Maggie Freleng

Maggie Freleng is a Pulitzer Prize-winning podcast producer and one of the foremost journalists in criminal legal reform today. She is the host of Graves County (found on the Bone Valley feed) and one of the hosts of Wrongful Conviction. Read my review of Graves County here, this interview will make more sense.

How is Graves County similar to Bone Valley and how is it different?
Both stories examine how a case can be built on sand—rumors, pressure, and shifting witness accounts—while the system keeps moving as if the foundation were solid. You hear the same players show up again and again: incentivized witnesses, media narratives, and institutions reluctant to admit error.

Graves County follows a case propelled by a citizen sleuth, a group of teenagers, and a prosecution that leaned on changing stories over forensics. The social dynamics of a small Western Kentucky town—friend groups, gossip, fear—are the engine. Think Salem, MA and The Crucible. In Bone Valley, there were at least testable physical threads, though ignored by the authorities; here, the absence is the point.

How did this case get into your radar, and why did it stick with you?
Right from the start, everything about this story stood out; the case came through a man known as "Sherlock Homeboy" in prison. He told Jason Flom about it, who gave it to me. Then I read transcripts where the “facts” morph with every telling. When you see a conviction held together by rumor and momentum, you feel a responsibility to slow it down—put everything on the tape, side-by-side, and ask: does this still stand?

How much time did you spend in Kentucky? What was it like being there? Did you live in a hotel and did you have a favorite restaurant?
On and off for two years—long stretches embedded around Mayfield and the wider county. We stayed at hotels and rentals. The days were interviews, record digs. Nights were notes and outlines. Unfortunately, Mayfield doesn’t really have “restaurants” and the ones there don't have alcohol—it's a limited dry county,  so only some places have wine and beer. I need a drink after these days. There are a few wing spots in town with drinks, but I'd call those more bars. Mayfield was not fancy. We ate a lot of fast food and BBQ.

What was the moment or piece of evidence that made you certain this story had to be told?
I think there were several moments, but one crystallizing moment came when I read Tom Mangold’s (from the BBC) emails, which are public record filed by the Kentucky Innocence Project. They were so revealing in terms of how people got involved and how narratives shifted. The most “OMG” moment was the email from Susan’s friend to Tom about how Susan had not been honest with him. That made us be like, “Woah, we really are on to something.” And from the beginning, there was just so much key evidence that was never collected; how witnesses were coerced or coached, and how much of the narrative seemed built on assumptions rather than facts. When I saw that there was a person, Quincy Cross, serving a life sentence despite there being virtually no physical evidence tying him to the crime, I knew this wasn’t just another cold case: this was a case that raised serious concerns about justice, about system failure. At that point, I felt a responsibility to tell it right, to lift up voices that had been ignored, and to show what really had—and hadn’t—been done.

Susan Galbreath, a citizen sleuth, plays a major role. What about her involvement surprised you? How did her version of events shape the official narrative?
Susan Galbreath, a homemaker (often called a citizen sleuth) was surprising in many ways. I was struck by her persistence, her willingness to dig into things that authorities either dismissed or never investigated fully. She pursued interviews, collected her own documents, and explored angles other people ignored.

But ultimately, what surprised me was the shamelessness she had in making false allegations and ruining people’s lives. She was proud of it. And I say that because we know for a fact that she said Quincy Cross stalked her, something Tom reported, but later found out it was her own husband. She never made an effort to correct the record and used it to steer the narrative that Quincy Cross was a monster.

What was the most surprising thing about it, after everything you learned?
How quickly a theory can become an institutional memory. Once a narrative calcifies, every new detail gets bent to fit it. Watching that happen in real time—across years and people—was the single most sobering thing.

Do you consider this true crime or investigative journalism and is there a difference?
I’m an investigative journalist who uses the tools of narrative audio. “True crime” can be a genre label; investigative reporting is a method: documents, timelines, sourcing, accountability, and being willing to publish the truth even if it's not what we ourselves want to hear.

I was shocked to learn that the National Innocence Project is a nonprofit but that some states, including Kentucky, have innocence-type units inside the public defender system. How does that change cases like this one?
That can mean better access to state resources and clients—but also heavy caseloads and government constraints. Separately, some counties have Conviction Integrity Units in prosecutors’ offices. Structure matters: independence, resources, and incentives shape outcomes.

It seems like there were so many victims in this case. How do you balance who the story is about? Who is this story about?
This story is about an entire town, but first and foremost, it’s Jessica Currin’s story, though her life and the people who loved her are not a plot device. It’s also about Quincy Cross and what it means to serve life for a crime you adamantly say you did not commit, and the facts appear to back that up. And it’s about a community—teen girls who became witnesses, a citizen sleuth who became central, and a system that can cause such harm, beyond the defendants. The balance is: center the person who was killed, scrutinize state power, and, like Bone Valley, Seasons 1 & 2,  give everyone their full, complicated humanity.

We thought long and hard, making many revisions to determine who or what to center the story on. The original story was centered on the tornado that ripped through Mayfield in 2021. We felt it was a good metaphor for the fallout of Jessica’s homicide, but that structure just didn’t work. We ultimately believe this is everyone’s journey, but we used Jessica and Quincy’s stories to drive the narrative. 

