Blood Memory from Love and Radio

From our friends at Love and Radio, the groundbreaking new series Blood Memory https://loveandradio.org/2026/02/blood-memory/. In this first episode, two women meet the same man in prison and walk away with decidedly different impressions of him. “Sometimes, if you want something great, you have to make a lot of sacrifices.” You can listen to the rest of the series over at the Love and Radio https://loveandradio.orgpodcast! Stay tuned after this episode for an interview with Love and Radio creator Nick van der Kolk and Snap Producer John Fecile. This episode featured the voices of Ariel, Heather Brown and Michael Thompson. The series producer is Meera Kumar. Robin Amer is the Managing Editor with additional reporting by Brian Krans and Anya Schultz. Fact checking by Nicole Pasulka. Bill Rohlfing provided the voice of the radio announcer. This episode featured music from: The Lighthouse Trembles – Natalia Beylis – Mermaids https://nataliabeylis.bandcamp.com/track/the-lighthouse-trembles Mind Shifts – Michel Banabila – The Unreal Realm https://banabila.bandcamp.com/track/mind-shifts Acqua – Las Olas – Las Olas https://loveandradio.org/2026/02/blood-memory/%22https://tambien.bandcamp.com/track/acqua%3C/a Not In Our Name – Pierre Bastien & Michel Banabila – Nuits Sans Nuit https://banabila.bandcamp.com/track/not-in-our-name Vertigo – Zoroxxe – Zoroxxe https://soundcloud.com/tambi3n/vertigo Mermaids – Natalia Beylis – Mermaids https://nataliabeylis.bandcamp.com/track/mermaids Après La Pluie – Memory Scale – And All Things Begin to Drift https://ab-memoryscale.bandcamp.com/track/apr-s-la-pluie Revoluciones (mirco) – Zoroxxe – Zoroxxe http://soundcloud.com/zoroxxe/07-zoroxxe-revoluciones-micro Good Grief – Sereptie – Sulpher’s End https://sereptie.bandcamp.com/track/good-grief Intemperie – Glitch Bird – Intemperie https://glitchbird.bandcamp.com/track/intemperie A Listening Voice – Russ Young – Cloak https://russyoung.bandcamp.com/track/a-listening-voice La Inmanencia del Ser – Interspecifics – Reducción https://tambien.bandcamp.com/track/la-inmanencia-del-ser Tigre de Papel (feat. King Klavé) – Quixosis – Zen & Caro https://quixosis.bandcamp.com/track/tigre-de-papel-feat-king-klav Chanclas de Mercurio – Quixosis – Zen & Caro https://quixosis.bandcamp.com/track/chanclas-de-mercurio-2 Sentimental, Sedimentary – Dialect – Under~Between https://dialect-trax.bandcamp.com/track/sentimental-sedimentary Vertigo – Zoroxxe – Zoroxxe https://soundcloud.com/tambi3n/vertigo Lágrimas de Sangre II – Ezmeralda -Patrimonio Inmaterial de la Nada https://eezzmmeerraallddaa.bandcamp.com/track/l-grimas-de-sangre-ii The Process from Birth – Michel Banabil – The Unreal Realm https://banabila.bandcamp.com/track/the-process-from-birth Paisaje Oblícuo – Zoroxxe – Zoroxxe https://soundcloud.com/tambi3n/2-paisaje-oblicuo We’ll Find Out – Timber Timbre – Timber Timbre https://timbertimbrefth.bandcamp.com/track/well-find-out dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices https://dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:08Glynn Washington?

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• 1:21Speaker 01

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• 1:53Glynn Washington?

  Snap Nation, this very special snap comes from my dear friend Nick Vanderkolk, the maker of the legendary podcast Love and Radio, which might just be the second best show in the universe, you know, after Snap and everything. But Nick, he's interviewed some wild people over the years. For this latest series, a 10-part epic called Blood Memory, Nick has outdone himself. Love and Radio has always been a weird show in the best way. Nick drops you into the deep end of the story, lets you figure out what's going on, one breath at a time, and Blood Memory is no exception. It's a story about justice, about manipulation, about memory. It's about the truth standing just out of

• 2:38Glynn Washington?

  view. It's also a story about the narratives we build, the ones that can heal us and the ones that hurt us. Blood Memory is a culmination of more than a decade of interviews and research by Nick and his collaborators, and it just won the Best Nonfiction Podcast Award at the Tribeca Festival. Today's episode is torn from real life, and due to the nature of the story, it does contain cursing, descriptions of violence, including domestic violence, and references to drug use. Snap Judgment is proud to present Love and Radio's Blood Memory. Stay tuned afterward for an interview with show creator Nick Vanderkolk and Snap producer John Faseal.

