‘Citizen Sleuth’ Director Discusses His New True Crime Documentary [SXSW 2023 Interview]
Society loves true crime. From podcasts to documentaries and limited series, we have a twisted fascination with grisly death. With this true crime boom has come a flurry of ethical questions about opening up old wounds and exploiting death for money and views. In Chris Kasick’s new documentary Citizen Sleuth, the filmmaker documents just one case of the strange ethics of true crime and the consequences of letting a lie go on for too long.
Read the full synopsis below:
The film follows Emily Nestor and her Mile Marker 181 podcast, as she conducts an amateur murder investigation into the death of Jaleayah Davis. Emily teases a cover-up by the Sheriff’s Department and pursues her top suspects. With a growing audience of millions, Emily’s podcast becomes a hit. But as she gets deeper into her investigation, Emily’s confronted with a new truth she struggles to tell her listeners. Told in real time over years, Citizen Sleuth chronicles the rise, fall, and redemption of a podcaster in the new media landscape.
Dread Central spoke with Kasick ahead of the documentary’s premiere at SXSW about true crime, the pursuit of the truth, and more.
Dread Central: So you said this is a four-year odyssey. Can you tell me how you got started with Citizen Sleuth and when you were introduced to Emily?
Chris Kasick: Two producers on the project, Fabiola Washburn and Jared Washburn, are into the true crime genre. My Favorite Murder promoted [Emily’s podcast] Mile Marker 181. They had listened to it and they sent it to me and I listened to it. A few months go by and I didn’t think anything of it. Then I subscribed to it and I listened to it again. And I was like, “Well, she is really a compelling character.” I’m also from the area, I’m from Ohio, so I was familiar with some of the locations that she was talking about. So I took a trip to Parkersburg, West Virginia, and I met Emily. She was one of these characters you wait for. <laugh>
She had a secret. And it was obvious to me from the beginning that she had a secret and didn’t know how to tell her audience and was struggling with telling her audience it. Over the course of filming, it all evolved into the ending that you see. It wasn’t an obvious journey because we were looking for justice for this cold case. And things weren’t adding up.
Then I met Kristin Bechtold who was accused of the murder early on in the process. I came away from that being like, “Whoa, I don’t think that this woman is a murderer.” They don’t usually open your door and let you come in and talk to them like that. <laugh> So it became this journey of telling the truth and the pursuit of the truth. We were looking for justice, but the pursuit of the truth became a higher calling in this, for the filmmaker and for the podcaster. So that’s sort of how we landed to where we’re at.
DC: That’s wild. As someone who is a true crime person, I think it is such an important documentary. It shows where we’re at in the true crime boom and all the people who start out with good intentions but don’t necessarily have that journalistic training. I think it’s so wild to watch her story evolve from a true crime story that we hear about a lot, to something much deeper. What a wild experience for you as a documentary filmmaker from an ethical standpoint too, making Citizen Sleuth.
CK: Emily was a complicated character because she was really out for the right reasons. You know, she’s from the middle of nowhere, West Virginia. She worked at Buffalo Wild Wings and she found success in [the podcast]. Then there were sponsors and advertisers and everyone was coming at her. As she was getting deeper into this, she was starting to have doubts and didn’t know what to do. The ethics were on display for both of us in trying to figure out how to navigate this. In the end, Emily held onto, “We need to tell the truth, we have to tell the truth.” It evolved into that ending, which was dramatic on a lot of levels for a lot of people and the community, and it still is. Yeah, it’s been a journey.
DC: How long were you filming with her?
CK: Years, to be honest. It was in six-month stints where we would go and film with her. Then her podcast would come out and it’d be reactions to her podcast. From the filmmaker’s side, finding Freddie Scott, Katy Nelson, and Kristen Kristin Bechtold, the three innocent people this has been pinned on took a long time. That took years to get them to talk.
They were not clear on my intention as a filmmaker coming in. The story that was out there was that they were murderers and it wasn’t until the process was revealed in Emily’s podcast that this story changed. For a decade, I mean, locally, the story’s been wrong for a long time, and so this is really the first sort of take on this truth.
DC: Do you know what the repercussions were after it was revealed that it was not a murder? What effect did this have on the town?
CK: Online, there was a backlash on the Justice For Jaleayah which has recently been hacked and is not even functional anymore. But online there was a very strong backlash, there was a lot of confusion because there have been years of Mile Marker 181 that was going out and it just seemed like there was this flip-flop at the end where Emily wasn’t actively putting out episodes for almost six months in the end then just dropped the final episode
It’s funny locally. There’s a line [in the documentary] at the library where someone is like, “I’m just here to be entertained”. So there’s an entertainment value for a lot of people. But when we’re dealing with the people who are involved in it, it’s a lot different of a reaction. The innocent people were thrilled by the podcast and how it cleared some names at the end. They had been looking for someone or some help in doing that for over a decade.
