What She Buried | 5. All the Kwanetas

Kwaneta tells Justine exactly what happened the day Michael Giles died. - Want the full story? Binge every episode of What She Buried ad-free now by subscribing to ⁠The Binge+⁠. You’ll unlock over 60 true crime series instantly, get early access to drops on the first of every month, and hear exclusive bonus episodes. Search for the channel on Apple Podcasts or head to ⁠GetTheBinge.com⁠. For behind-the-scenes details, join our free newsletter at ⁠Patreon.com/TheBinge⁠. What She Buried is a production of Sony Music Entertainment and Campside Media. Follow @sonypodcasts and discover more at sonymusic.com/podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices at podcastchoices.com/adchoices. The Binge — feed your true crime obsession. - For more of Justine’s work, read Unreasonable Women, which follows three women who have been punished for defending themselves. The result of seven years of reporting inside U. S. prisons, it's a gripping, urgent look at how survivors are criminalized, called "required reading for anyone who cares about women and justice," by Bookpage, "remarkable... riveting," by Kirkus, and "true crime at its finest," by Booklist. Available now on ⁠Amazon⁠ or ⁠Bookshop.org⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Fall never arrives all at once. First the air, then the light. And slowly, the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress, a hoodie slips beneath a blazer, an old cap finds a new scarf. Because you don't simply step into the season. You create it, layer by layer, until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross.

• 0:30Speaker 00

  Listen to every episode of What She Buried ad-free right now when you subscribe to The Binge. You'll hear the entire series before anyone else, get exclusive bonus episodes, and unlock more than 60 other true crime podcasts. Just head to The Binge channel on Apple Podcasts and tap Subscribe, or visit getthebinge.com to listen wherever you are. The Binge: Feed your true crime obsession.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  Campside Media.

• 1:08Speaker 00

  After the Erica Flores fiasco, it was undeniable. Even among people charged with heavy crimes, a difficult demographic to begin with, Quinetta was a challenging client. She was a defendant in a murder trial who, all out on bond, seems to have staged an elaborate ruse to coerce a 19-year-old, single mother into giving police a false confession. It would be a lot for any attorney to deal with. The day after Erica's false confession, Quinetta's lawyer quit. He told me, "I do the slicing and dicing. When the defendant starts to slice and dice, I gotta go."

• 1:51Speaker 00

  The court appointed Quinetta new representation: Robbie McClung and Richard Franklin. They were professional partners. But when I met them, they had that look that married couples get after spending decades together, kind of matching. Though Richard is balding with gray hair and tortoiseshell glasses, and Robbie is blond with bright lipstick heels. They'd worked countless murders, manslaughter, aggravated assaults, aggravated robberies. And yet, as always, Quinetta stood out.

• 2:26Speaker 02

  Dealing with Quinetta was hard. It was a stretch for me, because there were so many different sides of her that she tried to play, and it was just very difficult, because I never knew which Quinetta was coming out that day.

• 2:40Speaker 00

  Who were the different Quinettas?

• 2:42Speaker 02

  There's the Quinetta that was the rape survivor. There was the Quinetta that was the abused woman. There was the Quinetta that was trying to save her husband from being sent off to some foreign land where fighting was occurring. I mean, you pick the day, she's got a different story as to why her life is the way it is.

• 3:09Speaker 00

  All the Quinettas. It certainly felt to me like Robbie wasn't too fond of any of them. But she and Richard would nonetheless mount a zealous defense for their problematic client.

• 3:20Speaker 03

  We were blaming this murder on her boyfriend, right?

• 3:26Speaker 00

  Were you?

• 3:27Speaker 03

  Well, that's what I'm asking. I thought we were.

• 3:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, they were. It had been a while.

• 3:32Speaker 03

  She maintained that she was innocent, that he did it, and that he was the brains behind the whole thing, and he was forcing her to do it, and she had to do what he said. So that's what we were going with.

