Deadicated: The ‘Dead and Gone’ Podcast
Payne Linsey and Jake Brennan (photo credit Brett William)
“I was fascinated by the Grateful Dead fanbase’s ability to solve something,” observes Payne Lindsey, halfway through the premiere episode of the new true-crime podcast Dead and Gone. “A connection among fans so strong that it could help clear a 20-year-old cold case. I knew there was something special here. If used the right way again, this same fanbase could help solve any number of cases.”
As he offers this reflection, Lindsey, the show’s co-creator, has just introduced the story of “Grateful Doe,” a young man who died in a 1995 Virginia car accident holding a pair of tickets to an upcoming Grateful Dead show at RFK Stadium. The deceased’s identity remained unknown until 2015 when a number of online Deadhead sleuths worked together to ID him as Jason Callahan.
The podcaster adds, “It’s part of human nature to want the truth and, when people come together with that unified goal, the impossible can happen. I’ve seen it. We said, ‘What if we applied this investigative true-crime podcast idea to a targeted group of people who are already prone to keeping in touch and looking after each other in the first place? And what if we called out to the fanbase of a famous rock band to help solve decades-old cases? That could have a real impact.’”
The first case he selected was that of Mary Regina Gioia and Gregory Allen Kniffin, who were murdered on the night of Aug. 15, 1985 while living in Rainbow Village, an encampment on the shore of the San Francisco Bay. Although a man named Ralph International Thomas was convicted of the crime, thanks to a tip from a Deadhead familiar with the incident, Lindsey began to suspect that Thomas had been wrongly accused because he was a Black man with a prior criminal record.
Lindsey first gained notoriety in 2016, as a first-time podcaster, when he created Up and Vanished, which tracked his investigation into the 2005 disappearance of Tara Grinstead, a high-school teacher and former beauty queen living in the small town of Ocilla, Ga. His efforts helped shine a new light on the case, which eventually led to an arrest. Later, Lindsey went on to create a second season of Up and Vanished, along with another true-crime podcast of a more historical nature, Atlanta Monster.
On Dead and Gone, Lindsey has added another twist to the true-crime podcast genre. For this ambitious undertaking, he is joined by fellow podcaster Jake Brennan, who created Disgraceland, which examines numerous musicians’ alleged criminal exploits. (The podcast also spawned an entertaining book, Disgraceland: Musicians Getting Away with Murder and Behaving Very Badly.) The pair take on complementary roles in the series: Lindsey goes out into the field to report from the West Coast, sharing a narrative akin to his efforts on Up and Vanished. Meanwhile, Brennan chimes in from home with a series of extended riffs that touch on the Grateful Dead and the band’s fans in a manner reminiscent of Disgraceland.
Brennan’s contributions function on two levels. On one hand, he delivers a thumbnail history of the Dead for those unfamiliar with the group. Beyond that though, he uses a stylized delivery to present a hyperbolic account of the band’s mythology that serves to reinforce the stereotypes that Deadheads experienced back in 1985, when Gioia and Kniffin lost their lives. This approach lends an important subtext to the podcast, helping explain why the case initially received only a cursory investigation.
Lindsey acknowledges that, during this era, Deadheads “were definitely disparaged by a lot of people, law enforcement officers in particular. I think that’s partly why this case remains, in my eyes, unsolved. A lot of these people weren’t super comfortable going directly to law enforcement. Meanwhile, law enforcement officers didn’t really feel like going into the Dead community and trying to find these alternative suspects. They didn’t want to speak to witnesses that had a different narrative than what they were trying to present.”
What are the origins of Dead and Gone?
I was a fan of Jake Brennan’s work, specifically his podcast Disgraceland, which is a music history podcast and has all these crazy, badass stories about musicians. I wanted to figure out a way that we could collaborate together on something and it became an open discussion over a couple of years. We tried to figure out a podcast that we could make together, or some way to collaborate on something. Then, I stumbled upon this article about missing and murdered Grateful Dead fans. It was super brief but there was this guy, Todd Matthews, who had apparently identified this pattern of cases that all had this commonality and we were just like, “Wow, that’s interesting. Those are two subjects that we both cover.” He’s big into music history and that sort of thing, and I’m into investigative storytelling. So I was like, “What if we looked into this some more?” So we said, “Let’s just see what happens.” We didn’t even really know what the formula of this show would be other than that we were interested in the commonality this guy found and we were going to generate a story out of it. But it just so happened that it turned into this potential wrongful conviction stemming from these double murders in ‘85. That took over the whole podcast.
Did the pandemic play a role in the format of the podcast or had you always intended to be on the road while Jake was back at home?
I think, initially, we were just going to do what we were both good at, and so my part was sort of the investigative storytelling. The only slight shift is that the initial thought was, “Let’s do more of a broader overview of a bunch of these cases and try to tell as many stories as we can,” which is not something that I usually do in my investigative work for my podcasts. But as we got into it, one particular case kept drawing us in. As we learned more about it, we were like, “What if we did an entire podcast about this case and tried to figure out what the hell happened?” It became a complete shift in how we were framing this in our heads but also, at the same time, it kind of became what I’m familiar with, which is trying to figure out what happened to somebody and making a podcast about that.
What finally led you to focus on this single case for the entire season?
