706: A Mess to Be Reckoned With

Ira Glass

It started as something that she was doing in her spare time and kind of took over her life. Lissa Yellow Bird searches for missing people, people nobody else is looking for, people the police have given up looking for. A reporter, Sierra Crane Murdoch, met Lissa in 2014 when Sierra was looking into the disappearance of a young, white oil worker, KC Clarke. He'd vanished a couple years before on the reservation Lissa's from in North Dakota. Lissa was investigating it too.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

She had just gotten out of prison. She was looking for a distraction, a way to stay sober. And she basically opened up her files to me and allowed me to see the degree to which she had involved herself in this case.

She had actually spent years. And she cracked that case through really, really non-traditional means, like by basically waging this campaign against the person who she believed had murdered KC Clarke. She mailed tens and tens of thousands of fliers around western North Dakota.

Ira Glass

The flyer said, "Beware", with a photo of the guy she thought murdered KC Clarke and his wife. And they did turn people against him. But at the same time, Lissa befriended the wife.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

They were texting each other almost every day. They were talking on the phone constantly. And so she had this really intimate window into the lives of these people she was trying to investigate.

And through that window, she was able to see their vulnerabilities. So at the same time that she was maintaining this faux friendship with this woman, she was also completely undermining her and her husband. And the case broke open.

Ira Glass

Sierra spent years with Lissa, watching this play out, and ended up writing a book about Lissa and the case. They got close. Sierra would stay at Lissa's apartment for months. They'd drive through the badlands, running down leads, talked for hours every week when Sierra wasn't in North Dakota.

And during those years, this thing happened. Native American families started asking Lissa to look for their loved ones. Lissa's Arikara, a member of the Mandan Hidatsa Arikara Nation. Remember, Lissa was just kind of inventing how she did this work. Before this, she'd been a welder, a prison guard, a social worker, did some law enforcement work and studied criminal justice in college, but she'd also been a drug dealer.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

Lissa has lived on both sides of the law, which is what makes her so good at what she does. She's gone to prison. She knows how law enforcement operates from a perpetrator's point of view as well.

Ira Glass

In dozens of cases now, sometimes on her own, sometimes with law enforcement. Lissa has deployed the same doggedness and resourcefulness that she marshaled in that first case. Like, for example, when a woman named Olivia Lone Bear went missing from Lissa's reservation in 2017, there was this national search for her. But Lissa's theory was she might not be far from home, where she was last seen. And one day, she decided to take a boat out on the lake near Olivia's house with some fishing sonar that she'd bought years earlier thinking someday it might come in handy to find missing people.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

She just launched the boat. And yeah, within about 10 minutes, her younger relative spotted some shape on the fishing sonar and said, hey, Auntie, what's that? And Lissa looked at it, and it was a truck. And Olivia was inside.

Ira Glass

Months before this, Lissa and Olivia's family had tried to convince law enforcement authorities to look in that lake.

Lots of Native Americans go missing and are never found. We don't even have good statistics on this, because the cases are so underreported and poorly tracked. A big part of the problem? There are these federal laws that limit who can investigate cases and how they can investigate them on reservations, which leads to a jurisdictional tangle. And it's often not clear which law enforcement agency is supposed to take a case.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

If you don't know if they disappeared from on a reservation or off a reservation, it's really hard to say whose responsibility that case is.

Ira Glass

On the reservation, tribal police or the federal authorities. Off the reservation, city, or county, or state police.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

But because it's so unclear, those cases can become a lot lower priority, or those cases can be ignored by all jurisdictions. And that's where Lissa Yellow Bird comes in. She searches for the people who slip through these jurisdictional cracks.

Ira Glass

Sierra says another thing about this case-- she and Lissa talked for hours all the time about everything. But after those five days when Lissa was working this case--

Sierra Crane Murdoch

She just kind of went quiet about it. We didn't talk about it for years, which is really unusual because Lissa is always talking about her cases. She just never talked about this case again, though. And I knew that-- I knew because she was so quiet about it, and I knew also because it was her own relative that it had affected her in a way that no other case had.

