AN INTERVIEW WITH BRITTANY HUNT AND CHELSEA LOCKLEAR

KIRSTIN L. SQUINT: I read in the local newspaper in Robeson County, North Carolina, The Robesonian, in January of this year that The Red Justice Project was Chelsea’s brainchild because of your love for the true crime genre, and that Chelsea got Brittany hooked on true crime podcasts as well. Chelsea mentions in the first of the twopart story about Julian Pierce, episodes six and seven, that this was the first case the two of you discussed.2 How did you two meet, and what made you decide to become a podcasting team?

Missing & Murder Indigenous Awareness, 2020 (virtual drawing/painting, 8.5x11) by Raven Dial-Stanley

The premiere guest editor of NCLR, collecting and editing content for the feature section of the 2023 issues, KIRSTIN L. SQUINT is an Associate Professor of English at East Carolina University, where she held the Whichard Visiting Distinguished Professorship in the Humanities from 2019 to 2022. She is the author of LeAnne Howe at the Intersections of Southern and Native American Literature (Louisiana State University Press, 2018), a co-editor of Swamp Souths: Literary and Cultural Ecologies (Louisiana State University Press, 2020), and the editor of Conversations with LeAnne Howe (University Press of Mississippi, 2022). She is also a contributor to Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy (West Virgina University Press, 2019), winner of the 2020 American Book Award for criticism.

CHELSEA LOCKLEAR: Well, I like to say, like any good love story, we met online, mostly because that’s how I met my husband, also. I think we met through social media. Brittany always shared some really insightful posts, and she has been a voice for Lumbee people for several years via social media. She’s very funny and just a really great energy, and so I reached out to her with my idea, and it kind of took off from there.

Did you want to add anything to that, Brittany?

BRITTANY HUNT: Oh, no. I would just say that she mentioned earlier how we met on social media, and also she met her husband there, and we’re both the two great loves of her life, in addition to her daughter. It’s been an honor to work with Chelsea so far on this journey. I wasn’t into podcasting at all, and now I listen to two to three different shows a day, based on Chelsea’s recommendations mostly, and so she really pulled me into the podcast world. I think it’s a tremendous format through which to share stories, which Indigenous people love to do. It feels very familiar to me, so I’m thankful for Chelsea for that.

You describe what you do on The Red Justice Project as telling the stories of the victims. What storytelling techniques do you use to create a compelling experience for your listener? I remember in the Jap Locklear episode you talked about the oral tradition, and you also talked about the way podcasting intersects with that.3

BH: So, one of the things that I think we noticed in doing a lot of our research on the cases is that sometimes the cases aren’t treated with as much sensitivity as they should be given, and so we really like to bring a lot of sensitivity to the work, even though we are describing a lot of graphic content most times. That’s really important for us. We also like to, as much as possible, inject humor into the beginning of the episodes because the topics are really heavy, and so we do like to provide a little bit of comic relief in the beginning for our listeners because even though these stories are traumatic, we know that as Indigenous people we often use humor to deal with trauma in a lot of ways. I think Chelsea and I do that as much as possible in the stories.

So, Chelsea, you got Brittany into podcasting. Is that something that appeals to you as well, that kind of storytelling aspect of it, or the orality of it, I guess?

CL: Yeah, as Brittany mentioned, I think Indigenous people are known for their storytelling and oral history, and through my love of true crime podcasts, I was noticing that a lot of our stories, Indigenous stories, were not being told. Once again, I already knew we weren’t being shown in the media; we weren’t frequently featured on episodes of Dateline, of 48 Hours, of other kinds of true crime shows that you might see, or even just your nightly news. And when I was looking through different podcasts, I thought, we really are not being featured in podcasts, either, of true crime, considering the devastating rates at which we go missing and are murdered. I’m not a storyteller by nature, but I thought, there’s a gap. Why not fill it, or try to?