• 3:21Speaker 02

  You find out what your beliefs are when they're put to the test. If they don't stand up to the test, then you damn well better reevaluate to determine what your beliefs actually are. Because otherwise, you're just living a facade. When you step forward and take a stand for something, there's intimate knowledge associated with that stand. Elsewise, you wouldn't be taking it. You see? My intent is not to stand against anything, but stand for.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  And there's a difference. It's about relationship. Whether you're riding a 2,000 pound bull that doesn't want you on its back, or you're in a knife fight. There's an intimacy there.

• 4:09Speaker 03

  Can you think of a specific example of a fight that you were in where you especially felt that sense of intimacy and connectedness with the person you were fighting with?

• 4:18Speaker 02

  Sure. I took a knife away from a guy once that was intent on killing me. Felt that as I was getting ready to walk by him. And then I just took his arm and I pushed it into the bars. And he had a knife in it. So I held him there and took the knife away from him. I took him down. And he pled for his life. He begged me.

• 4:42Speaker 03

  You were holding him down on the ground or what?

• 4:43Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 4:44Speaker 03

  With the knife to his throat?

• 4:45Speaker 02

  Hmm, close. He wasn't going to move. Choice was mine. With imprisoned culture, I would have been perfectly within my rights to take his life. Because he was going to take mine. But that's not how I see it. And that's where ethics comes in. And the intimacy associated with that is I made a decision not to take his life. And there was no need. I choked up on the knife and I tattooed a circle around his heart. Lasting circle. And that was a very intimate act.

• 5:19Speaker 03

  I hope this doesn't sound like a weird question, but the way that you talk about people you've had fights with, it almost sounds like you're talking about past lovers or something. And does it feel like that to you at all?

• 5:29Speaker 02

  Isn't that great? I think that's great.

• 5:43Speaker 04

  From Love and Radio, you're listening to Blood Memory. I'm Nick Vanderkolk. This is episode one. Calipatria.

• 5:54Speaker 04

  Everybody dreams of having a great love in their life.

• 5:58Speaker 04

  They have daydreams about being heroic or whatever. But that's a dream. If they ever have to test their mettle of being courageous or heroic or having a great love, I think most people will not make it. Our real motives, our real desires are for comfort, security, having things be easy, pleasant. I can't blame anybody. That's just human.

• 6:28Speaker 04

  But sometimes if you want something great, you have to make a lot of sacrifices.

• 6:41Speaker 03

  Chapter 1. Ariel.

• 6:45Speaker 04

  My first memory as a child was a flower farm across the street.

• 6:51Speaker 04

  There were acres and acres of Hawaiian flowers. I grew up in the 50s and 60s in Hawaii, mostly in Honolulu. I was a flower child, quite naturally, because I was born and raised surrounded by flowers. It was just really laid back. And as a matter of fact, I didn't like it because it was too laid back for my personality. I was just a very uncomfortable person probably to be around and not very Japanese. I don't think I was really well-liked even in my own family. As I grew up, I found out that there was another whole world out there, outside of the islands, and how people were living there, that's so different from how I was living. And I wanted to experience that. I wanted to be there. I just felt like I'd probably fit in better.

• 7:36Speaker 04

  So when I got a chance, finally, I did move.

• 7:41Speaker 04

  After I left, I persisted in my flower child kind of mentality. I was a poet, teaching children in schools, you know, how to write poetry.

• 7:51Speaker 04

  I saw something that disturbed me and that was that, you know, all children seemed to be gifted with unlimited potential when they were younger. It didn't really matter whether they were rich or poor, or black or white, or brown or yellow, it didn't matter whether they were male or female. It didn't matter, they were all just so full of curiosity and positivity and potential. But by the time they were in, I would say by 7th grade, sometimes earlier, it was all different. You could see which kids were not going to succeed and which kids were going to succeed. It was very clear.

• 8:31Speaker 04

  I got a grant, a small federal grant, to teach in a school in East Palo Alto. Now today, East Palo Alto is a zip code. I mean, it is a good place to live. It's full of tech people who have a lot of money. And now, East Palo Alto is a happening place. But when I was teaching, it was full of poor black people, all herded into this one little area. So I went in there, and these were 7th graders. I'm so short, I mean, I had 7th graders who were like a foot taller than me. And classrooms full of children, very unhappy with their education and very jaded by the time they're in the 7th grade, that's so sad. I was told point blank, "You're never going to have these kids,

• 9:15Speaker 04

  sit still for 15 minutes to do a lesson in poetry. Are you kidding me right now? But go ahead, you got the money, go ahead." They just kind of threw me to the lions. And they did think that I was going to be eaten up and spit out very quickly.

