Archive 81 Presents... Love + Radio: Blood Memory

Hey everyone, we're excited to share another episode of a podcast we think you'll really like. It's from the team at Love & Radio, which is one of our favorite shows. And as a fun fact, when Mark was first starting out in audio, he actually worked under one of the creators of Love & Radio, Nick Vanderkulk. Nick taught Mark a lot about the craft of audio production, including how to remove music at the perfect moment, to add emphasis to a statement. The episode we're sharing today is the first of a genre-bending true crime series called Blood Memory. It's a show that shatters the conventions of what a true crime podcast can be, presenting a non-narrative, long-form investigation. The series follows the life of Michael Thompson, who became infamous for defecting from a notorious prison gang and testifying against them in several high-profile criminal trials. This is not a podcast that tells you what happened. Instead, it invites you into an immersive, ethically complex world that feels a little like Sons of Anarchy meets S-Town. Through nearly a decade of intimate interviews with Thompson, combined with meticulous investigative journalism, the series forces listeners to grapple with a central unnerving question. Is Michael Thompson a gentle soul trapped by a broken system? Or is he, as critics claim, a master manipulator who cannot be trusted? Listen to Blood Memory wherever you get your podcasts. Here's the first episode. 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 re-evaluate 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 else wise you wouldn't be taking it you see my intent is not to stand against anything but stand for 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 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? Sure. I took a knife away from a guy once that was intent on killing me. I felt it 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. You were holding him down on the ground or what? Yes. With the knife to his throat? Close. He wasn't going to move. Choice was mine. Within prison 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. 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. 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. Does it feel like that to you at all? Isn't that great? I think that's great. from love and radio you're listening to blood memory i'm nick vanderkolk this is episode one callipatria everybody dreams of having a great love in their life 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. But sometimes if you want something great, you have to make a lot of sacrifices. Chapter 1, Ariel. My first memory as a child was a flower farm across the street. 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. So when I got a chance, finally, I did move. 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. I saw something that disturbed me, and that was that, you know, all children seem 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 seventh 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. 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. These were seventh graders. I'm so short. I mean, I had seventh 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 seventh grade. That's so sad. I was told point blank, you're never going to have these kids 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. I said, I know that you probably just walked 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 wild flowers and little shiny things that somebody had thrown away. 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. 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 About 1986 or so I quit it I just couldn 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. Did you have a plan? No. I had no plan. And 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. So, like, what did drifting around look like? It started one day in a cave. I will never forget. Sorry, a cave? A cave, yes. I was exploring. Where? 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. The only way you can get to it is to go 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 but the whole set this is the only way by metaphor i can explain it that's what happened to my mind my mind started to disassemble itself 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 stoical 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. That began my whole saga of panic attacks for seven years. 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 After 7 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 got to do something. 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. Then my ex-husband, who was a public defender, and he said to me, you should do mitigation. I 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. 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. 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? 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 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. 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 Supersport. How'd you guys meet? 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. Chapter 2, Heather. Oh, my God. 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. 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. 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. I started working for the probation department in LA County, and I was assigned to work in their narcotics testing unit. So I would 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 Drino, 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 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 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. 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. And 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 family's 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. And in that moment, I thought I'm going to become a prosecutor and lock all these fuckers up. In about 2000 and... Yes, 2005, beginning of 2005, I got a case. It was a trial of an Arran 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. Chapter 3, Ariel. He was acting as his own attorney, so I took my orders from him. I met with him. And Big Mac was a member of the Aryan Brotherhood. Oh, definitely. That's the best thing that ever happened to Big Mac, which says something about the things that happened to Big Mac. Okay, so you start working with Big Mac, and it's already tense because he's representing himself. 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. He gets his hands on what? Pruno. Like bathtub wine. 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's a list of all the Aaron Brotherhood dropouts. It was not a long list. I want you to go through this list, send a letter to each one of these MFing rats and asked 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 A.B. 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. And the only one who wrote back and said he would see me was Michael Thompson. 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, 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. state 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. 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 going to go there and convince him to take back his testimony? To recant? What am I supposed to use or say? What's the incentive? He says, oh yeah, use your feminine wiles. And I just laughed. I said, 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 going to 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. And 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, 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. What were you guys talking about? 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. 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. 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, 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. Do you remember what you were thinking to yourself on the drive home? 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? Are you as charmed by him as everyone else is? You don't think he'll whack me, do you? Chapter four. Heather. 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. Did anything jump out at you in his file? 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 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 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. I'm probably one of the most violent individuals you'll ever meet in your life. Don't brag, just fact. It's that simple. 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 served me well as a prosecutor. 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. Were there any incidents that jumped to mind? 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 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 in 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, he's engaged in some illegal activity, he immediately will turn state's evidence and say hey well 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. 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 going to 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. I don't believe very much in romance. 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, he would write back or he'd tell me, I don't understand how you understand me so well. 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. 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. We'll find out 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 That's it for this episode of Blood Memory. Stay tuned to the end for a sneak peek of episode two. On this episode, you heard the voices of Ariel. Sometimes if you want something great, you have to make a lot of sacrifices. Heather Brown. I'm going to become a prosecutor and lock all these fuckers up. And Michael Thompson. You find out what your beliefs are when they're put to the test. We reached out to Michael McElhaney, also known as Big Mac, but did not hear back from him. Music on this episode comes from Michelle Benabila, Natalia Bayliss Las Olas, Zeroshi Memory Scale, Sarepti Glitchbird, Russ Young Interspecifics, Kishosis Dialect, Esmeralda and Timber Tambor Check the show notes for the full playlist The series producer of Blood Memory is Mira Kumar Robin Amor is our managing editor Additional reporting by Brian Kranz and Anya Schultz Fact-checking by Nicole Posolka. And visuals by Orla McCarty. Love and radio is a labor of love. And radio. And made possible thanks to you. Thank you. With extra special thanks to Rock Hard Abs, Casey Pamela Anderson, Mark Dunks-A-Son, Aaron Go-Go-Goers, Sam Huffman the Huffman, Jacqueline Potato Leak, Keith McLendry or Leith McKendry, Jotato Palmherry, Ali Mothra Perry, Kreese Lesage, William Stabby Spears, Jason V for Vendetta, and Ksani. I'm Nicholas Sardine, Punch Punch Vanderkolk. Thanks for listening. you've been listening to the first episode of blood memory from the team at love and radio for more subscribe to blood memory wherever you get your podcasts