You know I’m a literature professor, and I think about storytelling a lot, and I got so hooked on this podcast. One of the things that I’m often impressed by is your rapport. You are both so genuine and so funny at times. In the episodes on Julian Pierce, you’re talking about that period in the ’80s when there was so much police and political corruption in Robeson County. You describe how two Tuscarora men took over The Robesonian as an act of political dissidence. I laugh out loud every time I listen to this episode when Chelsea joked that if she had been taken hostage, she would have been happy to have been traded for a collard sandwich.4 You can pick out moments where you all are really funny, and I often think, “Wow, how did you make me laugh after telling me this terrible story that needs to be told?” But there are also really poignant moments, like during the interview about Marcey Blanks when Brittany is talking to her mother, and she cries with her on the phone because it’s so traumatic.5 I think you’re both really brave to take on this subject matter. Do you think of yourself that way? You know you are taking on really challenging stuff.

CL: I would not call myself brave. I’d say a little bit foolish to begin with because Brittany and I had no idea what we were getting into. We had no idea the conversations that we would be having with people, the depth of the conversations, and the effect that creating a podcast like this would actually have on us and on our community that actually listens to it. So, I don’t know if “brave” is the right word; I’ll throw in some foolery there at the beginning. But what do you think, Brittany?

BH: I agree with “brave” and “foolish” mixed together. Because some of the stories we’re telling are kind of scary to tell, especially cases where there’s not been any suspect that’s been apprehended, but there are rumors around town of who did it. Should we share those rumors? Should we not? How much protection do we need to give the people who we’re talking to, but also protection for ourselves? There is a level of fear, I think, associated with some of the stories that we’ve told in the past. I think it does take a combination of bravery and foolishness together. The interview with Marcey’s mom, Ms. Mary, was the most difficult interview I’ve ever done. I knew Marcey, so that added a whole other layer to it because I hadn’t known any of the other victims. I cried with her in a very genuine way because of something that she said that just broke my heart. That episode and that story is the closest one to me of all. I think it also takes a little bit of gumption, or strength, to be able to even interview family sometimes because some of the things that they’re telling us are so difficult to hear and so beyond what you could even think a human could endure.

I agree. We’ll come back to the Marcey Blanks episode in just a bit. I was researching what other folks had been saying about The Red Justice Project, and I came across some reviews on a website I had never seen before called Podbay. There were thirty-five reviews. They were all five-stars, of course. There was a review that really touched me because it reflected my own experience. It was by a listener called “DoomerVibes” who said, “I’d recommend this to anyone, but for North Carolinians, especially, this is a must listen. The dedicated hosts provide invaluable information about Lumbee culture, which is completely omitted from our education, packaged in a bingeable true crime format.” 6 I think all that is true. When I started listening, I started bingeing, but then there was a moment when I had to stop because some of these stories you’re telling are terrifying just to listen to, let alone to try to put yourself in the shoes of the family members of these victims as you all are doing. I feel like I need to process sometimes. I know there are times when you pause while you are actually doing the podcast, and you say, “I had to pray after I read this,” or “I’m going to have to smudge myself.” How does regularly reading about and researching these cases affect you emotionally? Do you ever take a step back and say, “That’s enough work on the podcast today. I need a break”?

BH: We had initially planned to set our podcast up in the same way that Crime Junkie does.7 For people who aren’t familiar with that podcast, they pretty much air every single Monday. But then over time, Chelsea and I started to realize that it was just too hard on us emotionally because, again, we’re telling stories of people we know. Some of the people Chelsea went to school with, and it’s people who lived on the same street as us or lived in the same community. It’s a whole different type of connection that we have to the cases than a typical true crime podcaster would have. So, we decided to start doing our podcast in seasons instead. We finished Season One in June, I believe, and decided to take a pretty long break, much to the anger of some of our fans, who have been messaging us, asking us for Season Two. But I think that we needed a break – mentally, emotionally – from some of the content that we were sharing. And then again, just as a reminder, we’re not just reading articles. We’re talking to family members, which adds a whole other level of pain, even for us in a second- or third-degree way. We had to take a break for our own mental health. And we’re also thinking of maybe potentially a different format for Season Two for that reason alone.

