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Crime Story Episode 29: Tristan Redman

Host: Kathleen Goldhar

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: The following episode contains difficult subject matter, including references to suicide. Please take care.

SOUNDCLIP

TRISTAN REDMAN: You can tell when somebody is obfuscating and you can feel it in your gut. And I can feel it in my gut with him that there is something that is deeply, deeply wrong.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I'm Kathleen Goldhar. This is Crime Story.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: A good ghost story, I mean, a really good ghost story can be just awesome. They endure. Think about A Christmas Carol or the movie Ghost for that matter. Good ghost stories are about so much more than the paranormal. The best ones offer those of us who are still alive a lesson of sorts. They speak to something that we're missing in the present. So while I do believe in the power of a good ghost story, I can't say that I believe in ghosts. And neither did journalist Tristan Redman, until one day when he connected a memory of weird happenings in his bedroom that he lived in as a teenager with a murder in his wife's family. Tristan turned his investigation into a fantastic, gripping, brilliant podcast called Ghost Story.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Tristan, welcome to Crime Story.

TRISTAN REDMAN: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And first, congratulations on winning the Emmy for the best documentary podcast of the year. That's pretty exciting.

TRISTAN REDMAN: Yeah, yeah, it is pretty exciting. I've just got back from L.A., and it was a bit of a whirlwind. It was really. I don't think I've won anything since I was maybe in like Swimming Club when I was 12 or something. It was quite fun.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Well, that's a pretty great next one to win as an adult. Speaking of the podcast and documentary, I mean, your background really is in news, right? So how did you find yourself making a documentary style podcast?

TRISTAN REDMAN: Oh, by complete coincidence, by a ridiculous series of lucky happenings, basically. I normally work in TV news, and I cover, I cover, you know, like European news, things happening in France, or like, you know, I go to Ukraine, Middle East, North Africa, that kind of thing. And I have never made a piece of audio journalism ever before in my life. So this was the first one. And basically, I was on holiday a few years ago with some journalist friends in Spain, and we were literally, you know, sitting around a table late at night telling each other stories. And my wife was like, tell, tell them the ghost story. So I told them the ghost story. And then she said, tell them the story about the murder in the house next door. So I did. And all these journalists around the table were like, oh my God, you have to find out if the two things are linked. It's a podcast. And I was like, oh yeah, maybe it is a podcast. And then from that moment on, I was just kind of hooked. And I, you know, I called a friend of mine who linked me up almost immediately with this guy called Joel Level, who's this incredible podcast editor in New York. And Joel was like, that's a great story. Let's make it. So very quickly, that was what we were doing. It was great.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I have to admit, when I first hit play on it, I was like, I hope this isn't just a ghost story. And it was so nicely told. And it was done with such a smart, elevated way of telling a story. So if people out there haven't heard it, I really encourage them to listen to it because it's surprising and gorgeous and smart, and yeah, congratulations. It's a great podcast. So let's just start at the beginning. And it start where you start in the podcast, which is in the bedroom of your home when you're a teenager, right? So what's happening at night in your room?

TRISTAN REDMAN: That's right. So basically…

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And it’s PG. We'll let everyone know that we're not talking about like teenage bedrooms.

TRISTAN REDMAN: Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I mean, there were definitely things happening in my bedroom. So I'm like 16, 17, and my family moved to London. This is the first time I ever lived in the U.K. And they moved into this kind of old, rickety Victorian house in southwest London, in a place called Richmond. And weird things used to happen in my bedroom. So like things used to move around the room. Not like they would fly through the air in front of my eyes, but there would be things that would move around. Like I'd go to sleep and, you know, there was this, particularly this yellow vase, that it would be on the little mantelpiece in the room, and I'd wake up in the morning and it would be like on the desk or the bedside table. And then I’d come back later in the day and it would be on the other table. And it took me a while to work out that anything was actually happening, because it was just the feeling of like over the course of many months, I was like, why am I always putting this stupid vase back on the mantelpiece? And then eventually, like I started noticing weird things with like lights. They would switch themselves on and off. I'd be like, I'm sure I turned that light off when there was no one else in the house, that kind of thing. So it was just this feeling that things were a bit weird. And eventually, after a while, I confronted my sister about it because she slept like me on the very top floor of this house. And I'd say, like are you doing this stuff to freak me out? And she'd be like, no, stop going on about it. So she denied it, but it carried on for several years. And then eventually, my parents sold the house. And I never thought about it again until a good 15 years later, almost, when we were contacted by an old neighbour of ours who's a family friend who's also kind of like a local historian who had found out by complete coincidence that the two families who lived in the house after us had also experienced weird things on the top floor of the house.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And the weird things that they experienced were kind of, at least some of them were a bit scarier than what you experienced.

