← Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings and Mysteries
Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings and Mysteries
115. Deathbed Confessions: Small Town Murder // I Am DB Cooper
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Kayla Moore
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Imagine you're sitting at your mother's side as she drifts in and out of sleep. You've been there for hours at this point, and days before that. You could almost fall asleep yourself if it weren't for the beeps coming from the machines keeping you awake. Being a caretaker is running you ragged, but you would do anything for your mother. She raised you. She kept you safe. But she's also about to tell you something that will change your entire world and the way you see her. Forever. This is the situation Janet Tessier found herself in as her mother, Eileen Tessier, lay on her Deathbed back in 1993. Janet didn't know it, but she had held onto a secret for decades, one that she thought she'd take to the grave. But now she was having second thoughts. Eileen gathered enough strength to call her daughter Janet over to her bed. She rushed to her mother's side, hearing the urgency in her dying mother's voice. Mom I'm right here. What's the matter? Eileen grabbed her daughter's arm with whatever strength she had left. She took a stilted breath. Those two little girls, the one who disappeared. Her daughter's eyes went wide. She knew exactly who her mother was referring to. A case that shook their community and the Nation back in 1957. A case so high profile that both President Eisenhower and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover were given daily updates. Eileen inhaled, ready to continue her confession, and Janet waited with bated breath. What did her mother know about the disappearance from 40 years ago? Welcome back to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings and mysteries. As always, I'm your host, Kayla Moore. Today I want to tell you about some deathbed confessions that changed the course of history. We did a deathbed confessions episode back in 2023. It's episode 11, so really early on in the history of the show, and a lot of you really loved it. So I wanted to do another installment. And maybe it resonated with you because you too are holding onto a secret that you swore you would take to the grave. It could be as innocuous as who your friend has a crush on, or as serious as the identity of a murderer. But many of us do hold secrets, whether our own or a loved one's. George Orwell once wrote, if you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself, because all secrets, even when they're our own, want to be revealed. And before we jump back in, I did want to shout out a listener today, Alexis, who is Serbian and practices the old tradition of reading coffee cups, which is like reading tea leaves. That does feel like a good way to figure out if someone is holding onto a secret. This type of divination is known as tasiography, or tasiomancy. If I'm ever in Serbia, I'm definitely going to hit you up to read my coffee cup. All right, I want to get back into the story. And as always, listener discretion is advised. 1957 In Sycamore, Illinois, a quiet, idyllic suburb. The kind of place where everyone knows each other. The kind of place where no one locks their doors because nothing bad ever happens. But all of that was about to change. On the cold, Snowy evening of December 3rd, seven year old Maria Rudolph was playing in the street with her best friend, 8 year old Kathy Sigman, when a man walked up to them. He seemed young. He had blonde hair swept back into a ducktail, a popular style at the time. The two girls stopped playing, wondering why an adult man they didn't recognize had approached them. He introduced himself as Johnny. He said he was 24 and unmarried. Do either of you want a piggyback ride? He asked. Kathy was wary of him. There was something about this guy that gave her a bad feeling. But Maria was younger, and she seemed to not have the same reservations. She excitedly told him that, yes, she wanted a piggyback ride. He gave her a ride. But he said that he would only give her another one if she brought him one of her dollies from inside. So she ran to go grab one, leaving Kathy alone with the stranger. Johnny asked Kathy again if she would like a ride. Again, she told him no. Well, then, do you want to take a walk with me around the block? He asked. Still, the answer was no. Okay, well, what about a trip in a truck or a bus? What was this guy's deal? No, thank you, said Kathy. When Maria came back, Kathy ran to go grab some mittens and told her friend to come with her. But Maria was eager for her next piggyback ride. It was cold, though, and Kathy's hands were freezing. So she ran off, promising to be right back. But by the time she returned, Maria and the man were nowhere to be found. The entire town helped search for Maria, but there were no trace of her or the man. The people of the town did learn something disturbing, though. Apparently, a few blocks away on the day Maria disappeared, a man in an overcoat noticed two girls walking along State street near the public library and attempted to strike up a conversation with them around 4:15pm the girls, feeling uncomfortable, quickly entered a nearby restaurant. When they returned outside, the man was gone. But he had left something unsettling behind. Several photographs of nude women scattered across the ground. This wasn't the only sign of something dark in Sycamore. Since Halloween, someone had been writing vulgar messages in chalk on a tree and stop sign at the intersection of Center Cross street and Archie Place, the spot where Maria disappeared from. Were all of these related? Eventually, the FBI was brought in to look at the case, and they had no luck finding any clues about Maria's whereabouts either. Kathy was shown a binder full of ex cons and known perverts, but she couldn't