DC: What is your relationship with true crime? How do you feel about the idea of true crime in general?
CK: The first filmmaker I worked with for a long time was Errol Morris, who had made The Thin Blue Line, which is a definitive film on true crime. The director of photography [for Citizen Sleuth] and I, Jared Washburn, met 20 years ago on a Morris set. I’ve worked with him for a long time. I love hearing stories of mystery and trying to piece stuff together. It’s just like a puzzle.
What I didn’t understand before I began this was what a profound effect this genre has on the people who are involved. You gotta go back to the truth and what really happened. In telling stories, entertainment and fact seem to slightly blur. My opinion of the true crime genre is, I think it’s still something that’s really relevant. It’s one of the most popular genres and I am fascinated by this need for answers, this need to create order out of something. And there’s no real answer to it.
DC: Well, especially because a lot of people who love it are women.
CK: That caught me off guard. It was a lot of mothers and daughters at Crime Con. Then I started dancing around why is this a thing? Why do women love true crime? You get a lot of different varied answers on that, and I don’t know the answer to it, but it’s an interesting world for sure.
DC: What was your relationship like with Emily while you were filming? Obviously it shifted quite a bit as filming progressed, but what was that like establishing a relationship with her?
CK: It wasn’t the plan. Once I realized that Emily had this secret and this internal struggle, I was like, we need to capture that. It’s a hard relationship to describe, to be honest.
DC: Yeah, I can imagine
CK: <laugh>. Yeah. Because there, there has to be a trust involved for that kind of Yeah. I moved there, I moved to Parkersburg, and got a house.
So I think she saw a commitment on my end where this didn’t feel like I was like Discovery or ID coming in to do a documentary for a day, which she had already done. But there was something different about my approach of going there and talking to everyone involved and involving myself in the community and hanging out at the bars and the libraries for years where everybody knows me. I thought it was such an interesting story that was happening in this under-served region where local journalism’s gone. The newspapers are nothing.
Emily came in and served as a voice to understand the community that they lived in. When Emily saw that I had made a commitment to her and the community, I think there was this trust that developed between us. But again, when someone’s revealing stuff to you that are secret, that’s a hard relationship to develop. We’re five years into knowing each other now. It’s still interesting because she just saw the movie last week.
DC: Again, the ethical stuff in this is wild about your role as a documentary filmmaker. And so often documentary filmmakers are expected to stay back. But you get involved. And I think that’s so interesting to see a documentary where we have a filmmaker intervening.
CK: The story was evolving in front of us. There’s the one scene where she’s on the Crawlspace podcast and there was never an idea of like, “Well, I’m gonna ask her about this.” It was right before we had started filming. She was talking to me about how this is an accident. We weren’t even gonna film that interview. Afterward, I didn’t even think it would be something that would be used. I had just asked her about it casually while she was holding the dog. I asked, “How do you do that? This is sort of a dangerous territory here where you’re pushing a story and you’re trying to bring people to it.”
She was grappling with it all in real-time. The rules for engagement are a little murky often. We were figuring it out in real-time and filming it. We had no idea she was gonna put out that ending at that time. So often in the Twitter age, things are so rushed to be the first to put things out there. I purposely told Emily and everyone involved that we were in no rush. We don’t have a deadline. We wanna tell the complete story because we think it’s that important to tell. So a lot of trust happened, I think, with this.
DC: Wow. That’s wild. What an incredibly weird, life-changing experience that you captured on film.
CK: I appreciate the kind words because no one has seen Citizen Sleuth. I’m proud of it and I know it works, but hearing feedback from a journalist, it’s cool to hear <laugh>.
DC: I think it’s a really interesting documentary about true crime in a way that we haven’t seen before. And I think that’s really important, especially when we are all so obsessed with true crime.
CK: So often in true crime, you have this idea of what the story is already gonna be before you start it. When I go to projects that are inherently interesting, my method feels a little chaotic. I like to let it go as far as it can go and then ask questions as it’s happening in real-time. But my dialogue with Emily, like me asking her, “How do you say this is a murder if you don’t believe it”, we constantly had dialogues like that on and off camera. It was a very casual atmosphere so we get that honesty. So it just didn’t feel like, “Oh, here are the lights, here’s an interview.”
We were doing vértié. We were trying to let things unfold over time and I think successfully. It just wasn’t obvious at the time though. You’re like, “What am I even doing?” It came together in the end. <laugh> 500 hours of footage over five years, down to 90 minutes. It’s sort of obvious, but it’s not really obvious while you’re making it that you’re pushing at something. And I knew we were pushing at a larger truth. I was curious if Emily was gonna pivot and actually tell the truth. That was the journey we were on.
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