But I didn't really know why, entirely. I thought there was something else going on. And three years passed, and that was when she finally said, OK, yeah, I'm ready to talk about it. She wanted to talk about it.

Ira Glass

Sierra suggested doing a story, and Lissa said yes. She wanted people to hear it. And that is what we're bringing you today. We listen in on this exceptional investigator, Lissa Yellow Bird. Those phone calls, they are really amazing. She just knows how to read people and how to pull information out of them that other people cannot get. And we hear her crack this case in five very intense days.

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. And before we get to this story, a heads up. This story mentions violence, including sexual violence. Here's Sierra Crane Murdoch.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

The last time I saw Lissa, we were at her grandma's house on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. This was in February. Her mom had called her over to find their missing cat, not something Lissa usually searches for, but she drove over right away in her hot pink pajamas.

And while everyone's eating breakfast, Lissa walks to the window, stares out with binoculars. Lissa thinks some coyotes got the cat. A few days earlier, her mom bought a hunting rifle, and everyone's cracking up at the idea of Lissa's mom, a retired professor who doesn't like to be outside and who's never had a gun, taking to the porch with her rifle. Lissa asks her nephew, Mercury, to teach her mom how to use it.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

Lissa goes to the bedroom to get the rifle. She comes back holding a guitar case and hands it to Mercury.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

The Yellow Birds are really close. At any time, you'll find four generations of them just hanging out at Lissa's grandma's house for days on end. And it was at this house-- everyone eating, laughing, watching television-- where they last saw Lissa's niece, Carla Yellow Bird, before she went missing. That was in August of 2016.

At first, they weren't that worried. Carla didn't live with the Yellow Birds. She lived about two hours away off the reservation, but she was always stopping by, sometimes stayed the night. She was 27, had lots of energy, confident. She'd walk into her family's house, plug her iPhone into their speakers, and start jamming hip hop.

And it wasn't unusual for Carla to take off for a few days, not answer when they called. When she stopped coming around, her family told Lissa, don't worry.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

Lissa was starting to worry though. Carla was the daughter of one of Lissa's favorite relatives, Uncle Chucky. He died a few years earlier. One of the last things he'd asked Lissa was to look out for Carla.

Then one morning, Lissa had a dream about Chucky. It wasn't long. He just kind of appeared, and he said, you need to go get Carla now. Lissa called her family and found out the night before they'd asked a holy woman to come to the house and pray for Carla. They hadn't wanted to tell Lissa.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

Her mom told her they actually were really worried. At this point, no one had heard from Carla in weeks.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

Lissa's family told her they didn't want it on social media, out of protectiveness for Carla. Carla had been in some legal trouble. She was addicted to meth. They didn't want to make things harder for her. Lissa thought maybe they were also embarrassed. In the Yellow Bird family are professors, anthropologists, social workers, all very aware of the stereotypes used to shame native communities.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

Lissa's seen this firsthand with how the family treated her. She was addicted to meth, spent three years in prison for dealing. For a while, her family avoided her. Even now, Lissa's been sober 15 years, and they don't like to talk about it. Lissa's mom doesn't even use the word "prison." She calls it "Lissa's other college."

Lissa couldn't disagree more with this attitude. She believes that when someone goes missing, that's the worst possible time to hide the facts. Often the things someone is trying to cover up can be part of what led them to go missing in the first place.

Lissa called Carla's mom, Loretta. Loretta lived a few hours away on another reservation, and the Yellow Birds didn't know her very well. Carla's parents weren't together long. Loretta told Lissa she'd reported Carla missing a few weeks earlier. Lissa offered to help find Carla, and Loretta said yes.

So Lissa got to work. One of the first people she called was the officer responsible for the case, April Jose, a detective for the city of Mandan, where Carla lived. April said she'd learned that in the days before Carla disappeared, Carla was on the Fort Berthold Reservation, and she might have gone to a second reservation, called Spirit Lake. But April didn't have jurisdiction on reservations. She was a city cop.

