23 She hadn't attended any of the protests that morning, but when she heard that everything was over, she left her house to go visit a friend who lived near downtown.

Speaker 23 She was on her way home when she got caught up trying to navigate the roadblocks.

Speaker 23 T testified that as she wound her way around downtown trying to figure out which streets weren't closed, there was another car behind her the entire time.

Speaker 23 He seemed to be in the same boat. He followed her at a safe distance, driving calmly and safely, making the same turns she made and stopping behind her at a red light.

Speaker 23 Like Elle, she drove past the little sawhorse on 4th Street.

Speaker 23 And the gray Dodge Challenger was still right behind her.

Speaker 23 She saw the crowd at the end of the street as she approached. So she was driving really slowly, and she came to a stop behind Elle's van.

Speaker 23 It was amazing, she said.

Speaker 23 I've never seen so many people standing up for black people.

Speaker 23 So many people of another color standing up for us.

Speaker 23 She testified that a passing marcher leaned in toward her open car window and thanked her for being so patient as the group moved up the street around her idling car.

Speaker 23 The challenger was still behind her.

Speaker 23 In her rearview mirror, she saw the car start to back up.

Speaker 23 That made sense to her.

Speaker 23 He saw the crowd and changed his mind. Maybe he didn't want to wait down there at the bottom of 4th Street for the crowd to pass.
Who knows how long it might take?

Speaker 23 So he's probably going to back all the way back out onto Market Street and try a different path.

Speaker 23 She remembered thinking she might be there for a while, but there was no way she would be able to maneuver her car all the way back out to Market Street in reverse.

Speaker 23 So she stayed put.

Speaker 23 If you're not familiar with downtown Charlottesville, we have a pedestrian mall.

Speaker 23 It's just an outdoor area, a few blocks of shops and restaurants, and it's just for pedestrians.

Speaker 23 But for some ungodly stupid reason, there are two streets that intersect it. Our pedestrian-only mall has two vehicular crossings.

Speaker 23 And 4th Street is one of them.

Speaker 23 So these three cars turned onto 4th Street from Market Street where it crosses the mall.

Speaker 23 And as you pass onto and then back off of the pedestrian-only area as you proceed down 4th Street, there are speed bumps.

Speaker 23 Security camera footage from a nearby business shows each car as it drove down 4th Street.

Speaker 23 L's red van.

Speaker 23 Then T's silver sedan.

Speaker 23 Then the challenger.

Speaker 23 The angle of this camera was only meant to capture the area just outside the restaurant's door. So it just catches a fleeting glimpse of each vehicle as they cross onto the pedestrian mall.

Speaker 23 One minute and 10 seconds after Fields' car first appeared driving down 4th Street,

Speaker 23 it reappears in frame, driving in reverse.

Speaker 23 And then suddenly, It accelerates forward.

Speaker 23 There was no one around him. The security camera footage shows that.
Witnesses testified to that. The state police helicopter hovering overhead, recording video of the entire scene, clearly shows it.

Speaker 23 L and T had made the same mistake he did, turning down a closed road, and they were waiting patiently for the peaceful crowd to make their way onto the pedestrian mall.

Speaker 23 But he was behind them, idling,

Speaker 23 alone,

Speaker 23 watching.

Speaker 23 When T saw him start to reverse, she assumed he was leaving.

Speaker 23 But he was just giving himself more room to accelerate.

Speaker 23 A photojournalist from the local newspaper was on the mall that afternoon. He'd worked all morning, taking pictures of the violent scenes on Market Street.

Speaker 23 But he'd come back out that afternoon now that everything was over, to look around.

Speaker 23 He wasn't with the crowd, but he heard them and walked over to see.

Speaker 23 He saw the Gray Challenger just as it started reversing, and he too assumed the car was trying to back out onto Market Street.

Speaker 23 But then he heard the engine revving.

Speaker 23 He raised his camera and captured 74 frames, a rapid burst of photos, sort of a grisly flipbook.

Speaker 23 Here too, we can lay to rest another persistent lie.

Speaker 23 While the helicopter footage provides a clear view of the entire scene, it's a bird's eye view. You can only see the tops of things, only the top of the car.

Speaker 23 I've seen the video. It's clear enough to me that the driver was accelerating, that he made no attempt to slow down as he plowed into the crowd.

Speaker 23 But both his attorneys at trial and his supporters online will tell you that he hit the brakes. He tried to slow down.

Speaker 23 These photos prove otherwise.

Speaker 23 On the stand, the photographer was shown his own pictures.

