Jacinda Davis found her latest true-crime story because she wanted to go to a record store.
As a longtime (and Emmy Award-winning) producer of true crime television, Davis finds herself on the road much of the time. Searching for material for a new series, titled “The Killer in Question,” she looked to Michigan, because that’s where Jack White of the White Stripes has one of his Third Man Records shops. A little Googling and up popped an intriguing case: Jeff Titus, a former Marine and police officer, imprisoned for nearly two decades for the murder of two hunters in Michigan that the original detectives on the case were convinced he didn’t commit.
Susan Simpson, an attorney turned podcaster, heard about Titus from Davis. On her podcast, “Undisclosed,” Simpson and her co-hosts, Rabia Chaudry and Colin Miller, are “looking for times when the system got it wrong, where something needs to be fixed,” she said, “and where through us telling the story we can help advance the cause of justice.”
Now Davis and Simpson are telling the same tale. The new season of “Undisclosed” will cover the Titus case beginning Oct. 25 and running through January. And on Nov. 1, the debut episode of “The Killer in Question,” a two-hour documentary, will air on Investigation Discovery.
This collaboration is an unusual one. The more typical path sees a popular podcast adapted into a TV show, like “Dear John,” or a TV show spun off from a podcast for a deeper dive. And occasionally, projects on the same subject are released around the same time — think of Joe Exotic, subject of both a podcast and a Netflix series — but whose creators don’t work together.
“It’s a unique scenario,” said Kevin Fitzpatrick, president and executive producer at Red Marble Media, where Davis is an executive producer. “I could tell that Susan and Jacinda are of the same cloth. They are people who want to tell a great story. I knew that we could make a better television show with her help, and I think she believes she can make a better podcast with our help.”
“We felt that we would be able to generate more interest in the story if we all did it,” Fitzpatrick added.
Talking, texting and then teaming up.
Simpson and Davis first met at a rooftop bar in Washington, where Simpson lives, in the summer of 2019. They had heard of each other’s work and were getting together to talk about a different case that Simpson was working on for “Undisclosed.”
“We had a couple of drinks and talked murder for a long time,” Davis said. At some point, Davis brought up Titus, whose case she had been working on for several months; Simpson was fascinated. They agreed to keep in touch.
Then the pandemic hit.
Simpson and her colleagues found themselves stymied in fleshing out the stories they were considering for the podcast. But Davis was willing to share the reporting she’d already done on the Titus case, and Simpson felt confident enough in his innocence to pursue it for her podcast. The pair began texting and talking about the case, and in late September, they headed to Kalamazoo County, to jointly interview witnesses, detectives and anyone with anything to say about the case.
They’re not the most obvious collaborators. Simpson, 35, has misgivings about the true crime genre. So much of it is “really sensational,” she said. Growing up in Atlanta, she thought she might become a paleontologist so she could “sort and analyze bones.” Instead, she said, she ended up going to law school.
For her part, Davis, 48, who lives in Montclair, N.J., isn’t a huge podcast fan. “I don’t have a lot of time to listen,” she conceded.
But Davis is captivated by true crime stories. Her first internship after college was at “America’s Most Wanted,” and any plans to be a psychologist or social worker disappeared. Her three teenage sons are used to her macabre obsessions. “A lot of times the dinner conversation is about serial killers or murders,” she said.
Still, the two have found lots in common — a shared passion for storytelling, for ferreting out the truth, for following a case wherever it may lead — and after just a few weeks of reporting together in Michigan, they share the easy banter of longtime colleagues, finishing each others’s sentences during a joint interview. Both are intensely curious — Simpson is dying to check out a park for abandoned pet alligators that they keep driving by. Both are unflappable: Davis got flashed one day while the two women were interviewing a witness who came to the door of his trailer wearing nothing but a bathrobe, and then proceeded to sit down as his robe gaped. Simpson was spared the sight. “I was making eye contact,” she said with a laugh.
Both women told me, separately, about their shared discovery of the pastry called elephant ears, sold out of a small shop they drove past. “It’s like funnel cakes but covered in butter and cinnamon sugar,” Davis explained. “My new favorite food,” declared Simpson.
Avoiding the sensational in true crime.