• 9:34Speaker 04

  They said, "I know that you probably just walk to and from school trying to not look around you, but I want you to look around you tomorrow. And for the rest of the week, I want you to look around for beauty. And the beauty that you see, bring it to class and share it." In order to help them, because I thought that in the beginning they wouldn't really believe me, so I went through the neighborhood and I found wildflowers and little shiny things that somebody had thrown away. And I brought them into the classroom and showed it to them and told them what I thought was beautiful about them. They just weren't wrapped. The rest of the week, they would come to class bearing in their arms or their hands some little thing that they found, flowers, a rock, and they were writing beautiful poetry.

• 10:17Speaker 04

  They acted like nobody had ever asked them about who they were as a person and an individual. They just woke up. They were so engaged. In fact, I had one teacher tell me that, "These kids are writing poetry during recess." And she couldn't believe it. People have it in them, and if they're ever recognized for being an individual, you know, and having something to say and having their feelings validated and valued, they would do it.

• 10:47Speaker 04

  About 1986 or so, I quit it. I just couldn't take it anymore. I had a really hard time with the individual suffering I saw because of systemic failures. And I thought, "Do I really want to be a poet?" And I realized, "No, I'm just lost."

• 11:07Speaker 03

  Did you have a plan?

• 11:08Speaker 04

  No. I had no plan. I'm not a very planful person, really. I tend to do things with great passion until I burn out, and then I have to reassess. That's just my nature.

• 11:26Speaker 03

  So like, what did drifting around look like?

• 11:28Speaker 04

  It started one day in a cave. I will never forget.

• 11:31Speaker 03

  Sorry, a cave?

• 11:32Speaker 04

  A cave, yes. I was exploring.

• 11:34Speaker 03

  Where?

• 11:35Speaker 04

  It was in Illinois. You know, there are a lot of caves in the Midwest. Some of them are what they call wild caves. A lot of spelunkers like those caves. And I had a great time. I wasn't afraid. I even went into parts of the cave that the only way you can get to it is to go in on your belly and crawl through. Slide on your belly like a reptile. I had to actually do that. And I was just like perfectly happy doing that. Nothing was wrong. I thought, "Oh, this is so great." And the second time I went there, it was like somebody was moving the furniture of my mind. And not just the chairs and tables, but the whole set.

• 12:12Speaker 04

  This is the only way by metaphor I can explain it. That's what happened to my mind. My mind started to disassemble itself.

• 12:22Speaker 04

  So while my friends were going on, I said, "Ah, you know what? I'm gonna just sit here for a while and wait for you to come back." That was tremendously historical because I was actually losing my mind at the time. So while they did that and waiting for them to come back, I sang every song I knew the lyrics to. Every song I could possibly think, I sang it. I sang it out loud, just to keep my sanity, until they came back.

• 12:51Speaker 04

  That began my whole saga of panic attacks for seven years.

• 12:59Speaker 04

  I went through counseling, I went through rebirthing. I did all kinds of things. I couldn't quite shake the vulnerability to having a panic attack. I was pretty much disabled for much of those 10 years because of that. I couldn't even write. I had writer's block the whole time.

• 13:22Speaker 04

  After seven years, I said, "I don't know if I'll ever get over this. I can't wait my whole life to get over this. I've gotta do something."

• 13:32Speaker 04

  What would people pay me to do that I can do kind of naturally? And I realized I can listen to people. People tend to want to tell me their problems. This happened to me ever since I was a little girl. People would tell me their life story, and I don't know why. Maybe because I just listened. And then my ex-husband, who was a public defender, and he said to me, "You should do mitigation." I'd never even heard of it. And he said, "Well, I have an attorney who needs somebody like you to help him with interviews. Would you do it?" And I said, "Sure." To me, it was easy. You sat there and you developed rapport, you listened to their stories, you asked them questions, you wrote things down.

• 14:15Speaker 04

  The attorney wanted to pay me for this and I thought, "This is amazing." I get paid for listening to people. That's how it started.

• 14:24Speaker 03

  And sure, this is an oversimplification, but essentially, after someone has been convicted, you come in and your job is to show a jury that your client should receive a lighter sentence because of mitigating circumstances. Is that more or less right?

• 14:40Speaker 04

  Right, right. It's a simplification, but it's not totally inaccurate. I work on principally capital murder cases, which means he's eligible for the death penalty. I don't work on whether the client is guilty or innocent. As a matter of fact, I pretty much professionally have to assume the person is guilty, even if he might not be, because my job specifically is to do the family history. Anything that goes into who he is as a person, an individual, and why he got into trouble in the first place. Ultimately, what mitigation comes down to is humanization. The prosecutor wants to dehumanize the defendant and demonize the defendant and make the jury

• 15:24Speaker 04

  feel like this is not even a human being, this is a monster of some kind. Incomprehensible, can't believe and can't understand why this person would have done it. It's so incomprehensible that the only thing you can do is just put them to death and get rid of them. My job is to do the opposite, which is much harder.

