Americans are listening to an increasing number of podcasts over the last decade and chief among the genres is true crime. Now, the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office is one of the latest organizations to hop on the trend.
Bexar County True Crimes Podcast, co-hosted by Sheriff Javier Salazar and Fox San Antonio investigative reporter Yami Virgin, dropped its first episode on Spotify and Apple Podcasts on Oct. 26.
Once a month, the sheriff will pick cases to highlight that have either gone through the court process or are unsolved, said Virgin, who has extensive experience covering crime and also hosts a podcast on immigration.
“Alternating between the adjudicated cases and the cold cases, I think it’s a great formula to bring more attention to these missing people’s cases and also to the officers and the work that they do every day,” Virgin said.
The podcast starts by dissecting “The Scorned Wife Case” in its first three episodes, which are released every Thursday.
In 2016, Frances Hall was convicted of murdering her husband and business partner Bill Hall. The 2013 murder drew international headlines as details of Bill Hall’s affair with a younger woman emerged as Frances Hall’s motive for driving her husband, who was on a motorcycle, off of Loop 1604.
In the podcast, Bexar County investigator Ruben Arevalos, who worked on the Hall case, talks through the twists and turns of the investigation, forensics, arrest, trial and sentencing of Frances Hall, who received the minimum, two-year sentence after being convicted of murder and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
A fourth episode will be recorded to answer listeners’ questions about the case, which began pouring in earlier this month, Virgin said.
“It’s not like CSI” or other crime TV shows, Virgin said, because real investigations take time and don’t always end up with the bad guy in jail.
Part of Virgin’s role on the podcast is to steer Salazar and other law enforcement guests away from “cop talk,” which can be full of jargon, she said. “I’m really there to guide things — to keep it conversational.”
Both Virgin and Salazar said they understand the importance of avoiding the tendency that many true crime podcasts have to sensationalize stories about real human beings.
This podcast will stick to the facts of the cases, whatever they may be, Virgin said. Sometimes the facts are salacious, she noted, which was true with the Hall case.
Salazar said he wants to use the platform to spread awareness of resources for domestic violence survivors — as well as help generate new leads for cold cases.
“There are cold cases that we really need help from the public to solve,” Salazar said. “And we’ve got some cold cases that go back decades.”
In the first episode, Salazar does a public service announcement about domestic violence and what listeners should do if they’re in that situation.
“At the root of this, it’s a domestic violence case that — like we know domestic violence cases tend to do — escalated to the point where the victim died,” Salazar said.
The podcast could also become a platform for crime victims and the families of victims to tell their own stories, he said. “We’re just kind of in the early stages of this and deciding where to go from here.”
The sheriff’s office is far from the first law enforcement agency to participate in podcasting — NYPD launched its “copcast” Break in the Case in 2019 and the U.S. Marshals Service launched Chasing Evil last year — but it is among the very few (if any) that feature a current elected agency head as a host.
Bexar County True Crimes Podcast is produced by members of Salazar’s staff and recorded inside the office’s media room. Beyond the time that Salazar and staff spend recording and preparing for the podcast, it’s not funded by Bexar County, he said, noting that he may not always be able to co-host the show, if his duties interfere.
The three, 25-minute episodes took about two hours to record, Virgin said.
The subject of the next podcast hasn’t been finalized yet, but Virgin hopes an upcoming series can focus on Patty Vaughan, who went missing on Christmas 1996, Virgin’s first year as a reporter. It’s a deeply personal case for Virgin.
“I have stayed with her family the entire 26 years [since], including eight years that I was up in Milwaukee working as a reporter,” she said. “It just breaks my heart because I promised them I would be there until the day that we found Patty.”
