Divided Minds — Sandy Beal E6

Transcript

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Speaker 29 Before we begin, please note, this series includes talk of suicide and sexual violence. Please take care while listening.

Speaker 29 So I guess we can start driving now. So we'll just meet you there in 10 minutes or however long it takes.

Speaker 22 Okay.

Speaker 29 So I'm just in the car now.

Speaker 29 Last night the family gave me Sandy's coat that she had with her the night that she died. And so I'm feeling a great weight of responsibility.
I'm taking the coat with me.

Speaker 29 And we're going to go to the cemetery this morning. Sandy's body's not there, but there is a marker for her.

Speaker 32 And I'm just popping in the address.

Speaker 32 We rolling?

Speaker 32 Yeah.

Speaker 29 Okay, so tell us where we are.

Speaker 15 We're at Greenwood Cemetery.

Speaker 33 I think it's the largest one in Jonesport because there's probably like 10 cemeteries here. And we are in our family cemetery for many generations, many centuries.

Speaker 33 And we're about to walk to where Sandy's memorialized.

Speaker 33 That's interesting. I wonder what the pennies are.
Is that just to show that you've been here?

Speaker 15 I wonder what, does anyone know what pennies have put on there for?

Speaker 29 The first time I met Kim and she told me about Sandy, I don't think she imagined her cousin's story would become the subject of an entire podcast.

Speaker 29 A year went by before I asked her if she would be willing to embark on this project together. I couldn't do it without her buy-in.

Speaker 29 And Kim, she was immediately 100% a yes, which I thought was pretty brave, because when you invite a journalist into your life, you're opening yourself up to a lot of questioning, not all of which is comfortable or feels natural.

Speaker 29 Kim was allowing me to scrutinize her long-held belief that Sandy was murdered. She was essentially giving me permission to check her work and risking the prospect of being proven wrong.

Speaker 29 Early on in the process, she invited me to come to Maine, to meet the whole family, and to crash a big birthday party for one of her relatives who was turning 80.

Speaker 29 This trip, it was an intense two full days of interviews.

Speaker 29 For hours at a time, I sat down with members of the Beale family and, like an investigative reporter does, I peppered them them with questions, trying to establish the basic, undisputed facts of the case.

Speaker 29 And a lot of these questions were directed at Kim, as she was my conduit to the family and the one who had spent the most time investigating Sandy's death on her own.

Speaker 29 The final day of my trip, we drove to the cemetery where Sandy has a grave marker.

Speaker 29 I only had a few minutes before my flight back, but I wanted to get Kim's temperature after a long and emotionally grueling weekend.

Speaker 33 I'm still processing it.

Speaker 33 It was definitely different to dredge it all back up. The questions that you were asked, I was like, whoa, I've never thought about those things before.

Speaker 33 And then some of the things that we came up with that I thought were solid evidence. Now we've got to figure out what it means and what it all was.
But that was a little disturbing.

Speaker 33 But the questions you asked were

Speaker 33 pretty,

Speaker 33 they caught me by surprise. I have more questions than I thought I did, and I'll send them to you.

Speaker 33 I'm trusting that it's all going to unfold, and we'll get the answers that we need to help bring some closure for them.

Speaker 33 Well, for me, too.

Speaker 33 I'm so glad you guys came up here. I can't believe you'd come to Jonesport, Maine, and do this.

Speaker 29 From iHeartRadio, I'm Melissa Gelton, and this is What Happened to Sandy Beale, an iHeart Original Podcast.

Speaker 29 Chapter 6 Divided Minds

Speaker 29 When I first met the Beals in Maine, I made them a promise that I would keep an open mind and follow the evidence and I wouldn't be swayed by one side or the other.

Speaker 29 It was clear from the get-go that there were two opposing sides here, minds so divided that there was very little agreement on what the most basic facts meant.

Speaker 29 The Prince George's County Police Department and the Beale family had examined the exact same documents, dissected the exact same set of facts, and come to wildly divergent conclusions about what happened to Sandy.

Speaker 29 As a pair of fresh eyes on the case, I wondered whether both sides were trapped in their own cycles of confirmation bias, processing the information in a way that aligned with their own preconceived ideas.

Speaker 29 Like the cardboard under the wheels of Sandy's car. The Beals interpreted it as a sign that Sandy was trying to leave the poll yard on the night of her death and wasn't planning to die by suicide.