• 3:50Speaker 00

  He, as in DeAndre, Quinetta's boyfriend, he did it. This seemed to be the best approach, as far as Richard and Robbie could see, because there was tons of evidence that Quinetta had orchestrated a financial fraud to steal Michael Giles' money, and that Quinetta had set up Erica Flores. But when it came to proving that Quinetta had actually pulled the trigger, that was where things got murky. And if the trial came down to why Quinetta might have pulled the trigger, they were going to get murkier still.

• 4:28Speaker 00

  From Sony Music Entertainment and Campside Media, this is What She Buried. I'm Justine Vanderloon. Episode 5: All the Quinettas.

• 4:47Speaker 04

  There's no direct evidence she had done the crime. Nobody saw her do it. She didn't admit to do it. She actually said she never did it.

• 4:54Speaker 00

  Josh Healey was the lead prosecutor in Quinetta's case. Remember how Erica Flores was convinced to take part in a sting operation that would expose a racist DA with a scar on his head? That's Josh. There's nothing to suggest that he's ever been part of any racist conspiracy, but he does have a scar on his head, which is an unusually shiny head. When I met Josh Healey at his office, now he's in private practice, a defense attorney, he had his feet up on his desk in this room stuffed with files. He beckoned me in. He'd done a lot of press about this case, and he was always open to talking about Quinetta.

• 5:34Speaker 00

  And when he did, this big, juicy grin spread across his face. What Josh lacked in direct evidence of the crime, he made up for in circumstantial evidence: the concrete slap, the money trail, Erica Flores. And Josh's favorite part of all? Quinetta's search histories.

• 5:55Speaker 04

  We had our computers and our cell phones. You know, how to kill someone without leaving a mess, how to clean blood off a couch, one-way tickets out of Dallas around that time. You know, just the craziest searches.

• 6:07Speaker 00

  Josh Healey put the highlights, things that could help him best make his case, in his prosecutor's notes. They read, "Defendant looks up images of the brain on victim's computer. Defendant searches the value of victim's house. Defendant searches bloodstain removal hints at doityourself.com. Defendant searches, how do I get blood out of furniture, on esque.com." It was going to be challenging for Richard and Robbie to explain all of that away at trial. Josh knew he had the advantage. And it was clear that he really wanted Quinetta locked up. This one was personal.

• 6:45Speaker 04

  I always said if I end up dead, there's like five people to look at, and she's one. Just, I mean, that's the nature of our business when I was a DA at that level.

• 6:55Speaker 00

  Who were the other four?

• 6:56Speaker 04

  Death penalty guys. You know, serial killer, racist killer. I had one, they didn't seek death, but he killed two people, and it was just evil, just bad people.

• 7:07Speaker 00

  You put her up with them?

• 7:09Speaker 04

  Yes. She's probably worse, because she's got half a brain, to be honest. I mean, there are certain people that deserve to be rotting in hell from what I call prison, and she is one of them for what she did to that guy.

• 7:24Speaker 00

  So I wondered, when Josh was dealing with Quinetta, what was it about her that made her especially terrifying? Had he felt it in person when he interacted with her? When she was like first in jail, did you meet her?

• 7:40Speaker 04

  Well, I can't talk to her without her lawyer present. I'm not allowed to. When she was in jail, and for the bond hearing, I saw her there, yes. But I can't talk to her until, shoot, I don't know if I've ever had a conversation with her.

• 7:54Speaker 00

  Oh. Josh had never actually spoken to Quinetta. He'd just formed this idea of her. And the idea, it didn't just come from the crime he was charging her with.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  Josh loves to tell us everything. He takes great delight to stop us in the hallway and tell us all sorts of terrible things about our clients. Why?

• 8:15Speaker 03

  That's Josh.

• 8:16Speaker 02

  That's Josh. He likes to talk. He does, he likes to talk. So he'll tell us stuff.

• 8:22Speaker 00

  He'll tell us stuff. And show us stuff.

• 8:26Speaker 03

  And there was some gross stuff that he found, from her to various people out there that he showed us.

• 8:34Speaker 00

  What kind of gross stuff?

