Every time a Black person is killed, the lie arrives faster than the facts.

He had a gun. He was high. She was threatening.

In this alternative episode of When Killers Get Caught, Brittany Ransom steps away from a traditional case to examine a pattern that stretches from Emmett Till to the present day and why the phrase “they’re killing Americans now” is landing as confirmation, not concern, for Black Americans and other marginalized communities.

This episode explores how state violence has historically been justified through dehumanization, fear, and selective citizenship. From Indigenous displacement and slavery to policing, internment, mass detention, and modern use-of-force narratives.

Drawing on history, law, and the warnings of James Baldwin, this episode asks a difficult but necessary question: Who is recognized as fully human, and when does injustice finally “count”?

This is not about partisanship. It’s about citizenship, power, and the cost of a system that teaches itself how to look away.

Content warning: This episode discusses state violence, racism, and historical trauma.Sources for this episode include U.S. Supreme Court decisions, federal legislation, Department of the Interior reports, and the work of James Baldwin, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Michelle Alexander, Erika Lee, and other historians and legal scholars.

Follow and join the conversation:📱 TikTok: ⁠⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@caughtpodcast⁠⁠📸 Instagram: ⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/whenkillersgetcaught⁠⁠

Coming February 2026: Subscription-Only Content.Have a case, story, or idea you’d like us to explore? Submit it to ⁠⁠CaseCloserSubmissions@gmail.com⁠⁠ and be part of the discussion.

Music featured in this podcast is used with permission from Myuu.⁠⁠⁠⁠https://spoti.fi/1Uda2ci

In 1981, during the height of the War on Drugs, police raided a San Francisco apartment expecting a major drug dealer. Instead, they found a grandmother in an apron baking brownies.

Her name was Mary Jane Rathbun, later known as Brownie Mary, a woman whose arrest would help change how America viewed medical marijuana, the AIDS crisis, and compassion under the law.

As young men died alone in hospital wards during the 1980s AIDS epidemic, Mary broke the law to feed, comfort, and care for patients no one else would touch. Her quiet rebellion challenged the criminalization of cannabis, exposed the cruelty of drug policy, and helped pave the way for medical marijuana legalization in the United States.

This episode explores the life, motivations, and legacy of Brownie Mary, and asks a deeper true-crime question: What happens when the system treats compassion like a crime?

Because sometimes the most extreme crimes aren’t committed by monsters but by people the law refuses to understand.

Follow and join the conversation:📱 TikTok: ⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@caughtpodcast⁠📸 Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/whenkillersgetcaught⁠

Coming February 2026: Subscription-Only Content.Have a case, story, or idea you’d like us to explore? Submit it to ⁠CaseCloserSubmissions@gmail.com⁠ and be part of the discussion.

Music featured in this podcast is used with permission from Myuu.⁠⁠⁠https://spoti.fi/1Uda2ci

This episode contains in depth discussion of infanticide, postpartum psychosis, suicide, and severe mental illness. Listener discretion is advised.

In 2001, Andrea Yates drowned her five children in a case that shocked the nation and was quickly labeled as one of the most horrific crimes in American history. But what if the story most people remember is incomplete?

In this episode of When Killers Get Caught, host Brittany Ransom revisits the Andrea Yates case with updated medical, legal, and psychological context focusing not on shock value, but on what the system missed before the tragedy ever occurred.

Andrea Yates suffered from severe postpartum psychosis, a rare but life-threatening psychiatric condition that causes hallucinations, delusions, and a complete break from reality. She had a long, documented history of mental illness, multiple hospitalizations, suicide attempts, and explicit medical warnings not to be left alone, not to stop medication, and not to have more children. Those warnings were ignored.

This episode breaks down:

• The warning signs of postpartum psychosis and why it is a psychiatric emergency

• How religious extremism and untreated mental illness collided

• Why Andrea Yates’s first trial resulted in a wrongful conviction

• How misinformation in court influenced a jury

• What changed after her acquittal by reason of insanity and what still hasn’t

• Why women with postpartum psychosis are still more likely to be incarcerated than treated
  

More than two decades later, Andrea Yates remains confined to a state psychiatric hospital. Her case is now taught in medical schools and cited in maternal mental health advocacy yet many of the same systemic failures remain.

This is not a story about a monster. It’s a story about untreated illness, institutional failure, and a tragedy that unfolded in plain sight.

Because when systems fail, the truth always leaves a trail.

Follow and join the conversation:
📱 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@caughtpodcast
📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/whenkillersgetcaught

Coming February 2026: Subscription-Only Content.
Have a case, story, or idea you’d like us to explore? Submit it to CaseCloserSubmissions@gmail.com and be part of the discussion.

Music featured in this podcast is used with permission from Myuu.
⁠⁠https://spoti.fi/1Uda2ci