Is it right to have so much fun researching such an ugly story? The ethics of true crime are a frequent topic among those who write about it. In Sarah Weinman’s recent anthology, “Unspeakable Acts,” crime narratives share space with essays that raise objections to the genre itself, especially in its sensationalized “damsel in distress” iteration.
Stories about crime that merely titillate can strike readers, viewers and listeners as voyeurism, with all the attraction and revulsion that implies. But work like “Undisclosed,” with its focus on exoneration, inhabit a different landscape than shows like “Snapped,” the Oxygen channel stalwart that seems to valorize murder, when undertaken by abused wives.
“There’s definitely two worlds of true crime,” Simpson said. Programs like “Snapped,” seem to her “really sensational. It’s not my thing. I would not be interested in working with someone who was portraying cases in that way.” Simpson prefers to do work that includes “an examination of the criminal justice system,” she added.
It’s into this more nuanced space that Davis’s new show arrives. Rather than simply recap a cut-and-dried case, “The Killer in Question” will ask whether the man in prison actually committed the crime, and if one set of detectives got the story very wrong. For Davis, the true crime work that she does is more about exploration than exploitation. “These are very personal stories told by people who were affected, who want to share their journey,” she said.
“And on a broader more human level,” she added, “these are essentially stories of loss and tragedy, of forgiveness and redemption. They’re stories we all know and experience but probably not on such a tragic level and it’s those emotional undercurrents that I think really resonate with women. It’s not really about the crime at all.”
The details of the Titus case.
In Jeff Titus’s case, the crime itself is relatively straightforward.
The bodies of Doug Estes and Jim Bennett were found on Nov. 17, 1990, in the woods of Kalamazoo County. The men had been hunting, separately, on a piece of land known as the Fulton State Game Area. The murders went unsolved until 2000, when cold case detectives took a closer look at a suspect cleared a decade earlier: Titus, a Marine veteran and police officer at a nearby Veterans Affairs hospital, whose land bordered the preserve on which the killings took place. Titus was convicted in 2002 and is currently incarcerated at Lakeland Correctional Facility, in Coldwater, Mich. He has always maintained his innocence.
“I can’t think of another case where there are two sets of detectives that don’t agree,” Davis said. “The original detectives in this case absolutely, 100 percent cleared Jeff Titus and believe he is not guilty. [They are the ones who took the case to the Michigan Innocence Clinic.] And the cold case team is the opposite. They believe beyond a doubt that they have the right man.”
Two days after the murders, Titus found a gun belonging to one of the victims. It had been wiped clean. The first set of detectives found that odd; the cold case team found it implicating. Titus’s co-workers at the hospital testified that he told them that he hated to see hunters walk across his land. There were plenty of witnesses against him; it seems he wasn’t well liked. Of course, as Simpson pointed out, “people who are unlikable are often easy targets for wrongful conviction.”
But Titus had an alibi. He had been hunting 27 miles away when the crimes were committed. Two witnesses saw a car stuck in a ditch right after two gunshots were heard, and offered to help the driver get out. One witness, a neighbor of Titus’s, said it definitely wasn’t him. Both contributed to a police sketch, which looks a lot like Thomas Dillon, a serial killer who was active in Ohio, the next state over, at the time. His modus operandi: killing hunters, fishermen and other outdoorsmen. (Dillon died while in prison for the murder of other hunters.)
Both Simpson and Davis hope their stories will prompt more people to come forward with information about the Estes and Bennett murders.
“Once we start, word gets around,” Simpson said. “In some cases people start calling in with information, which we can incorporate as time goes on.”
Davis agrees. “People want to talk, I think,” she said. “Memories change. Little details get lost. But over all, people remember.”
Naturally, the two have formed an opinion about Titus’s guilt. “The evidence in this case struck me as underwhelming to begin with,” Simpson said, “but you never know what’s going to turn up once you start investigating. After a month in Kalamazoo, everything I’ve found has confirmed the conclusions reached by the case’s initial investigators: The evidence for Jeff Titus’s guilt just isn’t there.”
Davis was cagier. “I flip flopped over the last year but definitely have a solid opinion now, but I want people to come to their own conclusions based on what they see in the show,” she said. “Ask me again after it airs.”
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