Speaker 29 But this detail was not even remembered by Detective Shyselski. It didn't register as important because it didn't fit neatly into his theory.

Speaker 34 We each are bringing our own experiences, our own beliefs, our own desires to the table so that when two people with different mindsets are given the same information to look at, by virtue of their different brains, they may interpret those things in very different ways.

Speaker 29 Jeff Kakuka is a professor of psychology at Towson University. He's an expert on how bias can influence decision-making, including in investigations.

Speaker 34 In psychology, when we talk about bias, what we're talking about is kind of like a reflex. It's something that our brains do without us even realizing that we're doing it.

Speaker 34 Once you have a conclusion in mind, you're no longer sort of

Speaker 34 taking in all the information and evaluating it in an objective way. Instead, what tends to happen is people will

Speaker 34 selectively seek out information that fits their existing beliefs.

Speaker 34 And if they encounter any information that goes against their existing beliefs, they'll either ignore it or find a way to somehow minimize its importance so that they can, again, sort of continue preserving that belief that existed in the first place.

Speaker 29 There's an adage that I've thought about a lot while making this podcast. It's called Hanlon's Razor, and it goes like this.

Speaker 29 Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. There's a few different versions of the phrase, and sometimes incompetence is subbed for stupidity.

Speaker 29 This proverb, it's a helpful reminder not to immediately assume the worst intentions in the actions of others.

Speaker 29 That more often than not, people are careless or selfish rather than mean-spirited or evil.

Speaker 29 Of course, malice exists, but if you look for it everywhere, you could risk having a distorted perception of reality.

Speaker 29 Take, for instance, Sandy's original death certificate. issued on February 18th, 1977.

Speaker 29 It was given to Joanne back then and has remained in her possession ever since.

Speaker 29 At the bottom of the page, there's a line where the medical examiner must indicate the manner of death, choosing between natural causes, homicide, suicide, accident, or undetermined.

Speaker 29 You would expect the box for suicide to be checked, but it's not. Instead, there's an X through the box undetermined manner of death.

Speaker 29 It was always an odd inconsistency that bothered the family. And a few years ago, it got even weirder.
Kim requested a new copy of Sandy's death certificate.

Speaker 29 When she received the document, she was startled to find that the box for suicide now had an X2.

Speaker 29 Kim's immediate impression was that the records might have been altered to fit with the police's story. And it's entirely possible.

Speaker 29 that the medical examiner's office colluded with the police to cover up her death.

Speaker 29 But the possibility also exists that it's just a typo, that the medical examiner initially stamped the wrong box and fixed it later.

Speaker 29 Incompetence?

Speaker 29 Or malice?

Speaker 34 That's the thing is these biases are so pervasive that they can affect every aspect of our decision-making without even us realizing that it's happening.

Speaker 34 We have these beliefs and our brain is wired in such a way that leads us to pursue information that agrees with our beliefs rather than pursuing information that might prove us wrong.

Speaker 34 Because who likes to be proven wrong?

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Speaker 29 It's understandable why Kim and the rest of the Beale family was suspicious of Prince George's County Police. Because the investigation into Sandy's death was tainted by a clear conflict of interest.

Speaker 29 Sandy was a police trainee and her car was filled with evidence linking her to local cops.

Speaker 29 And if PG County police officers were willing to cover up their sexual misconduct, what other wrongdoing were they capable of?

Speaker 29 If Shyschelsky could forget the cardboard, what other inconvenient facts might have evaded his memory? Without trust in the police, the Beals were skeptical of everything they were told.

Speaker 29 And this is where I thought I could be of help. I wanted to bring in some unbiased experts to try to recreate what happened that night in the poll yard, inserting some impartiality into Sandy's case.

Speaker 29 That's how I met Paul Uribe, a certified forensic pathologist who has worked for the U.S. Army as well as local and state agencies.

Speaker 29 He told me he's performed over 1,500 autopsies in his career, and hundreds of those have been suicides. I gave him the rundown on Sandy's case.

Speaker 38 The keys in the ignition and the cardboard under the wheels while she's in the mud, that might indicate that Sandy had been trying to leave the location that she was at.

Speaker 38 How do you interpret this kind of information in the context of a suicide?

Speaker 32 I would lump that in with, okay, what's the timeline? What happened in the hours before her death, even going back like 24 hours? Why was she there? Who was she meeting with?

