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Transcript
Wondery Host (0:00)
Wondery subscribers can listen to Something Was Wrong early and ad free right now. Join Wondery in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Have you ever woken up with a funky symptom like a swollen itchy eye and immediately googled it or searched TikTok to see what's wrong? We've all gone down that rabbit hole, but it's time to get the help and care you really need with ZocDoc. ZocDoc is a free app and website where you can search and compare high quality in network doctors and click to instantly book an appointment. You could filter for doctors who take your insurance, are located nearby, are a good fit for any medical need you may have, and are highly rated by verified patients. Stop putting off those doctor appointments and go to zocdoc.com wondery to find and instantly book a top rated doctor today. That's zocdoc.com wondery zocdoc.com wondery what came.
Madison McGee (0:55)
Next is intended for mature audiences only. Episodes discuss topics that can be triggering such as emotional, physical and sexual violence, animal abuse, suicide, and murder. I am not a therapist nor am I a doctor. If you're in need of support, please visit SomethingWasWrong.com resources for a list of nonprofit organizations that can help. Opinions expressed by my guests on the show are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of myself or Broken Cycle Media. Resources and source material are linked in the episode notes. Thank you so much for listening. Madison McGee is a producer, documentarian, podcaster and co victim of murder from West Virginia. After learning about her father's unsolved murder in her teen years, Madison devoted herself and her future career to bringing awareness about her father's long since cold case. In her hit podcast Ice Cold Case, she highlights her own investigation into her father's 22 year old murder and all that continues to come next in her journey. The Broken Cycle Media team is honored to have this discussion with Madison about the power of her work and how she's harnessed the media to obtain what justice may still be available for her and her father.
Madison McGee (2:48)
My name is Madison McGee. I am a television and film producer based out of la. Originally from West Virginia. I host and created a podcast called Ice Cold Case which is my journey as I investigate my dad's nearly 22 year cold case. He was murdered in Ohio in 2002. I've been investigating it for a few years and take you on this very interesting journey of mine. I think when you're a kid you don't realize that traumatic things are traumatic. If you're born into it, it becomes a norm when you're a kid. That's just normal to you. You don't realize until later and you compare experiences with people. And I think that's sort of what happened to me when I was a kid. I grew up in a very rural town in West Virginia. It's very conservative. And so the idea of a non traditional family was also very weird. My parents were never married, but I knew both of them and I spent time with both of them. I grew up with my grandmother as my primary caretaker. So I think with all of that becoming more normalized, a lot of the trauma that I experienced because I was quote, unquote different won't even exist in 10, 20 years for people, which is amazing. I think that I was so naive watching other people whisper about my mom and I having different last names. I didn't even really register until I was older. And then I was like, that's why I felt so othered. I already had this understanding of the otherness that my dad definitely experienced. And I experienced to a degree that my dad was black in this very small, very, very white community. I think that created an interesting experience for me and I think that it all forms your personality. When I was six, my dad passed away. I was told that he had a heart attack and that's how he died. So there was this level of trauma growing up. I don't really know if I realized certain things I was doing was related to trauma. I just thought it was normal. Now depression and anxiety is talked about a lot more. Kids in high school are more familiar with those terms. We didn't really know what any of that was when I was growing up. I act like that was 100 years ago. It was like literally 10 years ago. It is really weird that we weren't talking about those things at the time. But I didn't realize me withdrawing or me feeling this level of social anxiety as a 12, 13 year old was related to all these things that were happening to me. When I was 16, I found out that my dad was murdered instead of dying of a heart attack. That was this very strange moment for me because I realized that I had this very weird intuition that I think a lot of people have, but not all people are paying attention to. I was 16, so it is a bit scary to realize your gut can sort of tell you things. My mom and I were visiting my dad's side of the family in Ohio. He lived about two and a half hours away from Where I grew up. We went up there on my dad's birthday, May 4th of 2012. On our way back, my mom had offered to drive me by my grandmother's house on my dad's side. She was living with my dad's sister and her son. When we were leaving, my cousin walked outside to say goodbye to us. I turned around to wave goodbye, and I felt something punch me in the stomach. So much so that I hurled forward, like the wind was knocked out of me. But nothing was there. I get in the car and I can't speak because I could barely breathe. My mom is asking me, what's wrong? What happened? Did you get stung by a bee? What's going on? Thinking that my dad had a heart attack and that's how he died. I looked at my mom and I asked her if that cousin who I saw was with my dad when he had a heart attack and watched him die and didn't help him. My mom was just silent. My mom's a chatterbox. Did not know what to say. She didn't know what to do. We pull over and that's when my mom told me that my dad actually died because he was murdered and that my cousin was sort of involved in the happenings, not necessarily in the murder, but there was a lot of really weird things that happened that morning before my dad was killed. So it