Meet the Super-Serious Sasquatch Chasers of America’s Premier Bigfoot Conference

As luck would have it, one of the largest Bigfoot conferences in the United States is held thirty minutes from the town where I grew up. Each May, Marc DeWerth hosts the Ohio Bigfoot Conference, located in Salt Fork State Park in southeastern Ohio. The area is known for its high level of Bigfoot sightings, as the topography is reportedly ideal for the creature.

I found that people have many different impressions of what Bigfoot is. Some people feel Bigfoot is an alien or a government experiment, but a majority of the more rational sasquatch enthusiasts believe that Bigfoot is a holdover from premodern times, a giant biped that co-evolved with our ancestral forebears. (There is some evidence to suggest that ten foot tall humanoids did at one point walk the earth.) The OBC is like an academic conference in which these ideas can be exchanged.

One thing I found particularly interesting was the ethical debate surrounding the hunt for the creature – some people maintain killing one is the only way to prove they exist, while others strongly feel that the creatures should be respected and left alone. I touched on this in more detail in my original version of the article; a bit was taken out for brevity’s sake.

The article was published in June, 2017, on Narratively, and can be found here.

A guy from the town where I was living at the time stepped in at the last minute and took some amazing photos of the event. His name is Matthew Collins, and his work can be found here.

Info about the Ohio Bigfoot Conference can be found here.

Niche business: running a smoke shop

I was walking down the street recently and saw Sarah sitting on the patio in front of The Smoking Octopus. It is a smoke shop, and I wondered about the difficulty of opening a store like that. Sarah owns the shop, and she was friendly and casual but also spoke with the nonchalant seriousness of an experienced business owner.

I started out working for another smoke shop in Fairborn about four years ago. I was into hookahs before I started I had a friend from Turkey and he was really big into hookah. He asked me to smoke with him. It was the first time I did and ever since then I’ve loved it. That’s what interested me about working there.

It was fun to go to work – I didn’t see it like a job anymore and thought it would be fun to do [professionally]. I worked my way up and ended up managing that shop for about three years. My manager there actually offered me a position running his hookah bar, which was down the street in Beavercreek. I managed the hookah bar and ended up owning it. The land the bar was on went up for sale, so it was either I stay there and ride it out until someone buys it or sell it then and take the money and run. So I sold it. With the money I made, I moved down here. I originally wanted to open a hookah bar. But due to zoning issues I couldn’t, with the building being so close to a church and a school. So I took the information I learned managing a smoke shop and said, ‘I’m going to do that instead.’ I’ve been here for a year and a half. I just turned 23 this month.

I love the town, I loved the people, the building my shop is in is amazing. I’ve grown up around here and this was always my favorite building in town. It took me about half a year to find a new spot after I sold the hookah bar. Thankfully my parents have been very supportive. Without them, I wouldn’t be here right now. I went to my parents’ house for Christmas and one of the last gifts they handed me was this little box. I opened it up and there was a picture of this building. Best Christmas present ever.

Opening the shop went pretty smooth. The only thing you have to do [unique to a store like this] is apply for your tobacco license. That’s though the State. It takes a while for them to process your application, but once you have that, it’s legal for you to sell tobacco products in your store.

Getting the tobacco license wasn’t too difficult for me. I used a lot of advice from my boss at the old place, because I told him I had interest in opening a smoke shop. I asked him what he did and he helped guide me through. Without that advice, it probably would have been a lot more difficult because I wouldn’t have known who to go to and how to talk to them about opening it. Being able to rent from somebody who allows smoking is important too. For a lot of smoke shops, it’s kind of grandfathered in that you can smoke inside the store, but you have to make sure that it’s ok to smoke inside the building with the landlord.

There is a lot of legal terminology you have to learn to work in a smoke shop. You have to come in here knowing what to say to the workers here. It’s not a ‘bong,’ it’s a ‘water pipe.’ If someone came in here right now and used a street word for something, I legally have to tell them to leave my store. It’s that serious. (Laughs) People like to joke about having signs everywhere that say ‘for tobacco use only’ – you have to have those in front of everything, especially the glass and the papers. Some shops are really strict – you say one wrong thing and they’ll kick you out.

