Gone South

In 2012, historian Karen Cox is digging through the Mississippi State Archives when an archivist tells her, “If you want to know about Natchez, you need to look at Goat Castle.” Cox expects a ghost story. What she finds is stranger and darker: a 1932 murder that turned into a national Southern Gothic spectacle.

The victim was a reclusive former Southern belle. The suspects were her eccentric neighbors, a failed concert pianist and an aging socialite, living in a decaying mansion overrun with goats. Newspapers dubbed them the Wild Man and the Goat Woman, and tourists flocked to Natchez to gawk.

But beneath the spectacle was the real tragedy: Emily Burns, a young Black woman forced into the story and ultimately blamed, while the white suspects became local celebrities. Sent to Mississippi’s brutal Parchman prison, Emily was erased from the public record.

Cox set out to write her back in and to expose what Goat Castle reveals about justice in the Jim Crow South.

Subscribe to our newsletter:https://jedlipinski.substack.com/Connect with Jed Lipinski:https://www.instagram.com/gonesouthpodcast/https://www.facebook.com/groups/gonesouthpodcast/https://www.linkedin.com/in/jed-lipinski/Karen Cox is the author of Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South:https://www.amazon.com/Goat-Castle-Story-Murder-Gothic/dp/1469661438

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At a 2024 House Judiciary oversight hearing, an exchange about racially motivated violence goes viral after FBI chief Kash Patel appears to stumble over a question about the 2015 Charleston church massacre. The moment sparks a grim question: how does a tragedy this defining slip out of view?

Jed Lipinski revisits what happened at Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church when 21-year-old Dylann Roof sat in on Bible study, then opened fire and killed nine Black parishioners. With New Yorker writer Jelani Cobb and Charleston native Jack Hitt, we trace the deeper history Roof targeted: Denmark Vesey, the long shadow of Confederate “heritage,” and the symbols that still shape South Carolina’s public life.

From the Confederate flag’s removal to today’s backlash, this is a story about memory, denial, and what the country chooses to learn, or forget.

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On September 9, 2023, a road-rage encounter in South Carolina turns into a nine-mile chase and ends with 33-year-old Scott Spivey dead on a rural back road. Police quickly call it self-defense under Stand Your Ground.

But Scott’s sister, Jennifer Foley, doesn’t buy it. As the case is closed and sealed off, she starts building her own timeline, until a civil lawsuit forces the release of the evidence file: thousands of documents, photos, body-cam and dash-cam footage, and recorded phone calls that suggest the official story was shaped from the start.

Wall Street Journal reporter Valerie Bauerlein and attorney Mark Tinsley follow the trail into a world of conflicts of interest, missing (or buried) evidence, and a system that treats the shooter as the victim.

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Wall Street Journal reporter Valerie Bauerlein, who covered the Alex Murdaugh murder trial gavel to gavel, explains why the most revealing part of the Murdaugh saga isn’t Alex at all. It’s the 100-year legal dynasty that made him possible.

We go back to Hampton County, South Carolina, a post–Civil War “burned county” built to enforce White Rule, and follow three generations of Murdaugh power: Randolph Murdaugh Sr., the solicitor who learned how to bend the system; “Buster” Murdaugh, a charismatic, ruthless prosecutor tied to bootlegging and alleged jury tampering; and Randolph Murdaugh III, the smoother operator who kept the machine humming, until cameras and modern technology started capturing what used to happen in the shadows.

From the family’s early courtroom tactics and railroad lawsuits to the 2019 boat crash that killed Mallory Beach and the frantic hospital damage-control captured on security footage, this is the story of how a dynasty built its power and how it finally collapsed from the inside.

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Gone South, the Edward R. Murrow award-winning podcast, is back for a fifth season. Join host Jed Lipinski as he investigates new southern-based stories each week. 

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