TRISTAN REDMAN: Yes, totally. My experiences would be anodyne compared to theirs. Basically, the most recent occupant of the room was a young woman who'd slept in there for about 10 years, and she had been telling her mother that she saw a faceless woman who would appear to her in the room at night. Now, I never saw anything like that. For me, it was just these weird things I couldn't quite put my finger on. And I should emphasize here that I don't believe in ghosts. I'm like you, right? I'm also not, generally speaking, interested in ghost stories at all. Because for me, like a ghost story is something that has a beginning, but doesn't often have a middle or an end. Like it's just a strange, uncanny thing that appears, but it doesn't lead anywhere.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah.

TRISTAN REDMAN: But when I found out about the other people in my room, it was hard not to think, oh my God, have we actually discovered some sort of proof of the afterlife? But yeah, this young woman had definitely experienced something a bit more frightening. But we then made the link, of course, with what had happened in the house next door, because by complete coincidence, my wife's great grandmother was murdered in the house next door in 1937, and she was murdered by being shot in the face. So the presence of a faceless woman in the bedroom that I slept in was really quite disturbing and arresting.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: How did you learn that you had this uncomfortable connection to your wife's family?

TRISTAN REDMAN: So I guess the first thing I should say is that although my wife's family had lived in this neighbourhood in the 1930s, they no longer had any attachment to it by the time I met Kate at University. And she came to stay at my house, and randomly, her grandfather came over for lunch because he just happened to be passing through town, and she was very close to her grandfather. And he came to the house, he walked through the front door, and the first thing he said when he came to the front door was, my mother was murdered in the house next door. And poor guy, you know, I don't think he really knew where he was going for lunch. Like he had just been invited around to lunch, and he was meeting his lovely granddaughter's random boyfriend. And I think he must have been pretty shocked when he turned up at that address.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Did Kate, who became your wife, she wasn't then, know? I mean, I know she knew that her great grandmother obviously had been killed, but did she know that it was in the house next door? Or was she finding that out for the first time too?

TRISTAN REDMAN: She was finding that out for the first time too.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Wow.

TRISTAN REDMAN: She had no idea. And, you know, like she wasn't even that familiar with the murder story. You know, it was a thing that people knew about in the periphery of their imagination and minds in the family, but it wasn't something that was talked about or really anyone knew. And, you know, the details of the story were a bit hazy. So yeah, it was the first time she knew about it.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And let's just stop and talk about your wife's family, because I mean, they were quite the accomplished family.

TRISTAN REDMAN: Yeah. So the Dancys are a pretty intimidating bunch when you start going out with one of their daughters. So my wife is, she's a diplomat at the United Nations, has been a British diplomat. She's a very impressive woman. I probably would say that, but she really is. And her father is a philosopher, a moral philosopher called Jonathan Dancy, who if you, you know, are in the rather small world of moral philosophy, is a very big deal. And he even has his own school of philosophy. It's called Moral Particularism. And my wife's brother is a Hollywood actor called Hugh Dancy, who's been in a bunch of stuff. He's currently in Law & Order in the United States, but he's also, you know, he was in Black Hawk Down and various other films. And, well, you know, I've been kind of part of the family for 20 years or so, but it did take me definitely a few good years before I felt not intimidated by these people.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I’m sure.

TRISTAN REDMAN: Because they are a very impressive bunch.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And then Naomi and her husband, who went by the name of Feyther, tell me about the two of them.

TRISTAN REDMAN: Sure. Yeah. So the murdered great grandmother was called Doctor Naomi Dancy, and she was a kind of pioneering female doctor in the interwar years. And her husband was this guy who's known in the family as Feyther. His name was Doctor John Dancy, and he is kind of the founding father of the Dancys as they are today. He was a kind of international man of mystery, a musician, a magician, a spy, a bit of an all-round kind of hero to many people in the family. And he was a guy, above all, who had the gift of a gab. So they were pretty extraordinary couple. But the interesting is that Doctor Naomi Dancy, who was murdered, is not really very well known in the family, and Feyther very, very much is. So yeah, he's still a larger than life character in the family memory.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And we'll get to that, because I think one of the more profound things your podcast does is it does bring Naomi to life. It does tell us more about who she is and gives her a little bit more of a place in the family history than she had before, which is important. But who killed Naomi? What do we know about the murderer?

