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Audacy Podcasts

For years, Gone South has been a podcast about crime in the American South. But in Season 5, we’re widening the lens.Through deeply reported, narrative-driven stories—and conversations with journalists, historians, musicians, and people who’ve lived these stories firsthand—we’re digging into the myths, scandals, and power structures that still shape the South… and, in many ways, the country itself.From re-examining the cultural meaning of the Alamo to tracing the family history of Alex Murdaugh to investigating the federal indictment of New Orleans’s former mayor, each episode stands alone. Together, they paint a picture of what this region really is and how it came to be.Gone South is a show for people who want to understand how history lingers and why it still matters now.Written and hosted by award-winning journalist Jed Lipinski, Gone South is the recipient of the Edward R. Murrow Award for Outstanding Achievement in Journalism.Previous serialized seasons include:Season 1: Who Killed Margaret Coon?Season 2: The Dixie MafiaSeason 3: The Sign CutterFollow Gone South to get new episodes every week.

Gone South

In 1985, two fishermen pulled a body wrapped in 200 pounds of chains from the Mississippi River. It was Dorothy Thompson, 63, who ran a strange and beloved roadside attraction outside New Orleans called the Azalea Original Pet Cemetery — final resting place for thousands of dogs, cats, and the occasional cheetah. Dorothy's disappearance opened up a murder investigation that quickly ran into a problem: almost everyone around her had a motive.

There was a groundskeeper who'd allegedly swindled her out of her property days before she vanished. Rumors that Dorothy herself had killed two of her four husbands, both found dead on the cemetery grounds. And a mother, Grace, whose own past in Kansas City hinted she might know a thing or two about getting away with murder. In Part One of this two-part episode, we dig into the tangled, decades-long history of one family's blood-soaked pet cemetery.

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The Pet Cemetery Murders: Part 1

In 1982, 16-year-old Roxanne Sharp was raped and murdered in the woods outside Covington, Louisiana. Her case went cold for over 40 years, derailed early on by a serial killer's false confession. Then two Louisiana State Police officers walked into radio host Charles Dowdy's studio with a pitch: help us keep this case alive. The result was Charles's first true-crime podcast, Who Killed Roxanne?, made in real-time alongside an active police investigation.

One year after the show aired, police arrested four men in connection with Roxanne's murder. Charles tells us how a small-town radio show host ended up standing at a press conference that closed a four-decade-old case — and what it's like to help solve the very story you set out to tell.

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Who Killed Roxanne? How a podcast helped solve a 44-year-old Louisiana murder

Part One left off with Jema Heffernan taking in a man named Javon Donahue — and Javon nearly strangling her to death. In Part Two, that single act of violence hardens into a decade-long "hostage relationship": Javon controls her money, her car, her ability to leave, and every time she manages to get away, he finds her.

In 2017, after a four-hour standoff that ends with Javon forcing the gun into her own hand, Jema shoots him, and survives being shot herself. What follows is a botched cover-up, a shallow grave, and a trial where prosecutors argue that a decade of documented abuse doesn't excuse the killing. Jema is convicted and sentenced to 10 years. Justine van der Leun tells us what happened next, including the day, seven years later, she was there to pick Jema up.

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She Killed the Man Who Almost Killed Her: The Jema Heffernan Story, Part 2

Lloyd Lockridge:

Journalist Justine van der Leun set out to find the untold stories of women serving murder sentences after surviving years of abuse — women whose only official record reads "guilty," with no mention of what came before. She mailed 10,000 letters to incarcerated women across the country and got back more than a thousand replies. One came from Jema Heffernan, a mother of three serving 10 years for killing her husband, Javon Donahue.

Jema's childhood in a military family took a dark turn after she was raped at 13 — and her small Missouri town turned on her, not her attacker. Years later, she took in a man freshly out of prison as a favor to a friend, never imagining he'd become a father figure to her daughter, and then the man who nearly strangled her to death in her own living room. In Part One of this two-part episode, Jema tells us how a "roommate situation" spiraled into a relationship she never chose.

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She Killed the Man Who Almost Killed Her: The Jema Heffernan Story, Part 1

In the mid-1960s, McDonald's sued a tiny Mobile, Alabama fast-food chain called Colonel Dixie — over golden arches, green sidewalks, red and white trash cans, and a stolen operations manual. Colonel Dixie won on the trademark claim and went on to become a beloved local institution, famous for the Dixie Dog. But the brand still carries a whiff of scandal, because in 1983 its co-founder, Paul Leverett, was convicted of hiring a hitman to murder his wife.

Elizabeth "Liz" Leverett was killed while her husband drove their children around Mobile in a carefully constructed alibi. She had decided that week to file for divorce. The case went cold — until a burglary across town led investigators to a pawn shop owner, a stolen diamond hidden in a necktie, and an x-ray taken years earlier. Lagniappe journalist Kevin Lee tells us how it unraveled.

