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
I already felt like I've been through this. I've already grieved my dad's death. I was also reeling through the moments where over the last 10 years of my life, when anyone had a heart attack in their family and I'm the one consoling them going, I know what you've been through. I know what you're going through. Now I've been lying this whole time because I didn't.
That's not what happened to my dad. In a way, I almost still feel like I do know what it's like to lose someone to a heart attack because for 10 years, that was what I experienced. I grew up also in church. It's like, okay, God, why did you let my dad have a heart attack? Now it's like, well, why'd you let my dad get murdered?
I do wonder what my life would have been like had I not found out at that moment or not found out at all. My life is forever altered, not just emotionally, but also in a career kind of way. Anything that I felt like I wanted to do or was drawn to do really was now filtered through this. My dad was murdered and now I have to solve it.
I went to school then for communications instead of going for medicine. I decided that I wanted to work in film and television eventually with the hope of making a documentary about my dad's case in order to solve it. My career goals changed. I was always very funny. I was always making funny videos in high school and really, really comedic focused. And that also took a bit of a shift.
I had a really strong knack for digital content. And so if I could get people to care, I knew that there would be power in that. But I wasn't sure how to achieve that at the time. I found out about my dad's murder 12 years ago now. So it took a long time for me to really figure out the medium in which to do this. I first started racking my brain around, how do I tell this story?
I wasn't sure what it was going to be. I just knew that I needed to start diving in whenever I felt ready. And that happened to be during COVID, the shutdown, April, May of 2020. And I was like, okay, I have all of this spare time on my hands. I could probably read through a case file or two if I only had access. So I need to do that first. to get access to the police files.
I called the county that handled the case. I called them to get access. I had heard of FOIA, which is Freedom for Information Act, allowing you access to files. I don't know how it all works. I will say that when I called, I was like, this is my dad. I found out about his murder significantly later. I was a child. I'm just very curious what happened.
I still don't even really know beginning to end what transpired that morning. Would just love access to the case file. The front desk said, we send over the request immediately. to the prosecutor's office. They redact the file. They send it back to us. We send it to you. It takes about two and a half weeks. I was like, okay, cool. Sounds great.
I'll give it an extra two weeks because I know that these places actually move quite slow. But then a month went by. I didn't hear anything. Called back. She's like, yeah, we're waiting on the prosecutor's office. I was like, if I file a Freedom for Information Act, would I get the files right away? And she's like, oh, that's federal.
So there was no way even, according to this person, if I had filed a FOIA that I would even get the files. So I then went over her head and just called the prosecutor's office and said, I was just wondering what the holdup is. Is there anything I can do to expedite this process? That took about another two months before they finally emailed them over.
My initial contact was May of 2020, and I received the files in January of 2021. I got access to all the files, which took an incredibly long time and was very complicated, but I did end up getting a copy of what I would assume is one of the smallest case files I've ever seen in my life. I think that 36 pages is quite small.
Going through the case files was really strange because I lost my dad at such a young age that essentially I probably had like a year and a half of actual locked in memories with my dad. Reading through these case files, I'm almost learning more about my dad than I ever knew while he was alive. So that was kind of strange. And then also to read about it from a victim perspective.
This isn't like I'm reading someone writing up a retirement congratulations for my dad. This is his murder file. Reading through it takes half a day because it's such a small file. But I definitely was left with a lot of questions because it's so small and there's just so many holes in this file as far as there's so many people who could have killed my dad.
There's so many avenues that don't feel like they were explored enough or at all.
That's when I really decided now I need to start talking to people. Well, what do I do with that? Do I try to record it with my phone? Do I see if they'll let me interview them with my camera? How do you make a documentary with no budget? Podcasting is a natural next step because it's a little lighter of a lift now.
As far as crew requirements and gear requirements, in my case, it's very hard to get people to agree to go on camera. It's an open case. For all that we know, there's a murderer on the loose still. Maybe they've been arrested for something else or they're in prison for something else, but you don't know that.
So it's very tricky to get people to agree to sit down for an on-camera interview when they don't know where the killer is. I faced a lot of complications with that. So podcasts just became the natural progression. I started reaching out to the police department, the prosecutor's office who sent me the files and some family members and asked if they would be willing to talk to me
I couldn't just bank on traveling to the other side of the country and hoping that they would say yes. I had to really line up these interviews because I don't have a lot of time. It's very expensive to go and I didn't want to have to go back and forth. I reached out to some people ahead of time. I got a couple people to agree to meet with me.
In June of 2021, I went out and I started doing my first round of in-person interviews and collecting audio. Still really unsure about what it was going to be. Every time I go back to the area, there's a couple that I meet up with. They were working at the Narcotics Anonymous program with my dad. That's how they knew my dad.
They were one of the first people I got connected with when I started doing this. They did not ever want to be interviewed for the show, which I've been really respectful of. There's other people who knew my dad on the drug dealing side, which is a completely different side of him. My mom has her slew of stories of my dad that are also sort of very different from other people's perspective.
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