TRISTAN REDMAN: Well, I mean, that is a central question of the podcast. There is significant doubt over who killed Doctor Naomi Dancy. The official murderer was her brother, who then supposedly went on and killed himself immediately afterwards. And his motive was that he was a troubled PTSD suffering or shellshocked veteran, as they were known in those days, from the First World War, who had problems with alcohol and possibly drugs, and was temporarily staying in the house with his sister and supposedly was jealous of her comfortable family life and her kind of middle class existence and also supposedly jealous of her eyes because he was going blind. He'd lost one eye in the First World War. He was losing the sight in his second. And Naomi, as it happens, was known for her particularly striking big blue eyes. And allegedly, that's why her brother chose to kill her by shooting her in the eyes before then locking himself in the laboratory and killing himself. But there is significant doubt about the veracity of that story. Now, the doubt was not something that was in the family consciousness. It came about much, much later. But there are some significant questions about the behaviour of her husband, Feyther. And that's really what we kind of delve into in the show.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: What even starts you questioning the official line of who killed Naomi?

TRISTAN REDMAN: So I think it was 48 hours before I found out this strange coincidence about the people in my bedroom and the possible ghost. My wife found this article online, on the National Archives website in the United Kingdom, and it was basically an archivist at the National Archives who'd uncovered this police file from the murder in 1937 and read it and was like, whoa, that is crazy. What's going on here? And she wrote this article in which she basically asked the question, was it a murder suicide, or was it in fact a double murder by Naomi's husband, Doctor John Dancy? And she highlights a bunch of strange bits of evidence in this article. One is that there was a life insurance policy that had just been taken out on Naomi's life just before the murder for a significant amount of money. There were anonymous letters that were written to the cops about, from people who suspected that John Dancy may have been the actual killer. And there were these odd bits of evidence where Feyther, Doctor John Dancy, he appears to actually tamper with bits of evidence. And then there's the rather kind of strange detail, which is that he gets remarried very quickly after the murder. So all of these things together led to a lot of doubt about who the actual killer was. And so that's what we started digging into. And we found some really quite extraordinary things about who my wife's great grandfather actually was, and that essentially, his life was mostly just a rich tapestry of lies.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: How so?

TRISTAN REDMAN: I mean, I guess the kind of origin story lie is that he did not go to Cambridge University, which sounds like a small thing. Like who cares? But the family I married into, the Dancys, they are a family of academics and educationists, for whom that origin story is really important. So he tells this lie about where he was educated, which was quite easy to disprove. But then there's all sorts of other stuff, like he is known in the family as a magician and a member of the Magic Circle, which is, you know, this like famous club for magicians in London. Now, we found no trace of him at the Magic Circle whatsoever. He tells these stories about him as a songwriter, to the extent that he tells stories about particularly which songs he has written, including this one called Cruising Down the River, which was like a number one hit in the like early 50s, I feel like, in the U.S. It was covered by Frank Sinatra. He didn't write that song, nor did he write any of the songs that he said he wrote. So, you know, this is kind of tissue of lies that goes throughout his life story. You know, the big question is really whether or not he was actually in the Secret Service at all. And, you know, he tells this 3000 page long story about his time serving in MI5 and MI6, and there is no trace of him whatsoever in the MI5 and MI6 archives. And, you know, there are academics who we spoke to who, you know, doubt that he was ever involved as a spy in any way. So there's enormous number of lies.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: In fact, you find direct plagiarisms.

TRISTAN REDMAN: Yeah. So a lot of his, a lot of his memoirs were directly plagiarized from historians. You know, he just lifts whole passages from historians of the Secret Service and just, you know, dumps them down in his memoir and hopes for the best. But yeah, why anyone would tell so many lies about their life is, you know, just enormously sad to me. Like what on earth was he trying to hide? So then it becomes a question of like what was compelling these untruths? Was this the sign of a person who maybe murdered his wife and his brother-in-law and his whole life has been a kind of cover up of that crime? Or were his lies to do with the trauma, his own trauma from the First World War and deep depression? And, you know, like so many people in this story, the shadow of the First World War really bears down on them. And it's kind of the… it's kind of the mood music of the whole show really, is the impact of the First World War.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah, that's very clear and present in it. And it's interesting that I, you know, I think that detectives at the time of the murder and all that weren't as aware of, you know, going to war and what can happen to human beings, with PTSD and all that. And one of the things that you do do, because the crime scene itself is complicated by the fact that Maurice, the brother, is found dead, supposedly by his own hand slicing his throat, which is a very violent and difficult way to die, behind a locked door. So can you tell me about what you looked into? Like how would it have been possible that Feyther had killed her if the official murderer was behind a locked door?

