A WAVY LINE SNAKES ACROSS GEORGIA'S MIDSECTION, CONNECTING COLUMBUS TO AUGUSTA. ONCE THE STATE'S ATLANTIC SEABOARD, THIS BOUNDARY SEPARATES THE ROLLING HILLS AND PLUTONS OF THE PIEDMONT FROM THE LIVE OAKS AND SALT MARSHES OF THE COASTAL PLAIN. HERE, THE GROUND ABRUPTLY RISES INTO ROCKY CLIFFS, AND WATERS BLITZ DOWN RAPIDS AND SHOOT OVER WATERFALLS. IT'S AN IMPASSABLE DIVIDE THAT MARKS THE END OF MOST JOURNEYS UPSTREAM.
THIS BORDERLAND IS CALLED THE FALL LINE, A THRESHOLD BETWEEN WORLDS IN COLLISION — GEOGRAPHIES, ECONOMIES AND ECOSYSTEMS THAT, AT TIMES, CAN SEEM POLES APART.
A WAVY LINE SNAKES ACROSS GEORGIA'S MIDSECTION, CONNECTING COLUMBUS TO AUGUSTA. ONCE THE STATE'S ATLANTIC SEABOARD, THIS BOUNDARY SEPARATES THE ROLLING HILLS AND PLUTONS OF THE PIEDMONT FROM THE LIVE OAKS AND SALT MARSHES OF THE COASTAL PLAIN. HERE, THE GROUND ABRUPTLY RISES INTO ROCKY CLIFFS, AND WATERS BLITZ DOWN RAPIDS AND SHOOT OVER WATERFALLS. IT'S AN IMPASSABLE DIVIDE THAT MARKS THE END OF MOST JOURNEYS UPSTREAM.
THIS BORDERLAND IS CALLED THE FALL LINE, A THRESHOLD BETWEEN WORLDS IN COLLISION — GEOGRAPHIES, ECONOMIES AND ECOSYSTEMS THAT, AT TIMES, CAN SEEM POLES APART.
Laurah Norton (M.F.A. ’06) didn’t mean to start her own criminal investigation. She hadn’t planned on scouring archives, slogging through bureaucratic red tape, fixing errors in public records, confronting crooked cops, tracking leads all over the state or uncovering big breaks in two missing persons cases that went cold nearly three decades ago. She didn’t expect to incite hundreds of amateur sleuths across the globe to work together on social media to comb databases, raise money for rewards, stir up media coverage and government intervention, and aid the victims’ families. And she certainly never intended to top the iTunes charts with the No. 3 podcast in the U.S. at more than two million downloads.
She was just trying to prepare for class.
“It was an accident,” Norton says, “and now I accidentally have two full-time jobs.”
A senior lecturer with the English Department, Norton has taught creative writing and literature classes at Georgia State since her days as a graduate student in 2003. She’s also a true crime podcast junkie and wanted to teach a class about the medium.
So, she proposed to design a course from scratch that would lead students through the journey of making their own investigative podcasts from start to finish — researching mysterious situations, creating narratives, writing scripts, recording and producing audio, and even publishing their finished products online.
There was a slight problem, though. Norton hadn’t done much of that herself. She’d have to set out on a journey of her own before she could pass on any insight. It’s a good thing she knew right where to start.
VANISHED
Norton first heard about Dannette and Jeannette Millbrook, twin sisters from Augusta, Ga., who went missing in 1990, in fall 2016. The case disturbed Norton profoundly and had grown increasingly cold, year after year.
The 15-year-old girls had stopped at a convenience store to buy some snacks on their way home and then disappeared without a trace. No one knew what happened to them, and nothing indicated they had left on their own volition. Equally disturbing, the Richmond County police recorded every single aspect of the case incorrectly — the order of events, the locations, even the twins’ own names and birthday — which means every single report thereafter spread nothing but error and contradiction.
But it only gets worse. The police treated the missing teens as “runaways” from the very start, did no investigation and then improperly closed the case just a year later. Even though they hadn’t even tried to make progress on the girls’ whereabouts, they went so far as to reclassify them as “located” and thoroughly wiped them from the system at the local and national levels. And then the case files went missing, too. These are all things that, according to police procedure, simply couldn’t have happened. But they did.
“The case failed at every level,” Norton says. “No one helped the family. No one looked for the girls. No one was questioned. No one covered the story.”
Effectively quashed by media and police, the case never entered the public consciousness. When Norton began researching the story, the Web brimmed with hits and leads regarding similar cases of the same era, but she could find only three reports about the Millbrook twins — all from 2013, 23 years after they vanished, when Sheriff Richard Roundtree quietly reopened the case at the family’s request.