• 16:01Speaker 05

  Believe it or not, Nick, when I was young, I was dating a parolee. I just thought he was hot and he looked like Robert De Niro and he drove a souped-up Chevy Nova Super Sport.

• 16:14Speaker 03

  How'd you guys meet?

• 16:15Speaker 05

  Uh, I met him at the lake. I'm from the East Coast, small town called Dalton, Massachusetts. It's like three hours west of Boston. You know, where I'm from, it's like a small town where everybody has like a lifted truck or a big cool car, you know, and drives up and down the strip. You know, the main drag and the town over. It's just stupid, small-town living, you know? So, I was dating this guy and he was bad news.

• 16:44Speaker 03

  Chapter 2 Heather

• 16:46Speaker 05

  I was so in over my head, okay? But I knew that he had been to prison and was out on parole.

• 16:56Speaker 05

  And when he was very young, he had committed some crime that got him in prison. I think he got arrested when he was like 19. And then by the time he got out, I don't know, he was like 26. So when I was dating him, he was 26, I was 16.

• 17:12Speaker 03

  Oh my God.

• 17:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I lied and told him I was 18 and I used to lie to my mother and tell her I was going babysitting and you know, I would go out with this guy. I always, in my 16 year old brain, always thought this guy didn't have the tools to assimilate back into society, which is why he would get in trouble and go back into prison. You know, it's hard to find a job when you got a conviction for a robbery or whatever it was he did, right? After being incarcerated for that long, you have a prison mentality. You know, and sometimes it's kill or be killed in prison. I always felt like, hey, you know what? I think that these criminals need more help functioning outside of prison.

• 17:57Speaker 05

  Now, mind you, unbeknownst to me, Eddie, we'll just call him Eddie, was using drugs and got really upset one night and popped out of the bushes and he punched me in the head. He had a cast on his arm. I saw stars that night.

• 18:13Speaker 05

  I didn't call the police because I was like, oh my God, like, he's going to get arrested, go back to prison, and then it's going to be all my fault. And when he gets out, he's going to come kill me, right? So he ended up going back to prison, not because of me, but for something else. I think he's in prison for life now. But when I ended up coming out to California to go to college, I decided I wanted to be a parole officer. And I was going to help all the criminals assimilate back into society.

• 18:41Speaker 05

  I started working for the probation department in LA County and I was assigned to work in their narcotics testing unit. So I would like watch not so hygiene conscious people pee in a cup to make sure that it was their urine for their drug testing. And I saw all kinds of things. This one girl barfed all over me one day because someone told her to drink Drano and it would give her a clean pee test. And then like one guy got busted with like a fake penis. You know, he had like a fake contraption that he had filled up with somebody's clean urine and got busted. There was all kinds of crazy stuff going on. And I thought, God, you know, there's all these criminals who are actually

• 19:25Speaker 05

  drug addicts and alcoholics, right? Maybe if I became an alcohol and drug counselor, I could help society better that way. I was getting my certification to be an alcohol and drug counselor. I was waitressing too, right? To get through undergrad. The night manager at the restaurant, his name was Jim Dutton. I used to swing my finger and be like, you listen here, Jim, and I'd just pop off about things I was upset about or whatever. And he said to me one night, you know, Heather, you love to argue so much. Have you ever thought about being an attorney? And I was like, no, never in my life that thought ever entered my mind. Okay. So fast forward, I'm at this group counseling session.

• 20:09Speaker 05

  You have to do like 600 hours of group counseling, like where you're like volunteering your hours and doing this to get your certification. And I looked around at all the people and I was just, you know, you're listening to their stories. And a lot of these people had done some horrible things. And most of them were in counseling because they were ordered to by the Corps to get into some treatment, or their family members were at their, you know, on their last leg of even caring because they had stolen from their family members, depleted their life savings on rehabilitation that was ineffective.

• 20:42Speaker 05

  I was sitting in this session and I looked at this woman and I thought, oh my God, if I had you for a mother, I'd be shooting up heroin too. Right? Like this lady was awful. And then I looked at the next guy and he was like eating like a scab off of his hand. And I just went through the whole room of these people. And I thought, every one of you needs to be locked up and have the keys thrown away. Like, I had that moment. I thought, you have all just destroyed your families' lives, done horrible things to other people. None of you actually want to get clean. You're only doing this because you've been ordered to by the court. And maybe I'll help one of you.