• 8:36Speaker 02

  I don't remember.

• 8:38Speaker 03

  Well, she was sending pictures out of her private parts.

• 8:42Speaker 02

  Oh, there we go. Okay.

• 8:44Speaker 03

  And Josh had it on the big screen in his office, that, "Look what, it's not good." But by the same token, it was not going to be admissible in evidence either.

• 8:57Speaker 00

  The pictures had been found by the police when they searched Quinetta's devices, and Josh had to turn them over to Richard and Robbie as part of discovery. But still, what was the purpose of displaying them on the big screen?

• 9:12Speaker 03

  That he showed us to say, "Look, here's what you're dealing with."

• 9:16Speaker 00

  But isn't it, like, it sort of strikes me as maybe a little unusual, and maybe it's not, for a prosecutor to find, say, personal photos of somebody's vagina and then have it on his screen and say, "Everyone, come look."

• 9:32Speaker 03

  No, because they, they, no, no, no, he wouldn't show it to the, he wouldn't show it to the general public.

• 9:38Speaker 00

  No, no, but just the...

• 9:39Speaker 03

  It was stuff that, it was, it was information that they had acquired by subpoena. You know, they subpoena all this, this stuff, all the stuff they can get.

• 9:50Speaker 00

  It's jarring to envision two white men dressed in their suits and ties, one charged with locking Quinetta up, the other defending her, staring at these images of her body, images that were enlarged on a screen. But just in terms of like his curiosity about it, what does that have to do with anything?

• 10:11Speaker 03

  Well, we have the same information he does, okay? And we could have gone through their, we could have gone through our copy of it and found the same thing. We just hadn't gotten it far yet.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  Well, it kind of, it kind of explained a little bit of the oddity of her relationship with men.

• 10:29Speaker 03

  He does it to get his idea of what he's dealing with and what he wants to do with her. We never came to any kind of agreement at all prior to trial on what we could do with her.

• 10:41Speaker 00

  The reality here is that there's research that shows that when a woman's sexuality is evoked, people perceive her to be lacking mental capacity and moral status. The legal system itself is based on an idea that most of us hold, even unconsciously, that, in the words of the old-time jurists, chastity equals veracity, that a woman's sexuality is inverse to her truthfulness. Innocence and guilt are all intertwined for women here. For Black women, research shows that this is compounded. They are disproportionately incarcerated, often denied the right to self-defense, and

• 11:26Speaker 00

  hyper-sexualized from girlhood.

• 11:30Speaker 00

  It seems unlikely that Quinetta knew the full academic backdrop back then. She probably also didn't know that various people were inspecting and chuckling about and pathologizing intimate photos of her as they sifted through all of the discovery documents. But even if she had, by the time Quinetta's trial rolled around in October 2009, it was pretty obvious to everyone concerned that she was doomed. Even the judge. Do you remember how quickly you knew that she was guilty?

• 12:04Speaker 05

  Well, as a judge, you're not supposed to prejudge somebody and make that determination until you've heard everything, but day one.

• 12:17Speaker 00

  The Honorable Andy Chatham. Most judges won't speak to the press. Andy, however, is...

• 12:24Speaker 05

  A media whore. I love this stuff. My wife will tell you, I've never-- he's never met a microphone I didn't like.

• 12:31Speaker 00

  Maybe you missed a career.

• 12:33Speaker 05

  No, I got a face for radio and a voice for newspapers.

• 12:40Speaker 00

  And when Andy Chatham was face to face with Quinetta during pre-trial hearings, he saw, well, the same person Josh Healey did.

• 12:49Speaker 05

  Confident, adamant she was not guilty of this. This is what she does. She's a con artist. She is able to convince people to do things that they would not ordinarily do.

• 13:03Speaker 00

  To Andy Chatham, it was simple.

• 13:06Speaker 05

  She's the cement lady, and she will always be the cement lady. There's no other apt description that I can think of that's better.