Speaker 23 In one frame, the brake lights are illuminated, indicating that the driver tapped his brakes.

Speaker 23 But this wasn't as he neared the crowd.

Speaker 23 It was the moment his car bottomed out over a speed bump.

Speaker 23 Several witnesses testified that they heard the car's undercarriage scrape the speed bump as he crossed the pedestrian mall.

Speaker 23 Several testified that it looked like the car was briefly airborne because it hit the speed bump so fast.

Speaker 23 But once he cleared that barrier, the brake lights never came on again.

Speaker 23 As he approached the crowd, he was accelerating.

Speaker 23 It sounded like a gunshot.

Speaker 23 I just remember screaming. I think I was saying, Where are my kids? Where are my kids?

Speaker 16 I thought a bomb went off.

Speaker 23 I thought more cars might be coming. I tried to get out of the street, but I didn't know why my legs wouldn't work.

Speaker 23 When I came to, my leg was broken and I couldn't find my child.

Speaker 23 The only thing I could think about was getting my wife out of the way.

Speaker 23 These are the words of the people whose bones he broke.

Speaker 23 He drove right through that crowd, ramming into the back of T's car, pushing it forward into L's van.

Speaker 23 L was actually hit by her own parked car. She'd gotten out to greet a friend in the crowd and was standing in front of the van when it was pushed forward in the crash.

Speaker 23 The street was too narrow for Fields to continue on this path. The two cars he'd crashed into were blocking the intersection.

Speaker 23 And here again, we have a moment in time that has become distorted in the retelling.

Speaker 23 Conspiracy theorists will tell you that the crowd attacked his car unprovoked, that the damage to his vehicle occurred before the attack, that he feared for his life because this mob attacked him.

Speaker 23 And there certainly was some damage to his car that wasn't from the crash.

Speaker 23 But that didn't happen until after the crash.

Speaker 23 Dozens of people were lying on the ground, bleeding and broken. Many people ran, not knowing what horrors might come next.

Speaker 23 Was he going to get out of the car with a gun?

Speaker 23 And for every person who was lying injured on the pavement, half a dozen others stepped up to render aid, moving victims out of the street, tearing off their own clothes to try to stop bleeding, stabilizing possibly broken necks.

Speaker 23 But some people in that crowd identified a threat, and they did what they felt was necessary. striking the vehicle and putting a few good dents in it.

Speaker 23 He had just killed someone. I think that's fair.

Speaker 23 With no path forward, Fields really was surrounded by an angry crowd now.

Speaker 23 In the collective imaginations of aggrieved white supremacists, this angry crowd has existed throughout the story.

Speaker 23 But the evidence is clear. No one had an issue with the Gray Challenger until after it was a clear and present danger.

Speaker 23 He threw the car into reverse, hitting several more people in the process, and backed all the way back up 4th Street, back onto Market Street, and he drove toward the highway.

Speaker 23 He still had the GPS directions for his trip back home pulled up on his phone.

Speaker 23 The footage captured by the state police helicopter tracked his flight from the scene.

Speaker 23 The officers who filmed it never actually testified. They couldn't.
A few hours later, miles from downtown, they lost control of their helicopter and both troopers died in the crash.

Speaker 23 Fields drove for a little over a mile, with an officer in pursuit for much of that drive, before surrendering, just blocks from the on-ramp to the interstate.

Speaker 23 The officer who pulled him over actually had no idea what Fields had done, he just happened to hear the radio call just as Fields was passing by where he was sitting in his parked car.

Speaker 23 So, when Fields saw the officer and asked, Are the people okay?

Speaker 23 He didn't know the answer.

Speaker 2 I couldn't even believe it was real.

Speaker 5 Join me, Tatiana Siegel, executive editor of film and media at Variety, for a four-part tale of youthful ambition, artistic integrity, and the dark side of fame.

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Speaker 12 Featuring new interviews with Samantha Mathis, Dr.

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Speaker 28 Liz went from being interested in true crime to living true crime.

Speaker 29 My husband comes back outside and he's he's shaking and he just looks like he's seen a ghost and he's just in shock. And he said,

Speaker 30 your dad's been killed.

Speaker 31 This is Hands Tied, a true crime podcast exploring the murder of Jim Melgar.

Speaker 33 Liz's mom had just been found shut in a closet, her hands and feet tied up, shouting for help.

Speaker 29 I was just completely in shock.

Speaker 3 Her dad had been stabbed to death.

Speaker 5 It didn't feel real at all.

Speaker 35 For more than a decade, Liz has been trying to figure out what happened.

Speaker 29 There's a lot of guilt, I think, pushing me, and I just, I want answers.

