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Death of an Artist — True Crime
Death of an Artist

In February 2024, celebrated children’s book author and illustrator Petra Mathers and her husband, photographer Michael Mathers, mailed letters to dozens of friends and family members to let them know they had died by suicide. Petra and Michael were by all accounts healthy, happy, and in love. Why did they choose to die together? And what did that decision do to the people left to mourn them?

In season 3 of Death of an Artist, journalists Leon Neyfakh and Alice Gregory set out to interview everyone who got one of Petra and Michael’s letters—as one married couple trying to understand another. Through intimate conversations with Petra and Michael’s friends and family about their own relationships to aging, grief, death, and the friends they thought they knew, Death of an Artist weaves together a portrait of a community grappling with the Mathers’ deaths and the final words they left behind.

Listen back to season 2, where Katy Hessel offers an inside look at how Jackson Pollock and his wife, Lee Krasner, changed everything about the landscape of modern art. And in season 1, host Helen Molesworth revisits the artist Ana Mendieta’s death and the trial that followed—interrogating both the silence and the protest that have accompanied her story ever since.

Death of an Artist Season 1 is a co-production between Pushkin Industries, Somethin’ Else, and Sony Music Entertainment.

Death of an Artist Season 2 is a co-production between Pushkin Industries and Samizdat Audio.

Copyright: 2024 iHeartMedia, Inc. © Any use of this intellectual property for text and data mining or computational analysis including as training material for artificial intelligence systems is strictly prohibited without express written consent from iHeartMedia

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From A Slight Change of Plans: “I Will Never Leave You” Oct 06, 2026

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This week, we’re sharing an episode of another Pushkin podcast, A Slight Change of Plans, a show about who we are and who we become in the face of change. In this episode, host Maya Shankar interviews Lucy Kalanithi about her late husband Paul Kalanithi, author of the bestselling memoir “When Breath Becomes Air.” Lucy talks about being at her husband’s side during his final days, and reflects on how his death transformed her relationship to time.

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Episode 6: By the Time You Get This Letter Sep 22, 2026

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“Dear Lottie and Herbie, by the time you read this, I will be dead . . . That's why I'm writing this letter. I've had a long and happy life doing what I loved best . . . Now it's time to make room for someone else on this earth.”

The letters Petra and Michael sent out echo the words of a letter in a children’s book Petra wrote 10 years earlier: the final installment in her beloved series about Lottie the chicken. But it was their relationship – not their work – that Petra and Michael seemed to think of as their most important artistic achievement. Were their deaths, and these letters, their final creative collaboration?

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Episode 5: We Are Without Fear Sep 15, 2026

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“I wrestle with: Was it courage, or was it cowardice?”

This question animates a memorial service for Michael and Petra, held several months after their death. Alice and Leon want to understand it as well: Was Michael and Petra’s suicide a move toward something, or away from something else? To figure it out, they reach out to Michael and Petra’s families, to find out what examples they had from their own parents’ end-of-life experiences that might have led them to this choice.

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Episode 4: Bird on a Wire Sep 08, 2026

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“It brought up all the things I've never done. All the risks I haven't taken. It was always about trying to be free, you know?”

According to Michael Mathers’s first true love, he was always a romantic. Was the death orchestrated with Petra the ending of a love story he’d been trying to craft all along?

Get early, ad-free access to the entire season of Death of an Artist by subscribing to Pushkin+ on the Apple Podcasts show page or at pushkin.fm/plus.

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Episode 3: The Train Has Left the Station Sep 01, 2026

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“I have never regretted my decision, only the amount of unhappiness it caused you. Still, unforgivingness is the product of those who feel it.”

When Petra and Michael died, they left everyone in their lives behind. But it wasn’t the first time: When Petra first fell in love with Michael, she left her son Tillmann to be with him. In an interview with Alice and Leon, Tillmann reckons with his mother's choices and the marks they left on his own life.

Get early, ad-free access to the entire season of Death of an Artist by subscribing to Pushkin+ on the Apple Podcasts show page or at pushkin.fm/plus.

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Episode 2: It’s Lonely Without You, Friends Aug 25, 2026

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“I would've screamed. I would've shouted. I would've cried out. I would've protested. I would've given a million reasons to not leave this world.”

Michael and Petra left their house and the logistics of their afterlife to their friend Patty—unbeknownst to Patty’s sister Virginia, who considered herself one of Michael and Petra’s best friends. Patty and Virginia have different perspectives on what Michael and Petra did, but they agree on what it was like to be around them as a couple: awestruck and a bit excluded, something even Alice and Leon pick up on while looking at their dozens of photo albums.

Get early, ad-free access to the entire season of Death of an Artist by subscribing to Pushkin+ on the Apple Podcasts show page or at pushkin.fm/plus.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode 1: Dear Honeys Aug 25, 2026

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DISCLAIMER: This podcast is about suicide. Listener discretion is advised

"When Michael and I got together some 40 plus years ago, we’d always planned on checking out together."

In February of 2024, a letter arrived at the pharmacy in Astoria, Oregon. It was from local residents Petra and Michael Mathers, and they wanted to let the pharmacists know that they had died—by suicide. Petra was a celebrated children’s book author and illustrator. Michael was a photographer. And as police investigated their deaths, they discovered a whole network of people around the country who had received similar letters.

Journalists Leon Neyfakh and Alice Gregory, who have themselves been married for more than 10 years, visit Oregon to begin putting together the pieces of Petra and Michael’s shared life: the start of their love story, and the end. And they set out to interview everyone who received a letter from Michael and Petra, to try to understand why a couple who was seemingly so happy and in love would want to end their lives.

Get early, ad-free access to the entire season of Death of an Artist by subscribing to Pushkin+ on the Apple Podcasts show page or at pushkin.fm/plus.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Introducing Death of an Artist Season 3: Petra Mathers and Her Michael Aug 18, 2026

Show notes

When Alice Gregory and Leon Neyfakh started building a library for their infant daughter, they stumbled across a name in an obituary that Alice recognized from her own childhood: celebrated children’s book author and illustrator Petra Mathers. Petra had died by suicide alongside her husband, Michael Mathers. Both were in their late 70s, seemingly happy and healthy.

The details of Petra and Michael’s deaths pulled Alice and Leon down a rabbit hole that neither were expecting—a plan many years in the making, dozens of letters mailed out across the country, friends and family caught between betrayal and envy, and a community grappling with their own feelings around aging and death.

Death of an Artist drops weekly on Tuesdays starting August 25. Get early, ad-free access to the entire season of Death of an Artist by subscribing to Pushkin+. Subscribers also get bonus episodes, exclusive binges, full audiobooks, and early ad-free listening for all Pushkin shows.

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Bonus: The Women on the Scene with Audrey Flack Aug 23, 2024

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Artist, musician and writer Audrey Flack shares her firsthand accounts of the downtown New York City art scene in the mid-twentieth-century and a song she and her band, The History of Art, wrote about Jackson Pollock.

Flack passed away in June. For more about her life, see “Audrey Flack, Creator of Vibrant Photorealist Art, Dies at 93.”

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