Madison McGhee
speaker
121 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 25 Feb
Madison McGhee’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Thanks for having me.
What Came Next is intended for mature audiences only. Episodes discuss topics that can be triggering, such as emotional, physical, and sexual violence, animal abuse, suicide, and murder. I am not a therapist, nor am I a doctor. If you're in need of support, please visit somethingwaswrong.com forward slash resources for a list of non-profit organizations that can help.
Thank you so much for listening. Madison McGee is a producer, documentarian, podcaster, and co-victim of murder from West Virginia. After learning about her father's unsolved murder in her teen years, Madison devoted herself and her future career to bringing awareness about her father's long-since cold case.
In her hit podcast, Ice Cold Case, she highlights her own investigation into her father's 22-year-old murder and all that continues to come next in her journey. The Broken Cycle Media team is honored to have this discussion with Madison about the power of her work and how she's harnessed the media to obtain what justice may still be available for her and her father.
My name is Madison McGee. I am a television and film producer based out of LA, originally from West Virginia. I host and created a podcast called Ice Cold Case, which is my journey as I investigate my dad's nearly 22-year cold case. He was murdered in Ohio in 2002. I've been investigating it for a few years and take you on this very interesting journey of mine.
I think when you're a kid, you don't realize that traumatic things are traumatic. If you're born into it, it becomes a norm. When you're a kid, that's just normal to you. You don't realize until later and you compare experiences with people. And I think that's sort of what happened to me when I was a kid. I grew up in a very rural town in West Virginia. It's very conservative.
And so the idea of a non-traditional family was also very weird. My parents were never married, but I knew both of them and I spent time with both of them. I grew up with my grandmother as my primary caretaker.
So I think with all of that becoming more normalized, a lot of the trauma that I experienced because I was quote unquote different won't even exist in 10, 20 years for people, which is amazing. I think that I was so naive watching other people whisper about my mom and I having different last names. I didn't even really register until I was older. And then I was like, that's why I felt so othered.
I already had this understanding of the otherness that my dad definitely experienced and I experienced to a degree that my dad was black in this very small, very, very white community. I think that created an interesting experience for me. And I think that it all forms your personality. When I was six, my dad passed away. I was told that he had a heart attack and that's how he died.
So there was this level of trauma. Growing up, I don't really know if I realized certain things I was doing was related to trauma. I just thought it was normal. Now, depression and anxiety is talked about a lot more. Kids in high school are more familiar with those terms. We didn't really know what any of that was when I was growing up. I act like that was 100 years ago.
It was like literally 10 years ago. It is really weird that we weren't talking about those things at the time. But I didn't realize me withdrawing or me feeling this level of social anxiety as a 12, 13 year old was related to all these things that were happening to me. When I was 16, I found out that my dad was murdered instead of dying of a heart attack.
That was this very strange moment for me because I realized that I had this very weird intuition that I think a lot of people have, but not all people are paying attention to. I was 16, so it is a bit scary to realize your gut can sort of tell you things. My mom and I were visiting my dad's side of the family in Ohio. He lived about two and a half hours away from where I grew up.
We went up there on my dad's birthday, May 4th of 2012. On our way back, my mom had offered to drive me by my grandmother's house on my dad's side. She was living with my dad's sister and her son. When we were leaving, my cousin walked outside to say goodbye to us. I turned around to wave goodbye and I felt something punch me in the stomach.
So much so that I hurled forward like the wind was knocked out of me, but nothing was there. I get in the car and I can't speak because I could barely breathe. My mom is asking me, what's wrong? What happened? Did you get stung by a bee? What's going on? Thinking that my dad had a heart attack and that's how he died.
I looked at my mom and I asked her if that cousin who I saw was with my dad when he had a heart attack and watched him die and didn't help him. My mom was just silent. My mom's a chatterbox, did not know what to say. She didn't know what to do.
We pull over and that's when my mom told me that my dad actually died because he was murdered and that my cousin was sort of involved in the happenings, not necessarily in the murder, but there was a lot of really weird things that happened that morning before my dad was killed. So it was very strange that I, who had no context, put him there with my dad, not knowing what happened.
For me, that day was a big one. I remember that day very often. When I do go back through my life of where did everything shift, My dad was shot and killed in his house, but he was walking towards the front door. The front door was kicked in. So whoever did it never entered the house, never left really any DNA. They're not even really sure what kind of gun was used.
There's different reports all the time. The police files are actually sitting right here. They say something different than what the detective said when I spoke with them in person. So really not a lot of info from the beginning. They were able to identify a suspect through witness testimony that was not as reliable as one would hope.
They took a person to the grand jury to see if there was enough to take it all the way to trial. They decided that they didn't have enough, and they dropped the charges on this suspect. Since then, there's been no new evidence brought up. There's been no new information that they've uncovered. It's just sat for 22 years.
I entered in this backlog of trauma that I started to experience a little bit later in my adolescence. I had already grieved my dad's death through the lens of he had a heart attack, this very scientific health-related issue that's insanely common that no one can really blame anyone for. And so I had to grieve my dad's death now through this murder lens. which is very difficult to do.
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