identify any of them as Johnny. It wasn't until April, five months after she disappeared, that the worst case scenario came true. Maria's body was found 120 miles away in another county by a mushroom forager. A forensic pathologist ruled that she had been stabbed. The case was then upgraded from a missing persons case to a murder investigation. No one wanted to believe that a child was killed by someone in their small community, but they all had to reckon with the fact that one of them might be the threat. Soon enough, though, they had gone through their entire suspect list and had come up empty. They felt like it could be someone in the Sycamore community, but who? The father of two from down the road? The mailman? The high school science teacher? None of them seemed more or less likely than anyone else. Eventually, the case went cold, and Maria's family lost hope that her killer would ever be brought to justice. It wouldn't be until over 50 years later that a man was arrested, tried and convicted for the murder of Maria Rodolphe. The beginning of the road to that conviction takes us back to Eileen Tessier confessing to her daughter while on her deathbed.
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Those two little girls and the one who disappeared, Eileen started, barely able to breathe. She took another sharp inhale. John did it. John did it. Wait what Janet thought there John, like her brother John? Was her mother really saying what she thought she was saying? That her son was responsible for the little girl's disappearance. You have to tell someone. You have to do something. She was nearly hysterical at this point. She had kept this to herself for so many years. Janet actually worried that getting this worked up would push her ailing mother over the edge. But Eileen had to keep going. She told Janet that the night Maria went missing, the cops stopped by their residence. Janet actually remembered them coming by that night. Eileen explained that back in 1957, they asked about 18 year old John, Eileen's son and Janet's half brother. Where was he? Between 5:45 and 7:00pm that night, Eileen could tell that the cops were suspicious of her son. And so she lied. She told them that John had been home with her and her husband. According to Eileen, the cops jotted this down and then went on their way. But the truth was, Eileen didn't know where her son was at the time. And he had a history of behavior that led her to believe he was the one who took Maria. John Tessier was always seen as a bit of an outsider. He was different from other people in Sycamore. Growing up, John earned the nickname Commando because he would walk around town and camouflage carrying a wooden sword. He'd gotten expelled from his high school after he pushed a female teacher and called her a horrible name. As he got older, he was known around town as being a creep, especially towards young girls. Immediately after Maria went missing, the local police received calls to their tip line to check John out. Were John's parents shocked to see red and blue flashing lights shine through their windows? When she opened the door to the police, did Eileen already have a suspicion as to why they were there? She knew a girl had gone missing, but could John have had something to do with it? Eileen wasn't sure. But she still made the choice to protect her son no matter what. It wasn't the first time she had done it, and she couldn't be sure it would be the last. All she knew at that moment was that she needed to give her son an alibi for the last several hours. So when John told the officers that he had been home the entire night, Eileen and her husband corroborated his story. If John was home at the time, they believed Maria was taken, at least according to himself and his parents. Then it couldn't have been him who took her. Right after the FBI took over the case, John came up again as a suspect and was brought in for questioning. When he was asked to give an alibi, his story changed. He told the FBI that he was actually in Rockford, Illinois on December 3, 1957. And his story went like this. On the morning of December 3rd, John was in Chicago to go to the US Air Force recruitment center where he failed a physical. After leaving the recruitment office, he spent the rest of the day wandering around Chicago. John said that at 5:15pm he got on a 90 minute train from Chicago to Rockford, which was 40 minutes away from Sycamore. And he said that at around 7pm he placed a call home for his stepfather to come pick him up. Law enforcement was able to confirm that John was at the recruitment office in Chicago that morning. And yes, he did fail the physical. They confirmed that he made a 7pm phone call to his home because an operator made a note that someone named John Tessier placed that call. And they confirmed that after he made that call, he went to another recruitment office in Rockford where he asked about getting a doctor's note so that he could pass the physical. One of the recruiters mentioned he felt John was nervously twitching and he actually wondered if he was on drugs. But what law enforcement couldn't corroborate was where John was after he left the recruitment office in Chicago and before he made a phone call at 7pm and this was where his alibi got sticky. Because some reports of Maria's disappearance were place it as early as 5.50pm Could John have snatched Maria and then had enough time to make it to Rockford to make the phone call that would then become his alibi. But that would have required him to have a car and he said that he had taken the train all day. The FBI still had him take a polygraph test in which he did confess to sexually abusing a young girl in the past, but otherwise he passed it and he was then taken off the suspect list. Later on in life, John would go on to become a police officer. One who was eventually charged with the statutory rape of a 15 year old runaway that he was looking after. His ex wife accused