And IDs: you have to respect the ID policy. I have signs everywhere – if you don’t have one, I won’ sell anything to you.

Every now and then you’ll get your troublemakers. You have your groups – you have your disrespectful patrons and you have your patrons that know what it’s all about it, get what they need, and leave. It’s usually the kids that have just turned 18 that are the hardest to deal with. They think that because you work in smoke shop that you’re going to be cool with them acting stupid. They’ll joke around about smoking and ask if I know where to buy drugs, and I tell them I have no idea. They’ll have to go ask someone else that question. I’ve had to kick people out before.

The weekends are a little more difficult because you have your out-of-town crowd. I had this lady in her mid-twenties come in not that long ago. She said, can I smoke in here? I said, yeah, you can smoke cigarettes in here. She said, no, can I smoke a joint in here? I said no, you can’t do that here. She said, really? I said, I’m going to have to ask you to leave. She gets really lippy with me and she pulls it out of her purse and acts like she’s about to light it. I said, you either leave my store right now or I’m going to have to call the police. She got all mad and slammed my door and walked away.

You will get undercovers that come in every now and then. Usually you can pick them out if they ask a lot of questions but don’t really show interest in buying anything or ask you to get anything out. They try to catch you on your terminology, mainly, and they ask you about things that are difficult to describe to try to test you. I’ve never had any problem getting through it with them, nobody here has.

But one experience I really enjoyed involved these five older ladies that came in after eating in the restaurant next store and asked me what a hookah was. I explained it to them and asked if they wanted to try it. They said, yeah, I think so. It took them about ten minutes to pick out a flavor. I prepared the hookah for them and they sat out here and smoked it. They wanted me to take pictures of them to send to their grandkids, like “Look what I’m doing!” (Laughs) They bought shirts from the shop that say “Put that in your pipe and smoke it” on the back.

I was surprised, being in a small town, at how close I’ve gotten with the people I’ve met in the shop. I have a lot of regulars that I’ve become really good friends with. Because back where I worked before, I would recognize people’s faces but I’ve really gotten to build some great friendships out of running the store. I’ve made a lot of good connections with people, like glass blowers. I travel around to a lot of music festivals too and that’s where I get a lot of my local glass connections.

The weekends are a little hectic, as they are more touristy times. It get can pretty busy in there. We always have two people working in there. The street fairs are insane. We have to have at least four or five people here. We took a picture from up above during the last street fair and I think there were eighty-three people in the store. But I enjoy the busy days. It makes the time go by quicker. Bad days are rainy days. Not a lot of foot traffic. Parking’s kind of limited right now and not a lot of people are going to want to walk up here in the pouring rain. But if it’s nice like this, business is always good.

I’ve been really into business ever since I started managing the old shop. I’m going to Wright State for business management. I went through my first year of college not knowing what I wanted to do, but being able to manage the shop and then owning the hookah bar convinced me that I really like the business-side of running a store. It was probably one of the most stressful times ever, because I was doing both. I’d get two hours of sleep a day – the hookah bar was open til 4 a.m. and I’d have to open the smoke shop at 9. It sucked but it paid off. I’m very appreciative to have had those opportunities.

The hand pipes are some of our best sellers, as well as the shi-shas and hookah tobacco. We also have a cigar humidor in there too, and cigar sales have really picked up a lot. We’re actually about to expand the humidor and install another one in there because we’ve had so many requests for new cigars. My shelves are stocked completely full. That’s been nice – people who live in town say they don’t want to drive all the way to Fairborn to get their cigars. I have a list of requests that people can add to, that way I can stock cigars for them. Every day in the smoke-shop world there’s something new, something new out on the market. It’s a learning process of figuring out all the new things that are coming out. So that keeps it interesting, there’s always something new to learn.