TRISTAN REDMAN: So we spent a lot of time talking to homicide detectives from the United States, from Canada, from Britain. And one of the most tricky bits of evidence, as you say, is this idea that if Maurice Tribe, the brother-in-law, had been murdered, then it was very complex for Feyther, the would be murderer, to then get out of the locked room. The only way he could have done it would have been climbing back out the window, down a drainpipe, coming back through the house, and then waking up the housekeeper who was upstairs in the house, because she witnesses him breaking down the door. And that really would have been the only way he could have done it, which is an enormously elaborate set up and required everything to go right and absolutely nothing to go wrong. And that's, you know, that's something which is really a strong part of the case for the defence for Feyther, is that, you know, could you really imagine such a scenario and then enact it without anything going wrong? So yeah, that's the kind of locked door, the locked door element of the story, which is made even more interesting by the fact that, you know, in the 1930s, is a time known as the golden age of detective fiction, when, you know, like Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers and G.K. Chesterton are huge household names in Britain. And people are really, really into the detective stories, including, as it turns out, my wife's great grandfather. So he was obsessed with detective fiction, especially Dorothy Sayers, who's a famous detective writer. And he actually calls her about two weeks after the murder. He cold calls her at home and basically says, hi, I'm doctor John Dancy. You may have heard of the murder that happened in my house. Would you like to come around and see the scene of the crime? And Dorothy Sayers is so disturbed by this phone call that she writes a transcript of their conversation and sends it immediately afterwards to Scotland Yard and says, I just thought you ought to know that this guy, Doctor John Dancy, phoned me, and this is the conversation we had. Do you think this is a bit strange? And Scotland Yard look at the transcript and they write back to her and say, nothing to see here. Move along. And they just completely overlook this very bizarre bit of evidence.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: It's so bizarre. I can understand, when there's a locked door from the inside and the dead body, it looks like he committed suicide, why the police would reach that conclusion. But you worked really hard to try to at least make us think that there is another possibility. So what evidence or what things did you uncover that sort of brought you to the idea that the answer is just not as clear?

TRISTAN REDMAN: Well, I guess the most glaring bit of evidence for me inside that room is that the brother-in-law, Maurice Tribe, supposedly locks himself inside there, and he's holding a revolver with three rounds in it. And then if the official story is to be believed, then chooses to cut his throat, which is an incredibly improbable thing to do, because killing yourself by cutting your own throat is both very painful and very traumatic. And who on earth would choose to do that if they also had a revolver? So that's an incredibly glaring and suspicious bit of evidence there. Then you've also got the tampering with the knife. So supposedly, the door is knocked in after Maurice has killed himself, and then Feyther tampers with the bits of evidence. He cleans the blood off Maurice’s hands, and he puts the knife back in the hands. Now, there's no explanation that we can think of for having done that other than he's trying to hide something. On the other side of the equation, you have the fact that the pathologist found that there were hesitation marks on Maurice’s neck. Now, those are like the little attempts to cut your neck before you actually do it. And that yeah, they’re marks of hesitation or trial. And the pathologist's view was that Maurice Tribe must have killed himself because these were, you know, classic hesitation wounds. But then when we spoke to some members of the family, they said to us, well, this guy, Doctor John Dancy, was a surgeon. And not only was he a surgeon, but he was a police surgeon. So he was a doctor who would go to crime scenes with police officers, and he would like certify people dead, for example. And therefore, he would very probably know what hesitation wounds would look like. And in the words of one of my wife's relatives, if he had wanted to fake hesitation wounds, he would have known how to have done so. So it's an incredibly complex but fascinating case. And we got the impression, as we were investigating it, that we had really stumbled across one of the kind of great 20th century crime mysteries. We had no idea that it was going to be that way when we started out on this journey, but the kind of further and further we went, it really seemed like, you know, this was kind of an Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers esque murder that felt like it had been set up. You know, it's just so incredibly complex and indecipherable. It was fascinating.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: How did your wife's family handle this? I mean, Feyther was somebody that they held up as important to their family history. How did they react to all of this?