She couldn’t believe it, so she hit the archives and rooted through decades’ worth of Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Augusta Chronicle newspapers. Nothing. There had been absolutely zero coverage.
“It was so upsetting,” she recalls. “I got angry, and then I started thinking about what I could do.”
Channeling her anger into productive obsession, Norton shared the case with her rhetoric and composition students and kept digging. She wanted to help publicize the case, but she also needed experience making a podcast so she could teach her new class. This was her chance to do both.
Norton contacted the twins’ younger sister, Shanta Sturgis, and obtained her enthusiastic endorsement to tackle the case. Sturgis and her mother, Louise, had never given up on the girls. Making hundreds of phone calls and barking up every conceivable tree, they’d been struggling to get any kind of attention or help for decades.
Norton found a partner in Brooke Hargrove, a close friend from college as well as a therapist who specializes in grief counseling. Norton would handle the scriptwriting and narration, and Hargrove would use her experience dealing with awkward situations and strong emotions to handle the interviews.
Driven to expose the systemic barriers that divide this family’s struggle from those on higher ground, Norton and Hargrove called their podcast “The Fall Line.”
“Because there’s another fall line, too,” Norton says. “I mean the line in society where everything falls through the cracks and certain people tend to disappear.”
Taking its name from that wall of water and rock that splits Georgia in two and turns away those who would go farther upriver, “The Fall Line” focuses solely on Georgia’s marginalized communities — the people who, no matter how hard they try, rarely make it upstream to get the attention and justice they deserve.
“THERE’S ANOTHER FALL LINE. I MEAN THE LINE IN SOCIETY WHERE EVERYTHING FALLS THROUGH THE CRACKS AND CERTAIN PEOPLE TEND TO DISAPPEAR.”
— LAURAH NORTON
“THERE’S ANOTHER FALL LINE. I MEAN THE LINE IN SOCIETY WHERE EVERYTHING FALLS THROUGH THE CRACKS AND CERTAIN PEOPLE TEND TO DISAPPEAR.”
— LAURAH NORTON
“THERE’S ANOTHER FALL LINE. I MEAN THE LINE IN SOCIETY WHERE EVERYTHING FALLS THROUGH THE CRACKS AND CERTAIN PEOPLE TEND TO DISAPPEAR.”
— LAURAH NORTON
RITES OF PASSAGE
Despite knowing next to nothing about audio production, Norton and Hargrove went ahead with their investigation, using the crudest of equipment to record and broadcast it to anyone willing to listen.
“We had planned to work with the sheriff ’s office, but they weren’t interested,” Norton says. “In fact, they were very resistant to the idea. So, we ended up doing our own investigation. And we found quite a bit. It’s crazy to go back in time and watch how quickly a case can unravel.”
Without assistance from law enforcement, Norton and Hargrove sifted for leads among archives and public records, pounded the pavement and started connecting dots. They identified and questioned people close to the family who should have been part of the police investigation but had been ignored. They corresponded with prison inmates to establish links between evidence and testimony. They determined that a convicted serial rapist and accused serial killer, now deceased, was active in the area at the time and even knew the twins’ estranged biological father, who was later convicted of abetting a murder. They followed up on unidentified bodies police had never considered even though they fit the twins’ profile.
Using social media to amplify their message, Norton reached out to state government, the district attorney, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and media outlets near and far to ratchet up the pressure on investigators and make Dannette and Jeannette Millbrook household names.
And the inaccurate public records with the erroneous names, locations, birthdate and timeline that hampered the investigation from the very beginning? They worked with the family and police to fix those, too, and detectives are now using the correct information.
Equal parts cliffhanger and crusade, the podcast captured an audience with its compelling narrative about ordinary citizens gumshoeing their way through a labyrinth of error and intrigue. After just a few episodes, “The Fall Line” earned a detailed mention on the hit podcast “My Favorite Murder” in September 2017, and its popularity mushroomed overnight.
With popularity came assistance from listeners. Without solicitation, hundreds of fans started using the Facebook discussion group to figure out ways to publicize the case, ferret out leads and even coordinate labor so stuff actually got done.
Someone in Canada created a Wikipedia page for the Millbrook twins. Many perused public records of unidentified bodies, hunting for correlations. People from all over the country submitted tips in droves, to both the podcast and the Richmond County Sheriff’s Office. Several collaborated to design and print “missing” posters, which they then tacked up throughout Augusta. Lawyers offered free legal advice, and a private investigator shared some trade secrets. Businesses teamed up with fans to volunteer an $8,000 reward for information leading to an arrest. Others have planned a day to remember and celebrate the twins in Augusta on March 18, which marks the 28th anniversary of their disappearance.