• 21:25Speaker 05

  And in that moment, I thought, I'm going to become a prosecutor and I'm going to lock all these fuckers up.

• 21:47Glynn Washington?

  You're listening to Snap Judgment. Stay tuned.

• 21:52Speaker 01

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• 22:25Glynn Washington?

  Welcome back to Snap Judgment. Today, Snap Judgment is proud to present Love and Radio's Blood Memory.

• 22:35Speaker 04

  In about 2005, beginning of 2005, I got a case. It was a trial of an Aryan Brotherhood defendant, Michael McElhaney, or Big Mac as they called him. He was at that time facing the possibility that he could go to trial for capital murder.

• 22:52Speaker 03

  Chapter 3, Aryan.

• 22:55Speaker 04

  He was acting as his own attorney, so I took my orders from him. I met with him.

• 23:01Speaker 03

  And Big Mac was a member of the Aryan Brotherhood?

• 23:04Speaker 04

  Oh, definitely. That's the best thing that ever happened to Big Mac, which says something about the things that happened to Big Mac.

• 23:10Speaker 03

  Okay, so you start working with Big Mac and it's already tense because he's representing himself?

• 23:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, and he has a really bad temper, and somehow he's getting his hands on Pruno, so when I come to see him, he's drunk.

• 23:20Speaker 03

  He gets his hands on what?

• 23:21Speaker 04

  Pruno.

• 23:22Speaker 03

  Like bathtub wine?

• 23:23Speaker 04

  Right, right, yes, exactly. Which is why you rarely get any ketchup in prison, because they make great Pruno out of ketchup, apparently. I don't want it. I think ketchup is bad by itself, but, you know, wine made with ketchup, I don't think so. But he would come drunk to our meetings, and he would make no sense at all, and he wasn't any help to me in my job, and I thought, "This is ridiculous, I'm wasting my time." But one day, he gave me an assignment. He said, "Here is a list of all the Aryan Brotherhood dropouts." It was not a long list.

• 24:01Speaker 04

  "I want you to go through this list, send a letter to each one of these MF-ing rats, and ask them if you could come and interview them for me." I said, "Okay." "What do you want me to get out of this?" And he says, "Well, find out why they testified against the AAB." So I went down the list, and I sent all these letters out. Some people didn't even reply, but some people replied and said, "What are you doing? I know you're trying to get me, you're trying to get me killed, I know what you're doing." The only one who wrote back and said he would see me was Michael Thompson.

• 24:42Speaker 04

  I had written to him a pleasant letter saying, you know, what's it like out there and all of that. At the time, that was, um, let's see, where was it? Calipatria, I think. A desert prison, real far south, a horrible place. And he wrote me back the most wonderful little letter, talking about the ecology of Calipatria. They have a lot of date, I don't know if you call them groves, but trees, date trees. And I went, what? The language was so educated and so precise and descriptive that I thought, this is a guy who must have copied this stuff from a brochure or something. I mean, this stuff was like almost poetic.

• 25:21Speaker 04

  And so I brought that to Big Mac and he said, ha ha, yeah, Thompson, I knew that, expletive deleted, would say yes, that overbearing, expletive, expletive, he used to be true A B. Ask him what happened to him, why did he become a rat? So I thought, okay, Mac, you want to send me to Michael Thompson, who bucked the whole A B, dropped out and testified against them? And you think I'm gonna go there and convince him to take back his testimony? To recant? What am I supposed to use or say, what's the incentive?

• 26:05Speaker 04

  He says, oh yeah, you use your feminine wiles. And I just laughed. I say, I don't have that many wiles, number one. And number two, even if I had all the wiles in the world, this is a man that did this. I went out there and I thought I was gonna get a face-to-face interview with Michael Thompson. So I was surprised when I arrived there to find that he was behind glass. Obviously, I introduced myself and he knew, obviously, why I was there, we already corresponded. I suppose we talked about the case and everything that was going on with the prosecution and so forth, for maybe an hour or less.

• 26:41Speaker 04

  Every once in a while, a correctional staff would come in there and look in to see if I wanted to leave, but I was just immersed in conversation and it didn't even occur to me to leave.

• 26:50Speaker 03

  What were you guys talking about?

• 26:51Speaker 04

  Everything. It was just like one thing led to another, mostly about spirituality and our beliefs. It was just like a very free-ranging conversation. It was not very structured.

• 27:10Speaker 04

  He talked about his Native American beliefs. Some of the things he said to me floored me because it was like listening to myself talk, except on the deepest part of me, things that I would never share with anyone. He was saying them to me. I was just stunned that I would have a conversation like this with an ex-gang leader in a Level 4 prison in a desert in California.