This is another part of the jurisdictional tangle in these cases. April was trying to follow every lead, but she could only go so far. To interview suspects on the reservation, she needed the cooperation of law enforcement there. It's part of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. But no one was calling her back.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

So Lissa did exactly the thing her family didn't want her to do. She opened Facebook and wrote, "Carla Yellow Bird has been missing, and I want to know any and all info related to her disappearance before I take this to the next level." People in the broader native community know Lissa, the work she does. When she puts something on Facebook, people respond, give her leads they might be more cautious about giving police. She started getting calls right away, and she learned Carla was last seen driving around with two men on the Spirit Lake Indian Reservation.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

Suna Guy, she hears this name a few times. He's a member of the Spirit Lake Tribe. So Lissa posts again on Facebook, says her niece was last seen with Suna Guy, gives his full name. And within a few hours, she gets a call from a blocked number.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

It's Suna.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

There are long stretches where Lissa doesn't say anything, just lets Suna fill the silence. Lissa sounds sort of unimpressed, which is tactical.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

Lissa spends a lot of this conversation trying to get Suna to give her his number. I should say Lissa is really good at talking on the phone. She told me once, you know me, I'll keep a dumbass on the phone forever.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

Lissa thinks he's lying. Suna knows something. The next day, Lissa tracked down the other guy people had seen in the car with Suna and Carla the night she disappeared. He was a friend of Carla's, named Jason. Lissa got him on the phone.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

Jason said Carla had drugs she wanted to sell in Spirit Lake, so Suna had offered to pick her up a few hours away and drive her and Jason back to the reservation. When they got there, Jason said Suna ditched him and took off with Carla and some other guys, guys who are known as scary, violent. Then hours later, Jason ran into them again, but Carla wasn't with them.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

Lissa was starting to feel sure that Carla was dead. At the same time, she was gathering leads. She was also talking almost every day with April Jose, the detective in Mandan. April had gotten a hold of Carla's phone records, bank account, and seen no activity.

Lissa decides she needs to apply more pressure, so she goes on Facebook again, blasts Suna's name in another public post. She writes, "I have been given information that Carla was last seen riding with Suna Guy. Please contact me by private message. Your confidentiality is assured." And then the phone rings.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

It's Suna.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

Suna still hasn't told her anything. But this time, Lissa doesn't try to keep him on the phone. She hangs up on him, the guy whose number she doesn't have, the guy she suspects murdered her niece. Lissa's anger here, that's not a tactic. She's enraged. What's crazy to me is that Suna stays on the phone and takes it, and then unprompted decides to call her back, just 10 hours later.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

Carla and Lissa had some things in common. There are obvious things. They both had addictions. They were both mothers. They really loved their kids. But because of their addictions, they'd had their kids taken away from them for stretches of time. They knew how awful that felt.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

Lissa says Carla was a really cute kid-- kind of shy, giddy. But as Carla got older, Lissa would get on her case. Carla was known to take your stuff, little things. Like if you left your earrings out, you might later see your relative wearing them. And they'd be like, look at the cute earrings Carla gave me. The last time Lissa saw Carla, they were at their grandma's house. Lissa walked in on Carla raiding the fridge.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

Lissa told her, damn, Carla, if you're going to steal, at least steal something nice. Still, when Carla needed help, she often called Lissa. And Lissa tried to help her as best she could because of Carla's dad, Chucky. He's a big part of why it's taken Lissa so long to talk about Carla and why it still hurts so much.

Let me just tell you what happened. A few years before Carla went missing, Chucky moved in with his mom, Lissa's grandma. Lissa would visit him a lot, spend hours in his bedroom. They'd flip through books together and talk about them. Chucky didn't have as many graduate degrees as others in his family, but everyone said he was the smartest Yellow Bird.

It made Lissa feel good to keep up with him. She liked proving to herself and to Chucky that she hadn't totally fried her brain with drugs. They spent lots of time debating this massive book he kept by his bed, The Code of Federal Regulations, Title 25. It spells out how the US government is supposed to fulfill its obligations to tribes in exchange for taking their land, how it's supposed to always act in their best interest, for their well-being, obligations the government has ignored in all kinds of ways both Lissa and Chucky witnessed themselves.