• 13:17Speaker 00

  Quinetta was up against a system that, from the start, viewed her case as a made-for-TV spectacle. Here was this master manipulator of men, a harlot who took scandalous photos and victimized an upstanding American veteran. Everyone seemed to agree that Quinetta was guilty as hell. She even had a tabloid-worthy nickname bestowed on her by the judge. That concept of Quinetta as the cement lady, it cast a pall over the proceedings, and it made her extra frantic. But the thing that doomed Quinetta, really, wasn't anything the judge or the lawyer said

• 14:00Speaker 00

  or did. It was that DeAndre showed up.

• 14:04Speaker 02

  So we took her in the back and were like, okay, he is gonna talk. He is gonna tell the story. They're gonna convict you based on his story and everything else. What do you want us to do? That's when she told us to go ask and see if they would do something less.

• 14:21Speaker 00

  Quinetta knew what she was up against. If convicted, she faced life without the possibility of parole. So she agreed to a plea. 50 years in prison.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  Fall never arrives all at once. Burst the air, then the light. And slowly, the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress, a hoodie slips beneath a blazer, an old cap finds a new scarf. Because you don't simply step into the season, you create it, layer by layer, until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross.

• 15:06Speaker 06

  If you've got an insurance question, you could talk to the butcher at your local grocery store. He'd probably talk about trimming the fat, but it'd be about your brisket, not your insurance policies. Or you could talk to your local GEICO agent. They offer personalized assistance in finding the choicest cuts of coverage for all your insurance needs, which means more money for filet mignon, or, if you're a vegetarian, tofu le mignon. To find a GEICO agent near you, visit geico.com/ local.

• 15:43Speaker 07

  To accept this free call, press 1. To refuse this, press 2. Secure us. You may start the conversation now.

• 15:50Speaker 00

  Hi.

• 15:51Speaker 07

  Oh, my God. Hi, I'm so exhausted. These people are trying to kill me.

• 15:57Speaker 00

  It had been about a week since our interview across the glass. I was back in New York. Quinetta had just returned from the hospital unit, a checkup. She'd been having trouble reaching me on the phone, so she was a little frazzled at first. But pretty soon, she relaxed. And now she seemed almost eager to go where we'd never really gone before. She wanted to walk me through exactly what had happened in those moments before and after Michael Giles died. I already knew about the times surrounding the killing in late June, early July 2006.

• 16:36Speaker 00

  Quinetta's flight to Texas, the days of spaghetti warehouse, of half-priced books, of sex and arguing. It's hot. They're both out of sorts. They have it in for each other. So much history, so much resentment. Sometime earlier, they'd been arguing long distance, and Michael had called the nursing home where Quinetta worked, lobbing accusations that Quinetta had acted improperly, making her look bad. Quinetta was afraid she'd lose her job, and she denied the allegations. They wrote heated emails back and forth.

• 17:18Speaker 00

  Quinetta wrote, "I could have got you in a lot of trouble in England, but I didn't." Michael wrote, "You love to bring up the old and talk trash to me." Quinetta wrote, "You have ruined my life, my career. I wonder if I go in today, if I even have this bullshit job, or if you called and got me fired from that." Michael wrote, "I was into you, but you love to fight, love to control. Take some responsibility." Now she was back in town, looking for some funds, doing their quid pro quo. So I don't know the timeline, because maybe you know the timeline.

• 18:03Speaker 00

  But I'm like, well, okay.

• 18:06Speaker 07

  You want me to tell you the day he died? I'll tell you the day he died.

• 18:09Speaker 00

  Yes, I do. Please.

• 18:11Speaker 07

  Oh, he died on the 4th of July that night.

• 18:15Speaker 00

  In Quinetta's telling, the series of events that leads to the killing begins a few hours after Michael Giles' mom has gotten the call that he's not coming to the family barbecue. Bickering has turned into full-blown arguing. It's getting really heated. Quinetta and Michael had arguments before. He's never been the sweetest guy with her. But he wasn't violent. Until, she says, he was.