• 27:35Speaker 04

  I had the best time. And when it finally came time and the guy came back again, the correctional officer, and I was thinking to myself, "You again, we're not done yet." And he said, "Uh, you have to leave." And I said, "Why? What time is it?" And he said, "It's 2:30 or something." And I was shocked because I had been there for six hours.

• 27:56Speaker 03

  Do you remember what you were thinking to yourself on the drive home?

• 27:59Speaker 04

  I was thinking to myself, "This is not a man who should be in prison." I was just confused. Why is this man still in prison?

• 28:14Speaker 05

  Were you as charmed by him as everyone else is?

• 28:18Speaker 05

  You don't think it'll whack me, do you?

• 28:20Speaker 03

  Chapter 4, Heather.

• 28:24Speaker 05

  I first became aware of Michael Thompson when I was assigned to cover a parole hearing. We, as a prosecutor, have the opportunity to go and oppose the release of those individuals and present any evidence at those hearings that we perhaps have, or any arguments as to why that person shouldn't be released. So I just coincidentally got on the list. It's kind of an alphabetical list where they, you know, ask you, "Hey, are you available?" I read through the transcript from the prior hearing. I also read the entire file that I had.

• 28:58Speaker 03

  Did anything jump out at you in his file?

• 29:00Speaker 05

  Well, the fact that he was in prison for murdering a couple people, but moreover, it's not just the original facts of the case, it's what they've done while in custody. Mr. Thompson had been locked down for many, many years by the time I went to oppose his release. And so when I looked at all of the quote unquote trouble that he'd been in while in prison, you know, you get written up for having too much peanut butter in your cell sometimes, which I believe was one of his violations. But as a prosecutor, I don't see that as a deal breaker for him getting released.

• 29:33Speaker 03

  Right.

• 29:34Speaker 05

  By any stretch, I'd probably be hoarding peanut butter if I was in prison, but you know, or anything I could get my hands on. The board of paroles sometimes sees that as like, oh, wow, you can't follow the rules, which I get, you know, but me personally, when I'm looking at that, I look for big things like violence, things like drugs, anything that's indicative of some type of criminal activity while in prison. Mr. Thompson had been on video talking about how he is an incredibly violent man.

• 30:03Speaker 06

  I'm probably one of the most violent individuals you'll ever meet in your life. Don't brag, just fact. Is that simple?

• 30:09Speaker 05

  To me, that should be a huge red flag to most people that this inmate should not be released ever. And then, you know, obviously you look at the seriousness and the nature of the original crime and the callousness, and also the inmate's ability to actually come to terms with really their motivation for such a crime. Like what would drive you to commit such a horrible, heinous, violent act against another human being? I studied psychology in my undergraduate schooling, and I also used to do a lot of counseling with addicts and whatnot. And I think that I have an eye for people who manipulate other people, and that's served me well as a prosecutor.

• 30:54Speaker 05

  One of the biggest things that stood out to me in Mr. Thompson's file, but it wasn't even as apparent on paper as it was when I was in the presence of Mr. Thompson at those hearings, is just how truly manipulative he is.

• 31:09Speaker 03

  Were there any incidents that jumped to mind?

• 31:11Speaker 05

  When he was speaking in front of the parole board, he would twist things ever so slightly. There were two women that were on the board, and I was sat there watching this, and they were enamored with him. He's a very charismatic, charming man. Okay, he's attractive. He used to be much larger when he was younger. He's, I'm sure with age, probably gotten a little bit thinner and a little smaller. But he was a very large, imposing man. And he speaks in a manner that is so calming. And his voice is somewhat soothing.

• 31:49Speaker 05

  And he comes across as a very calm individual, very composed. They were like, wow, oh, Mr. Thompson. We applaud you for getting your PhD. And I'm like, PhD? I think that's bullshit. Okay, sorry, can I say that? Yeah, yeah. Okay, I smell bullshit. But I also noted, what I did see was a pattern. And I brought this up to these women at the board. And I was bold in my argument. I said, if you look at the pattern and practice, he's like capitalized on keep your friends close and your enemies closer. As soon as law enforcement is on to him, as soon as they smell like, whoa, whoa, whoa,

• 32:32Speaker 05

  he's engaged in some illegal activity, he immediately will turn state's evidence and say, hey, whoa, whoa, you know, look over here. I know about these dead kids. Let me tell you where their bodies are at. And law enforcement thinks, oh, well, this little, you know, insurance scam, or this scheme, or this is nothing compared to us solving these unsolved murders. But he's full of shit. He's full of shit. That's all there is to it. He can be as good looking as he wants. He's lying. He believes his own lies. He's truly pathological. I do believe that he believes his own lies.