Speaker 32 Who did she have relations with?

Speaker 32 And that would answer the question, why are there cardboard under the tires?

Speaker 29 All these questions he's asking, they're great ones. We don't have answers to them, though, because PG County Police closed the case before establishing these facts.

Speaker 29 That, on its face, isn't necessarily suspect, Paul said.

Speaker 32 Is every death investigated to the absolute extreme of pushing the investigation as far as we can, interviewing absolutely everyone possible, and doing a full court press on every case.

Speaker 32 No, and that's just, that's largely a matter of resources and resource allocation.

Speaker 29 This reminded me of what Detective Shyselski told me about how overworked and understaffed he was back in the 1970s. I mean, they put us like dogs.
They really did.

Speaker 29 Sheshelski told me that his immediate read of the scene was that of a suicide. There was ample evidence of it, he said.
And one of the biggest factors was the gun.

Speaker 32 If it was a homicide, if it was a murder, first off,

Speaker 32 I don't think the killer would have left the gun there, number one.

Speaker 32 Then, when I found out the gun belonged to her father,

Speaker 32 it's not likely that someone would have murdered her. with her father's gun.

Speaker 29 But from the Beals perspective, the gun is the most important piece of evidence that proves Sandy didn't die by suicide.

Speaker 29 The gun isn't abstract to them. It was returned to the family after Sandy's death.
Sandy's brothers have shot it. They know the power it takes, the kickback after you pull the trigger.

Speaker 29 And based on their personal experience, they came to believe she couldn't have shot herself with it. Not that Sandy wouldn't, although they also believe that, but that she couldn't.

Speaker 29 That the physical evidence just didn't line up here's michael and stephen thing about that gun it was a 357

Speaker 39 and it was a long gun long barrel rifle gun and when that damn thing

Speaker 39 when you shot that thing it kicked i mean it had a kick to it so she would have to use two hands in order to shoot it

Speaker 39 And the trigger wasn't a hair trigger either. It had a couple of pounds of pull.

Speaker 39 So

Speaker 39 that's the other thing, you know, that kind of got me about why they said she would shoot herself because if she was able to manage that, that friggin' gun would have shot off, would have taken off right through the side glass window.

Speaker 29 And Kim shared this opinion that it was impossible Sandy shot herself.

Speaker 40 And when I met with the Prince George's County Police, they were so insistent on, you just don't understand. We've seen lots of things like that.

Speaker 40 And I finally just said, if you can prove to me through ballistics and show me the trajectory and all the opportunities that this was suicide, then I'll believe you.

Speaker 40 But not until then, all your evidence completely goes against the evidence that I have. She did not commit suicide.

Speaker 29 Listening to Detective Shyzelski and the Beale family, I was faced with two different interpretations of the same evidence. And so I asked Paul for his opinion.

Speaker 29 And he turned my attention to Sandy's hands.

Speaker 32 When you fire a revolver, especially especially a 357 Magnum, there's a lot of gunpowder that explodes, and a lot of that gunpowder comes out through what's called a cylinder gap.

Speaker 32 So say if you have your hand over that cylinder gap or even adjacent to it when you discharge it, you can get soot on your hand that way.

Speaker 29 Both of Sandy's hands had gunpowder on them, according to the police report.

Speaker 29 Paul said he would interpret this to mean that Sandy was either holding the gun or had her hands very close to it when it was fired.

Speaker 38 So would it be possible to have stood on your hands and not have been the one to pull the trigger if you were in a small enclosed environment?

Speaker 32 It could be, like if you were grabbing for the gun to push it away or something like that. I've done cases where two people are struggling for a gun and

Speaker 32 the gun goes off and it's very difficult to tell who

Speaker 32 you know who pulled the trigger because they both might have had their finger on the trigger or someone had their finger on the trigger and the other person is grabbing their hand to try and either keep them from pulling the trigger, usually to keep them from pulling the trigger.

Speaker 29 Paul pointed out that Sandy was also shot at very close range, which is characteristic of a suicide.

Speaker 32 Now, if it's a contact wound, it's either one of two things. Either the person put the gun to their head and pulled the trigger.

Speaker 32 In this case, put the gun to, she put the gun to her abdomen and pulled the trigger or someone else put the gun to her abdomen and pulled the trigger and then that's where okay we're looking for

Speaker 32 we're looking for other evidence to support that or rule that out

Speaker 32 so i can tell you the range i can tell you the trajectory i can tell you what it injured i can tell you you know i can give you maybe a little estimate of survivability, maybe.