Speaker 31 Listen to Hands Tied on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 23 It wasn't until he was sitting at the police station that an officer told him that someone had died.

Speaker 23 Based on the audio of this interview,

Speaker 23 sounds like he was having a panic attack.

Speaker 23 It is impossible to know which one of a man's lies he actually believes.

Speaker 23 As he was lying face down on the side of the road, he said, I didn't want to hurt people, but they were attacking me.

Speaker 23 And later at the magistrate's office, Fields can be heard on body cam footage saying,

Speaker 23 I felt like the people behind me were trying to surround me.

Speaker 23 But that just isn't true.

Speaker 23 There were no people behind him. Not until he drove over them, anyway.

Speaker 23 The only time his car was ever surrounded by anyone was when he drove into them.

Speaker 23 He sat all alone for a minute and 10 seconds, looking down that street at the crowd.

Speaker 23 He was obviously capable of backing all the way back up 4th Street. He ended up doing just that after the murder.

Speaker 23 But he chose to accelerate forward instead.

Speaker 23 He chose that

Speaker 23 because he wanted to hurt them. He wanted to hurt black people and Jewish people and gay people and liberals and communists.

Speaker 23 He saw Black Lives Matter signs and rainbow flags and people in black bandanas

Speaker 23 and he couldn't stand it.

Speaker 23 He had other options.

Speaker 23 He wasn't defending himself.

Speaker 23 And he knows that.

Speaker 23 A few months after the attack, while he he was awaiting trial in a local jail, he brought up the topic of Heather Heyer's mother in a phone call with his own mother.

Speaker 23 Could your mother's like going around doing speeches and shit,

Speaker 23 slandering me?

Speaker 36 I haven't heard anything. I've been on some good radio.

Speaker 36 Oh, okay. The only thing I seen was that she was on the the news and she's going like around the one speeches and shit.
She's one of those anti-white communist

Speaker 36 Well, she lost her daughter and so, you know. It doesn't fucking matter.
She's a communist. She's

Speaker 36 uh you need to stop talking.

Speaker 36 Nobody's an um

Speaker 36 She is a communist, an anti-white liberal. I don't know.

Speaker 36 Jay.

Speaker 36 It's not up for questioning. She is.

Speaker 36 She's the enemy.

Speaker 36 Nobody's an enemy, though. She's the enemy.

Speaker 36 She is the enemy, mother.

Speaker 23 Her death

Speaker 23 doesn't fucking matter.

Speaker 23 Her mother's pain doesn't fucking matter.

Speaker 23 They're the enemy. They're anti-white communists and their lives are worthless and they don't.
fucking matter.

Speaker 23 That's what he believes.

Speaker 23 That's the truth. Not the self-serving, self-pitying tears in the magistrate's office.
Not the lies that he told his lawyers that they repeated for him in court. None of that.

Speaker 23 This is the truth.

Speaker 23 Like I said, I didn't know Heather.

Speaker 23 But I've met her mother on a few occasions.

Speaker 23 We've never talked politics, not really.

Speaker 23 We talked about her daughter, about the case, about the Nazi who who said he was going to use her daughter's grave as a urinal.

Speaker 23 She always asks me how my little dogs are.

Speaker 23 But I'm willing to stake a claim here and say that neither Heather nor her mother would say that they're communists.

Speaker 23 Because that word doesn't mean what you think it means here.

Speaker 23 He doesn't mean someone who identifies with the political ideology of communism.

Speaker 23 It means someone who doesn't want Nazis around. It means someone that white nationalists don't like.

Speaker 23 In another recorded jail call, Fields explained to his mother that all liberals are communists who hate white people and want to destroy white society.

Speaker 23 So when you see a white supremacist talking about his fervent desire to hurt or kill communists, just know he means you too.

Speaker 23 The murder was premeditated.

Speaker 23 He was convicted of first-degree murder, which in Virginia requires premeditation.

Speaker 23 But that doesn't mean you have to make the plan far in advance.

Speaker 23 At trial, the prosecutor emphasized that they believed he formulated his intent during that one minute and 10 seconds that he spent idling on 4th Street, staring down at the crowd.

Speaker 23 And I think that's almost certainly the truth.

Speaker 23 I don't think that he drove here from Ohio intending to do this.

Speaker 23 I don't think he knew when he left his cat at his mother's house for the weekend that he would never come home again.

Speaker 23 The plan didn't form until the opportunity presented itself.

Speaker 23 But the plan was able to form so quickly because he'd thought about it before.

Speaker 23 And he wasn't the only one.