How has your process changed as you moved through Season One? In episode ten, you said you had to record your first episode so many times. And you were so experienced sounding by that point. I am curious, for example, thinking about the interviews with family, what are some of the things that changed and what did you learn throughout the season?

CL: Each episode we learned something that helped us out with the next episode. When we first started – the Brittany Locklear episode was our very first episode – and Brittany and I probably recorded that six or seven times to try to get it right, maybe even more.8 And we actually wrote the script together; whereas, in later episodes we would take turns writing scripts, so it wouldn’t be such a burden on us each week. But I think we realized pretty early on, because of the type of podcast that we had, an Indigenous true crime podcast, where there’s not a lot of media coverage, that it actually was up to us to create that media and that was really through interviews with families. We quickly realized by episode three or four that if we wanted to cover more stories, especially in our community, where the local newspaper or local television station had not covered those cases thoroughly, we actually had to speak to families. That changed our mindset once we learned that we would have to do that. And it really changed the tone of the podcast because we couldn’t just binge newspaper articles and write a quick script. We really had to take our time and think about questions like, Who do we interview? What questions do we ask? How sensitive do we need to be with these family members? What can we cover? What can we not? As Brittany said, some of them tell you things like, “Please do not say this in the podcast,” even though it would be something really interesting to the audience. You have to honor those wishes. I think with each episode in Season One, it was a learning curve for us. But it was a good experience leading up to Season Two for us.

WE QUICKLY REALIZED BY EPISODE THREE OR FOUR THAT IF WE WANTED TO COVER MORE STORIES, ESPECIALLY IN OUR COMMUNITY, WHERE THE LOCAL NEWSPAPER OR LOCAL TELEVISION STATION HAD NOT COVERED THOSE CASES THOROUGHLY, WE ACTUALLY HAD TO SPEAK TO FAMILIES.

I have been very interested in the craft of it. How much time does it take for you to write an episode? I imagine that’s also changed.

BH: It just depends because sometimes there’s more information about one case than others, and sometimes family members haven’t gotten a chance to talk about their loved ones in a while to anybody, so they’ll talk for longer, maybe, than other interviews where a family member doesn’t want to share so much. But usually if we have, for example, a twenty-five-minute episode, that would be about twelve pages of a script. Writing that does take several hours to do. It is a pretty laborious process. But there have also been times when the way Chelsea and I will do it is we’ll record separately or on Zoom. But there were a few times when her recording didn’t work, so we didn’t know until the end, and we had to do it over and over again. And those were times when I wanted to fight Chelsea, which I never told her until now. But that only happened a few times. Generally, I would say it takes five to six or seven hours to write a story, and then recording it might take another hour or so. Then Chelsea’s husband is the one who edits and cuts and puts our episodes together, so he has to do quite a bit of work on that as well, especially if we mess up a lot while we’re recording. He’ll have to go through and delete.

CL: Which is often.

Do you have the whole season ready before you release it?

CL: We were really working on the fly during Season One. Season Two we are planning out much better. I don’t think we realized how much traction we would get with Season One, and I couldn’t even imagine that we would turn out basically thirty episodes over a six-month period. That’s pretty hefty for one season of a podcast, thirty episodes. Also, that gives my husband a break from editing.

That’s a lot of work, especially on top of your regular jobs. On that note, that Robesonian article I read from January said that your reach was across twenty-five states at that point, but I’m sure it’s much different now.9 Do you know how many listeners you have, or do you measure that by downloads? What do you know about your audience?

CL: I actually had not looked up the stats in a while. I looked them up and shared them with Brittany yesterday. We’ve reached fifty-five countries! Granted, some countries only have ten downloads, but we’ll count it, and forty-four states. It’s gotten quite a bit of a reach across the US now, which is exciting.

That is exciting! Thinking about those early episodes, I love the way that you say, “This is what Lumbee is; this is who we are; you’ll notice our Southern accents.” Even at that point when you didn’t realize the reach you would have, you prepared everybody. I think that’s fantastic. I guess I’m wondering: did you have that vision or that hope that you would get an international reach?