• 33:06Speaker 05

  And the first parole hearing I went to, I didn't leave that prison until almost 11 o'clock at night. I was like, oh, my God, I'm gonna take one in the head in the parking lot right now. I was definitely concerned about my safety when I went to my car that night.

• 33:27Speaker 04

  I don't believe very much in romance. And romance always seems to fade and become something else. But family, family is another thing. Family is that unspoken blood commitment to people that you will help them no matter what. You may not approve of them, but because they're family, you have a kind of visceral connection. You just love them. That's how I felt about Michael from the very first. In fact, he felt more like family than my own family felt. Like somebody who is so much like me in a kind of spiritual way, emotionally close. I could understand him so well. In fact, when I started to write him letters and he would write back or he'd tell me, "I

• 34:10Speaker 04

  don't understand how you understand me so well."

• 34:14Speaker 05

  He is a smart man because he understands people. He has a confidence about him that is very attractive to people. I wasn't going to let fear or apprehension stop me from doing my job and from standing up for something that I believe in and for the safety of the people of California.

• 34:34Speaker 04

  I said to myself, "I'm going to help get him out." The world would be a much better place with this man out of prison. And I wouldn't say that about too many people, you know, whether they're in prison or not. In prison, the world would not be one way or the other changed, but he is so charismatic just naturally. It's like a light just kind of pours out of him. And I was determined to help that light get out into the world.

• 35:32Speaker 06

  Do you strive to deny each kindred spirit in the room? We'll find out. We'll find out. And is your highest pleasure now? The misfortune of fools? We'll find out. We'll find out. You hide nothing. Just believe it. We all see it.

• 36:16Speaker 06

  That's it for this episode of Blood Memory. Music on this episode comes from Michelle Benabila, Natalia Bayless, Las Olas, Zaroshi, Memory Scale, Sarepty, Glitchbird, Russ Young, Interspecifics, Kishosis, Dialect, Esmeralda, and Timber Tamber. Check the show notes for the full playlist. The series producer of Blood Memory is Mira Kumar. Robyn Amor is our managing editor. Additional reporting by Bryan Krantz and Anya Schultz. Fact checking by Nicole Pasulka and visuals by Orla McCarty. I'm Nicholas Sardine Punch Punch Vanderkolk. Thanks for listening.

• 36:55Glynn Washington?

  Thank you, Nick. Now, we're going to step deep into the story with an interview with Nick and Snap Producer John Facil.

• 37:10Speaker 06

  Hey, this is Snap Judgment Producer John Facil. I'm currently sheltering by a jetty on Venice Beach. I'm reporting a story for Snap Judgment about a surf spot in LA. I also, I had to do an interview for another episode at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. So Snap Judgment listeners have all that to look forward to. And I'm being blasted by sand, but it's a beautiful day. And I thought there was no other place I wanted to interview my friend Nick Vanderkolk about his series Blood Memory on Love and Radio.

• 37:50Speaker 06

  I feel like you should also mention that-

• 37:52Speaker 03

  Uh, you had asked me to also go to a beach. Now, I'm in, I'm on the west coast of Ireland and our beaches are a lot rainier. So I, I did not show up at a beach today.

• 38:03Speaker 06

  Really let me down. Is it raining right now?

• 38:05Speaker 03

  Uh, it's always raining.

• 38:08Speaker 06

  This is like, uh, what you've reported is like a quintessential California story, you know? It, it really, it takes place in LA, rural California, California prisons. Uh, there's a lot about California prison gangs. It's funny, we actually, later in the series, nuestra familia is mentioned and we've done an episode about nuestra familia as well. The higher gun. For the rest of the series, you mostly hear from the first person who you speak to in this opening episode, Michael. Why don't you describe who Michael is to us?

• 38:43Speaker 03

  So, Michael is most famous for being, um, one of the most senior members of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang to defect and testify against them. I mean, he, he's honestly like one of the most interesting people I've ever met in the course of my life, which is kind of saying a lot because I talked to a lot of interesting people in the course of, uh, the kind of work that we do. This is not like a classic, uh, redemption story, even though he did leave the Aryan Brotherhood. He, he is sort of a, like, kind of a, a classic unreliable narrator.

• 39:22Speaker 03

  Um, and so part of the series is, is kind of trying to piece together, you know, what is true and what isn't true about, um, his story.

• 39:31Speaker 06

  And how did you first hear about Michael and meet him?

