Texla True Crime

Texla True Crime is built around two states, Texas and Louisiana, which Lisa describes as the places she has been lucky to call home. Her brief is homicides, missing people and, in her words, anything else she wants to talk about. Most episodes carry a number and a name, and a run of them reads like a case ledger: '038-Jakaren Harrison', '037-Clint Nelson', '036-Laura Ackerson', '035-Brian Davis Part 2'. The Brian Davis title alone shows a case stretched across more than one episode. Lisa researches and writes the stories herself and links the sources in a Google Doc in the show notes. The narration leans on the paper trail. In the Laura Ackerson case, cell phone records lead detectives to a sister's home in Richmond, Texas, where the sister recalls an odd surprise visit, a U-Haul, and a question about whether alligators could eat a person; divers go to Oyster Creek next. In the Brian Davis case, a mother's testimony about when she deposited money for her daughter is set against a detective's reading of the bank records, and phone records and an employer's word place a seemingly obvious suspect elsewhere. She is candid about gaps, too. Covering Clint Nelson, a 21-year-old who went missing over Labor Day weekend, she notes that she is working from media reports and that nobody knows exactly what happened, while tracing how police told those looking for him to wait until after the holiday to file a report. Some material is hard to hear. '038-Jakaren Harrison' describes the abuse and death of a young child in blunt terms, down to postcards signed in the girl's name about trips that never happened. Lisa flags this at the start of episodes, cautioning against listening around kids and allowing that, for all her efforts at PG language, a swear may slip out. Her humor is dry and sparing. There is a 'surprise, surprise' when a couple turns out not to be where the phone records pointed, a remark that it does not take a detective to guess the detectives' next move, and delight at a witness she credits with probably the most amazing Southern name ever. Home seeps in at the edges: a household of animals may wander through, including a talkative cat named Wanderer. The feed also steps off the beat. In 'BONUS-The Christmas Doctor', Kim, host of People Are Wild and a traveling ER nurse, joins to talk through a Hallmark Christmas movie, with a digression about why tamales in upstate New York are a hard sell. It closes by admitting it is badly edited and was simply for fun. Across the case episodes, the farewell barely changes: be kind, leave the world a little better than you found it, and always watch out for motorcycles on the road. What comes through is one person's careful research, read out from home, heavy where the record is heavy and neighborly everywhere else.