BH: I think we had that hope. And Chelsea didn’t mention, but we also have forty-four thousand downloads total of the podcast, so it’s a lot more than I thought we would ever get. I’m really excited that not only are North Carolinians and Robesonians listening to the podcast, but people all over the world and all over the country as well. I don’t think we had anticipated it, but it was definitely something we hoped for. It’s good to see that it’s realized.

That’s excellent news. In terms of thinking about the content and the way it connects to that reach, The Red Justice Project examines many cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women, especially Lumbee women, but you also discuss missing and murdered Indigenous people more broadly in North Carolina and beyond US national borders. I’m thinking about Canada’s Highway of Tears, which are episodes nine and ten, and episode twenty-eight about the bodies of 215 children that were found on the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia.10 They were found last May, so I think folks will remember that in the news. These were just very powerful. Can you talk a little bit about how you chose the scope of your podcast?

CL: I think when we first started, our idea was to be pretty broad, which is why our second episode was about Neil Stonechild, which was based in Canada as well.11 We had several other episodes that were across the US, but we really found that we got more listeners and more engagement, especially on social media, when we talked about cases specific to our community. One, because thankfully we have friends and family who are nice enough to listen to our podcast, but really because these stories had never been told in this format and really had hardly been told in the media. With Marcey’s case, as Brittany can tell you, there were about three or four news articles, very small, and most people wouldn’t have even known about what had happened, so we really found that people were most interested in the cases they had never heard of. There are other bigger cases, like Kamloops, that were really relevant because it did actually make some national media attention.Since then, several more residential schools in the US and in Canada have been investigated. They did ground radar penetration, and they’ve actually uncovered several thousand more bodies of Indigenous children. There has been nothing in the media, which was really sad because at least Kamloops did make national media, but since then none of the other schools have even made a blip really on national news.

BH: And I would just like to add another comment about what Chelsea was saying earlier. I think our listeners have really enjoyed listening to cases that were in our community but they didn’t know about because they’re getting so few articles. There was even one story that we covered of a girl named Casey Young, who I went to school with.12 One of my friends who I was telling about the episode knew Casey and had not known that she had died in 2009. At this point it had been eleven years, and she didn’t even know that Casey had passed away, so finding out that way with me telling her about us covering her story highlights the ways that these stories are covered up or hidden in our communities or in our local news media. They’re not really talked about as much as they definitely should be.

Sometimes you talk about particular roads where several crimes have taken place, and sometimes it’s a revelation to you that so many crimes have taken place in one area. I’m often amazed when you talk about how – and this happened in several different episodes – the victim had just one line in the newspaper. There’s a real honoring of these folks that’s happening in your episodes, which I think is moving, from a listener perspective. I would like to talk some more about Marcey Blanks. This is such a powerful story. It’s so powerful because the victim was a student Brittany knew when she worked at Lumberton High School. Brittany shared firsthand memories of Marcey, as well as the pain she experienced from her loss. I think this episode is also very important because you’ve underscored how murders of Indigenous women are much less publicized than those of white women. And this is certainly true of your first episode about Brittany Locklear, which is a truly horrifying case of a very young girl, and you talk about some comparisons to JonBenét Ramsey and some others who made national media. Would you talk about the ways you’re trying to amplify this issue and humanize the statistics around missing and murdered Indigenous women?

Courtesy Of Public Schools Of Robeson County Staff

BH: For me, in researching these cases and in talking with families, and also being a person who does consume a lot of true crime media in general, either through podcasts or Dateline episodes, you see the ways the cases in our home communities are almost identical to some of the cases that are really popular, for example JonBenét Ramsey. There’s also a woman named Jessica Chambers, who was murdered in Mississippi, I believe, and her body was burned, but she lived just long enough to name the person who had killed her, and then she died shortly after. Marcey’s case was very similar in that she had been stabbed repeatedly and was burned and then named her assailant. But Marcey’s case got three articles that were maybe five sentences total. And Jessica Chambers’s case ends up getting a special on the Oxygen network that’s eight parts, and now it’s a podcast.