was very strange that I, who had no context, put him there with my dad, not knowing what happened. For me, that day was a big one. I remember that day very often when I do go back through my life of where did everything shift. My dad was shot and killed in his house, but he was walking towards the front door. The front door was kicked in. So whoever did it never entered the house, never left really any DNA. They're not even really sure what kind of gun was used. There's different reports all the time. The police files are actually sitting right here. They say something different than what the detective said when I spoke with them in person. So really not a lot of info. From the beginning, they were able to identify a suspect through witness testimony that was not as reliable as one would hope. They took a person to the grand jury to see if there was enough to take it all the way to trial. They decided that they didn't have enough and they dropped the charges on this suspect. Since then, there's been no new evidence brought up. There's been no new information that they've uncovered. It's just sat for 22 years. I entered in this backlog of trauma that I started to experience a little bit later in my adolescence. I had already grieved my dad's death through the lens of he had a heart attack. This very scientific health related issue that's insanely common that no one can really blame anyone for. And so I had to grieve my dad's death now through this murder lens, which is very difficult to do. I already felt like I've been through this. I've already grieved my dad's death. I was also reeling through the moments where over the last 10 years of my life, when anyone had a heart attack in their family and I'm the one consoling them going, I know what you've been through. I know what you're going through now. I've been lying this whole time because I didn't. That's not what happened to my dad. In a way, I almost still feel like I do know what it's like to lose someone to a heart attack. Because for 10 years, that was what I experienced. I grew up also in church. It's like, okay, God, why did you let my dad have a heart attack? Now it's like, well, why'd you let my dad get murdered? I do wonder what my life would have been like had I not found out at that moment or not found out at all. My life is forever altered, not just emotionally, but also in a career kind of way. Anything that I felt like I wanted to do or was drawn to do really was now filtered through this. My dad was murdered and now I have to solve it. I went to school then for communications instead of going for medicine. I decided that I wanted to work in film and television. Eventually, with the hope of making a documentary about my dad's case. In order to solve it, my career goals changed. I was always very funny. I was always making funny videos in high school and really, really comedic focused. And that also took a bit of a shift. I had a really strong knack for digital content, and so if I could get people to care, I knew that there would be power in that. But I wasn't sure how to achieve that at the time. I found out about my dad's murder 12 years ago now. So it took a long time for me to really figure out the medium in which to do this. I first started racking my brain around, how do I tell this story? I wasn't sure what it was gonna be. I just knew that I needed to start diving in whenever I felt ready. And that happened to be during COVID the shutdown. April May of 2020. And I was like, okay, I have all of this spare time on my hands. I could probably read through a case file or two if I only had access. So I need to do that first to get access to the police files. I called the county that handled the case. I called them to get access. I had heard of foia, which is Freedom for Information act, allowing you access to files. I don't know how it all works. I will say that when I called, I was like, this was my dad. I. I found out about his murder significantly later. I was a child. I'm just very curious what happened. I still don't even really know. Beginning to end what transpired that morning. Would just love access to the case file. The front desk said, we send over the request to the prosecutor's office. They redact the file, they send it back to us. We send it to you. It takes about two and a half weeks. I was like, okay, cool, sounds great. I'll give it an extra two weeks because I know that these places actually move quite slow. But then a month went by. I didn't hear anything, called back. She's like, yeah, we're waiting on the prosecutor's office. I was like, if I file a Freedom for Information act, would I get the files right away? And she's like, oh, that's federal. We don't abide by Freedom for Information Act. So there was no way, even according to this person, if I had filed a FOIA that I would even get the files. So I then went over her head and just called the prosecutor's office and said, I was just wondering what the holdup is. Is there anything I can do to expedite this process? That took about another two months before they finally emailed them over. My initial contact was May of 2020, and I received the files in January of 2021. I got the access to all the files, which took an incredibly long time and was very complicated. But I did end up getting a copy of what I would assume is one of the smallest case files I've ever seen in my life. I think that 36 pages is quite small. Going through the case files was really strange because I lost my dad at such a young age that essentially I probably had like a year and a half of actual locked in memories with my dad. Reading through these case files, I'm almost learning more about my dad than I ever knew while he was alive. So that was kind of strange. And then also to read about it from a victim perspective, this isn't like I'M reading someone writing up a retirement congratulations for my dad. This is his murder file. Reading through it takes half a day cuz it's such a small file. But I definitely was left with a lot of questions because it's so small and there's just so many holes in this file. As far as there's so many people who could have killed my dad. There's so many avenues that don't feel like they were explored enough or at all.