Speaker 32 So I can tell you all of those things, but I can't tell you who shot it.

Speaker 29 I asked him about the lack of fingerprints on the gun. Turns out, Paul didn't find this that unusual.
Firearms are notoriously hard to test for prints.

Speaker 29 One study estimated that fingerprints are recovered from firearms only about 13% of the time. And that's nowadays.

Speaker 32 But because of, say, you know, the texture on the handle or, you know, just a partial print at an odd location of the gun, they might not be able to get it and and i would also have to know okay what is the fingerprinting policies and procedures of the prince george's county police departments circa 1977 and you know did they follow that procedure

Speaker 29 reading the autopsy report sandy's gunshot wound is described in excruciating and impersonal detail quote the wound is slightly ovoid a quarter inch in diameter and is surrounded by an eighth inch rim of abrasion resembling muzzle imprint.

Speaker 29 Powder is noted in the wound margins.

Speaker 29 I asked Paul, based on everything that's in the autopsy and the police report, and taking into consideration the family's significant questions, if it was possible that Sandy shot herself.

Speaker 32 If you put your hand right at the base of your rib cage or base of your sternum, move it over about three inches to

Speaker 32 the bottom of your rib rib margin that's where the entrance was

Speaker 32 now once again if she were to do this herself she could fire the gun essentially holding the handle of the gun with her gun with her

Speaker 32 with her left thumb on the trigger which is sort of like holding it backwards essentially which is consistent with her kind of holding her left hand across her body, so to speak, and then likely firing the gun with her thumb on the trigger.

Speaker 32 That could also explain why they didn't find any fingerprints on the gun as well.

Speaker 29 Paul could see a scenario in which Sandy shot herself and caused the injuries described in her autopsy. What had been unthinkable to the Beals was a real probability to Paul.

Speaker 29 Still, he admitted that the case was unusual.

Speaker 38 How many times in your career, if you remember, have you seen a teenage girl shoot herself?

Speaker 32 Handful. Probably less than five.

Speaker 38 Ever in the abdomen?

Speaker 32 No.

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Speaker 23 Featuring the iconic journalists of Variety and hosted by co-editor-in-chief, Cynthia Littleton.

Speaker 36 But what's happening in America isn't just the cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere.

Speaker 35 I'm Asmak Khalid in Washington, D.C.

Speaker 36 I'm Tristan Redman in London. And this is the global story.

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Speaker 29 The stories Sandy's family tell about her emphasize her sense of humor and her protective instincts. She was quick to speak her mind and stand up for herself.

Speaker 29 Her family knew her to be cheerful, focused, hardworking. She was a well-adjusted kid who they trusted.

Speaker 29 And based on their knowledge of her, as a daughter and a sister and a cousin, they didn't believe Sandy would take her own life. It was incomprehensible to them.
It didn't match the person they knew.

Speaker 29 But during this reporting, I found out a lot of things they didn't know about Sandy. Things that were happening in her life.

Speaker 29 And as painful as it is to contemplate now, there's probably a lot they didn't know about how she was feeling.

Speaker 29 Sandy died surrounded by police paraphernalia. Her dashboard held a shift schedule card, a duty rig, and newspaper clippings about cops.
And she was found in a location where cops like to gather.

Speaker 29 Her family believed that she was protected in the presence of police, but I think it's more likely that all that time she spent hanging out with them was actually an opportunity for abuse.

Speaker 29 From what I've discovered, it seems obvious that at least some police officers took advantage of Sandy, pursuing inappropriate sexual relationships with the teenager.

Speaker 29 And in this climate, Sandy became pregnant and had an abortion, in secret.

Speaker 29 If she was being mistreated by police, then I imagine she would have felt very alone, possibly possibly scared, and she probably didn't know how to make it stop.

Speaker 29 Sandy kept these painful parts of her life hidden. She presented to the outside world as fine.

Speaker 29 And to her family, this was strong evidence that she couldn't have died by suicide because they didn't see it coming.

Speaker 29 Their assumption about suicide was that if Sandy had been considering it, her pain would have been so visible it could not go unnoticed.

Speaker 29 But that's not always the case.

Speaker 31 If you think about human nature, what makes it up? Purpose, meaning, contribution, and connection.