• 18:43Speaker 07

  I just remember, he was on top. He was on top. And that's when it started. He was in my ear, talking shit. When he was on top of me, he was mad. I remember he was, you know, mad. He was just wanting to be, just talking shit. Didn't make it himself matter. And that's when the fourth of July happened.

• 19:16Speaker 00

  What happened in that room was never recorded or documented. Michael Giles can't respond to accusations. And Quinetta only has, well, her word. But then again, violence between people in a romantic relationship, that almost always happens behind closed doors, often when tensions run high, often when a man feels he's losing someone or something. And it doesn't just happen to sweet, submissive women. It also happens to women who lie and who scam, who do drugs and do crimes. Imperfect victims, who nobody will ever fully believe.

• 20:01Speaker 00

  And when it came to Michael Giles, the fact is that Quinetta never accused him of harming her. Until just the once, on the night of his death.

• 20:10Speaker 07

  I didn't even know he had it. I don't even know where he pulled it from. He pulled the gun. He put the gun in me.

• 20:21Speaker 00

  Put the gun in me. This isn't the first time Quinetta's told me this. In August 2020, after we'd been corresponding for over a year, she gave me a similar account, written down, disjointed, but with the same elements. She wrote, "The 9mm came out. His gun. In me. Threats, crying, choking." Quinetta said that she had a method for when a man was like this.

• 20:58Speaker 00

  Did Michael Giles sexually and physically assault Quinetta during this moment? We will never know for sure. What I do know is that Quinetta had survived abuse before. And so she'd honed certain techniques to subdue an angry man.

• 21:16Speaker 07

  I remember calming him down. I remember talking him down, but just think, that's what I do.

• 21:23Speaker 00

  That's what I do.

• 21:25Speaker 07

  Calm down, baby. You're gonna get through this. I'm comfortable with saying that script. The whole, you know, I shouldn't have been doing this. I know, I know, it's not gonna, I know I pushed you to do this. I know, I don't know why I make you so mad with me. And I, you know, it's my, I'm old, I know how to do that.

• 21:43Speaker 00

  Once Quinetta had neutralized the most immediate threat, she had a single goal in mind.

• 21:49Speaker 07

  I remember just thinking, get the gun.

• 21:53Speaker 00

  But how do you disarm a military man? One who is not happy with you?

• 21:58Speaker 07

  We'd been finished. My hands shaking. And I remember making him a bowl of ice cream, vanilla ice cream. And he asked me to pass him his Benadryl or something. Benadryl, Claritin, something. He stopped us, took it past him there.

• 22:15Speaker 07

  It seems hard to get him from whatever state he was in, that he had a gun like that, into a relaxed. It took a while.

• 22:24Speaker 00

  Michael is still upset, and Quinetta is still reassuring him. Now, in her telling, she coaxes him to lie down on the couch. She straddles him, begins to massage his back. The whole time, she's been tracking the gun. Now, with Michael just lying there, she reaches for it.

• 22:46Speaker 07

  But, but what happens that you get it and then what you do is shoot him? Like, what happened there? He didn't even know I had grabbed it and slid it. And I think when he realized it, I remember him tensing. And I remember him tensing.

• 23:04Speaker 00

  She lifts the gun, presses it to the back of his head, and pulls the trigger.

• 23:10Speaker 07

  Shooting someone in the head, there does seem to be an element of rage to that. A lot, kind of? No? No, I think it was just more so that I grabbed it and I shot him because I didn't want, I don't know what I was thinking. I mean, I knew that, I wasn't thinking like, oh, I'm going to shoot him in the head. I don't remember thinking that.

• 23:32Speaker 00

  It was like a reflex. But why? In that moment, why kill him?

• 23:40Speaker 00

  What about a less permanent solution?

• 23:42Speaker 07

  Get the gun and just back out of the house. That's what I should have did. That's what I, that's what I should have did. You know, how you have an argument with someone and you don't say the things you're supposed to say then? Like, when you're in the shower, you think, oh, this is what I should have did. I had no problem. I was never gonna call the police because I'm not even supposed to be down here. But I should have held it on him.