I got an email from this guy who had potential information about this double murder back in ‘85. He had his own story about an alternative suspect and it was immediately compelling. I think, at that point, Jake was like, “Dude, we have to do the entire podcast on this.” But I said, “Slow down; I’ve been down this road before.”
I wasn’t reacting immediately to the excitement and possibility of there being something for us to uncover because I just don’t like to react that way anymore. I was skeptical as to how much we could do or who was willing to talk to us. I was like, “This is going to all depend on what turns up during a trip to Oregon.” After speaking with three different people back to back, when I returned to the hotel, I was like, “Shit, this is so much information—already way more than we could find on the internet. There is enough here to continue exploring. We really have no choice.”
Honestly, prior to that point, I was resistant because the workload and the responsibility just seemed overwhelming. But I felt like I had no choice— I had to see this through. And I’m thankful that I did.
You crowdsourced the Deadhead community for this podcast. What has surprised you the most about that process or the community in general?
The idea of crowdsourcing the Grateful Dead community is how I found this story to begin with, after I revealed that I was working on this podcast. I was introduced to a whole web of Deadheads, who are deeply connected through their experiences with the Grateful Dead and being on tour, and they’re all moving parts to this murder case. So it’s kind of amazing—having tapped into this old group of friends who maybe haven’t seen each other in decades—to see that all these people still have this strong bond. They’ll pick up the phone and talk to a stranger like me because they still want to know what happened to Greg and Mary.
I’ve found that everyone I’ve dealt with in the Grateful Dead community has been fun to talk to. They all have bizarre, funny, spectacular stories about their times on tour and the different people they met. So it’s cool meeting these people and having them reminisce on tape about their magical experiences from that time.
I was also sort of amazed that even the people who didn’t directly know Greg and Mary, or Ralph Thomas, still genuinely wanted justice and were willing to put themselves out there on a podcast and tell their story decades later, in hopes of the truth finally coming out. And they all genuinely feel that way.
In addition to your investigation of this case, you present an account of the Grateful Dead’s history, highlighting some of the darker elements, even as you acknowledge that the band members were not involved. Has it been a challenge to strike a proper balance between those two narratives?
I think it’s always a challenge because you’re dealing with people’s perceptions. I think our intent is very pure, and we know the band has nothing to do with this. We are now both fans of the band and the culture, and have plenty of family and friends who have been their whole lives. So we’re basically trying to go out of our way to make sure that we don’t come across that way. There are also some topics and some stories that we need to touch on that are extremely interesting, even though they may be dark. But I also think, as this podcast develops—and some of the bad apples who may have played a role in this double murder appear—you start to understand how these guys existed in this environment. And maybe it’s not entirely unique to just the Grateful Dead scene, but at least you’ll understand how these guys, these wolves in sheep’s clothing, were able to exist here. That is very important to understanding why this murder could go unsolved for so long.
Some of the environment that you describe is undeniably unique to Grateful Dead culture. What other band was touring with a traveling circus in the ‘80s and ‘90s?
That’s for sure. There’s nothing else like this. That’s definitely unique to the Grateful Dead. I think everyone knows of the Grateful Dead, or they’ve heard of the Grateful Dead. But I don’t think everyone knows—unless you were around to experience it—what it was really like. So digging in and painting that has been interesting. I think coloring that stuff in—whether it’s good, bad or ugly—is important to understanding the lifestyle of these two victims, all of the witnesses and everyone else we talked to.
You’ve been at this for a few years now, going back to Up and Vanished. What’s the best piece of advice you’ve received or learned along the way?
The thing that I’ve definitely learned—and it’s been told to me by several respected documentarians who have told stories like this—is that these stories will never leave you. It doesn’t matter if your podcast is over or if your documentary is over. The book is never closed. Any time you do a deep-dive on a story like this, you’re tied to it forever. And people will email you, people will call you, people will text you, and you always have to be an open line for new information. You can never abandon the people that you met, and whose trust you earned. So that’s obviously a huge responsibility.
It can also be scary, which is something that I’ve definitely learned. But what I’ve tried to do every time is challenge myself to be more fearless.
I’ve also learned that I don’t want to tell a story for the hell of it. I don’t want to rehash this horrible thing that happened over 30 years ago, just for a few clicks and listens. That doesn’t feel good to me. I genuinely feel this obligation to turn a new page or make something out of this that’s worth something. I take that part of it seriously, and it goes both ways. Any of these witnesses that I’m speaking to want to see something come out of this. As a listener, if you’re investing your time, you want something to come out of this. I feel that responsibility, and there’s no time to be scared of the bad guy if you want answers. So by signing up to do a story like this, you’ve got to deal with the shit that sucks, too. And that includes knocking on the doors you may be scared to knock on. That just comes with the territory, and I think I’ve gotten a little better at that part of it. But it’s always nerve-wracking, and I want to feel like I’m giving it my all. So when I look back on it, I know that I did the best that I could.
Looking ahead, do you think there will be a season two of Dead and Gone?
The consensus is that we would love to keep it going. Whether it’s a second season on a single case or a combination of a few cases, I think that exploring these true-crime stories through this lens is very interesting. We’ve already made a footprint in the Dead community with this, so that can immediately be used as a tool to do more.