I love how it ends, with Quincy getting cut off on the call. Why did you decide to do that? How did you get that idea?
Because right now this is a story that is still unfolding, and media attention has been and will continue to be part of that unfolding story, so to falsely create a perfect end didn’t feel true. What felt right was to leave with Quincy’s words, a bit of hope for his October 23 hearing, and the reality of what people in prison and their loved ones deal with every day. Prison is cruel. Power literally cuts the line—time limits, surveillance, rules. Ending there leaves listeners where Quincy lives: interrupted, controlled, unable to finish a sentence. It’s not a gimmick; it’s the truth of the setting.

Quincy is being held with life imprisonment despite what you describe as no physical evidence tying him to the crime. What has held up his conviction, legally speaking, and what obstacles stand in the way of a new trial
Getting a new trial in Kentucky is beyond challenging due to various deadlines and legal rules. For example, a motion for a new trial must be submitted within five days after the verdict is announced. Even when entering  “newly discovered evidence,” there's a one-year limit starting from the judgment date. Generally, any motion needs to be filed within three years of the final judgment. To qualify as "newly discovered evidence" for a new trial, the evidence usually has to be something that wasn't available earlier, has to be significant, not just repetitive, and likely to change the trial's outcome. Given these requirements, it's nearly impossible to meet them.

So right now, Quincy’s attorneys are presenting evidence that in the years post-conviction has not yet been admitted to a court. That includes new testing on ink used in a diary entry purportedly written in 2000 after Jessica’s killing. 

If you could say one thing to Susan Galbreath, what would it be?
I would ask her now, with all the facts, would she do things differently? Did she intentionally steer the case away from Jeremy? What does she know that she never revealed that could help put the real killers away? 

But those are questions. What would I say? I would say, "I hope the suffering for everyone involved was worth your blip of fame.”

I loved to hear you describe audio in your conversation with Gilbert. How does audio play into this story in particular?
Audio provides a story and character without visual distractions, much like a book allows you to immerse yourself.  It captures breath, hesitation, overlap and feels less contrived than video, which, in my opinion, helps the authenticity and intimacy of audio reporting. Field tape—parking-lot air, paper rustle, a door buzz at the jail—they place you inside the system, not just reading about it.

What do you hope listeners take away from Graves County— not just about this case specifically, but about justice, wrongful convictions, or how community and rumor intersect with law enforcement
I hope listeners walk away recognizing that “justice” is fragile, that it depends not just on laws, but on the human systems and people implementing them. Delays, assumptions, rumors, pressure from community, weak evidence—they all can tilt outcomes, sometimes catastrophically. Law enforcement needs to be trained better to look at facts and avoid tunnel vision. We all do. I’ve gotten it wrong before too. This podcast comes FROM a place of getting it wrong. As a journalist and investigator. Listen to my podcast Death and Deceit in Alliance. It’s a director's cut of a show I put out a few years ago that shook me, and many listeners, to my core. It comes out on December 5 and I'm really hoping these two investigations parallel each other to really show how we can ALL get it wrong. Not just the police, not just prosecutors, but critical journalists like myself. None of us are immune. The problem is when we double down and refuse to confront our mistakes like the Kentucky Attorney General's office and journalist Tom Mangold. 

And I hope all of it provokes questions. How can journalists and activists do better? How do we demand better oversight? How do we support people who are fighting for exoneration? How do we ensure transparency?

What is your favorite sound?
The silence after a good question…hearing the silence of grappling.

You mentioned spending a lot of time on podcast episodes that seemed to be barking up the wrong tree for a story. What happened and what did you learn from it? 
We followed an early theory that felt tidy. The more we mapped timestamps, phone logs, and statements, the more the puzzle fought back. The lesson: kill your darlings. Let documents and tape lead, not your instincts. We scrapped a beautiful outline because it wasn’t true enough.

What’s a podcast you wish you made?
Any In the Dark—clinical reporting, moral clarity, and a masterclass in how to interrogate state power.

What’s a podcast you love that everyone already knows about?
As a journalist and someone with a public radio background, I love On the Media. It gives easy-to-digest news stories and interviews about, well, the media. It gives me a good launching point to look further into the news in my industry.

What’s a podcast you love that not enough people know about?
Missing and Murdered. Connie Walker is one of my favorite radio journalists, and the issues she brings light to are certainly not well-known enough; people need to know about them. 

Bear Brook and There Goes the Neighborhood also get honorable mentions. 

And, listen to my podcast Suave, which won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize, to learn more about our incarceration system!

Anything else you'd like to add?
Yes. I want to acknowledge how courageous the people who have come forward are—witnesses who finally told the truth despite mounting pressure from law enforcement to stick to the prosecution's story, families who kept believing there might be more to the story, even when they were told to accept one specific version. Even law enforcement you’ll hear from in the podcast who did the right thing to speak out.  I also want people to know that investigative journalism is about asking questions, looking carefully at evidence, and letting truth be the lodestar. And when we make a mistake, because we are all human, we HAVE to take accountability to do better next time. No system will be fixed without holding truth to power. Finally, if this season helps even one person get justice they have long been denied or helps a family find some peace, or holds someone in power accountable, then I have accomplished what I set out to do. 

Thank you, Maggie!