Off Duty | The Guardian Investigates · The Guardian

Off Duty: The Prosecutors | Ep 5

March 18, 2026·32 min·2 clips

An FBI map puts Edgardo Colon in Humboldt Park, miles from the mini-mart murder scene.

Raul Palma Perez is the witness everyone is waiting on, and now he has vanished again. Eric keeps calling and texting, trying to figure out whether Raul is still reachable. After more than a week, a text finally comes through. At first, Eric and Jennifer think the message must be a language mistake. They assume he means edema. He does not. Raul says he had a brain-eating amoeba, and the episode pauses on how rare that illness is and how often it kills. Raul is one of the few people to survive it, and that fact hangs over everything that follows. The case then shifts back to the investigation and the people giving confessions at the police station. Tyrone and others are still there, but the FBI map already suggests the stories they are telling cannot all be true. Alex goes in. Clay goes in. Edgardo Colon is driving. Melvin Young is in the car. The episode keeps stressing that if any one of those people is missing from the story, the account falls apart. That contradiction matters because it strengthens the claims from defendants and a witness who say they were coerced. The next day, the Chicago Police Department holds a press conference and charges Tyrone Clay and Edgardo Colon with Lewis's murder anyway, even though police already had reason to believe they could not be the right men. The episode treats that as the moment when the gap between the official story and the evidence becomes impossible to ignore. Eric and Jennifer realize they have cast a small net and pulled back more than they expected. That helps the case, but it also raises a bigger question: what else is out there? Jennifer then reaches for a different kind of evidence. If they already have the police reports, she wants the reports about the reports. The metadata. The episode explains metadata in practical terms by comparing it to the information attached to a photograph. With police reports, the same idea applies. The useful questions are not only what the report says, but when it was created, when it was submitted, who approved it, and how it moved through the system. That shift reframes the investigation. The paper trail itself becomes part of the case. The closing section is careful about institutional response. The Guardian says it made repeated attempts to contact the Chicago Police Department. The department did not have anyone available to answer questions. Former prosecutors Nancy Adusi and Andy Varga, along with their legal representatives, did not respond to interview requests, though court papers deny wrongdoing. The Cook County State's Attorney's Office declined to comment because litigation is pending. Judge James Lynn did not respond. The episode ends with that silence in place, leaving the listener with a case defined as much by missing answers as by the evidence that has surfaced.

As heard by us

A case about how records and metadata can expose a shaky investigation.

The chapter finds its tension in a missing witness, a confession that does not quite sit right, and the gradual pressure of metadata. As the case turns, the central question sharpens: if the map is already working against the official story, what else was built on sand?

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Why you'd press play

You want the case to turn on a document trail nobody expected.

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