• 39:35Speaker 03

  There was a Nat Geo documentary, I watched it sometime in 2011, but it was about the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang and they're, um, connected to some absurdly, I don't have the number in front of me, but some absurdly high percentage of all of the homicides that were perpetrated in the US prison system. But Michael was in it, you know, he's a prominent voice, but he's not- Sort of the central character, but every time he would come up on screen, whatever you're imagining. Uh, an Aryan Brotherhood guy to be like, he, he doesn't fit that, that stereotype, you know?

• 40:16Speaker 03

  He's incredibly soft spoken. He's very articulate. He was wearing. Like one of those, I think they're called a bolo tie with, with some like Navajo. Symbols on it. I'm not entirely sure, but it was, it was some sort of like Native American. Uh, emblem, which also really surprised me. I just found him very arresting and very charismatic. And I was like, I gotta, I gotta find this guy. And it was, it was quite difficult. He, at that time, he was in protective custody, uh, cause a lot of people wanted him dead.

• 40:54Speaker 06

  What does that mean protective custody?

• 40:56Speaker 03

  It's essentially like the, the, the prison equivalent of the witness protection program.

• 41:02Speaker 06

  So he was in prison though. He was still in prison.

• 41:05Speaker 03

  He was still in prison. Yes. Yeah. You know, this was all over snail mail. I think I made a good impression in terms of the way that I approached him. We would have this exchange. We, we talked on the phone a little bit. Eventually, I think this was in twenty eighteen, I went out to meet him finally for the first time. He was in Chino at that point, so I went out to Chino. I was not allowed to record. Uh, I wasn't allowed to bring, uh, like a notepad or anything. But it was, yeah, it was like weirdly, weirdly chill, you know, it's California. It's like beautiful day. And the visitor center is outside.

• 41:40Speaker 06

  What did you talk about in that first conversation?

• 41:43Speaker 03

  Like everything, uh, he talked a lot about, you know, the themes that, that come up a lot in the piece, like the intimacy of violence. I remember at one point, my dad is a, um, uh, has written a lot on the subject of trauma.

• 41:58Speaker 06

  Your dad is Bessel van der Kolk. I don't know if you know that. Yeah, he's pretty famous.

• 42:03Speaker 03

  I, yeah.

• 42:04Speaker 06

  The body keeps the score guy.

• 42:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. Uh, at one point, Michael quoted.

• 42:10Speaker 03

  That book to me. And I thought he was like being cute. And I go, oh, ha, ha, ha, that's funny, Michael. And he and he was like, why, like, why are you laughing? And I said, like, you know, you know, my dad wrote that, you know? And he said he had no idea. I don't know if I buy that, to be totally honest with you. Because like Vanderkolk's like kind of an unusual name, you know?

• 42:33Speaker 06

  That's the thing about this series. Um, Michael is very, um, there's no other way I can put it untrustworthy. And I'm listening to the first couple of episodes of this going like, what is going on here? Like, is this guy? Is this guy for real? And and and over the course of the series, the question, is this guy for real? Becomes kind of the occupying, uh, uh, force.

• 42:59Speaker 03

  You know, I, I, I will say, like, a lot of the work that I do is really predicated on the idea that, like, there's no truly good guys and truly bad guys. People are made up of these parts and they wear different masks depending on the context in which they are in. And unfortunately, I, I feel like the zeitgeist of the way that we consume media in the last, especially in the last 10 years, it doesn't allow for that.

• 43:26Speaker 06

  Yeah. Well, this is a really thoughtful series. Um, it's it explores a lot of ideas. It's very nuanced. Um, from a documentary standpoint, it's it's beautiful. There's lots of different kinds of tape. It takes you all these different places. And it's independently made. I mean, I just, this is such a unicorn of a thing right now. And and I hope that people really appreciate it. Um, it's, it's rare that something like this gets made and it exists. And it only happens because of persistence. You know, congrats on getting it out there and I hope people go and listen.

• 44:06Speaker 03

  Thank you, thank you. Actually, one funny story. By the time we were actually sitting down to do the interviews, I had known Michael for eight years at that point. And he said to me, "You know, Nick, I'm really in awe of how much you've really stuck with this, you know? And how persistent you've been with this. You know, like, don't take this the wrong way, but you would have done really well in the Aryan Brotherhood."

• 44:34Speaker 06

  Well, I suppose that's always available to you if podcasting doesn't work out.

• 44:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, which is looking more and more likely every day, so.

• 44:45Speaker 06

  All right. Thanks for talking to me, Nick. I'm covered in sand. I don't know if you can see this.

• 44:49Speaker 03

  Oh, my God. Whoa. Holy shit. Well done. That's commitment to the art.

• 44:56Speaker 06

  People think you just get on a microphone and talk. It's not so simple.