As far as all the local artists, they’ll come here with a bunch of briefcases when you call them. I get to pick and choose what I want. Having the tobacco license is what allows you to buy everything in bulk. You can’t go through a wholesaler without your tobacco license. There’s no way I’d be able to stock my store paying full price for everything. I go through maybe four different distributors because there’s never just one that has everything you need.

I’m very open about cutting deals with people. I’ll definitely help you out. I know a lot of smoke shops can be overpriced. Now, when I go into other smoke shops, I judge them on the prices they charge, because I know what they got [their merchandise] for. I don’t want to be that person that rips you off. I do package deals and give ten percent off with any student or military ID. I’ll run sales through the weekend and stuff like that every now and then.

I take off about one day a week. Other than that I enjoy being here. Most of my employees are friends and family. My fiancée and I run it together, and the lady that just left is my mom. She works for me in the mornings. When I’m away from it for too long, I feel weird. I just got back from a week and a half-long vacation so I was eager to get back here. If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life. Finding that niche makes it a lot easier to have a job. I worked guest services at a hotel for four years and then I worked at Bath and Bodyworks, which is the worst job in the world. Having that many bad experiences working for someone, I wanted to be my own boss. I’ve never had one I liked. I wanted to do everything the opposite of how they did. I can treat my employees they way I wanted to be treated in my past jobs.

This interview originally appeared in an abbreviated form at the Yellow Springs News.

I am a professional book indexer

I, like most people, was taken aback when I heard that Grant writes the indexes for books for a living. I often wondered how an index came together, and I was worried that I might have to write the indexes for my own books. But it is freelancers like Grant who do the dirty work of going through books and picking out the terms that make up the index. His vocation puts him into contact with all kinds of interesting texts, but the nature of his work makes for a particular way of reading them.

If you go to a history book and you just want to read about the Gettysburg Address, go to the index and look up “Gettysburg Address.” That’s what an index is. I make that. I read the book and pull out the things that go into the index, and I write the index.

I read a book about indexing years and years ago, and the author said an index is a map to the information. It’s a matter of thinking about what the subject is. I read the introduction before I get started, if the book has one, where the author will give you the scope of the book, why they wrote about the subject and some of the big ideas, highlighting the key concepts that come up. I try to get these concepts into my head. A brief look at the table of contents helps. And then I put it aside and begin indexing the first chapter.

One thing you have to be able to do when things get complicated is to shove away a lot of the ancillary arguments and conversations the author gets into. You’ve got to really be able to focus on the key concepts. In some ways, you’re purposefully ignoring a lot of what the author is saying, cause you can’t index every little nuance. That’s not your job – you’re not recreating the book, not getting into the nitty-gritty.

It’s almost like you’re reading for an exam. You’re getting the concepts and you’re processing a whole lot of information without having to understand all the ins and outs. A good indexer can index books they don’t understand thoroughly. I’ve done books like that before, like chemistry books, which can get pretty tricky. Some philosophy is really hard to wrap your mind around. You don’t have to quite understand it all. You have to know they’re talking about “being” and “truth,” or note when they reference [it conjunction with] Kierkegaard or something like that, but the relationship between being and truth is not something you have to explain to someone.

Folks are always really curious about it, I gotta say. When I tell people about it, the universal reaction almost always is, “Wow, I never thought about that before, that someone’s got to do that.” The other thing people ask is, “Can’t computers do that? Is there a software program you use?” And they’re thinking that I use a program where I type in a few words or concepts and then the program scans the text. It doesn’t work like that. I have to put all of that information in by hand. But there is an indexing computer program that I’ve been using for years. I originally got it when it was DOS back in the 90s. It’s a very specialized word processing software that’s specifically designed to create an index. But there’s no text scanning – I type everything in. I make the decision what references go in. Every line, every page reference has to go in by hand.

I type in a main term, “Lincoln, Abraham” and then “Birth of” and the page reference. Then I type in another one. The program puts all that together automatically into alphabetical order. It interleaves everything, but I can manipulate that index with a few keystrokes. I can go back and edit, change things around if I decide I don’t like a certain term, etc. It’s an ongoing process of building and refining as you go through the book. But I don’t go back through the book unless it’s incredibly complicated. I read as I index, and I index as I read.

When you’re done with the index, you have an extremely rough draft. Your own spelling mistakes all over the place, concepts might be differently worded or listed under different headings. So I begin the editing process, which takes a day or two, or three, depending on the size of the index, modifying and tightening up, or adding sub-entries if things aren’t in enough detail. That’s how the process goes.

Does the editor or author indicate what they are looking for in an index, or how it should look?

Almost never. Maybe once a year. Maybe once a year someone will give me a list of terms or say they want these concepts in the index.

So it’s essentially left up to your expertise how to phrase or format the index?

Right.

Is there any kind of standard or thorough it has to be? Or does reading through the book inform what the ultimate index is supposed to look like?

A little bit of both. There’s a section of the Chicago manual that’s devoted to indexes. If you have an entry, “Lincoln, Abraham,” you don’t want to see that term and then 34 page references. In some indexes you’ll see that – no sub-entries. That’s a really bad index. You see that often, even in big-name books. Maybe the editor did it, an author did it. Or the author had a grad student or is paying someone in the family to do it, or something like that. No professional indexer would do that.

An entry without any subentries should have a maximum of six page references, or twelve numbers indicating six spans of pages. Anything more than that and you’ll have to start building subentries. And to build subentries, you want to build subentries that make sense and include all the things pertinent to that person, name, or concept. That’s what makes a good index.

Publishers have a rule of thumb that five percent of the book is the index. If it’s a 100 page book, there are five pages of index. If it’s a whole lot more than that, you’re doing too much, or if it’s a page and a half, you’re missing something. Five percent should be enough to get all of the information into the index.

You can pretty much tell if it was a professional indexer, an editor, or an author. It’s certain that each indexer will create their own index. They’ll be just as good, but it will be different [from those made by other indexers.]. You see things in different ways, phrase things slightly differently. There should be a great deal of overlap, but no two indexers will create the same index. And that’s not a bad thing.

How would the index of a history text differ from that of a science or philosophy text, if at all?

In terms of the index, probably not much. I go about them the same way. If there’s going to be a lot of information around any concept, whether its “mitosis” or the “Battle of Antietam,” you have to make those entries and subentries meaningful and useful. You apply that same strategy and thinking to any subject you’re reading. You read science differently than you read history, but you’re still trying to produce an index that’s competent for both.

Publishers will contact me, often they have the book in hand or will have it in a week or two. What I get are the final proofs. It’s the very last stage. Once the author approves it, it can go to press.

Once I get the book, I’ll usually have a month to index it. That’s for a book that’s 300 pages or less; your average history book or biography. That’s what most of my projects are. If the book is larger than that, the publishers will give me a little more heads up or give me a little more time to index it. Depending on the complexity and size, it will take me around a week to index a book. I can pretty much average a book a week. I do about forty or fifty books a year – that’s a little more than a week for each project.

It was an absolute non-sequitur getting into indexing. It was total serendipity. I have a degree in botany. I was working in a managing plant research labs at University of Massachusetts Amherst for about five years. There was no place to go, and if I wanted to do anything interesting I was going to have to get a PhD.

I had a friend who I’d gone to school with who was in the same position as me. He loved botany, he was waiting tables, and he lived in Amherst. He mentioned that he knew someone who was a freelance indexer and editor, and he was thinking about learning about indexing as a way to make some extra money. A lightbulb went off – that sounded really interesting. I talked with his friend and taught myself how to do indexes using index cards. They were small projects but I took that work to her for comment and review. She gave me some feedback and said, “Look, I’m going to go out on a limb and ask a guy I know at an academic press if you can index a science text for him.” This was in 1996, and then I just pushed it.

I just networked on my own. I got a digest that lists every publisher in the US and Canada, and I’ve gone through that two or three times in my career, writing every single publisher that produces let’s say 100 nonfiction books per year. I wrote hundreds of letters and emails, and in 1997 I went out on my own. It took me a year to build up enough experience to realize I could do this. With a lot of work and little luck, I realized, I can do this. And it worked out.

I’ve never met another person who does this. Occasionally I’ll meet someone that says they know an indexer. There is a American Society of Indexers that has chapters in lots of states. But I’ve never been a part of it. When I was just starting off, I went to a chapter meeting of ASI in Massachusetts. There were like fifty or sixty people there, but I didn’t feel connected to any of them. We didn’t have much in common. But I think one thing that attracts a lot of people to the job is the independence, and so you don’t get a whole lot of folks that are interested in meeting other indexers. The one meeting I went to, most of the indexers were women, most were middle-aged or older, and most were doing it as a part-time thing. I didn’t have the sense that there were many folks that were doing it full time. They were retired, or their spouse was making enough money, or they had an interest in literature. There are a lot of indexers, but full-time indexers, there probably aren’t that many at all.

The publishing world relies heavily on freelancers. There used to be in-house indexers, in-house designers, in-house copyeditors, but there aren’t anymore. That stuff is all outsourced. It’s cheaper not to have someone in house. There are freelancers everywhere doing this in publishing, and it’s the personal relationships that keep it together. The editor knows that if he’s used this proofreader and this indexer and this copyeditor for years, he can keep going back to the pool of people he’s developed relationships with. I’ve built up a clientele that I’ve worked with for years. Some editors I’ve worked with for close to twenty years at this point.

I’ve met a few editors from a large biology text publisher, but those are the only editors I’ve ever met. Everyone else, I have no idea who they are. There are people I’ve worked with for years and years at the University of Kentucky but I’ve never met any of the editors. But they send me pictures of their kids because I’ve known them for years. There’s a woman at a press in New York City who I’ve worked with since the late 90s – I know about her daughter going to college, but I’ve never met her. It’s gets to be a really personal relationship after all those years.

The downside to that [personal relationship] is when they retire or move on. This has happened numerous times. I’ve had a good relationship with an editor, she leaves, and I’ve lost that press. The person that comes in has their own stable [of indexers]. It’s so personal that if someone leaves, gets sick, retires, there’s no guarantee I’ll keep working for that publisher. On the other hand, I’ve worked for years with the University of Nevada Press, with three different editors, and they keep passing me on.

I get up and usually try to start working immediately. By 7 or 7:30 in the morning I’m at the computer reading. I take multiple breaks during the day and stop by early afternoon. That’s my usual day. I own my own time, and I wouldn’t trade that for anything.

Of course, I have no benefits, no insurance, no vacation. And I rarely know more than a month out if I have work or not. I’ve got a couple of large projects right now, science books, that will go on for two months. That’s some stability, but when I don’t have those, which is fairly frequently, then I often don’t know what I’ll be doing in a month or six weeks. Editors aren’t thinking that far ahead. There’s always that uncertainty. When work comes, you take it. The consequence of that is, you’re overworked, you don’t get enough time off, and there’s a real danger of fatigue, burning yourself out. You’re loathe to say no because you don’t know what else will come up. The other thing is that the relationship you have is with a few presses. I can’t work for twelve presses. You can’t do too much because you’re only one person. But there’s always the concern is that if you say no, or say no a couple of times, they’ll start going with someone else. You want to keep your name up there and active, and the way to do that is to say yes and not no.

I’ll tell you one thing it does – indexing makes you realize how much really bad writing is out there, and what a really good writer is like. I read tens of thousands of pages a year – you get sensitized to what good, clear writing is. It’s such a pleasure [to read writing like that].

A dull book is hard to index. Or a really abstruse book, where the thinking’s really confused or the author is particularly invested in academic language. When the author doesn’t have that kind of clarity, the indexing job is hard.

I get really bored with a lot of books because they just aren’t that well-written. I read a lot of books and I get impatient with murky writing. There are some books out there that are just absolutely horrible. Just because it’s published doesn’t mean the writer’s very good, or that it’s well-edited. Some of it is really sharp and some of its really sloppy. Sometimes the more prestigious the university press, the more pretentious the prose is going to be. If something’s being published by Harvard University Press, then it had better be very dense and filled with lots of jargon and academese and “subtle” points. Just cut through it! The real meat of the book would be the Cliffs Notes version of it.

A well-written book is really easy to index. A well-written history or biography is a joy to index. Because the concepts make sense, they’re logical, the story is clear. What the author is doing, he or she makes really clear, and that makes the indexing really easy. You know PG Wodehouse? I read PG Wodehouse almost exclusively. I read some poetry, I love Raymond Chandler, Wodehouse – anything but something serious. I do that all day long; I’ve no interest in reading something serious. I can’t take a history book. I occasionally read a biography, but it has to be something really special.

Plowing through pedestrian prose – I don’t need to do that. That’s why I love Wodehouse – he’s a genius with writing, a genius as a writer. It’s comedy and it’s silly, but boy, you pay attention to what he’s doing with sentences and words, and it’s imaginative beyond belief. He’s creative at the highest level. Chandler – his prose is his own. That’s why I read now, for the skill of the writer.

This was originally published as a blog post at the Yellow Springs News.

About the Missives from America project

The culture of jobs and the nature of work itself has always fascinated me. Surrounding every job is its own lingo, lore, and unique set of experiences, and ever since coming across Studs Terkel’s Working in high school, I’ve wanted to see what these worlds were like for myself. And so, my working life thus far has primarily been defined by me taking jobs for curiosity’s sake. Sometimes this strategy has worked out well, as I’ve seen and learned a lot of cool/valuable/unique things, but it has also landed me in jobs that have been, to say the least, extremely trying.

But seeing these jobs firsthand wasn’t enough to satisfy my curiosity. I love being taken through the ins-and-outs of someone’s everyday world, and so I took a cue from Working and started recording in-depth interviews with people about their jobs and unique hobbies. My aim is to compile the interviews for a book in the vein of Mr. Terkel’s oral histories, and so far I’ve recorded and transcribed a few dozen of these conversations.

The pieces in this section have been transcribed and rearranged for clarity and organization, but are 100 percent the interviewee’s own words (except where obviously indicated). Some focus on the minutia of day-to-day life at X gig, while others explore the emotional ramifications of a job or the life circumstances that led them to it. Most do both.

I am interested in speaking with anyone in practically any field for this book. Please feel free to get in touch and we can go from there!

“Podcast of Interest”: Columbus’ True Crime Garage is a killer hit

This profile originally appeared in (614) Magazine and was published in the February 2018 issue.

In the corner of a cold bar, the walls echo with discussions of suspicion, deceit, and general human malevolence. The two men producing these echoes sip their drinks, hats pulled tight over their heads, their speech steeled by eerily extensive knowledge of murder and mayhem.

These two men aren’t plotting a crime—although they have no last name as far as the author knows. No, they’re carrying on their favorite hobby—one that has turned into a career—which is breathing new life into cases long forgotten, and rarely solved.

These two men are Nic and The Captain, and from a two-car garage they’ve built an unlikely empire on the unlucky—and in the process become de facto experts in a sordid field.

As it turns out, Nic and The Captain aren’t the only two “true crime dorks” out there. Their weird shared conversations became the foundation for True Crime Garage, now one of the most downloaded podcasts of its genre, swimming in the same sea as My Favorite Murder and Serial, riding the wave that started splashing down a few years back with Making a Murderer and The Jinx.

Nowadays, the grisly stories ripped from the headlines aren’t being portrayed by shoddy reenactments on TV—they’re being combed through by average, everyday dudes.

The pair has logged more than 200 episodes since they began in 2015, and today the show ranks as one of the most well regarded podcasts of the genre, winning acclaim from “casuals” and serious enthusiasts alike. The two didn’t set out to become leading voices in the true crime world, but they have readily adapted to a job that includes the responsibilities of investigators, journalists, and storytellers.

And in “re-opening” some of these cases—and with the powerful platform their popularity has endowed them—they’re helping to keep unsolved cases alive. They’re often in regular contact with victims’ families and work to expand the available information about a case in an effort to bring loved ones home. 

“In true crime, you often know who did the murder, but you don’t know who the victim was,” The Captain said. “We want to extend that respect to the family.”

By dint of their hard work, the podcast has become more than a passion project. True Crime Garage, which did in fact start in a sweltering and freezing garage, is now financially successful enough that the hosts have taken true crime full-time.

Close friends their whole lives—playing on the same elementary sports teams and later getting drunk in each other’s garage—TCG dates all the way back to two school kids carrying on strange conversations. The Captain recalls being on the bus in elementary school and hearing Nic and friend talk endlessly about Unsolved Mysteries, and that he later wrote lyrics about Law and Order for a band they were in. Makes more sense when you realize their fathers are detectives—something the comes in handy when researching for the show.

It could be that respectful experience that drives Nic and The Captain to avoid a true crime pitfall, in which programs often seem like exploitation. Nic admires authors like Ohio’s James Renner, who not only writes about cases but invests himself in uncovering new information. Similarly, they wanted their show to add something to each case.

“From the beginning, [Nic] wanted everything to be as accurate as possible, and to leave out information if it can’t be verified,” The Captain said. “He takes his job very seriously.”

While true crime exploded as a genre, the boys were still shocked by their sudden popularity—especially when their unpolished first shows reached nearly 10,000 downloads.

Fittingly, it was a local story that really put True Crime Garage on the map. Episodes 16 and 17 focused on Brian Shaffer, an OSU student who disappeared from Ugly Tuna Saloona in March 2006 and was never seen again. As The Captain recalls, the number of listeners skyrocketed after the episodes were published, as they provided the first truly extensive look into the crime.

“It’s actually weird how much the case has done for us,” The Captain said. “I hope we’ve done something for it.” (The Shaffer episodes remain some of the most downloaded of the show.)

Those episodes provided a turning point for the podcast in other ways, too. TCG has always tried to bolster their reporting with a tremendous amount of research—no article, documentary, police report, or local news coverage goes unturned, Nic says, but their approach in this case led them beyond the library. The Captain took to exploring the South Campus Gateway complex personally, taking photos of buildings and filming himself retracing Shaffer’s last known steps. They even followed up on a tip about a body recovered in one of the Great Lakes that fit the description of Shaffer. (It was later determined to be someone else.)

Putting all of this information together in a cogent, linear program serves a larger purpose, Nic said. It creates a sort of information clearinghouse that allows the average person to stay on top of a case, which will in turn hopefully lead to a break. For that reason, it is not uncommon for family members of the disappeared to get in touch with tips and information. The father of Joey LaBute, for example, who went missing in Columbus in March, 2016, reached out in gratitude for what the show did to popularize his son’s case.

“I prefer to cover unsolved disappearances—it’s sad when someone is ripped out of this world and you Google their name and nothing comes up,” Nic said. “To hear from relatives that you covered someone’s case well, that’s really the best email you can get.”

Things continue to look up for True Crime Garage in 2018. A new season is in the works; they renewed contracts for a year of steady advertisements, and there are plans to visit a few true crime conventions. There have even been discussions about converting the podcast to a visual medium. Many people have aspirations of doing creative projects with friends for a living; True Crime Garage’s DIY success shows that it can be done, and that it can be more than entertainment in the process. But while they get plenty of offers to sponsor the show or help with merchandise, thus far they’ve spearheaded their own success and are comfortable doing things on their own terms.

“When we started, we were just seeing if we could do it,” The Captain said. “My advice for people just starting out is to do an episode a week, do it for a year, and don’t expect a dime. But if you focus on the actual content, everything else will follow.”