SAN ANGELO — Last week, local journalist and Big Bend Sentinel Managing Editor Rob D’Amico called it a wrap on a true crime podcast he’d been working on for a year and a half. His podcast, Shane and Sally, was recorded and produced by Texas Monthly, with a suite of bonus material and an introductory article in this month’s issue of the magazine.
Shane and Sally explores a 35-year-old cold case. The two titular characters — teenagers living in San Angelo — disappeared in 1988 after watching a fireworks display on the Fourth of July. Sixteen-year-old Shane’s car was found the next day; he and his girlfriend Sally’s bodies were found four months later in a field. Their remains suggested that they had both been murdered with a shotgun fired at close range.
Rumors immediately swirled: some speculated that the two teens, who had taken an interest in counterculture, were part of a satanic cult. Haphazard police work didn’t do much to staunch the flow of speculation. The end result was a trail of missed opportunities and disappointment — the case was declared cold.
Alongside co-host and friend Karen Jacobs, D’Amico picked up all those frayed ends, working with family members, law enforcement and a cast of locals to see if old clues could lead anywhere new.
Jacobs originally pitched the idea to D’Amico, knowing that he’d worked on a previous true crime podcast: Witnessed: Borderlands, which delved into the case of Rick Thompson, a former Presidio County sheriff who was caught smuggling cocaine from Mexico to Marfa.
D’Amico was struck by one detail in particular: a few months after Shane and Sally’s bodies were discovered, an officer walking down the hallway at the San Angelo Police Department found an ID on the floor that turned out to be Sally’s. But the sheriff’s office had been investigating the case and hadn’t reported finding a purse or an ID — how did it get there, and why?
The Big Bend Sentinel talked to D’Amico about the podcast, his journalistic process, and the enduring mysteries of the case. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
BBS: What’s been the response from San Angelo so far?
RD: I think the response has been as positive as possible when you’re talking about the tragedy of two teens getting killed. People are happy that we went and took a deep dive into this, and they really want this case solved as well. You’ll see a lot of comments on social media about it, like, I remember this horrific crime, I was a teen at that time, and I hope for the parents that this gets solved.
BBS: Sally had been accused of taking part in a satanic cult — the “satanic panic,” a media frenzy of paranoia about satanism in the ‘80s and ‘90s, is a huge part of the generational background of this case. What do you think people were so afraid of at the time? And how did those fears play into how the case was investigated?
RD: This wasn’t just playing with Ouija boards and candles. A lot of the information that these teens and their social circles were giving may not be true at all, but they described very elaborate rituals, like drinking the blood of certain animals, mixing all kinds of potions, even so far as one rumor that Sally was supposed to steal the baby of her newlywed friends when it was six months old so that the cult could sacrifice it. Obviously, a lot of this was probably hype, but it was what everyone was talking about. So when the investigators looked at it, eventually the satanic theme just became kind of like everything else in the case — a swirl of rumors they didn’t know how to respond to.
In the beginning, they did take the satanic angle seriously. But I think over time, investigators recognized that there was the “panic” part of the satanic panic. The usual motives for murder aren’t going to come down to satanism; they’re going to come down to sex, money, drugs.
BBS: Working with victims’ family members, is there anything you think you’ve learned about grief and how people process trauma over 20, 30, 40 years?
RD: [Shane’s father] Marshall taught me a lot about that. I don’t know if “taught” is the right word. But he certainly discussed that a lot. Even after 35 years, it’s like a range of emotions that he goes through — he’s mad at the investigators, he’s mad that someone took the life of his son. So there’s anger, and then there’s tears when he remembers things like Shane saying, “I love you dad,” before he saw him the last time. Grief is the anchor, but life goes on.
BBS: The last podcast you put out deals with crimes committed in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s. How do you think the nature of police work has changed since then?
RD: Hindsight is hard on these things, especially in the Shane and Sally case. When you see a lot of the missing reports and evidence, you hope that things have to be better nowadays. The current Tom Green County Sheriff’s Office, for example, has a lot more deputies, a lot more investigators, more money, and the ability to do a lot more forensics that we didn’t have back then. DNA was just emerging in 1988.
As a journalist, I get the sense that the relationship is really poor right now between law enforcement and the media. Some of these law enforcement officers have been burned in the past by reporters. I think law enforcement needs to understand that things aren’t going to be perfect every time and that they still need to be professional.
BBS: As a reporter who works in print and in audio, what’s the benefit of telling stories via podcast?
RD: The number one advantage of a podcast is that people can listen to it in their car or while they’re going to sleep — they don’t have to read. It can be more entertaining. You hear the voices of your sources, there are some pretty big characters. And you have a chance to add some music, to add a little drama. The big disadvantage is that oftentimes you can’t add as much detail in a podcast, particularly names.
I’d like to add that people think that podcasts are some kind of weird technology that takes special skill to be able to listen to. They’re really not, it’s just like a radio story.
You can find Shane and Sally wherever you get your podcasts, or online at https://www.texasmonthly.com/shaneandsally.