Our issue is not that white women don’t deserve coverage; it’s just that Indigenous women and girls deserve the same level of coverage and that the purposeful covering up of these cases is adding to the problem that’s happening in our community. There’s a common phenomenon called “Missing White Woman Syndrome,” which describes the way our nation, and even the world, becomes captured by the stories of missing and murdered white women. Think of Laci Peterson, JonBenét Ramsey, Natalee Holloway, so many different women’s stories we know in detail. It makes you sympathize and empathize with that family. But then you don’t have that complementary coverage of Native women, so there’s no one who is empathizing and sympathizing with us, which makes the problem even worse. I think that’s why our podcast is so important, not only to us, but to our community, as well.

CL: Another great example of that that’s super recent is Gabby Petito. The whole nation and social media were enthralled with her. She was a young white girl, very pretty, trying to make it as a social media influencer. She went missing in Wyoming, where several hundred Indigenous women have gone missing. And there’s been no blips, no thousands of TikToks or Instagram posts wondering where these Indigenous women are, like you saw with Gabby Petito. What causes America to rise up for Gabby Petito, and how can we get that same rise for Indigenous women, as well?

Let’s talk about Faith Hedgepeth because her story does also tie into this issue that we’re talking about right now. Your season finale is just absolutely powerful from beginning to end.13 You have a beautiful song at the end, “Hometown Hero” by Charly Lowry. A lot of folks in North Carolina are probably familiar with the very horrific murder of Faith Hedgepeth. She was a Haliwa-Saponi woman and a UNC student whose body was found in 2012. This case is a rarity because it has had some national attention, and it did make state-wide headlines again in August of this year because a suspect was finally arrested. Your storytelling in this episode is powerful for a lot of reasons, but I think part of it is because you both talked about relating to her: you were similar ages, you had taken similar paths, in terms of going away from your home community to predominantly white institutions, and you felt like you had some similar experiences as Faith Hedgepeth. How did you feel when you heard about the arrest, especially given all of the possibilities that were out there about the suspect?

YEAH, I DON’T THINK THERE’S ANY INDIGENOUS COMMUNITY IN NORTH CAROLINA WHO DOESN’T KNOW FAITH’S NAME AT THIS POINT BECAUSE SHE DID HAVE SUCH AN IMPACT.

BH: I was actually taking a nap when I got the news. And I woke up and had thirty texts and all these notifications, so I think it’s a lot of different emotions. Who is this person? He was never named in any of the other information. It seems so random, almost. So, there’s also a lot of curiosity. How did this happen? But also a lot of relief and such happiness for her family to have one answer among hundreds of questions that they probably have on this case. There are so many different connections that I feel like I had with Faith without actually knowing her. This case has always felt really close to me in a lot of ways. I felt a whole mix of emotions when I found out.

CL: Yeah, I don’t think there’s any Indigenous community in North Carolina who doesn’t know Faith’s name at this point because she did have such an impact. Faith is the exception, she’s not the rule, because she did meet some of those standards. She was smart. She was very beautiful. She was off at a good school, not in her tribal community. In many other ways she was similar to Marcey: she was an Indigenous girl, grew up in her Indigenous community. But she was different in other ways. Marcey wasn’t an honor student heading to Chapel Hill and getting out of her community. So, I think being in Chapel Hill had a lot to do with it. I don’t know that we would see the same kind of coverage if it had happened in Hollister, in her tribal community.

BH: Then you even think about cases like Eve Carson, which I think is kind of similar to Faith’s case, which got even more national attention than Faith’s and which was solved rather quickly in comparison to Faith’s, which took nine years to solve.14 So, even though Faith’s case got much more attention than most Indigenous women get, she still got less than most of the famous cases of white women being murdered get.

Regarding another case, the Casey Young episode, you talk about how the victim was a part of the LGBTQ community and the ways that LGBTQ people are more vulnerable to violence. You also talk about homophobia and its connection to evangelical Christianity in Robeson County. To what degree do you feel you need to educate your listeners about issues in Robeson County and Lumbee communities, in particular? Obviously, I’m talking about the context of this case, but you could speak to that more broadly.