Speaker 29 Thomas Joyner is a researcher at Florida State University. He spends his days researching ways to prevent suicide.

Speaker 31 It's a deep puzzle about human nature, about why this would happen.

Speaker 29 The Beals have not been able to answer this. Why Sandy would have thought that this was the best option for her?

Speaker 29 And this question is the subject of Thomas's research, which explores what's happening in the minds of people who are suicidal.

Speaker 31 If you become that convinced that you're a burden on other people,

Speaker 31 and if you feel like you're

Speaker 31 disconnected and cut off, ostracized, alienated. If you feel those two things deeply, and then also permanently, that they're intractable, that they'll never change.

Speaker 31 That mixture is the danger zone where people might take their lives.

Speaker 29 Of those who find themselves in this dangerous zone, of feeling deeply alienated, a burden to others, and convinced that those feelings will never change, not all attempt suicide.

Speaker 29 The vast majority of people who experience suicidal ideation do not act on it. To put it in perspective, around 46,000 people die from suicide every year in the U.S.

Speaker 29 About a million more attempt it, and many, many more, around 12 million people, seriously think about it.

Speaker 31 Yeah, it's one thing to talk about death in the abstract, but to actually face it in reality,

Speaker 31 totally different matter.

Speaker 31 Not everybody has the requisite fearlessness, pain tolerance, even practical knowledge to have the capacity to even enact suicide, even if they really genuinely desire to do so.

Speaker 29 Did Sandy have those things?

Speaker 29 I know she had access to a gun, her father's, and her brother Michael actually told me that he'd seen Sandy take it on a few occasions. Sandy said she was borrowing the gun for target practice.

Speaker 29 So it follows that Sandy would have known how to use it.

Speaker 31 And suicide as a form of death, of course, is fearsome and scary and daunting. And so to face it fully, to stare it down,

Speaker 31 you need a capacity to do that. Not everybody has it.

Speaker 29 I told Thomas about the Beals' vivid memory of Sandy as a happy, high-functioning teenager.

Speaker 31 Sometimes it does look like that. Suicide does look sudden.
What does that mean? Does it mean it

Speaker 31 was truly impulsive? Or might it mean, for example, that the person was very successful in concealing

Speaker 31 their ongoing misery and planning? And I think it's the latter. I think it's clearly the latter, but there is debate about that.

Speaker 31 And that can hurt to the loved ones. It seems like she would have told us, you know, we're the family, we're the loved ones.
But a way to understand that is that

Speaker 31 she felt maybe that this was a profound burden. that she's carrying,

Speaker 31 that she's a burden to everybody. She felt that maybe on the inside, to share that with others, in her view, might have further burdened them.

Speaker 31 A sudden death in anyone is a tragedy.

Speaker 31 And it doesn't matter what the cause was. That's going to grieve families

Speaker 31 and trouble families for years or even decades.

Speaker 31 And then to add the additional layer of

Speaker 31 it wasn't just an accident or an illness. They took their own lives

Speaker 31 that hurt

Speaker 31 that that really hurts and

Speaker 31 and i don't think it need

Speaker 31 be very different than a car accident or or a heart attack but

Speaker 31 to to get to that place you have to have a a particular understanding of the suicidal mindset that most people most families don't have

Speaker 29 I asked Thomas what to make of the fact that Sandy had plans for the future. She was moving to Maine.
She was actively pursuing a career in law enforcement.

Speaker 29 Even her abortion could be considered a sign that she was thinking ahead, planning for the life she wanted. She was still balancing her checkbook right before she died.

Speaker 31 If you have plans,

Speaker 31 it either means that suicide is not on your mind at all. It can mean that.

Speaker 31 Or if you have plans, it can mean that there's a struggle going on in your mind, an argument, a debate between death and life, an ambivalence that's going back and forth, tilting back and forth.

Speaker 31 And when it tilts toward death, planning for future activities ceases pretty much, and planning for suicide kicks in.

Speaker 31 And then when it tilts back towards the other side of the ambivalence towards life, then you might

Speaker 31 you know, put the suicide planning on the shelf, so to speak, and kick in plans for activities.

Speaker 31 And so

Speaker 31 most go through this ambivalence process, then most or all

Speaker 31 will have plans for tomorrow, plans for next week, just like anyone else will.

Speaker 29 It's a striking concept that someone could be planning their life one minute, then end it the next.