Chucky was four years old during a major event in their tribe. The US government built a dam, flooded out most of the reservation, forced everyone, including the Yellow Birds, to relocate. They were farmers, self-sufficient, but the land the government moved them to was unfarmable. There was huge unemployment. A lot of people left the reservation for cities. Chucky and most of his generation were sent away to boarding schools where a lot of them were abused.

In his room, Chucky also had stacks of articles about an emerging science called epigenetics that's shown how traumatic stress can change the way a person's genes behave and how those changes can affect your kids' genes, make it likelier that they develop illnesses, like depression or PTSD. Chucky put into words a pattern Lissa had observed her whole life, that she and the people she would later help had been delivered into a system where they had no chance, a system that kept taking from them, until they died. And their bodies are dragged behind bushes or left to drift at the bottoms of rivers and lakes. And few people bother to look for them, to fish them out.

Chucky himself wasn't doing so well. He was an alcoholic. He was in his early 60s, and he had cirrhosis.

One night when Chucky was drinking, he got violent, and his mom kicked him out of the house. Lissa called him and told him to come to Fargo where she was living. She didn't think he'd come. But then he called her one night from a Fargo hotel. He wouldn't tell her which one.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

Later that night, Chucky called Lissa again. He said he was going to kill himself. Lissa stayed on the phone with him all night, for seven hours. She kept him on one line. On the other line-- she took her son's phone-- dialed the police. She called every hotel in the city looking for him. Before Lissa could find him, Chucky hung himself. That was the night he asked Lissa to watch out for Carla.

In the three days Lissa was getting all these calls from Suna, she was also trying over and over to reach the one investigator who has the authority to look into crimes on the Spirit Lake Indian Reservation, an investigator with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Lissa left a ton of messages for him, even asked a tribal councilman to call on her behalf. And finally, after days of this, the investigator returned her calls.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

He tells Lissa, we know about Suna. We're looking for him, but we can't find him anywhere.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

Lissa gives him all the information she has-- who she's talked to, who knows what, where to find them. She seems way ahead of the investigator. This is typical. I've seen Lissa work on dozens of cases. The investigator tells Lissa, don't worry. We got it covered. Then a few hours later--

[PHONE RINGING]

Sierra Crane Murdoch

It's Suna. I have no idea why he keeps calling.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

Actually, yes. Suna raped his child's babysitter and spent 10 years in prison for it. He was 21 at the time. She was 14. One of Lissa's many jobs over the years was as a counselor to sex offenders in a prison.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

This is the fourth time Suna has called Lissa in three days. It's the middle of the night. She hasn't slept. She's chain smoking cigarettes, downing cup after cup of coffee. Suna starts telling Lissa he's worried. There are some guys he doesn't recognize driving by his house, stalking him. He says they have Texas license plates.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

Lissa laughs like this for a really long time.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

Suna seems totally thrown by this. He tries to laugh too, except it's clear he doesn't understand what's funny. But in Lissa's mind, this was hilarious. The guy she thought murdered her niece, he was calling her for help because he didn't want to get murdered. And then she basically tells him, go get murdered.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

Later, Lissa told me she was exhausted. She hadn't slept in days, and she was getting desperate. It had been three days since she posted Suna's name on Facebook. She just lost it. When Suna called the next afternoon, he sounded different.

Ira Glass

Sierra Crane Murdoch. Coming up, Suna's new tactic. That's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, "A Mess To Be Reckoned With." Sierra Crane Murdoch is telling the story of Lissa Yellow Bird, as Lissa investigates the disappearance of her niece in 2016. And we pick up where we left off in Lissa's investigation. Here's Sierra.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

On day four, Suna calls Lissa again, and something's changed.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

If this sounds at all manipulative to you, it did to me too, like he's flattering her, saying Lissa finally convinced him to do the right thing. And then he asks, so what can you do for me after I've done this thing for you? But Lissa goes along with it.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

Suna says he's not ready to tell her what happened, but Lissa's worried he'll have a change of heart overnight, back out. Plus, Suna says people are after him. It was possible he'd get killed before he confessed the next day, and then they'd never find Carla's body.