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Colonel Dixie: The Murder of Liz Leverett

Jacklean Davis was the first Black woman to make homicide detective in the New Orleans Police Department. She grew up in Central City, inspired by a Black patrol officer known on the street as Christy Love, and she rose fast — cracking the 1986 case of a killer who had been hiding in plain sight, presenting himself to detectives as a witness. Ebony asked whether she was the best homicide detective in the city's history. Whoopi Goldberg looked into playing her.

Her colleagues shredded her case files and stuffed dog waste in her desk. Then, in 2002, a dispute over a $5,000 security detail at an Essence Fest after-party became a federal extortion case, and Jackie went to prison in Tallahassee. Journalist Ethan Brown, who spent months with her and thousands of pages of her records, tells us how her rise and fall tracked the NOPD's own — and why a prosecutor's anonymous internet comments would later cast a shadow over her conviction.

The Rise and Fall of Jacklean Davis, New Orleans' First Black Female Homicide Detective

Len Davis was a New Orleans police officer known in the Desire projects as Robocop and the Desire Terrorist. In 1994 he ordered the murder of Kim Groves, a 32-year-old mother of three who had filed a brutality complaint against him — and he's since been called the most corrupt cop in the city's history. What brought him down was Operation Shattered Shield, and at the center of it was an undercover FBI agent posing as a high-level drug dealer, known only as J.J.

His name is Juan Jackson. He was one of roughly 300 Black agents in an FBI of 11,000 when he entered the Academy in 1983, trained under Joe Pistone of Donnie Brasco fame, and spent two decades undercover — as a hitman for hire in Chinatown, an arms dealer, a money launderer, and a drug kingpin in Waterbury, Connecticut. He tells us how he got Len Davis to strip to his underwear in a wired hotel room at the New Orleans Hilton, and why, testifying for two and a half weeks, he couldn't stop smiling.

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J.J.: The Undercover FBI Agent Who Took Down Len Davis and New Orleans' Dirtiest Cops

In 2019, John Fenley was 39, newly separated, and living in one of his mother's rental apartments in Provo, Utah. Searching LoopNet for the biggest building at the lowest price, he found a 220,000-square-foot warehouse on 17 acres in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, listed at $375,000. He assumed the price was a typo. He had never been to Arkansas. He bought it anyway — and then bought Murfie, a bankrupt Wisconsin startup, inheriting roughly a million CDs belonging to strangers.

What followed was copper thieves, a pandemic lockdown that stranded his shipping containers, a running battle with Pine Bluff's zoning office, and a feud with Go Forward Pine Bluff, the tax-funded nonprofit he believed was blocking him at every turn. Then an $890,000 windfall landed in his bank account, and he bought 74 parcels at a tax auction, making him one of the largest landowners in town. Writer Max Read dubbed him "The Man Who Bought Pine Bluff, Arkansas." Four years later, he's still there.

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The Utah Entrepreneur Trying to Remake Pine Bluff, Arkansas

In 1996, a pipe bomb packed with masonry nails exploded in Atlanta's Centennial Olympic Park, killing two people and injuring more than a hundred. The FBI's first suspect was Richard Jewell, the security guard who'd found the bag and helped clear the area. By the time he was cleared 88 days later, investigators had no idea who they were looking for. Columnist John Archibald had covered the Olympics that summer, never imagining the bomber would come to his own city.
On January 29, 1998, a bomb hidden in a FedEx box exploded outside a Birmingham abortion clinic, killing an off-duty police officer and gravely wounding nurse Emily Lyons. This time someone saw the bomber walk away — a UAB student named Jermaine Hughes, who followed him to a gray Nissan pickup with North Carolina plates. The name that came back was Eric Robert Rudolph. Within hours he vanished into the Nantahala National Forest, where he'd stay for five years while locals put up signs reading "Run, Rudolph, Run."

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Eric Rudolph: The Olympic Park Bomber and the Largest Manhunt in American History

In October 1997, a vault supervisor named David Ghantt loaded $17 million into a van and drove out of a Loomis Fargo warehouse in Charlotte, North Carolina. It was the second-largest cash heist in American history. It took him about an hour, working alone. He stole two of the facility's three security tapes. The third one kept rolling.

What followed was five months of botched getaways, wild spending sprees, an FBI wiretap, and a murder plot hatched at a Halloween party. Reporter Jeff Diamant, who covered the case for the Charlotte Observer and interviewed nearly every co-conspirator, tells the story of the crime that came to be known as the Hillbilly Heist — and how a crew that studied Goodfellas managed to ignore every lesson in it.

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Hillbilly Heist: David Ghantt and the $17 Million Loomis Fargo Robbery

After acquiring secretly recorded audio of Felix Vail, Jerry Mitchell approaches a Louisiana prosecutor named Hugo Holland who takes on the case. Hugo makes additional breakthroughs in the investigation, and nearly 51 years after his first wife's death, Felix stands trial. 

Find us on ⁠Facebook⁠, ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ and ⁠Twitter⁠. You can also subscribe to our newsletter, ⁠Gone South with Jed Lipinski⁠.

S4|E30: Catching Felix Vail | Part 3

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