Speaker 29 And it made me think once more about the cardboard under Sandy's tires.

Speaker 29 Could Sandy have been experiencing a struggle in her mind, feeling ambivalence between life and death? Maybe at some point she was planning on leaving the poll yard, until she made a new plan.

Speaker 29 I told all of this to Kim, what I learned from Thomas about suicide, and what I gleaned from Paul, who reviewed Sandy's autopsy with me.

Speaker 29 And she listened, took in all the facts with a gentle smile and a deferential nod. It was something she would need to think about, she told me.

Speaker 29 So we casually said goodbye and I expected to hear from her soon. And I did, because as I've been reporting this story, Kim has relentlessly continued her own parallel investigation.

Speaker 29 Every time I spoke to her, she had her sight set on something new, a new document to obtain or piece of evidence to examine.

Speaker 29 On her list of critical items to track down was Sandy's full medical file, which was held at the medical examiner's office in Maryland. Kim left me this voice memo after her last visit there.

Speaker 41 Okay, it is, I think, the 22nd at 3 o'clock. I just left the medical examiner's office.
And when I got there, it was like, God just opened the doors because...

Speaker 41 The door just opened and she's like, okay, come on in. So I got right up to the fourth floor and this really nice lady named named Linda, and she was just most helpful and

Speaker 41 called the medical records. Medical records were familiar with my name already, which was kind of cool.
You know, and I was showing her, oh, I have the autopsy report. I don't need the autopsy report.

Speaker 41 I need the medical records. I need slides.
I need anything else in there that can help me get this case reopened.

Speaker 29 Although she already had Sandy's autopsy, She knew it was only part of the file on her cousin's death. She wanted to see what else she might be able to discover hidden in the depths of the archives.

Speaker 29 Specifically, she was looking for biological evidence, the sperm that was collected from Sandy's body, to see if it could be tested for DNA.

Speaker 29 And she was looking for photos, which she hoped would offer new insight into Sandy's death.

Speaker 41 And after about a half hour, Mike came out and

Speaker 41 very nice guy. He's retired firefighter, retired vet from Army.
He said for sure for any DNA, I'm going to have to get a subpoena. There's absolutely no way around it.

Speaker 41 He said there's probably going to be pictures in there. So that's where we stand.
He was very helpful. I know he'll help me.
I think I've got their

Speaker 41 curiosity intrigued anyway. So I do feel like they're going to help me.

Speaker 29 Her ultimate goal was to stumble onto something, anything, that might get Sandy's case reopened, forcing Prince George's County to take a deeper look.

Speaker 33 So

Speaker 41 I don't know. If we could just get them to open it, that would be really awesome.
I don't likely see that happening because they're pretty convinced that this is a suicide.

Speaker 29 Reopening the case would mean that it would be considered an active investigation again.

Speaker 29 It would mean that the police might interview Doug or test the sperm. or track down the cops that supervised Sandy in the Explorer program so many years ago.

Speaker 41 Anyway, that's where we stand. It was a good meeting.

Speaker 41 We'll see.

Speaker 29 Kim flew back to Texas with a new agenda of trying to get a subpoena to retrieve and test the DNA in Sandy's file. But before she could follow through, she received an email.

Speaker 29 It was from Bernie Nelson. a cold case detective from Prince George's County.
He wanted to meet Kim in person to talk.

Speaker 29 I asked if I could tape the conversation and PG County said no. But Kim met with him and that meeting changed everything.

Speaker 33 So this is 11 o'clock on Monday morning, he asks.

Speaker 33 So how did all this podcast stuff happen?

Speaker 29 We've talked a lot about suicide this episode.

Speaker 29 If you or someone you know is considering self-harm, please contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or text Strength to Crisis Text Line at 741-741.

Speaker 29 What Happened to Sandy Beale is hosted by me, Melissa Jeltson. It's written and produced by me and Katrina Norvell.
The podcast is edited by Abu Safar. Sound design by Aaron Kaufman.

Speaker 29 Jason English is our executive producer. Research and production assistants by Marissa Brown.
To find out more about my investigation, follow me on Twitter at Quasimato. That's Q-U-A-S-I-M-A-D-O.

Speaker 29 Thanks so much for listening.

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Speaker 36 But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval, it's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere.

Speaker 35 I'm Asmakhaled in Washington, D.C.

Speaker 36 I'm Tristan Redman in London, and this is the Global Story.

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