BH: I was thinking about this question a lot. I think that there are some media that are created for non-Natives to tell them about what Natives are like, and then there’s some media that’s created for Native people by Native people, and Chelsea and I really strive to create something that feels like it’s for Indigenous people but still accessible to non-Natives, as well. We not only want to create a podcast where people can learn more about Lumbee people, and Indigenous people in general, where they can learn more about what our communities face, but also something that provides a space and a voice for Lumbee and Indigenous people and provides a media platform despite us having very little media coverage in general, especially media coverage that’s positive. But on the issue of homophobia in the Lumbee community, more generally, it’s important to think about the impacts of colonization into Indigenous communities. Prior to colonization, Indigenous communities were often very welcoming and accepting of LGBTQ tribal members, and there were protected spaces specifically for those members who were often regarded or respected even higher. Unfortunately, the introduction of colonization, with a particular type of Christianity that has infiltrated into Indigenous communities, has caused a level of homophobia that ends up creating situations like what happened to Casey Young and what happened on other episodes that we shared, as well. These impacts are disastrous, but I still think they’re important for us to talk about. And also, to help Lumbees confront these issues that are in our communities, it’s really our responsibility at this point.

WE NOT ONLY WANT TO CREATE A PODCAST WHERE PEOPLE CAN LEARN MORE ABOUT LUMBEE PEOPLE, AND INDIGENOUS PEOPLE IN GENERAL, WHERE THEY CAN LEARN MORE ABOUT WHAT OUR COMMUNITIES FACE, BUT ALSO SOMETHING THAT PROVIDES A SPACE AND A VOICE FOR LUMBEE AND INDIGENOUS PEOPLE.

I’m wondering what the future of The Red Justice Project looks like. Are you planning to revisit any cases, or do you mainly do that with folks via social media?

CL: I definitely think there are a couple of things that we would like to revisit, especially in the start of Season Two. One is kind of an extended chat around residential boarding schools, especially given the media that, again, hasn’t been quite the same wave of media that we saw with Kamloops. But there have been a lot more bodies found, and we really, in just a thirty- to forty-minute episode did not get to touch on many of the issues that were caused by Indigenous boarding schools, such as loss of language, loss of culture, some of the experiments that were done on Indigenous children, such as malnourishment and its effects on students’ ability to learn. So literally they would starve kids to see if it would affect their ability to learn, which is, of course, if you don’t eat, you cannot concentrate. There are so many things in that episode alone that we didn’t get to touch on that I think we would love to bring back for Season Two. And, of course, with us ending with Faith’s episode, we’re hoping that there will be many more updates since someone has been arrested, so I could see us touching on that as well in Season Two.

What is your engagement like with your listeners? I follow you on social media, and I know you say, “Call us if you have a tip.” Do you get tips? Do you talk to folks just through social media? Are there other ways? When you go to Robeson County, do people pull you aside now and say, “Hey, I heard this thing”? What’s that like for you?

BH: We do get messages from people. We get theories. After the Casey Young episode, her cousin actually reached out to me and told me that it was the first time she felt like she could breathe in eleven years because the way we told the story kind of validated her own perspectives and her own memories of her cousin. There are times like that where it feels so right, what we’re doing, and so purposed.

I really enjoy those episodes when you’re talking to people that are in your family or people that you know, or they’re people that you just met, and they get really comfortable, and then there’s this guy who says, “Chelsea, let me tell you.” I thought, “That’s great. You developed this relationship that makes people really comfortable.”

CL: This was something that I think Brittany was touching on earlier: we might use a thirty-second clip of an interview, but literally we were on the phone with someone for two hours because when you’re talking, especially to people from your own community, you really build that rapport with these families. For them, it’s almost like a therapy session. Here’s someone who actually wants to listen to my story and hear what I have to say about my child, or my cousin, or my niece. And for a lot of family members, even though it’s really hard to talk about in some ways (and this is something Brittany says a lot), it’s kind of a form of justice for some of these families: just to be able to have their story put out there and to know that other people are listening. n