• 24:04Speaker 07

  It just, it didn't work like that. It didn't, it didn't happen like that.

• 24:09Speaker 00

  It's easy to come up with better decisions when you're years and miles away, listening to how a situation unfolded. But people in prison for murder? It goes without saying, they made some very big mistakes. And Quinetta's conceding to this. Should have done it differently. Shouldn't have even been there.

• 24:29Speaker 00

  But once it happened, there was no turning back. Quinetta Harris shot Michael Giles, one time, in the head.

• 24:38Speaker 00

  And then she took off.

• 24:39Speaker 07

  Did you know that he was dead?

• 24:43Speaker 07

  Had to be dead. I didn't, I didn't check. I ran. If you ran, did you take any? Oh, yeah, I'm sure. I had my phone and I had my purse, of course. I know that. But I don't know if I, I don't remember grabbing it, but I had to have it to get in the hotel. You didn't run straight out. You got your stuff and you ran. I must have. Because my stuff wasn't in the car, so I must have grabbed it. Or, you know, grabbed it and running out. I think, and I was driving, it was just like, yeah, I had to know he was dead.

• 25:18Speaker 07

  But it's like, like, the way it happens is not, like, with the emotions and stuff, it's not linear. It just, I just remember I was scared. I remember running.

• 25:32Speaker 07

  And all that driving.

• 25:37Speaker 07

  And the more I drove back and forth, I didn't feel no better.

• 25:40Speaker 00

  Finally, she checks into a hotel, just off the interstate.

• 25:44Speaker 07

  I left the lights on. I was so stupid because I was scared to turn the lights off. I wanted to take a shower. I'm scared to get in the shower. I just was still, I don't know what, I was, I was just scared afterwards. Which I don't understand, but I was really scared.

• 26:05Speaker 00

  Unlock all episodes of What She Buried, ad-free, right now by subscribing to the Binge Podcast channel. And it doesn't stop at What She Buried. Subscribers get a binge drop of a brand-new series on the first of every month. That's all episodes, all at once, all ad-free. And between drops, you've got ad-free access to Crime Scene, the Binge's weekly series, plus instant access to over 60 true crime podcasts. Shows like Wild Boys, Blink, and My Fugitive Dad. So you'll never be short on stories. Search for The Binge on Apple Podcasts and hit Subscribe. Not on Apple? Head to GetTheBinge.com to subscribe directly.

• 26:47Speaker 05

  Observe: The North American Dad. 50s, great polo collection. He enters his vehicle information on Carvana. An offer appears in minutes. Remarkable. He squints, reads it again, smiles, and says, dang, that's a good offer. The highest form of approval. No haggling, no hassle. No one called him boss. He's still on the couch. Astonishing. Sell your car today on Carvana.com. Pickup fees may apply.

• 27:25Speaker 00

  What Quinetta told me? It's plausible. It lines up, more or less, with the stained couch, with the bullet to the brain. Even with the approximate timing that Michael Giles' family remembered, that last call to his mother on July 4th. The way Quinetta talked, flat, about a sexual assault, about Michael Giles' actions, that was, in my experience interviewing people who've gone through similar things, normal enough. Some people crumble. Some people are removed.

• 28:02Speaker 00

  I'd heard of driving back and forth after killing someone, of running scared to crappy hotels, crappier motels.

• 28:11Speaker 00

  And most people didn't call the cops. They were not from communities, typically, that had good relationships with law enforcement. Some were already involved in other illegal activities. And also, you panic when you have a dead body. It's natural to think about how to hide it, not how to present yourself to authorities for punishment.

• 28:34Speaker 00

  I'm not the only one Quinetta told this version of her story to. Quinetta's lawyer, Robbie McClung of the Richard and Robbie Duo, remembered this account. It's just, it hadn't been useful as a defense.

