Gone South, the Edward R. Murrow award-winning podcast, is back. Unlike previous seasons, writer and host Jed Lipinski brings listeners new episodes every week with no end in sight. Each episode of Gone South Season 4 tells a different story about one of the South's most interesting crimes.
Full Episode
ramble hi everyone gone south the award-winning true crime documentary podcast series is back now with new episodes weekly tune in every week as writer and host jed lapinski shares a different story about one of the most interesting crimes that took place below the mason dixon line usually told by the person who committed the crime the person who solved it or both gone south not only sheds fascinating insights into the criminal mind but also into human nature enjoy this preview
In the 1990s, the most popular way to manufacture methamphetamine was the pseudoephedrine reduction method. Basically, this involved getting your hands on a lot of over-the-counter cold medicine like Sudafed, crushing up the pills, and mixing the powder with a solvent to isolate the pseudoephedrine inside. You then reduced it with chemicals like iodine or red phosphorus.
In just a few hours, you had methamphetamine. But before Sudafedrin came into fashion, meth cooks were limited to what's known as the P2P method. P2P stands for phenyl-2-propanone. It was the main precursor chemical used to manufacture meth. Meth cooks, whether they were making it in a lab or a bathtub, mixed P2P with other precursor chemicals to make the drug.
As meth gained popularity in the late 70s, though, phenyl-2-propanone was classified as a controlled substance, and the common precursors, like ether, were tightly restricted. Chemical companies started reporting suspicious orders to the DEA.
So in 1983, when a chemical manufacturer in New Jersey learned that an individual in Atlanta with no apparent connection to a laboratory or institution had just placed an order for 15 drums of ether, they immediately contacted the DEA. That's how Steve Peterson learned about it.
That's a lot of freaking ether. You've got to be making huge quantities to buy ether in that quantity. You know what I mean?
Not long after Steve joined the storefront, his team spoke with the ether manufacturer in New Jersey. They learned that Daryl was due to pick up all 15 drums from an Atlanta distributor in a few weeks' time. So DEA got permission to drop a tracking device, or what Steve calls a beeper, into one of the drums before Daryl picked them up.
I call it a beeper because this is before we had GPS. So this thing just emitted a signal, a beep, And you had to be line of sight in order to receive the beep. And you looked at it on a little screen, and it kind of looked like Pac-Man. You know, you followed the little dots. And if you were traveling, you would follow the little dots.
Okay, well, you must be turning left because the dots are turning left. Looking back now, it's almost as if we were in the Fred Flintstone days, judging from today's technology. But back then, this was all cutting-edge stuff.
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