On the very first episode of The Knife: Off Record, hosts Hannah Smith and Patia Eaton bring you a behind-the-scenes conversation about making a true crime podcast. Plus, Patia tells Hannah about a missing persons case in Tennessee. Show Notes: SOLVED 21 Year Old Missing Persons Case (Erin Foster & Jeremy Bechtel) See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What is the concept behind 'The Knife: Off Record' podcast?
It's all here for you to hear. Keep a record of. Yeah.
We're calling this episode format of our show Off Record because we have our interview episodes where we speak with people who have lived through a crime. And many, many times we come across stories where something really interesting has happened, something we want to explore further, but nobody wants to talk with us about it. And we still want to talk about it.
So we find out everything we can, and we're here to bring you those stories.
Chapter 2: How do podcast hosts handle off-the-record stories?
Yeah, I actually just talked to someone yesterday and I found the timing appropriate since I knew we were coming in to record today. I was like, yes, I got a hold of him. I've been trying to call him. We got to talk to this guy. He is intimately connected to the story that we're researching.
And this type of thing happens to us all the time where you get a hold of someone, they start talking to you and you're just like, oh, yes, like everything you're saying is gold. I'm so thrilled that you're talking to me. And then they get to the end and they're like, but I don't want to do an interview. And also don't use my name. This is off the record.
This is off the record. And you're like, okay, how am I going to tell this story and also keep this person's trust? So that's something we're always looking to do. Recently, I called someone about a story, and it was a situation where the same thing. She answered my call. She was excited to hear from me, excited to tell me about what she had been through.
I asked her if she would schedule a recorded interview. She agreed. And just before the call ended, she said, you know, actually, I had a question. And I said, what is it? And she said, what is a podcast? What a great question. A great question. It did stump me for a moment.
So at that point, I have to take a step back and say, OK, this person may not totally understand what they're signing up for. And I need to make sure that they know that before they do the interview.
Yeah, sometimes those conversations end up turning into an interview. Sometimes they don't. They just end up as being informative background conversations for a story we are researching. And then sometimes it means we can't turn the story into an interview episode. And that's okay, too.
But you and I have been, and we'll get into our intros here in a second for people who don't know us, but we've been producing podcasts for a while together now. And one of the things that we've learned is that there are stories that you and I feel like
passionate about, we fall in love with, we think are important stories to tell that we, for a variety of reasons, have not been able to tell on a podcast. So we are going to bring you listeners those stories as well on the Knife Off-Record episodes. And we're excited to be able to, you know, tell you some stories that we find interesting and important.
Right, and really put you guys in the room with us during conversations we're having about these stories anyway. I mean, when we can't find the right person to interview for whatever reason about a story, it usually doesn't stop us from sitting on Zoom for an extra half hour being like, but guess what I learned? And that is why I'm so excited to be doing these episodes. Me too.
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Chapter 3: What are the hosts' backgrounds in podcasting?
Yeah, and that missing persons case and the research I did on that actually helped me get a job working with you, Hannah. So why don't you tell people a little bit about yourself?
So I'm Hannah Smith, and I've been working in podcasting since 2017. Like many, many people, listened to the first season of Serial when it came out and really was just blown away. I have always liked writing and storytelling, and I remember just feeling so amazed that you could tell stories a story, a true story, a crime story in this format, in this way.
And I just felt like I want to try to tell stories like that. I want to do something like that. So I started working in podcasting. I worked on a bunch of different shows in different genres, editing, producing, writing. And then in 2020, I got a job lead producing, hosting, and writing a true crime podcast called The Opportunist.
We covered crimes of opportunity, mostly fraud, as well as some cults. And even though I was a true crime fan before that, it was my first time working on a true crime podcast. And I fell in love with true crime all over again from this different perspective of what it's like to be on the other side of it, to make a podcast like this. I found out that I love making this type of podcast.
I love researching stories. I love speaking and interviewing people who were there, who lived it. I knew that this is what I wanted to do. So I kept doing it. I did it for three years and was thrilled to do it. And if you've never heard of the show, no worries. You're here now, and I'm so glad that you're here with us.
If you did hear the show and were a fan, then I have to tell you that I was by no means the only person that made that show. There were a lot of great people that made that happen. And one of those great people is sitting here with me today.
pasha eaton so if you were a fan of the show you should know her as well because pasha came and worked on the show from season two on and we just immediately became friends and found out that we have a lot in common as far as the stories that we are interested in and the way that we want to tell them long ago we dreamed about doing a new show a different show together so i'll throw it over to you now pasha tell us a
So when I moved to Los Angeles, I wanted to work in scripted television and I pursued that for a really long time. And I ended up working at a production company, loved the people I worked with and the shows I was working on. But a lot of stars have to align for a TV show to get made. And I was becoming sort of disenchanted by that.
And the pandemic came along and I was one day away from flying to North Carolina for a pilot shoot. Everything got shut down. And I was just so disappointed. I was out on my deck listening to a podcast. And I'm like, you know, I wonder if I could do this. But I don't have any podcasting experience. I don't have any nonfiction storytelling experience. I've only ever worked in scripted.
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Chapter 4: What types of true crime stories do the hosts prefer?
I really love interviewing people who have been a part of a cult and left a cult. I just think that those stories are so complicated and there are so many layers. There's so much psychology involved as well. You know, I find myself drawn to like really complex, difficult to understand crimes, really. Like, why did someone do it?
