S-Town: The Alabama Tip That Became Something Stranger

It starts with an email. A man in Woodstock, Alabama named John B. McLemore writes to a producer at This American Life, convinced a local murder has been covered up and the town is too corrupt to care. He wants someone to investigate. What he gets is something far stranger than he bargained for.

S-Town, from the creators of Serial, sent reporter Brian Reed down to Bibb County to chase that tip. What unfolds across its seven chapters isn't really a murder story at all — it's a portrait of a brilliant, furious, lonely man and the small Southern town that shaped him. The access is intimate, almost uncomfortable. McLemore talks for hours, unfiltered, about antique clock restoration, climate change, and the rot he sees everywhere around him.

Chapter I, 'Chapter I,' sets the trap the whole series springs later. You go in thinking you know what kind of story this is. You don't. Nearly a decade after it dropped, S-Town is still debated for how it handles its subject's life and privacy — a conversation that's only grown louder as true crime audiences ask harder questions about consent and exploitation in the genre.

Press play before bed and you'll be awake past 2 a.m. finishing it. Listen on Apple Podcasts, or find it wherever you stream.