In the Dark Season 2, Episode 1: Four Murders, One Suspect, Six Trials

July 16, 1996. Winona, Mississippi. Four people are shot inside Tardy Furniture, a small store in a small town, and one of the victims is a 16-year-old boy. The community is shattered. Investigators settle on a suspect: Curtis Flowers, a 26-year-old Black man with no criminal record who had briefly worked at the store. Then the same prosecutor, District Attorney Doug Evans, tries him again, and again, and again. Six trials for the same crime.

How does that even happen? That's the question that brought host Madeleine Baran and the APM Reports team behind In the Dark, whose first season won a Peabody Award, to Winona. Season 2 opens with the date itself. Episode 1 retraces that July morning minute by minute and lays out the case the state built against Flowers. The reporters didn't just read transcripts. They moved to Mississippi, knocked on doors, and started testing every piece of the prosecution's story.

What they found would put this case in front of the U.S. Supreme Court and make In the Dark one of the most consequential podcasts ever made. Their analysis of how Evans picked his juries became central to the national conversation around the case. But every answer starts with one question: who really walked into that store?

Start here and you'll binge the whole season. Listen on Apple Podcasts tonight.