TRISTAN REDMAN: Well, it was hard. It was. It was definitely hard. You know, the thing about an investigation is you don't know at the beginning what you know at the end. So we sort of fairly jollily set off down the road of doing interviews and talking about who Feyther was and who Naomi was without really knowing where we would land. And I think as the process went on, I think there were certain members of the family who were like, why have we agreed to do this? Which I can totally understand because it's, you know, it's a difficult thing to have these conversations anyway, but to do it with a microphone in front of your face, for something which is going to be for public consumption, is incredibly testing. And they were very, very patient. And it was a huge leap of faith that they had to take to agree to keep speaking with us about this investigation. And, you know, I don't think that where we landed in the end is to the liking of everyone in the family. I think some people have found it really, really hard because, you know, there are people in the family alive today who knew Doctor John Dancy, who knew Feyther. You know, he was their grandfather. And they would, you know, they'll have sat at tables with him at Christmas and other times of the year. And, you know, they remember him. And it's hard for them not to think, you know, who the hell are you? You're some guy who married into the family. You didn't actually know this man. And you're telling me that this person that I knew that you didn't might have been a murderer? And I can understand why that's very, very hard to get your head around. And yeah, I mean, I'm very grateful that they were so patient and participated in something that they didn't ask for. Was really hard.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: One of the things that I love so much about long form podcasting is you're able to sort of take a person and develop them in their entirety. And one of the things you do so nicely with Feyther is that you actually show the other side of him. Like he was a prolific liar. You do say he really was a doctor, so that is true. But you spoke to his daughter, Bindle, who was quite a character. And tell me a bit about what she told you about him as a father, because that does round him out as a person. He's not just this conniving con man to everyone.

TRISTAN REDMAN: No, he's not. So we met Bindle, who's now, I think, 99 years old and lives in the United States. And she spoke incredibly fondly and warmly about her dad. She said that he was the best father in the world. And we during the course of our reporting, we uncovered a trove of family letters that were written to the children by Feyther through the 1930s. And the man that we uncovered in those letters was, I mean, I'll just say it straight. He was a much better father than I am. I have two daughters. And if I could be as attentive, devoted and thoughtful a dad as he is, then my daughters would be very lucky. You know, he's a man whose entire existence seems to be, seemed to be geared towards the well-being and the education of his kids. And, you know, we didn't uncover any evidence of a coercive relationship with his wife, for example, or an abusive relationship with his wife. But as someone said to me, I don't know if this is a fair comparison, but like even horrible people, their children can think they're wonderful. So is the evidence that he's a fantastic father evidence that he could not have been a murderer? I don't know, but definitely, it really tore me, this idea that we'd been engaging in this investigation to deconstruct who this person was and then seeing a totally different side to him. It really knocked me for six, I would say.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I'm sure you've been asked this, but what do you think? Do you think it was Feyther, or do you think it was Maurice?

TRISTAN REDMAN: I mean, honestly, I flip flop every day on this question because it still kind of consumes me even though it's been like six months since we wrapped the show. Yeah, I think about it every single day, and I haven't settled in any one place. I think on a balance of probability, to me, it feels more likely that Feyther did it than not, but we cannot know for sure. I think that one thing I found very interesting about it is that it's not the big ticket items of evidence that I find the most disturbing. So, you know, like the, you know, the tampering with evidence, the insurance policy, all of that, you know, those are really disturbing things. But to me, it's the little items that we almost weren't even really able to talk about in the show because they require too much explanation. But he's a guy who you can see in his everyday actions, he's always often engaged in like covering things up. You can see little details where the only reason you can think of that he is doing what he's doing is that he is covering his tracks for some lie somewhere. And you see him doing that time and time again around the murder. And none of these things taken individually are enough evidence on their own to say he definitely did it. But you can tell when somebody is obfuscating and you can feel it in your gut. And I can feel it in my gut with him that there is something that is deeply, deeply wrong. And it's perfectly possible to say whatever is deeply wrong is, you know, the remnants of some trauma from the First World War. But I see there's so much of it, you know? You know, one of the things we uncovered in the bulletins was him talking about treating his brother-in-law about a month before the murder. And one of the ideas was that if he killed his brother-in-law, that the brother-in-law probably had to have been sedated in some way, because, you know, he would have struggled otherwise, and there was no sign of a struggle. And anyway, about a month before the murder, he says to the children in a letter, I've given Maurice an injection to keep him quiet, and now he's sleeping soundly. Which we thought was incredibly disturbing in the context of the murder. And then the other day, I was exercising, and I was thinking about this for some reason, and it suddenly came to me. I was like, this is a guy who's quite often engaged in covering his own tracks. Okay, so what would he be worried about here? He'd be worried that some kind of toxicology test might be done, and that they might uncover some trace of some sort of sedative in his brother-in-law's body, in which case, he would need a reason to explain that. And maybe, maybe a month before the murder, he says this thing to the kids to create a paper trail of like I've been giving him sedatives. So if you find something in his body, then, you know, that's not suspicious because it's just what I was doing. And, you know, all these little bits of evidence just keep popping up at me, and I can never really be quite, you can never be certain. You know, it’s never enough to say for sure, but there is enough to be incredibly disturbed by it.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Can we just talk a little bit more about Naomi? Because she really was, you know, John Dancy was so sort of disappointing in reality, but she was not. She was a really spectacular person. Can you tell me more about her?