Speaker 23 I think I need to do a follow-up episode about the history of vehicle attacks on protests. I'd intended to get into it here, but I sort of lost track of things.

Speaker 23 It was a subject of interest in certain circles, and several similar attacks in the United States predate this one.

Speaker 23 In the Discord server for Unite the Right rally attendees, the idea came up several times.

Speaker 23 I don't believe there's any evidence that Fields was ever an active participant in the chat, but it just goes to show how prevalent the fantasy was.

Speaker 23 A month before the rally, a user posting as Tyrone said,

Speaker 23 is it legal to run over protesters blocking roadways? I'm not just shit posting. I would like clarification.

Speaker 23 The same user posted a meme showing a large piece of John Deere farming equipment with the text, introducing John Deere's new multi-lane protester digester.

Speaker 23 Tyrone wrote, sure would be nice.

Speaker 23 A week earlier, another user posted, What is it called when you run over a protester?

Speaker 23 Black Lives Splatter.

Speaker 23 Shane Duffy, a member of the neo-Nazi group Traditionalist Worker Party, posted, This will be us, alongside an image from the 2004 movie Dawn of the Dead, depicting a bus driving into a crowd of zombies.

Speaker 23 Two days before the rally, another user posted on the subject of counter-protesters, writing, you're supposed to run them over with your car.

Speaker 23 These are jokes.

Speaker 23 Probably.

Speaker 23 Kind of.

Speaker 23 That's what they'd tell you.

Speaker 23 And none of those men actually did it.

Speaker 23 So maybe they were kidding.

Speaker 23 I think it's instructive here to quote from the style guide written by the editor of the neo-Nazi website, The Daily Stormer.

Speaker 23 It was intended to be an internal document for the site's authors. And the site was one that many of these men read daily.

Speaker 23 In the section about humor, The document's author, Andrew Anglin, wrote,

Speaker 23 The tone of the site should be light.

Speaker 23 Most people are not comfortable with material that comes across as vitriolic, raging, non-ironic hatred. The undoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not.

Speaker 23 There should also be a conscious awareness of mocking stereotypes of hateful racists. I usually think of this as self-deprecating humor.

Speaker 23 I am a racist making fun of stereotypes of racists because I don't take myself super seriously.

Speaker 23 This is obviously a ploy, and I actually do want to gas anti-Semitic slur for Jewish people.

Speaker 23 But that's neither here nor there. Serious articles are fine and can be written and published with absolute seriousness.

Speaker 23 However, articles which take a serious tone should not include racial slurs or even rude language about other races.

Speaker 23 Another section with the heading violence reads,

Speaker 23 it's illegal to promote violence on the internet. At the same time, It's totally important to normalize the acceptance of violence as an eventuality slash inevitability.

Speaker 23 I'm extremely careful about never suggesting violence. I go beyond legal requirements in America.
However, whenever someone does something violent, it should be made light of and laughed at.

Speaker 23 For example, Anders Bravik should be forever referred to as a heroic freedom fighter. This is great because people think you must be joking.
But there is a part of their brain that doesn't think that.

Speaker 23 So this is partly an attempt at just plausible deniability. If someone's offended, it was just a joke and you haven't lost face.

Speaker 23 If you get in trouble, it was just a joke. Maybe you won't be punished.
But if it works, if you tell a racist joke or propose a violent act and it's well received, then you've made a connection.

Speaker 23 You've found a fellow traveler.

Speaker 23 But as they say themselves, it's also a recruitment and indoctrination strategy. You ease people into it.

Speaker 23 You let them have an uneasy chuckle at your racist joke. Give them the internal deniability that they need to hear something like that and not push back.

Speaker 23 Erode their boundaries. Get them comfortable with that kind of talk.

Speaker 23 Normalize it.

Speaker 23 A now deceased Daily Stormer writer said it himself.

Speaker 23 Here's Robert Ray, the Nazi who called himself Asmodor, greeting a fan.

Speaker 23 The audio is a little bit fuzzy. There's a lot of background noise in this clip.

Speaker 23 And that's because it was recorded inside Market Street Park on the morning of August 12, 2017.

Speaker 37 I check that site every day, and I always laugh at it.

Speaker 37 It's humor. That's how it gets people.

Speaker 37 It's humor, but we do need to.

Speaker 37 Absolutely, yeah.

Speaker 23 It's humor,

Speaker 23 but we mean it.

Speaker 23 Just moments before this segment of the clip, Asmador had just finished telling this man about how he'd assaulted several people the night before.

