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Gone South – Audacy Podcasts — Society & Culture
Gone South – 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.

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Latest Episodes:

The Undercover Cop Who Got Too Close to the Cali Cartel Nov 04, 2026

Show notes

Javier Guzman was an undercover vice cop with the Tampa Police Department when the DEA recruited him to infiltrate the Cali cartel, then supplying roughly 80 percent of the world’s cocaine. Working alongside Robert Mazur, the agent behind The Infiltrator, on Operation PROMO, Javier posed as money launderer Antonio Ruiz and collected duffel bags of cartel cash across the country.

But he grew too close to the cartel’s money man, and the line between cop and criminal began to blur. Javier and his wife, Beth Browne, tell the story of the bust that sent him to federal prison and the memoir, Riptide, that followed.

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A Double Life: The Murder of Teresa Sievers Oct 28, 2026

Show notes

In 2015, Dr. Teresa Sievers, a holistic-medicine doctor in Bonita Springs, Florida, was beaten to death in her kitchen. The killers were her husband Mark’s childhood best friend and doppelgänger, Wayne, and a Missouri ex-con who called himself Jimmy the Hammer. Writer and psychoanalyst Mikita Brottman, author of A Double Life, explains how a swinging marriage, a rival anti-aging guru, and a murder plot hatched at a wedding led to one of Florida’s strangest crimes.

Brottman also shares a Freudian reading of Mark and Wayne’s bond, and why she thinks Florida produces so many bizarre true-crime stories.

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Redemption: The Nuns Who Visit Death Row Oct 21, 2026

Show notes

In Gatesville, Texas, a group of contemplative nuns visits seven women on Death Row, teaching them the rhythms of convent life: prayer, song, silence, and confession. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Lawrence Wright (The Looming Tower, Going Clear) got rare access to watch it unfold, and the result is his new book, Redemption: Faith, Justice and Sisterhood on Death Row. He talks about persuading silent nuns to open up, and about the abuse scandal in their order’s past.

Wright also found that some of the women may never have been rightly convicted. Melissa Lucio has been declared innocent by the judge who tried her, yet she remains on the row. Wright explains how this changed his view of the death penalty, and whether redemption is truly possible for people who’ve done terrible things.

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The Wiregrass: Two Girls, One DNA Match, and a Town That Suspected Its Own Police Oct 14, 2026

Show notes

In 1999, two teenage girls, J.B. Beasley and Tracie Hawlett, were found shot in the trunk of a Mazda in Ozark, Alabama, a small town in the Wiregrass region of the Deep South. With no suspect and a police department already accused of corruption, locals suspected a cover-up. Twenty years later, genetic genealogy led to Coley McCraney, a Dothan truck driver and church deacon with no criminal record. Journalist Matt Kessler spent years investigating the case and reporting on the trial. His new book, The Wiregrass, argues McCraney may be innocent.

This week on Gone South, Kessler walks us through the case: a contaminated crime scene, a missing car, thousands of undigitized files, and a whistleblower cop’s allegations. He also shares his own theory of what happened that night, and why he believes DNA alone isn’t enough to convict a man of murder.

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The Zoo Where Everything Went Wrong: Inside Magnolia Wilds Oct 07, 2026

Show notes

It started with a stolen parrot named Mango, who liked to dance to Doja Cat. When reporter Aidan McCahill wrote a quick, quirky story about the theft for The Advocate, he had no idea it would lead him down a monthslong rabbit hole into Magnolia Wilds, a Louisiana animal preserve already under fire from federal regulators — and its founder, Gabe Ligon, who'd just been arrested at a Texas airport on a felony theft charge.

What Aidan found was a menagerie of chaos: porcupines and capybaras escaping their enclosures, animals mauled and trampled to death, kids bitten by otters during $215 swim sessions, and employees quietly bringing kangaroos and lynxes home at night. Behind it all was Ligon himself — a libertarian showman who insisted he loved his animals even as the USDA, his business partners, and his own former staff told Aidan a very different story.

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The Pet Cemetery Murders: Part 2 Sep 30, 2026

Show notes

Part One left off with detectives certain that groundskeeper Brandon Nodier killed pet cemetery owner Dorothy Thompson — but unable to prove it. In Part Two, we dig into an even wilder theory: that Dorothy's own mother, Grace, may have shot two of Dorothy's husbands dead on the cemetery grounds. Because decades earlier, Grace had already gotten away with killing once — fleeing an insane asylum, a Kansas City murder charge, and a fortune in missing gambling money to reinvent herself as a New Orleans flower-shop owner and hymn composer.

Then, 24 years after Dorothy's murder went cold, an anonymous phone call cracks the case wide open. Detective John Doran hears from two men with chilling, firsthand accounts of what really happened to Dorothy Thompson — and sets a plan in motion to catch her killer.

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The Pet Cemetery Murders: Part 1 Sep 23, 2026

Show notes

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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Who Killed Roxanne? How a podcast helped solve a 44-year-old Louisiana murder Sep 16, 2026

Show notes

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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She Killed the Man Who Almost Killed Her: The Jema Heffernan Story, Part 2 Sep 09, 2026

Show notes

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 1 Sep 02, 2026

Show notes

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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