TRISTAN REDMAN: Yes. So she was a pioneering doctor at a time when there were very, very few female doctors. She was very little known in the family because she was really overshadowed by the memory of her husband. But we basically spent time in archives trying to track down who she really was, and we found out a certain amount about her. So she was a very well-known public health official in London in the 1920s and 1930s. But she also did an enormous amount of work for, especially for poor kids and mothers in the East End of London in the 20s and 30s. She worked very closely with a woman called Lady Cynthia Colville, who was like the Queen's lady in waiting. And together, they set up a kind of clinic, a Sexual health Mothers and Babies clinic in East London that was very famous. When Naomi Dancy is killed, Colville writes a letter to the Times in which, you know, she praises Naomi Dancy for her incredible achievements. And she really was not only a kind of woman ahead of her time in terms of her role in the medical profession, but was just an incredibly selfless, good person. She was portrayed sometimes by her husband as being rather hard and potentially quite preachy. That's, you know, that's kind of the legacy she has to some extent in the family. But when you read her words, you know, we uncovered some of the letters she wrote to the children. She just seemed like an incredibly kind and gentle woman, as well as being very publicly impressive. So it was pretty special to find out a lot more about her and try and kind of bring her memory back, because she's been overshadowed for too long by this husband of hers.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah. And you mentioned your daughters and their connection to her.

TRISTAN REDMAN: Yes. So Naomi Dancy, you know, we have a few pictures of her, and she has these incredibly large and striking blue eyes. And the thing that's really stuck with me is that my youngest daughter, Maxine, who's six years old, has exactly the same eyes as her. So when I, you know, there are certain photographs in particular, when I look at Maxine, I think of Naomi, which is pretty remarkable, really, to think that there is something of Naomi still around, because it seems like a very long time since she disappeared. But that was definitely an important impetus and motivation for me, was seeing that link between my own daughters and her.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: What about the ghosts? Where did you go with that? Because that's how you start, and it is a ghost story. So what about the ghosts?

TRISTAN REDMAN: Well, you know, in two years of investigating this story, I never saw anything which made me think we've cracked it. The paranormal definitely exists, right? You know, we met a lot of ghost hunters and psychic mediums and stuff along the way, and I never once, having a conversation with them, thought I can explain what's going on here. Like I'm not a ghost believer as a result of this story. But I think the lesson I picked up along the way was when someone's telling you a ghost story, they're trying to tell you something important, something that means something to them, and that you should listen to what they're trying to say to you. They might not know what the significance of that story is themselves. Like I don't really know what the significance of the things moving around my room was. Like was, you know, was this just all in my head? But it was something that marked me. And if somebody tells you a ghost story, it's something that's marked them. And it pays to be patient and listen to them. So I'm a lot more open minded about the question than I was, even if I don't actually believe in ghosts.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Well, on that note, I think we're going to leave it. And thank you for this conversation.

TRISTAN REDMAN: Thank you so much for having me. It's been really fun.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: You've been listening to Crime Story from CBC Podcasts. We drop a new episode every Monday. You can get our next episode a week early on CBC Podcasts’ YouTube channel or by subscribing to the CBC Podcasts’ true crime channel on Apple Podcasts. In addition to Early Access, subscribers to our true crime channel also listen ad free. Crime Story is written and hosted by me. Our producers are Alexis Green and Sarah Claydon. Sound design by Graham MacDonald. Our senior producer is Geoff Turner. Our video producer is Evan Aagaard. Our YouTube producer is Jon Lee. Executive producers are Cesil Fernandes and Chris Oke. Tanya Springer is CBC Podcasts’ senior manager, and Arif Noorani is the director of CBC Podcasts.

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Transcript: Crime Story, Episode 29

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