• 28:48Speaker 02

  I mean, I remember that story. Because the massage part is what clicks it back in my memory. Because I was like, you're giving him a massage and then you shoot him in the back of the head? Really? Wow. I just kind of looked at her kind of funny. Like, I don't think that's really gonna be a defense because you, you knew when you were telling him you, you were gonna give him a massage, you knew you were gonna shoot him in the back of the head. That's intentional. I mean, it is intentional. I didn't think it was going to be a strategy that was gonna get her what she wanted. She wanted it to be like some sort of battered woman syndrome or something. And I'm like, I don't think you're gonna get there because you literally picked up a gun and shot him in the back of the head. That is intentional murder.

• 29:32Speaker 00

  No two ways about it. Quinetta only ever described what could be defined technically as intentional murder.

• 29:41Speaker 00

  So if this was all a lie, it was a useless one.

• 29:46Speaker 00

  In my opinion, if Quinetta were lying about this, she would have lied better. Because she's a fantastic liar. She could have made up a story in which Michael Giles had abused her for years, or was hurting her in that very moment, and she fought back. But she never said that. I thought, this story is chaotic, and it doesn't absolve her of her crime. And for that reason, it's a conceivable scenario.

• 30:15Speaker 04

  I hope you're not believing her, William V.S. That's your prerogative, obviously.

• 30:20Speaker 00

  Josh Healey again. Yeah, I'm neither here nor there. I'm trying, I'm trying to, like, understand what happened. Obviously, nobody knows what happened in that room that, I mean, what happened after seems quite clear, but what happened then, it's anyone's guess, really.

• 30:33Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 30:34Speaker 00

  Josh knew that there were no absolutes here. But he also felt strongly that Quinetta planned the killing in advance. That she murdered Michael Giles for the money, and only for the money. And I can't refute that. I wasn't in that room either.

• 30:52Speaker 00

  What to believe?

• 30:55Speaker 00

  What not to believe? People like Josh were saying, don't believe a word Quinetta says. But remember, Josh never even talked to her. I had, for years. My own instinct was to keep listening to Quinetta. It was too neat and simple to discredit her entirely because she lied.

• 31:21Speaker 00

  But engaging with Quinetta and the complexities and uncertainties of her story, it was confusing, a little alienating.

• 31:31Speaker 00

  I needed some guidance.

• 31:34Speaker 00

  So I called in an expert of sorts, my friend, Josie Duffy Rice.

• 31:40Speaker 00

  She's a journalist with a Harvard Law degree, who has worked in a public defender's office and now does podcasts and Substacks and articles. She's a person who's basically entirely immersed in the criminal legal system and knows a ton about it. I told Josie this whole story, start to finish. Up until then, she'd never heard of Quinetta. It was all new to her. My immediate thought is, this sounds like both an extremely fucked up thing to do, to kill someone, lie about it, fake that they're still alive.

• 32:18Speaker 06

  Take their money. Like, it sounds so ridiculous. And also, it sounds to me like the reflection of a behavior towards someone she resented and hated, for whatever reason.

• 32:33Speaker 00

  Josie, unlike anyone who I'd ever talked to about this, put herself in Quinetta's shoes right away.

• 32:39Speaker 06

  What I'm picturing is, this dude has, like, for years, been, at best, needy, at worst, manipulative, coercive. Now he's gotten you fired from your job.

• 32:54Speaker 06

  Now you're on your third marriage, whatever. That job wasn't making you shit money, anyway. Now you probably, like, you hate him, you resent him, you don't even, you don't, not only do you not feel bad killing him, you don't feel bad taking his money. What doesn't sound to me like it happened is that she was, like, in that moment, under such duress, that she had to shoot him. And it could be true that she felt like her back was against the wall, but not in a way that is self-defense. Like, a guy saying, "I'll call your next job and get you fired," that doesn't rise to the level of, "I get to kill him, get away with it." I think it's totally plausible she did not go down there to kill him. I also think it's totally plausible that became part of the plan pretty fast.

• 33:40Speaker 00

  Josie sensed how I was feeling.