him of being inappropriate with her young daughter and she claimed that she found a picture of John's naked daughter in his belongings. Once, as Janet sat in her mother's hospital room hearing this deathbed confession, all of this information came flooding back to her. She remembered the time she got into an argument with John and he pulled out a gun and told her he would kill her and dump her where no one would ever find her. She thought back to how her sisters had told her he abused them as well. It was a family secret that slowly ate at the siblings. So Janet made the brave decision to tell someone her mother's secret. Her mother passed away a few months after the confession. But it would take years for Janet to find someone who would listen to her. She called the local police, who told her to call the FBI. But when she did that, they just redirected her back to the local police. It was a never ending loop of people who just didn't seem interested in this information. And then on September 11, 2008, Janet reached out to an Illinois State Police tip line. She had already decided that this was going to be her last attempt. Her final plea was this. I've given information to the person responsible for the cold case in Sycamore. I've done this a few times. Nothing is ever done. This is the last time I mention this to anyone. I'm not going to keep doing this over and over. It's exhausting. And it dredges up painful, horrible memories. She then hung up the phone, thinking that her pleas would go unanswered forever. She had tried, and the system had failed her. But then her phone rang. She got a call back from a state police commander, Tony Rapax. He told her he was going to put, quote, his bulldogs on the case, Larry Cott and Brian Hanley. They believed Janet's story and they started looking into the decades old cold case. And immediately they were able to poke holes in John's story. They saw that his alibi just didn't hold. Hanley learned through new interviews with John's childhood friends that he had told them he would pick them up on the night Maria went missing, but that he had never shown up and his friends never knew where he was. More and more people also started coming forward. A woman named Pamela Long, who was a child at the same time as Maria, said that a few years prior to Maria's disappearance, she too had been offered a piggyback ride from a strange man who matched the description of Johnny. Except he didn't introduce himself as Johnny to her. He introduced himself as Commando John Tessier's childhood nickname. And then a bombshell piece of evidence came through. This one from an ex girlfriend of John's. She called the police and told them that she had a photo of John from June 1957, and it should look pretty similar to how he looked at the time of Maria's disappearance. Maybe it would be helpful in the investigation. So she mailed it to the investigators. When the photo arrived, officers were shocked to see that it was signed love, Johnny. Whoa. This was definitely going into evidence. So Hanley popped it out of the frame, and as he did A yellow piece of paper fluttered out from behind the photo. It was a train ticket. A one way ticket from Rockford to Chicago, dated December 3, 1957. The day Maria disappeared. And not only that, but it wasn't punched. That meant that John never took the train that day. He was seen in Chicago though, Which means he must have gotten there another way. Maybe he had used his own car. That would have allowed him to travel to and from Sycamore, Rockford and Chicago that day. That also meant that the 7pm call to his stepfather was potentially not about getting a ride home like he had claimed. Was it about something else? And also, the operator confirmed that a call came in at 7pm from a man saying he was named John Tessier. But it was John who said the call took place in Rockford, 40 minutes away from Sycamore. But it was a collect call that could have been taken from anywhere, including Sycamore. He could have abducted Maria and then called his father from the outskirts of town. And now that it seemed like he wasn't confined to taking the train that day, that he had use of his own car, his alibi had completely fallen apart. In 2011, John Tessier, who was then going by another name, was arrested. By that time he was 73 years old, living in Seattle with his fourth wife and was a retired police officer. His arrest in 2011 was followed by a seven hour interrogation on September 10, 2012. The following year, Tessier stood trial for Maria's murder. A judge would decide the verdict as Tessier waived his right to a jury trial. After only 25 minutes of deliberation, the judge had reached his verdict. Guilty. John was sentenced to life in prison, but continued to maintain his innocence. It seemed like the case was finally closed. Like the living members of Maria's family could get some long awaited closure and John's affected sisters could start their own paths towards healing. But all of that changed in 2016 when a judge vacated his sentence and John Tessier was released. The charges against him were dismissed. And then in 2017, even with all of the evidence stacked against him, Judge William Brady declared John Tessier innocent in the murder of Maria Rudolph. Which is different than not guilty by the way. Innocent. The judge ruled that the 7pm phone call to his father was enough of an alibi. Today, John Tessier is a free man, innocent of the murder of Maria Rodolphe. And there have been debates over his mother's deathbed confession. Was she really saying that John was responsible for Maria's death? Could she have possibly meant something else was she so out of it because of the morphine? We may never know. But what does get me about this case is, even as a man who was declared innocent by a judge, what kind of life have you lived where those closest to you believe you could have been responsible for the murder of a child? That, to me at least, speaks volumes.
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Price estimates and read reviews all on the app Download Today In 2014, Walter Rucka gave his friend Carl Lauren a call. The two old friends had reconnected a few years ago after being on the same skydiving team in the 1960s and 70s, and they often had long phone calls. The men would tell each other everything about their lives, old war stories, fond memories, and their deepest and darkest secrets. But on this particular call, Walter was dying. He didn't know how many more of these calls he was going to get with his friend. You remember what I told you years ago? Walter asked Carl. Who did remember? Well, once I go, I want you to tell the world. That was the last time the two friends ever spoke. Walter died not long afterwards. Carl thought back to the big secret Walter had told him. It was the day before Thanksgiving in 2008, a specific but important date. 37 years prior to that phone call, the infamous D.B. cooper committed the only unsolved plane hijacking in US history. It was on this day that Walter had made his huge confession to that he was, in fact, DB Cooperation, the man who made off with $200,000 cash and disappeared into the sky back in 1971. November 24, 1971, a man whose name on his Boarding pass reads, Dan Cooper boards Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 with service from Portland to Seattle. He's described as being in his mid-40s with brown eyes, black hair and an olive complexion. He was estimated to be about 6 foot 1 and weighed somewhere around 170 or 175 pounds. Not necessarily a man that would stand out in a crowd. Later, his description and police sketch would be called a Rorschach test of sorts. It wasn't difficult to superimpose his face onto a variety of faces. This would cause problems for investigators. The flight Dan Cooper, or DB Cooper, as he would come to be known boarded should have been a quick 30 minute trip if everything went as usual. Portland to Seattle. But Cooper has very specific plans for these next 30 minutes. Once the plane's in the air, Cooper hands a flight attendant a note written in the most casual way, as if he were just passing a friend a note in class. The message reads, miss, I have a bomb here and would like you to sit by me before going to sit down next to the man. The flight attendant drops the the note at the feet of her co worker, Tina Mucklow. Tina's only 22 years old. She's new on the job, barely an adult herself. But now her life and the lives of all the passengers and the rest of her crew are in her hands. Could one wrong move kill them all? There's nowhere to run. There's nothing she can do. So Tina gets on the intercom that connects the cabin to the cockpit and tells the pilot, we're being hijacked. This is not a joke. But Cooper doesn't seem to be worried. He opens his briefcase for the flight attendant and she sees two rows of four red cylinders which she assumes is dynamite. He has the flight attendant bring a second note up to the cockpit and it lays out his demands. He wants $200,000 all in twenty dollar bills. That's around $1.5 million in today's cash and four parachutes. And if they don't give him what he wants, he'll blow up the entire plane. Capiche? The shocked flight attendant asks if he's really doing this. Cooper responds that he is, but he can't believe it himself. The pilot confirms that his demands would be met upon landing and the crew just needs to keep themselves together and keep everyone safe until then. And what if this clearly insane man changes his mind and detonates the bomb before they even reach the ground? Well, they're just going to have to take that risk. Flight attendant Tina Mucklow becomes the point of contact between Cooper and the rest of the crew. He tells her how the bomb works, how it'll kill them all if he detonates it, and she says a little prayer. On the outside, though, she's keeping pretty calm. And she thinks that keeps Cooper calm as well, though it's hard to tell who is calming who. Air Traffic Control has the plane fly in a holding pattern over the Puget Sound while they get everything in order. Tina realizes it's only because they want to make sure that the plane is over a body of water and not buildings or people, in case the bomb goes off. Things are not looking good. Tina watches as the plane starts descending, the passengers blissfully unaware that they all could just poof. They think that they're arriving at their destination, but when they get on the tarmac, none of them are allowed off. Tina exits the plane to get the money and the parachutes from a co worker of hers, one who was like a father to her. He asks her if she's okay. She wipes away her tears and tells him she's fine. And somehow she gets herself to walk back onto the plane. What