If the answer is not clear, then I'm like, okay, let's dig in and try to figure out why. Oftentimes, there's not like an easy answer, right? But I remember when we were on The Opportunist, we would try to find cases where the motivation was not always money. And it was so hard.
When you're just researching stories all the time and having to tell stories all the time, you start to see all these patterns. And it was also because we were making stories that were within a lens, right? They had to be crimes of opportunity. There was a lot of fraud that we covered. and cults and scams. And a lot of times people are motivated by money.
So we were always like looking for stories where the motivation was not money and was different or more unclear. And I think that with cult stories, money is oftentimes very much a factor, but there's also this factor of just like psychological control that sometimes people want to wield over other people. So that's a long answer, but I am really interested in scams and cults particularly.
What about you?
Yeah, I think in researching, investigating the cults we looked into on Opportunist were fascinating. I think the pattern in cults that intrigues me is this idea that you become someone you don't know. It's this like... When someone commits a crime and you know that person, maybe now they're a stranger to you.
But when you become the stranger to yourself, it's like, well, can I even trust my own brain? Yes. And that is a really wild thing for people to sort of unpack and pull themselves out of. And it's also this slow burn kind of story where, you know, it doesn't start with like, hey, come join my cult. Yeah. It never starts like that. Never. That would not be good for that cult.
And so that is, I think, something that really resonates with me is you never think it's going to be you. And then it is. And you don't even know it for a long time. I'm also really interested in missing persons cases. I think what draws me into those is maybe a sense of possibility, but also like a hope that... Always you hope for the best, I think, in any case like that.
But this sort of how can we come together to maybe bring some answers or clarity here? I think whenever we can do good, we want to do that. And so those cases I do find really end up intriguing me. I think that when you work in true crime, you know, you find yourself reading all of these really heavy headlines and it doesn't always make sense to tell a crime story.
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Chapter 5: How do the hosts approach interviewing and gaining trust?
Genetic genealogy. I mean, I guess from the standpoint of a producer, the unsolved, unresolved cases are... You know, I think everyone wants to play a part in helping solve something. But ultimately, those stories can be harder to tell because how do you end a story that doesn't have resolution? Yeah, but we can go back to Serial season one. Yeah.
Everyone discovered the difficulty of listening.
Oh, wow.
There's no easy way to wrap up this true story of someone in prison. Yeah.
Yeah. OK, so last listener question for today is actually one I love talking about, which is how do you get people to agree to speak with you?
Yeah, this is a huge part of the job. How do you get someone to agree to speak with you? I think it's really tricky. We do a lot of cold calling. You know, there's so many times where I will call someone on the phone who I don't know, who I've never spoken with before.
and talk with them about the project that I'm doing and what my approach is and try to build that trust with them so that they will feel comfortable enough to give me their time and energy and talk to me about an experience they had that was probably a really bad experience. So even them revisiting that and telling me that takes a lot of trust.
So I think ultimately it's building trust and being authentic
It does. And a lot of times when you first call someone, their question is, how did you get this number? Totally. And then you have to tell them, well, I was just, you know, lurking around the internet and I actually found a bunch of stuff in addition to that. But yeah, I did just call your cell phone and I try to sometimes send a text like, hey, this is who I am. I'm going to give you a call.
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Chapter 6: What challenges do the hosts face in storytelling?
My job was not taking up very much of it. And I started looking into a missing persons case in Sparta, Tennessee. And I started doing that in August of 2020. So I didn't exactly know where to start. I thought maybe I would look on Reddit and see if there was anything locals were saying about the case.
And I really didn't find anything except for one person on the Sparta, Tennessee Reddit had maybe commented on a true crime Reddit post about it saying, yeah, I'm from there. This happened. We don't know where they are. It wasn't like They didn't have any sort of like explosive information. But I reached out to that person and he didn't want me to use his name. So I'm not going to use it now.
But he grew up in that town and was the same age as the kids who went missing. And those kids who went missing were Aaron Foster, female age 18, and Jeremy Bechtel, male age 17. And they went missing on April 3rd of 2000.
Tell us a little bit about the case, what you knew at that time, I guess. Was that basically all that you knew?
Yeah. So all that had been written about the case at that point was that Aaron Foster and Jeremy Bechtel had gone missing. And what was generally known about the case was that they had been last seen at a party and they had left that party in Aaron's car together. And that would be around 10 p.m. that night. So initially, this is all I knew about the case.
And the party had taken place at a person named Bubba Cole's house. Bubba's actual name is Brian Cole. He's actually since passed away, passed away in 2014. So I was never able to speak with Bubba. But Bubba's house was a location that was known to local law enforcement as a place where people, you know, there was partying, there was alcohol and some drug use.
And that's pretty much what was out there is that they had left this party and never been seen again. And so the speculation in the beginning was really at this party. Well, what happened at the party? That's kind of where I started. I tried to figure out who was there. And I started actually by calling Jeremy's parents.
Now, I learned that over the course of looking for his parents, his mother, Rhonda, had passed away. She passed away from a battle with cancer in 2018. So I reached out to Jeremy's father, Ronnie Bechdel. And Ronnie took my call and I just said, hey, you know, this is my name and I'm working on a story about this. Sometimes I didn't even say podcast.
I would say like, I'm not sure what I want this to be. I think I want it to be a podcast, but I'm just interested in learning more about this case and seeing if there's anything we can find out. It's been a lot of years at this point. They had been missing 20 years. So, Ronnie, you know, he's the nicest person and he was like, yeah, what do you want to know?
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