Speaker 23 He was laughing and smiling when he said it,

Speaker 23 but he meant it.

Speaker 23 Robert Ray died a fugitive. He was charged with a felony for pepper spraying counterprotesters who were trapped by the ring of torch marchers the night before this.

Speaker 23 And he never appeared in court.

Speaker 23 And while Fields may not have been in the Discord, he posted some jokes of his own about murdering protesters.

Speaker 23 In May of 2017, three months before the attack, he posted a meme on Instagram.

Speaker 23 The image is strikingly similar to the photo taken of the moment his car hit the crowd. It looks just like it.

Speaker 23 The The text on the image reads, you have a right to protest, but I'm late for work.

Speaker 23 When he posted that image in May, I don't think he was thinking to himself, I'm going to do this one day.

Speaker 23 I don't think he was even thinking about it on his drive here.

Speaker 23 But the idea lived in his head. It was a joke, but he meant it.

Speaker 23 It was normalized. It was normal to think of people who protest Nazi rallies as subhuman, as enemy combatants.
It was normal to think about hurting them. It wasn't shocking or upsetting.
It was funny.

Speaker 23 It was just a joke.

Speaker 23 But they meant it.

Speaker 23 Which is why I feel so sick browsing the comments on posts made today by mainstream MAGA influencers.

Speaker 23 The rhetoric in these posts is as bad, sometimes worse, than what was posted in the Nazi rally planning chats.

Speaker 23 That protester digester meme, the one that Tyrone posted and that ended up entered into evidence in federal court to demonstrate the casual attitude the rallygoers had towards this kind of violence?

Speaker 23 That meme is now being posted by people who probably think of themselves as having pretty normal Republican politics.

Speaker 23 And I guess by today's standards, they do.

Speaker 23 Accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers have posted it. People posting under their real names are posting it.

Speaker 23 Doctors, tech executives, small business owners, federal employees, it's not just the radical fringe anymore.

Speaker 23 Average suburban conservatives are posting the kinds of things that I'm used to seeing with an exhibit number stamped on them.

Speaker 23 There is a lot more to be said about the rise in popularity among American right-wingers of this very particular form of violence.

Speaker 23 And I think I'm going to have to revisit that history another day because I think it's important.

Speaker 23 This is a relatively recent phenomenon, spiking dramatically in frequency in the last 10 years.

Speaker 23 Fields' crime is not an isolated one. He was acting out a fantasy that was common among his peers.

Speaker 23 Eight years ago, That peer group was small. It was just around the radical fringes of society where people felt comfortable talking about this so often that it started to feel acceptable.

Speaker 23 And now it's everywhere. Politicians and law enforcement officials are telling you it's allowed.

Speaker 23 They're damn near encouraging you to go out there and do it.

Speaker 23 And it's happened at least five times in the last week.

Speaker 23 Keep an eye out for each other out there.

Speaker 23 Don't ever assume that a driver is going to behave rationally.

Speaker 23 because I have a terrible feeling this is going to keep happening.

Speaker 23 Weird Little Guys is a production of Poolzone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.

Speaker 23 The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan, and theme music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me at WeirdLittleGuyspodcast at gmail.com.

Speaker 23 It will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal.

Speaker 23 You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.

Speaker 23 Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my Weird Little Guys.

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Speaker 33 I'm still pretending the laundry on the chair is part of the decor.

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Speaker 19 I do feel more sophisticated.

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Speaker 32 Huh, a taste for taste. I like that.
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Speaker 2 I couldn't even believe it was real.

Speaker 5 Join me, Tatiana Siegel, executive editor of film and media at Variety, for a four-part tale of youthful ambition, artistic integrity, and the dark side of fame.

Speaker 8 Just like my parents talk about they knew where they were when John F.

Speaker 10 Kennedy was killed.

Speaker 11 Pretty much everyone I know knows exactly where they were when River died.

Speaker 12 Featuring new interviews with Samantha Mathis, Dr.

Speaker 14 Drew Pinski, Corey Feldman, and more.

Speaker 15 Listen to Variety Confidential on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 28 Liz went from being interested in true crime to living true crime.

Speaker 30 My husband said, your dad's been killed.

Speaker 31 This is Hands Tied, a true crime podcast exploring the murder of Jim Melgar.

Speaker 29 I was just completely in shock.

Speaker 33 Liz's father murdered and her mother found locked in a closet, her hands and feet bound.

Speaker 5 It didn't feel real at all.

Speaker 35 More than a decade on, she's still searching for answers.

Speaker 29 We're still fighting.

Speaker 31 Listen to Hands Tied on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.