So Lissa keeps pressing him. She throws out a name, Dakota Charbonneau. People have told her Suna often hung around Dakota. He was notorious in Spirit Lake, with a record of violent crime. Lissa thought maybe he's the one who actually murdered Carla.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

Not going to give me a name? Fine, Lissa thinks. She keeps pressing him.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

The rest of this phone call is really hard to listen to. For the first time in four days, you hear Lissa's voice crack, but she keeps going, asks question after question. She gets Suna to tell her almost everything. He says one of the other guys shot her, took her drugs. Then he says he got away from the guys as fast as he could. Lissa asks him, did you go back and check on Carla, see if she was alive? Suna says, no.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

Lissa stayed on the phone with Suna for a lot of that night. And it's during this call that she softens toward him, like her anger has totally drained out of her. Later, Lissa would tell me she was afraid Suna was going to hurt himself or do something stupid to get himself hurt. She needed him to make it to the next day.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

She starts explaining his options in a system that she knows, and he doesn't.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

Lissa left for Spirit Lake the next morning at 7:00. It was a two-hour drive, and she called me. We talked the whole time. She told me she felt like all her searching for missing people had prepared her for this moment.

When she got to the reservation, FBI agents were already there. Suna had brought them to Carla's body. The crime scene was taped off. It was in a wooded area, the ground marked with old tire tracks. Carla lay no more than 50 yards from the road. People had been driving right past her for weeks.

The agents didn't let Lissa get close to Carla. Instead, they brought her pictures to make the identification. Carla was in bad shape. Lissa barely recognized her. And then Lissa saw the ring, the big, gaudy ring she had gotten after Carla for.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

Lissa had never minded searching for missing people on her own before, but now, suddenly, she felt very alone. She drove down the road to where Suna was waiting for her with several investigators and his family. His mom thanked Lissa. They huddled together as Suna made his confession.

Lissa was watching Suna, his rapid speech. She thought he seemed traumatized. She also thought he was telling the truth. And when he was done, he came up to Lissa.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

That's what the agents did. As Lissa was leaving the reservation, she stopped at Devil's Lake, this vast body of water that blends in with the flatness of the prairie around it. She got out of the car, walked to the edge.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

Another reason Lissa still hardly tells anyone about this case, a reason why it's still so hard for her has to do with what came afterward. Lissa went to Carla's funeral. Loretta, Carla's mom, thanked Lissa, honored her with a star quilt. But then what happened was a kind of unraveling.

Prosecutors began building their case against Suna and the two other guys responsible for Carla's murder. And Lissa became the main point of contact for Carla's family. She started going to all the legal meetings, helping Carla's mom understand what was going on. And at the same time, Lissa was still talking to Suna, constantly.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

At first, Lissa had a pragmatic reason to keep talking to Suna. She needed him to follow through, to testify in Carla's case against the two other guys involved. Lissa worried for Suna's safety. He wanted witness protection, so she started calling around on his behalf.

When the prosecutor found out about this, that Lissa was advocating for Suna, she made Carla's mom, Loretta, the spokesperson for the family and stopped inviting Lissa to meetings, basically iced Lissa out. The court stopped notifying Lissa about hearings in Carla's case. Court officials told her, we only do that for the victim's immediate family.

Suna pled guilty to felony murder, meaning he committed a crime that led to Carla's death, even if he didn't intend to murder her. Prosecutors said that Suna didn't plan to murder Carla. He didn't have the gun. He didn't pull the trigger. What Suna planned to do, prosecutors argued, was to rob Carla of drugs.

The other two men involved in Carla's murder, they pled out after Suna informed on them. They got 50 and 28-year sentences for a list of charges that included use of a firearm, conspiracy to commit robbery, and second-degree murder.

At Suna's sentencing hearing, Lissa sat behind Carla's mother, sister, and a few of Carla's kids. Lissa gave a statement, and she actually spoke on Suna's behalf. She had wanted him to get probation on a lesser charge. Lissa said, I was the person who brought Carla home, and it wouldn't have happened without Suna.