else was she going to do? If she tried to run, the whole plane could blow up and it would all be her fault. When she gets back on, she's hit with this overwhelming sense of courage and she asks the hijacker to let the passengers off. He thinks about it for a moment. He has what he needs, so he lets everyone deplane without incident. But Tina and the pilots had to stay. He needs them. He demands that the plane fly to Mexico City. But first they need to stop in Reno, Nevada and refuel. He directs them to fly below 10,000ft with the wing flaps at 15 degrees, which would keep the aircraft's speed below 200 knots. Huh. It sounds like he knows his way around an aircraft. Is there a chance he's a pilot himself? Tina wonders this, but she doesn't have time to assess him any further. The next thing she knows, he's asking her how to deploy the plane's stairs in the air before telling her to go and stay in the cockpit for the rest of the flight. The plane eventually lands in Reno and Tina and the pilots exit the cockpit. The hijacker was nowhere to be seen. He must have jumped out of the plane somewhere between Seattle and Reno. All that was left of him was a black clip on necktie left in his seat. But the mystery wouldn't end there. His body was never found. So did that mean he somehow survived the fall. And if he did somehow manage to make it to the ground alive, where was he now? The mystery of D.B. cooper's identity has been international news for decades now. But when Karl Lauren heard his friend Walter confess, there was not a doubt in his mind that Walter was Cooper. But let's take a look at the facts. This is what Lauren claims Reca said that convinced him. After surviving the jump and parachute drop, Recca walked 2 1/2 miles to Tianaway Junction Cafe in Cle Elum, Washington. His leg was injured, but he was still able to make the trek. Then he called his friend Jeff to come pick him up. And later Jeff did confirm that he did pick up a soaking wet, freezing Rekka that night from the restaurant. Rekka's coworker also corroborated that he came into work the day after the hijacking with an injured leg. Lauren also provided some additional context about his friend in the 2018 documentary DB the Real Story that he had made. During his military career, Rekka served as a paratrooper who then became a covert intelligence operator for multiple government agencies. So not only would he have already survived a jump from a plane using a parachute, but he would know his way around a plane. And clearly so did DB Cooper because of the very technical and specific instructions he gave the pilots. On top of that, he had also previously robbed a Big Boy restaurant. Sure, it wasn't quite the same thing as a hijacking, but if anyone was going to hijack and then jump out of a plane via parachute, Reka could be the man to pull it off. Carl Lauren also said that he wasn't the only person Reka confessed to. Reka's niece, Lisa Storie, also says that he told her he was D.B. cooper. In the documentary, Lauren plays snippets from their recorded phone conversations. Reka walks him through exactly how that day went down. And if you watched the documentary, you might start to feel like Carl Lauren convinced that Reka does fit the profile of DB Cooper. But if you listen to Reka's words closely, you'll maybe start to hear some testimony that doesn't really line up with what we know about the case. Rekka says that he didn't really plan out the day very well. He didn't exactly know what he was going to do, and he wasn't familiar with the type of plane he was on. A Boeing 727, 100. He says that it was actually the flight attendant, Tina, that suggested he jump out from the stairs of the plane. However, we know from Tina, that D.B. cooper knew exactly what he wanted to do that day, down to exiting through the stairs. Actually, none of Reka's story on what happened that day was corroborated by the accounts of those who were on the plane for the hijacking. Reca also doesn't really match the FBI's composite sketch of what Cooper looks like. The sketch shows him with a slim lower face, a slender nose, a slightly receding hairline. Rekka has kind of a broader nose, and even in his middle age, he maintained a full head of thick hair. And then there's Karl Lauren's lack of physical evidence. According to him and an expert whose last name is Koenigse. The evidence brought forward helps prove that Rekka was actually DB Cooper, but they never really divulge what the evidence consisted of. Okay, but what about Rekka being at Klee Ellum the day of the hijacking and people confirming that they saw him? Well, there's not really any way to verify that this actually happened on the day that Cooper hijacked the plane. Rekka could have been there at any time. So for many