Exhibit A

Our justice system is built on a simple premise: innocent until proven guilty. I wanted to see Bryan Kohberger proven guilty, in a courtroom, in front of a jury, with the state's evidence laid out for everyone to see. Instead, he took a plea deal, and I was left with a strange, specific disappointment.

I followed this case in real time from the beginning, from the moment the news broke on November 13, 2022, that four University of Idaho students had been murdered, through the weeks of silence that followed, until an FBI raid pulled Kohberger out of his parents' Pennsylvania home in the middle of the night. For an arrest that dramatic, I assumed the state had to be holding something significant. I wanted to see it in trial.

But the more closely I followed the pretrial hearings, the less certain I became that the prosecution's case was as strong as that arrest had implied. A single source of DNA on a knife sheath was, as far as I could tell, the entire physical evidence tying him to the scene. Don't get me wrong, I want justice for the victims' families. I want a conclusion for them. But I'm also a believer in a fair trial, for everyone, including a defendant whose own family is suffering through this too.

This isn't new for me. True crime has been part of my daily routine for years, it just used to live quietly in the background.

It started with Crime Junkie playing through my headphones while I worked. I was a technical writer by day, translating dense processes into something a frontline employee could actually use, and something about true crime, specifically the procedural, fact-based kind, helped me focus in a way music never did. It wasn't background noise so much as background structure. Somewhere in there, I always had a case running. The missing persons episodes were the ones that really got my mind working, there was no fixed ending yet, just a range of possible resolutions, and underneath all of it, a stubborn hopefulness for the families that this one might still end well.

From there, I moved into narrative podcasts with real arcs, Serial's first season on Adnan Syed, then Up and Vanished on Tara Grinstead. These weren't just facts delivered in twenty minute episodes anymore, they were slow builds, entire seasons spent circling a single question from every possible angle. I found myself just as invested in the interviews themselves as I was in the cases, the specific questions a host chose to ask someone close to the crime, the pauses, the follow ups, the way a person's tone or body language got picked apart afterward for what it might reveal. I wasn't just listening for what happened. I was listening for how people behaved when they talked about it, and what that behavior might be quietly confirming or contradicting.

Then came documentaries. Netflix and Hulu became the next stop, the Chris Watts case, the Ted Bundy docuseries, the kind of true crime content that reconstructs everything after the fact, interviews, dramatizations, a tidy narrative arc by the final episode. They were polished. They were compelling. And they were, by definition, someone else's edit of the truth, usually a biased one, shaped by whatever angle made for the most compelling television, not necessarily the most complete picture.

And then, without really planning to, I stopped watching documentaries almost entirely.

That's when I found the Law&Crime Network, and everything shifted.

The first trial I watched from start to finish was the South Carolina case involving the young woman who got into a car she believed was her Uber. It wasn't. What followed was one of the most horrific things I'd ever sat through, not dramatized, not narrated, not edited down to the most compelling forty minutes. Just the actual proceedings, in real time, exactly as they happened. Judge Clifton Newman presided over that trial, and by the end of it, I had a genuine respect for the way he ran his courtroom, measured, serious, unwilling to let anything slide.

That respect became something closer to admiration when it came time for sentencing. The defendant's guilt wasn't in question, not by any reasonable doubt, and Judge Newman didn't soften a single word of it. He called it the most severe case of murder he'd witnessed in his entire career on the bench, and when it came to leniency, he was direct, that's simply not part of his DNA. No performance, no going easy because a case had drawn attention. Just a judge saying exactly what needed to be said.

So when it turned out Judge Newman was also presiding over the Murdaugh trial, one of the most anticipated trials in recent memory, I was already invested before it began, not just in the case, but in watching him work again. I kept watching from there. Some of it was high profile, Murdaugh, Karen Read, Johnny Depp. Some of it wasn't, a FedEx trial that barely made headlines, ordinary hearings nobody was live-tweeting. I watched Idaho 4 the same way, every hearing, as they happened, not a recap after the fact.

By the time documentaries on cases I'd already followed at trial came out, I stopped watching them entirely. I already knew the facts. I'd already seen the actual questions asked and answered, under oath, without a producer deciding which twelve minutes made the final cut.

Somewhere between that South Carolina trial and Murdaugh, I realized what had actually happened. I didn't just develop a preference for trial footage over documentaries. I'd developed a preference for primary sources over someone else's summary of them, full stop. A documentary can only show you what its editor decided mattered. A trial shows you everything, the strong moments and the weak ones, the objections that get sustained and the ones that don't, the parts that would never survive a producer's cut because they're slow or technical or don't resolve neatly. That's exactly the part I want to see.

It got to the point where I wouldn't really discuss a specific case unless I'd watched the trial myself, or if a trial hadn't happened yet, unless I'd read through what was actually filed with the court. I got surprisingly good at working through legal filings and doing my best, I'm not a lawyer, to understand what they actually meant. Which, in hindsight, is just my job. Taking complicated information and breaking it down so someone outside that field can understand it. I just started doing it for myself, for free, at ten at night, about people I'd never met.

It's not a coincidence that this is also how I approach my actual work. I spend my days taking fragmented, secondhand versions of a process and tracing them back to what's actually true, then rebuilding something people can trust. Reading a court filing instead of watching a documentary is the same instinct, pointed somewhere much darker.

So this is Cross-Referenced, a place to write about the cases I've followed properly, gavel to gavel, and the ones I'm still watching in real time. I'll have opinions here, I always do, but they'll be built on the same thing everything else in this space is built on, the actual record, not someone's summary of it. No documentary summaries. No secondhand certainty. Just what actually happened, and what I made of it.