She said, I can tell you, a lot of our people are still laying in fields and behind bushes all over this country, and nobody cares. She told the judge it was so rare for people like Suna to come forward, to tell the truth. She asked him to show compassion to Suna, because she said he showed compassion to us.

The rest of the hearing, Carla's mother and sister wouldn't even look at Lissa. Lissa kept tapping Loretta on the shoulder, but Loretta just stared ahead, ignored her.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

Loretta wouldn't talk to me for this story. I reached out to her several times. She didn't respond.

Suna was sentenced to 15 years, which is actually a pretty lenient sentence for felony murder, but Lissa was furious. I've never heard her as angry at anyone as she was at the prosecutor in this case, a woman named Jan Morley. Lissa called Jan a slithering snake who was out to get Suna, typical of federal officials who fail tribal communities. So I called Jan, the prosecutor. She's retired now.

Lissa didn't realize it either. I asked her later. She sounded surprised. Lissa had told me that in her conversations with Suna, she had begun to see him as a vulnerable adult maybe with a cognitive disability, but Jan didn't see him this way.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

Lissa was right, actually. Jan had made up her mind about Suna even before Carla's murder. She had prosecuted his rape case 15 years earlier. Jan said it was violent. She remembered this when she began prosecuting Carla's case.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

The evidence in Carla's case is this. In the days before Carla was killed, Suna exchanged hundreds of text messages with Dakota Charbonneau, planning how to rob Carla.

The prosecution argued that the murder was an accident. The other guy with them that night tried to threaten Carla with a gun, and the gun went off. But afterward, Suna and Dakota traded more messages about how to cover it up, Jan said.

I didn't get to see the evidence, but the story Jan told me seemed so different from the one Suna told Lissa. I didn't know if Lissa knew all of this, so I shared it with her.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

Lissa's now helping Suna's lawyer prepare an appeal. When I talked to Suna, he told me that he now looks to Lissa like a mom. He still calls her Lisa, but they speak almost every week. Meanwhile, Lissa and Carla's mother, Loretta, they don't speak anymore.

Sierra Crane Murdoch

In this case, the anything Lissa did was to connect with Suna, to get him to trust her. Lissa's sympathy for Suna doesn't surprise me. The thing that drives her to look for people no one else is looking for, it's the same thing that drew her to Suna.

I asked Lissa once, why do you do this work? She said, it makes me happy. It makes me happy to help these people who have no hope left in this world. She couldn't save Chucky, she couldn't save Carla, but maybe she could still save Suna.

Ira Glass

Sierra Crane Murdoch. Her book about Lissa, which covers that first incredibly eventful case that Lissa did, it talks about Lissa and her family in so much more detail than we ever were able to cover here today in an hour. It is called Yellow Bird-- Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country.

Our program was produced today by Lilly Sullivan. The people who created today's show include Susan Burton, Ben Calhoun, Dana Chivvis, Sean Cole, Aviva DeKornfeld, Noor Gill, Damien Graef, Chana Joffe-Walt, Miki Meek, Lina Misitzis, Stowe Nelson, Katharine Rae Mondo, Ben Phelan, Nadia Reiman, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, and Nancy Updike. Our managing editors are Diane Wu and Sarah Abdurrahman. Our executive editor is David Kestenbaum.

Special thanks today to Paul Yellow Bird McCormick, Shawna Yellow Bird, Jessie Yellow Bird, April Bowman, Sarah Koenig, Brian Reed, Connie Walker, Pat Hogue, Bianca Giaever, Lauren Markham, Charles Hudson, Allison Cohen, Terray Sylvester, Sarah Deer, Zaneta Thayer, and Jessica Lussenhop.

Our website, where you can stream our archive of over 700 episodes for absolutely free, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.

Special thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, he is amazed at how much more efficient he is working from home-- no more getting up at the crack of dawn, climbing the radio station's broadcast tower every morning to check the temperature and wind conditions.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life.