• 33:42Speaker 06

  It must be, I'm trying to think of the best way to say this. I wonder for you how, like,

• 33:51Speaker 06

  disappointing is such a shitty word, but that's actually how I feel. I'm like, sucks to go into something feeling ex. And look, I love guilty people. They're my favorite kind of people. But it is, really is, like, oh, I thought you were being abused and killed this guy, and then actually you made your fiance, you put bandages on so you could pretend to be... Like, it feels like a different vibe. However, it reminds me of the, like, the Nietzsche idea of, like, suffering doesn't make you good. Like, all of it could be true. It's interesting, this vibe of, like, you seem like you were a bad person who also might have been in a kind of shitty situation.

• 34:33Speaker 00

  I would say it's not exactly disappointing. I think what it is, is completely discombobulating.

• 34:39Speaker 06

  Look, I do not discount the possibility that there are very evil people in the world at all. I'm not one of those people that's like, everybody deep down is good. There are 8 billion people in the world. I'm sure some of them are, like, irredemably bad. Like, most people are somewhere in the middle. And Quinetta, to me, still feels somewhere in the middle. She does not feel, to me, to be, like, an irredeemable harlot. She does feel, to me, more manipulative than, you know, some other people. To me, that doesn't mean that you're getting played, right? Like, I think it can totally be true that she wants a good story about her, and likes you, and has these opinions about the system that are, like, actually good and interesting,

• 35:22Speaker 06

  and misses her kids, and feels mischaracterized, and did some really fucked up shit.

• 35:28Speaker 00

  Quinetta had stacks of magazines in her cell. She read and wrote voraciously. She knew about the craft of journalism, how stories are reported, how information is verified, how a profile subject takes shape over the course of a narrative. When I started doing this podcast, she'd been eager to participate, not just by talking to me, but by offering me reporting suggestions. The name of an old friend who might remember things from back in England, the phone number of an ex-husband who could offer a different perspective on their lives, information on where old hospital records or police reports might be found. She seemed to be guiding me towards something.

• 36:13Speaker 00

  And it became clear that most everything, and everyone from her life before, was in Detroit, the city where she was born and raised. So I went, to see if Detroit was the missing piece of the puzzle. There, I could try to understand her world by getting to know the people who shaped it.

• 36:34Speaker 03

  I was a drug dealer.

• 36:35Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 36:36Speaker 03

  I had guns all over the fucking house.

• 36:38Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 36:38Speaker 03

  I had guns in the kitchen, everywhere.

• 36:43Speaker 03

  And she, one time, she shot at me.

• 36:49Speaker 03

  She is, she shot in the ground.

• 36:51Speaker 06

  Okay. Did she?

• 36:54Speaker 03

  Hey, listen, there was a lot going on, babe.

• 36:59Speaker 00

  That's next time on What She Buried.

• 37:07Speaker 01

  Fall never arrives all at once. First the air, then the light. And slowly, the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress, a hoodie slips beneath a blazer, an old cap finds a new scarf. Because you don't simply step into the season. You create it, layer by layer, until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross.

• 37:40Speaker 00

  What She Buried is a production of Sony Music Entertainment and Campside Media. This show was reported and hosted by me, Justine Vanderloo. Eric Benson is the executive producer. Ashley Anne Krigbaum is the managing producer. Production assistance from Lane Rose, Josie Duffy Rice, Mosi Secret, Emily Martinez, Shiba Joseph, and Michael Meyer. The story editor is Matthew Share. The series was mixed and sound design by Garrett Tiedemann, with support from Yuen Li Trum Yuen. Fact checking by Matthew Giles. A special thanks to our operations team, Ashley Warren, Sabina Mara, and Destiny Dingell. From Sony Music Entertainment, the executive producers are Catherine St. Louis and Jonathan Hirsch.

• 38:26Speaker 00

  Campside Media's executive producers are Josh Dean, Vanessa Gregoriadis, and Matthew Share. If you enjoyed What She Buried, please rate and review the show wherever you get your podcasts.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  Fall never arrives all at once. First the air, then the light. And slowly, the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress, a hoodie slips beneath a blazer, an old cap finds a new scarf. Because you don't simply step into the season. You create it, layer by layer, until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross.