Page 1
PROLOGUE
EP. 43 (Transcript): Turns Out, the Corpse Was Me
Unreleased Recording – Guest: Dr. Lila Jennings, Forensic Psychology Professor
[Note: Partial transcript. Audio distortion at ~00:17.]
LILA:
I have this incredibly inconvenient habit of letting dead people ruin my life.
It started with Laurel—my best friend, my platonic soulmate, the human equivalent of a weighted blanket with a PhD in calling me out. She could finish my sentences, predict my self-sabotage like clockwork, and spot my BS before I’d even convinced myself it wasn’t. She was the only person on Earth who could tell me I was being dramatic—which, fine, I usually was—without making me want to crawl into a hole and rethink every life decision. She knew every messed-up part of me and just… loved me anyway. No conditions, no holding anything back.
With Laurel, I got to be the unfiltered version of myself—messy, anxious, a little too obsessed with forensic documentaries—and it was okay. I was okay.
And then she died.
And everything inside me short-circuited.
It wasn’t just grief. It was like someone had scooped me out with a melon baller and left the shell behind, still walking around in my skin but not really living in it. And somewhere in the middle of all that, Laurel wasn’t the only one I lost. I lost myself too.
I didn’t even cry the way people expect you to when your entire world implodes. No sobbing on the bathroom floor, no dramatic monologue to the ceiling fan. I just… stopped being a person. Became this sleep-deprived, over-caffeinated husk, stumbling through my days like a glitchy NPC. I latched onto anything that could distract me. I hopped between unfinished research projects, buried myself in crime scene reports that had nothing to do with me, and cycled through hours of late-night true crime documentaries narrated by monotone British men.
Anything to keep moving.
[voice breaks slightly]
Anything but stillness.
[footsteps approaching, then stopping]
I think, in some backwards way, I was trying to make sense of death. Of loss. Like if I could break it down, study it the way I studied cases and trial records, I’d find a way to understand it—or at least learn how to live with it.
But grief doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t follow logic. It doesn’t care how many books you read or how many facts you memorize. It just settles in, makes itself at home, and waits you out.
And without Laurel, I didn’t have anyone left who knew how to drag me out of it. No one who could look at the crater-sized hole in my chest and say, “Okay, you’re not fine, but here’s what we do next.”
So yeah—my life, at that point, was a flaming dumpster fire inside a psychological funhouse. The type of situation that makes therapists go, “Oh wow,” and then immediately refer you to their supervisor.
Then there was Henry Mayfair, as you know. Dead in his study, strangled at his desk like something straight out of a police procedural drama. I never met the guy, but I’ve spent more hours thinking about him than is probably healthy.
Henry—or, more accurately, the murder trial that followed his very untimely demise—was the reason I crushed my grad school thesis. Obsessively. Compulsively.
Because something about the whole thing just didn’t sit right.
My thesis was on the psychology of straight-line cases. When a verdict feels obvious long before it’s actually earned, and the case follows a straight, almost inevitable path to a verdict once the narrative takes hold. Even when the evidence doesn’t fully support it. I used Henry’s trial as the primary case study—how the experts contradicted each other, how the pathology was framed to fit the story everyone already believed, how the science itself wasn’t wrong but the interpretation was.
I focused on how inconsistencies in expert testimony and misinterpretation of the available forensic data shaped the narrative of the case—how the psychology of experts, jurors, and the legal system can twist case evidence into something it was never meant to be.
The whole thing was a breakdown of misapplied methods, biased assumptions, and tiny degradations of evidence that were eroded into a certainty they never deserved.
The truth was always there. They just kept choosing the version that felt convenient.
You know that weird itch in your brain when something’s off and you can’t explain it, but you know it with your whole fucking gut? That was Henry’s case. The conviction felt rushed. Too clean. A few facts pushed aside. Testimonies that came out a little too polished. It was one of those cases where everyone quietly agreed on a villain before anyone bothered asking the real questions.
The villain, in this case, was Peter Mayfair—Henry’s son. Black sheep, bad reputation, a walking cautionary tale of rich dude entitlement and poor life choices.
Supposedly.