people, this deathbed confession just never seemed convincing enough. And many people bring up the fact that Walter Reca wasn't even the only person who confessed to being DB Cooper at the end of their life. Another man on his deathbed also confessed to his wife that he was the one who hijacked that plane. A man named Duane Weber. Apparently, on this man's deathbed, he said that he was Dan Cooper, which was the name that appeared on D.B. cooper's plane ticket, not D.B. it was 1995, and Dwayne was dying of kidney disease, and he said he just needed to get this off of his chest. Photos of Dwayne from the time do show a man who looks much more like the FBI composite drawing than Walter Reca. He also had a knee injury that he told his wife was from jumping out of a plane. And Duane's wife also said that one time he took her on a sentimental hike along the Columbia river near Seattle, a spot where, just months after their walk, wads of cash confirmed to be from DB Cooper were found. An 8 year old boy was walking that part of the river when he found about $5,800 in $20 bills arranged just how it was given to DB Cooperation, which raised the question for many, was that spot sentimental to Duane because it was where he landed? Lastly, and this is a point that I see brought up by a lot of people who believe Dwayne truly could be D.B. cooper. But Duane tossed and turned from a nightmare one night, and his wife said that he was talking in his sleep about jumping out of a plane, leaving his fingerprints on the stairs. It doesn't sound that important. Maybe until you realize that DB Cooper was actually meticulous about not leaving his fingerprints on the plane that day. There weren't even fingerprints found on the cigarette butts that he left behind. Was Duane having flashbacks at night because he was paranoid that he left behind a fingerprint by the plane's stairs that would give him away? However, eventually, Dwayne was ruled out because his DNA wasn't a match with the traces that were found on the black clip on necktie left behind by Cooper. So a DNA profile wasn't made on DB Cooper until 2007, and that was made from what was found on his tie. However, it's important to know that not every investigator is convinced that the DNA on the tie is actually the hijacker's. After all, he was meticulous about his fingerprints. Would he have been careful to not leave any clues behind that could identify him? There are other more compelling suspects in the D.B. cooper case. And civilian sleuths are still trying to find answers long after the case has been declared officially cold. But it just brings me to my final question. What would compel two men to declare that they were the infamous hijacker upon their death if they weren't actually him? Was it fear that they would never be remembered for anything else? So in a last minute panic, they came up with a bombshell confession? Or was it really that they had a secret they needed to get off their chest? I've spoken to hospice workers on this show, doctors, nurses, and others who have been around people at the end of their lives. And they have told me all sorts of reasons that people reveal secrets. For some, they're really out of it by the end. A mix of drugs, dementia, other cognitive issues. Sometimes they can't differentiate between what's real and what's not, and all sorts of confessions start coming out. But for others, the secrets they keep become way too much to bear. They assumed their truths were like candles they could keep in the back of their minds, dimming over the years until they were just extinguished. When in reality, they became like forest fires, growing and growing until they were all consuming. And in a moment of panic, they needed to release their secrets before the fire swallowed them whole. But what do you think? Is it better for the truth to come out? Or should some secrets stay with us to the grave? Let me know in the comments, wherever you're listening. I am very curious to hear what you all think. And you can meet me here next week with another big secret that didn't come out until someone's death. We're going to be looking into why so many children went missing in a small community in Tennessee in the 40s. And this one is an iceberg, you guys, and it goes way deeper than you could ever imagine. So you'll definitely want to join me for it. But until next time, what is it that you're hiding? Heart Starts Pounding is written and produced by me, Kayla Moore. Heartstarts Pounding is also produced by Matt Brown. Additional research and writing by Megan Gilbert Sound design and mix by Peachtree Sound. Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson Jernigan, the team at WME and Ben Jaffe have a heart pounding story or a case request? Check out heartsartspounding.com.