However, Norton might be most thankful for the audio engineer who reached out halfway through the first season and begged to donate his time and equipment for future episodes. She didn’t need any convincing.
“We had no idea what we were doing,” Norton recalls. “It sounded terrible. We were recording under a bedsheet — in stereo — and randomly talking toward a very primitive microphone from far away with no sound proofing. It was a hot mess.”
With the show suddenly attracting so much attention, sponsors started rolling in. Just months before, the pair had been making great financial sacrifices to fund their investigation — the time, the travel, the babysitters. Now, it was sustainable.
“I’ve always liked true crime, but I didn’t mean to get into it like this,” Norton says. “The case just made me lose my temper, and I wanted to do something about it. I can write and research and talk. So, I thought I’d make a little podcast and get some experience, and that’d be it. But it blew up and just kept going. It’s crazy.”
Just a month after concluding their inaugural season, Norton and Hargrove started another one about a similar missing persons case from Brunswick, Ga. While local police had a longtime suspect, the podcast did a lot to weave threads together, publicize the case and give the family a platform. By the time they wrapped it up in December, the duo had pushed the investigation so far they expect an arrest to be made.
Meanwhile, “The Fall Line” had grown from a one-off miniseries into an ongoing serial. Far from leaving the Millbrook twins behind, Norton and Hargrove continue to work leads and update listeners.
“It’s intense. It’s involved,” Norton says. “And we’re fairly confident we know what happened in both cases.”
Their next challenge brings them back to Atlanta, home of Grady Memorial Hospital, the No. 1 site for infant abductions in the U.S. between 1983 and 2003. They’ve identified seven cases so far and will delve deeper than ever to question hospital staff, police, victims and even perpetrators.
“It’s definitely going to be the biggest one we’ve done,” Norton says.
A prologue aired in late February, and the new season will premiere May 7.
From season to season, Norton and Hargrove have been careful to stay out of the stories. While they aren’t anonymous, the podcast never mentions them by name.
“We’re here to amplify the voices of Georgia’s forgotten missing,” Hargrove says. “We’re not characters or protagonists. We’re not going to tell the stories of people who’ve been marginalized and then stand in front of them.”
OVER THE WALL
It’s safe to say Norton’s prepared to teach her class now.
The daughter of a longtime newspaper reporter, Norton has unwittingly become proficient with skills she never dreamed she’d share with her father.
She knows her way around a microfiche machine. She can record and mix sound. She’s comfortable writing and reading aloud for the audio format, a far cry from her bread-and-butter literary fiction. She knows how to read between the lines of news reports. She can go head to head with government agencies to combat falsehoods and expose incompetence. She has connections throughout the criminal justice industry — homicide detectives, forensic psychologists, star podcasters from Atlanta to Canada and many more. Norton’s even arranged for many of these folks to visit her class for guest lectures and workshops.
“Now that I’ve had this experience, maybe my kids won’t have to make the same mistakes I made,” she says. “I feel like I can teach my podcasting class now.”
“Laurah is a superb teacher with an innate understanding of student needs,” says Lynée Gaillet, chair of the English Department. “Our faculty are blown away by what she’s doing. In my 33 years of teaching, I’ve rarely encountered a teacher of this magnitude. She makes us look good.”
EPILOGUE
Last December, months after the show’s first season ended, several listeners contacted “The Fall Line” independently with the same astonishing proposal.
It was no secret that Shanta Sturgis, the Millbrook twins’ sister who had donated so much of her time to help Norton and Hargrove with their investigation, was having a hard time. With almost no help, she takes care of five kids, works two jobs and supports a grandchild as well.
The listeners wanted to send her money anonymously so she could provide her family with a lovely Christmas.
“They didn’t want any credit for it. They just wanted the Sturgis family to have a nice Christmas,” says Norton. “It was … wow, I don’t know. I expected people to donate to the reward fund, but to have multiple people contact us wanting to do something so generous? And anonymously? This stuff is wild to me.”
Accustomed to humble holidays, Sturgis couldn’t have been more surprised. She used the money to buy gifts and food for everyone in her family. Even better, she kept it all a secret until Christmas morning. Her children couldn’t believe their eyes. It was a restorative experience for Sturgis, who had advocated for her missing sisters in the face of systemic indifference and hostility for far too long.
“All these years, I felt nobody cared,” Sturgis says. “And it’s been really amazing to find out that people did care. They just didn’t know."
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Photo by Steve Thackston